Chapter Eight
Over the following weeks we fell into a new routine, eating together in front of the TV, watching the news. We didn’t usually watch the weather forecast at the end, but that night we both sat, finishing our chicken wings, as they predicted torrential rain within the next twenty-four hours.
“Better put some buckets out on the top floor,” James said, and I raced around, putting down buckets, repositioning buckets, searching for more buckets, wishing James would just get the roof fixed.
I felt glad that Lennie was in the mausoleum, keeping dry.
That night, the buckets overflowed and the river burst its banks.
It swamped all the nearby fields and swept devastation through some of the best gardens in the village, putting the annual flower festival in jeopardy.
Elsewhere, the damage was worse and the local news crews entertained themselves for a day, wading through ruined kitchens and marveling at submerged cars.
“Good job we got the mausoleum checked out,” James said. “A flood like that could knock it off its foundations if they weren’t solid.”
Oh, really?
***
The next morning, after James had gone to work, I made my way down to the mausoleum.
Well! The river covered half the graveyard, my trainers were soaked in seconds, and as James surmised, disaster had struck.
One wall of the mausoleum had collapsed into the water, the two adjoining it were spread in pieces across the sodden grass, the door lay uselessly on the ground.
The fourth wall was mostly standing, but the roof was at a forty-five degree angle, one end pitched into the ground.
I looked down and saw a tibia floating in a puddle in front of me. I screamed.
Birds flew up from the nearby trees. I looked around to see who might have noticed, but on a Wednesday morning, in our personal graveyard, it seems no one can hear you scream.
A closer look revealed shattered coffins, some halfway out of the mausoleum, and bones scattered everywhere.
Some had made their way to the river and no doubt as far as the village and beyond.
A jawbone, complete with teeth, was snared in the reeds.
I wondered which ancestor it was. An Eleanor, or a Richard, or maybe a rare Hugo?
Our names were going to be mud when the authorities realized we’d unleashed an early Halloween on our neighbors, but that was the least of our worries. I crept up to what had been the door of the mausoleum and peered at what had been the interior, looking for Lennie. I couldn’t see him.
***
I ran up and down the riverbank looking, but there was no sign of Lennie. I paced the graveyard, searching for any trace of him or his clothing. Not a sniff, although I did see a patch of meadowsweet, which is good as a natural sweetener, if only James would let me use it.
I followed the river downstream to the gate and through it.
I crossed the road, which crossed the river, and went through the opposite gate into the field there and followed the public footpath along.
No sign. At the end of the field, the river turned one way, the path another, and the rest of the riverbank was blocked off by bushes.
I walked farther, through the fields, until I could see the house and the garden of the west farm, with the Newman family out in it. Then I turned round and went home before they saw me.
Half an hour later I went back out and looked again, but still no luck.
All day, I kept going down there, but each time, there was no change. I found a stick and poked the skull in the reeds clear to set it on its way, but it sank and I realized that if I was going to do anything, I should have rescued it to be reburied.
It occurred to me that Lennie’s body could still be nearby but stuck under the water, snagged on a tree root, ready to break free and float back up just as a walking group passed by. It would certainly be one of their more memorable outings.
I stood at the edge of the riverbank and peered hard. Where the water flowed by what had been the mausoleum, it was clear and you could see down to the pebbles on the riverbed, but not much further along it was deeper and murky. Anything could be under there, including Lennie.
There was nothing for it. I went back to the house, took a beanpole from Mr. Billings’s shed, and put on a pair of boots that had been near the back door since before I arrived.
I marched down to the river, checked there was no one around, and stepped into the water.
The boots leaked. After a minute my feet were so wet there was hardly any point wearing them.
I waded in deeper and water flooded over the top.
I wanted to scream with the cold, but I kept my mind on the job and pressed on, poking around with the beanpole as I did so.
I prodded as gently as I could; I wanted to know where he was, but I didn’t want to actually release his corpse from a tangle of reeds and send him on his merry way toward the village.
I wasn’t sure which I dreaded more: not finding him, but knowing he was out there, a disaster waiting to happen, or finding him and having to ask for James’s help to hide him again.
