Chapter 44
“So what does that mean?” I say. “That they both died on the same day? Some sort of accident, a car crash?”
“It’s possible, I suppose.”
Darker thoughts crowd my mind. “Or maybe they were victims of a crime? An attack, a double murder?”
Maxine shakes her head. “I don’t know if that’s possible, is it?”
“Why not?”
“I mean… we would have heard about it, wouldn’t we? A double murder would have been big news in the local area, right? Maybe even national news. It would have been notorious, the sort of thing that sticks in the memory.”
“So… what then?”
“Don’t know yet.” She leans down with her phone to take pictures of all five headstones. “But unless it’s just a big coincidence, there must be a story behind it. It must mean something.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Me neither. Two previous residents of your house die on the same day; not long after that the Hopkins family moves in with their son Kevin, and Mrs. Hopkins dies the following year.”
“You make it sound like the Amityville House of Horror.”
She gives me an apologetic shrug. “They’re the facts, Adam.”
“You ever heard this name before?” I point at the marble headstone. “Peter Flack?”
“No. But when you see the date he died… the first thing I thought of was how close it was to when my Adrian disappeared, in September that year. It was only three months later.”
We agree that she and Charlie will try to find out more about the unfortunate Peter Flack, while I try to find out what happened on that day in December 2001 that took the lives of both Flack and his grandmother, Elizabeth Makepeace.
I follow her lead in taking pictures of all the stones, all the names and dates.
Maxine is clearly pleased with her find, and there’s a light in her eyes that I’ve not seen until today.
There is an energy about her, perhaps born of the feeling that she might yet discover what happened to her husband—even after all these years.
She goes to look at some of the neighboring gravestones and I open the browser on my own phone, doing a few quick searches for Flack and his grandmother.
But nothing comes up. Either 2001 was too early for local news to be routinely posted online, or they’re in some obscure part of the early internet that can’t be found by Google, or perhaps content that old was behind a paywall to make some money out of family history enthusiasts.
I turned eighteen that year and could only vaguely remember pre-internet days; it seems hard to imagine a time when you couldn’t just take your phone out of your pocket and find the answer to any question in the world.
“Did you walk?” Maxine is typing on her own phone. “Need a lift?”
Charlie meets us at the Waverley Street gate in a white three-door Volkswagen and Maxine opens the passenger door for me.
Not a gray Volvo, I say to myself as I’m clambering into the back seat.
The car smells clean, faintly floral, with one of those little flowerpots on the dashboard with a plastic daisy that sways from side to side.
It’s quite a contrast to my Nissan, with its booster seats and biscuit crumbs and year-old raisins squashed into the upholstery.
As Charlie turns onto Clarendon Street and heads toward the city center, my mind is still in the half-forgotten cemetery, of two deaths linked to our house.
A woman and a man. Bonnie and Clyde? No, that was ridiculous.
She was his grandma, in her eighties and sixty years his senior.
I didn’t even know where they’d died—perhaps it had been somewhere else entirely, nowhere near the place that was now our family home.
It’s only as Charlie indicates right and turns across Maid Marian Way, toward the castle, that I realize I haven’t actually given them my address.
And yet somehow, we’re heading into The Park.
“I’ve never told you where I live,” I say, leaning forward between the two front seats. “How do you know?”
Maxine shrugs. “It was on the death certificate for Elizabeth Makepeace. Thought I’d told you?”
Charlie, who has yet to say a word since he picked us up in town, turns the car smoothly onto Regency Place.
“Anywhere here is good,” I say to him. I don’t want them to drop me right at my gate, close to my family home. “Thanks for the lift.”
“It’s no problem,” Charlie says over his shoulder, glancing at house numbers as we pass. “We’re here now. Might as well take you to the door.”
He slows, indicates, and pulls across the entrance to the drive.
Even now, even though we’ve lived in it for a week, I haven’t gotten my head around the fact that this house is ours.
The imposing red brick, the triple-width chimney stacks, the half-timbered gables, and stone-carved date over the front door—it still has the wow factor, as Jess said the first time we viewed it.
Maxine gets out and pulls the front seat forward so I can clamber out from the back onto the pavement.
“So this is it?” She turns toward the house, nodding slowly. “Very nice. Very nice indeed.”
“We’re still settling in, really. Finding our feet.”
She lingers on the pavement as if reluctant to leave, taking in the driveway, the porch, the big bay windows, and the old oak tree in the front garden.
Then she leans down and opens the glove compartment, takes out a clear plastic Ziploc bag, and hands it to me.
Inside are the dog collar, the little flip phone, and the brass key I’d discovered behind a hidden door six days ago.
“Could I… see it?” she says. “The place where you found everything?”
I follow her gaze toward the house. Jess is home with the kids and I still haven’t told her about Maxine; Dom’s car is in the drive as well. I don’t want to get into a whole load of explaining why I’ve brought two near-strangers to the house.
“Maybe another day?” I say. “It’s still a real mess inside, lots of unpacking still to do. Sorry.”
“I understand.”
“Let’s see what we can dig up on Peter Flack and his grandmother. I feel like we’re getting somewhere.” I tap the roof of the VW. “Thanks for the lift.”
She tucks a strand of dark-brown hair behind her ear. “It’s me that should be thanking you, Adam.”
“For what?”
“For asking questions. For getting in touch in the first place.” She indicates the Ziploc bag in my hand.
“Most people would have chucked that stuff out and never given it a second thought. But you didn’t, and it’s the first time in so long that anyone has even been bothered to try finding out what happened to Adrian.
It’s been so long since anyone really cared, apart from me and Charlie. ”
We say our goodbyes and she climbs back into the car beside her son. I watch the white Volkswagen pull away, toward the junction at the end of Regency Place, waiting until it turns left and disappears around the corner.
Back in the house, Dom greets me in the hall where he’s busy unloading paint, rollers, and dust sheets from his car. He gives me an inquisitive glance.
“So who is she?”
“Who?”
My brother-in-law shoots me a disappointed look, as if I’m insulting his intelligence, his sister, and the universe in general.
“The mystery woman and her driver,” he says quietly, “who just dropped you home.”
It’s pointless trying to spin him a line. Instead, I hold up the clear plastic bag that Maxine has just given me.
“The address on this ID tag,” I say, “is her house in Kimberley. Her dog, trained by her husband—who’s been missing for more than twenty years.”
I give him a quick summary of my connection to Maxine and the progress we’ve made so far, leading up to the visit to the city’s General Cemetery today.
And yet even as I’m explaining it to Dom, something niggles at me like a stone in my shoe.
It’s only now, as I’m saying it out loud, that I try to give it a shape, a name.
Not the fact that Charlie had known exactly where I lived.
Something else is bothering me about the last few hours.
Something about Maxine. Dom’s darkening expression is a mirror for my own thoughts, as I show him the texts she and I have exchanged over recent days.
It’s taken me a week of digging into the history of this house, of nosing around, inquiring about the contents of the hidden room. A week of finding my way, like a blind man in a strange new place, finding his bearings by touch alone.
But it had taken Maxine less than an hour to come back to me this morning.
In fact, it was a grand total of forty-two minutes between me texting the information about Elizabeth Makepeace, and Maxine’s response with a request to meet at the cemetery.
It was very quick, a very fast turnaround to find out the information, track down a death certificate and a cemetery, and physically locate a family plot in a place with tens of thousands of headstones. Unless…
“Unless,” my brother-in-law says, “she already knew all about it.”