Chapter 9 #4
I’m silent as I ponder this. Jon is right—my mother makes snide, passive-aggressive comments, she guilt trips, sometimes she
even manipulates. She does not address things head-on and she absolutely does not get angry.
That’s why she sounded so different on the phone. We weren’t talking around the subject and she wasn’t suppressing her distress
over it. She was properly pissed off and so was I and we just talked it out.
“I still don’t understand. Where did she get the idea that you’d move those graves?”
“She overheard me talking to Jack last night and—”
“Whoa,” Jon interrupts me. “Jack K is in town?”
“He moved back a few years ago.”
“You’re living next door to Jack again? And you’ve been talking to him? Do you still turn a fetching shade of raspberry if he glances in your direction?”
I’m turning a shade of raspberry right now as my cousin teases me. Did everyone in this town know about my crush back in the
day?
“Mum completely misinterpreted what she heard,” I say, trying to push on. “That’s all. She heard something about the graves
and she assumed the worst.”
“I bet she was sitting at the farm, making herself sick with worry that you’d guess who sent the council after you.”
“Probably,” I sigh.
“Your mum really is a complicated woman, Fi.”
“Tell me about it. By the way, I checked all of the boxes of letters from Tad’s author friends this morning . . .” I’d love
to tell Jon about the wind and the door handle that just would not twist, except he’d completely freak out, and I’ve only
just started to calm down myself. “There’s nothing in there from Charity Wilkie. Any other ideas how I can track her down?”
“Don’t kill me for saying this but . . . ask your mum?”
“I already did that,” I mutter.
“Then maybe email Rita. Her mother was the most respected agent of Tad’s generation. Any author she didn’t know wasn’t worth
knowing. I’ll forward you her details.”
We chat for a while as I whip myself up a plate of cheese and crackers for dinner. I pour myself a glass from the bottle of
red wine—which I immediately drink, then repour. Maybe it’ll help me sleep tonight. I ask how Jon’s kids are going, how his
book is going. He tells me his latest novel is “the worst piece of shit in the history of literature” which would be alarming
if I didn’t I know my cousin’s process so well. Intense negativity simply means the excited rush of a new draft has passed
and he’s into the hard yards finishing the thing. He’ll be in a better frame of mind once this draft is done and he can move
on to refining it.
When Ilona calls him for dinner we say our goodbyes. Erin has done a stellar job on the parlour—even going so far as to cover
a few of the armchairs with towels so I can sit on them. I ferry in a few armloads of firewood and get a roaring fire started
in the hearth. Then I rest my cheese plate and glass of wine on the circular table by the fire and I walk upstairs to get
my book.
I really need to relax and wind down before bed. I decide I’m going to stop thinking about Mum now. I’m going to stop thinking about the noises in the house and things falling off tables. I’ll get all toasty by the fire, and I’ll eat my cheese and drink my wine and read until I’m tired.
But when I get to my room, the book is gone. It was open face down on the nightstand this morning, but now it’s nowhere to
be seen.
I check under the bed, behind and beneath the nightstand. It’s gone. It’s just gone.
Jack was here today, but he didn’t come upstairs. He just walked through the ground floor of the house to the kitchen, through
the backyard, then back out downstairs to leave via the front door. He didn’t leave my sight for even a second.
And Erin was in the parlour the whole time. Maybe she did come upstairs for something when I was busy in the dining room—but why would she take a book I was so obviously reading? That doesn’t make any sense either.
I have been stressed. Sleep deprived. Maybe I picked it up unthinkingly, put it down somewhere silly. That’s got to be it.
Except that Mum sent Erin.
And Mum called the council.
And Mum was visibly displeased when she looked at this book last night.
No. Even Mum wouldn’t go this far. She sent me that radio today, a kind gesture to help me settle in. Why would she go to such
devious lengths to stop me reading a book? Calling the council was extreme, but I suppose it did make some sense if she really believed I was about to dig those
graves up.
If she really thinks so little of me.
I check every single room a second time, and the book is nowhere to be found.
This is nothing more than an inconvenience—another odd happening for me to overthink—in this case, something of no consequence, because there are eleven more copies of the very same book right next door to my bedroom, sitting in Uncle Tad’s office, still in the box they arrived in.
So I take one of those, and I walk back down to the parlour to my wine and my dinner, and I tell myself this is just one more
thing I can’t let myself think about. At least, not tonight if I want to get any sleep at all.