Still, I carried on along the river, the current pulling at me and the cold freezing me. What else could I do?
“Have you lost something?”
I jumped and turned to see a dog walker standing behind me, his pet wagging its tail beside him.
“My dog,” I said. It was easy to look distressed.
“Oh no!” he said. “Do you think it’s in the water?” I nodded. “Don’t panic; they’re natural swimmers. Do you have a photo? I’ll put it on the village Facebook page. What’s its name?”
“Tibs,” I said, thinking of the tibia. “I’ve already put it on Facebook.”
“What does Tibs look like?”
“He’s a liver and white spaniel.”
“That’s a coincidence,” the dog walker said, looking down at his own liver and white spaniel. “They’re great dogs, aren’t they? Good sniffers.”
That comment left me all aquiver; a good sniffer was the last thing I wanted to meet.
“My friend has a dinghy, might make it easier to search,” he said. “Do you want me to phone him?”
I shook my head.
“It’s no trouble,” the man said. “He loves dogs.”
So he phoned his friend and his friend said he could be there in half an hour. I climbed out of the river to wait, water pouring out of my boots as I trudged up the bank.
“Do you know what happened to this?” the man asked, nodding at the mausoleum.
“Gravity,” I said, and he seemed happy with that. Maybe he was new to the area and didn’t know what a recent development the collapse was.
We stood awkwardly; I was shivering from my dip in the river.
“Do you live nearby?” the man asked. “Do you think you should go and get changed?”
I said that was a very good idea and plodded back up to the house. There, I waited a minute, then ran back down to the graveyard, waving my hands in the air.
“He’s back! He’s back!” I shouted.
“Tibs?”
“Yes. He was there waiting when I got to the house. Pretty muddy, I think he was in the water.”
The man looked elated. “Well, that’s good news! Where is he?”
“In the house. I’d better get back to him. Thank you for your help.”
Thank you for nothing. I couldn’t go back into the water now; I didn’t have another story if I was caught. The only way we’d know about Lennie now was if he appeared. I went back to the house and put my clothes in to wash.
***
I decided not to tell James about the collapsed mausoleum straightaway.
Or at all, if I could avoid it. He’d helped me clear up immediately after the accident, but that was in the aftermath of an unexpected, unforeseeable event that had sprung up out of the blue.
This problem was caused by my failure to do what he had told me to do regarding the surveyor.
I didn’t expect a sympathetic response, and I didn’t want to shatter our relative peace with the news that the local celebrity we’d buried privately was back in the public domain.
Anyway, he wouldn’t be able to do anything I couldn’t, which at that point was to continue looking for Lennie.
I thought about tidying some of the bones up.
I shuddered. Anyway, where would I put them?
What would Mr. Billings say if he went down there and found a stack of human remains in a neat pile?
Mind you, what would he say if he went down there and found them as they were?
I spent a few minutes in front of the mirror, practicing looking surprised.
In the event that this development did come to light, it would be best to be prepared to be caught unprepared.
I tried to calm myself with the thought that if Lennie and all the other bones were swept miles away, maybe as far as the sea, and if James didn’t go down to the graveyard for at least five years, all would be well, the danger would pass.
For a moment both of these things seemed possible, but then reality reasserted itself and “it will be fine,” became an empty mantra I repeated to try to keep my panic at bay.
I spent the rest of the day going to and fro from the house to the river, to see if Lennie had turned up.
Between searches, I tried to watch my usual TV, hoping it would relax me.
After catching the end of Bargain Hunt, which was a repeat, I watched the lunchtime news, followed by the local edition.
They started with an item about how a number of bones had appeared around the village as the river levels started to go down.
“We thought it must be from the churchyard, didn’t we, Betty?” said Terry Chambers, husband of Betty, who ran the small shop and had found a shoulder socket at the bottom of their garden. “But when we went up there, there was nothing wrong at the church. The river didn’t even get that high.”
“It’s a mystery,” Betty said, twirling the bone around in her fingers.