Chapter 3
St. Austell, Cornwall, EnglandApril 25th, 2018
Another droplet of water fell into the basin.
Evaline Quinn tightened the tap, held her breath and waited to see if it would leak again. A drop fell. Then another. She exhaled sharply and made a mental note to add the leaky tap to her list of a billion things to do.
Beyond the locked bathroom door, David Bowie’s Starman played, and she hummed along as she studied her reflection in the mirror.
When had her hazel eyes sunk into her face? Was she always that pale? And oh, boy, did she ever need to pluck her unruly brows. She poked at a line of acne along her chin. Maybe you should stop eating greasy sausage rolls. She pulled at the waistband of her grey jeans to see how far it would stretch and raised her eyebrows at the two fingers’ worth of space. On second thought, she needed to eat a lot more greasy sausage rolls and Cadbury’s chocolate and beer and cider and fish and chips. In fact, she would try every delicious food England had to offer because, after eight weeks of hell, she had finally regained an appetite.
She continued to sing along to Starman.
The oldies always relaxed her. They had been a shared favourite with her dad. The music spoke to her soul and she spent a good many hours learning the classics on her cheap electric piano. Between the sunshine pop of the sixties to the rock, blues and disco of the seventies, the songs helped her through the daily slog of work and loneliness.
During the day, she worked as a computer technician in a dingy, closet-sized room with hospital-grade fluorescent lighting. It was an odd, boring job, but she liked the automation of fixing machines and she was damned good at it. At night, however, the awareness of being a twenty-three-year-old woman without a partner, let alone any friends, crept beneath her skin. It was a constant reminder that she was running out of time to mend her life back together and she hoped that her soul-searching adventure would begin after selling her dad’s English cottage.
With a heavy sigh, she lifted her chin and curtly nodded at herself. It is time, Eva. She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway.
At the far end stood her dad’s office door, acting as an ugly reminder of what had happened months before. It looked innocent enough. A simple, four-panelled white door with a brass knob.
As she tried to gather up enough courage to approach it, the hallway seemed to elongate with every passing second. She shut her eyes to stop the trip. There are no monsters in that room that will hurt you.
Just as she took a step forward, someone grabbed her thighs and raised her into the air.
“There she is.”
“Jack! What the hell? Put me down!” She swatted at his shoulder. “I swear to God, I won’t hesitate to karate-chop you in half.”
“Threatening words from a little lady.”
“Are you sure you want to mess with a ‘little lady’ who has six years of self-defence classes under her belt?”
“On second thought … perhaps not.” Jack set her down on the floor. “Want to grab a couple of pints at the pub?”
She glared at him.
Jack Byron was her realtor and a mistaken one-night stand. Clean, well-groomed, always wearing a dress shirt with a thin tie and a sparkling, white smile. A stark contrast to her – a hot, wild mess in black that liked to eat sausage rolls.
“The pub?” she said.
“To celebrate the completion of the cottage,” he mused, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “Then you and I could return and christen the place.”
Annoyance flared in her belly. She broke from his embrace and spun around to grip the kitchen counter. Is he really thinking about sex right now? Are you serious right now?
“You know I still need to clean Dad’s office,” she said.
“I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”
“That depends on what dirty little secrets I find, doesn’t it?” she said with unintended harshness.
Jack pressed against her and nuzzled into the crook of her neck. “I have a dirty little secret for you.”
“Let me guess, you like to smell feet?”
“What … no!”
She wriggled free. “Stop trying to distract me, okay? You know how important it is for me to clean his room.”
“I do,” he said.
“And when that’s done, the cottage is yours to sell to whatever happy couple.”
“Sure, Eva, but you could just as easily sign the contract next week.”
She could feel her face slipping into obvious annoyance. Stay calm.
“No,” she said with control. “You know I’m returning to Canada next week.”
“Have you bought your ticket yet?” He crossed his arms, challenging her.
No, she had not. After eight brutal weeks of being in England and yearning for her Toronto apartment, she had yet to buy a plane ticket. Why? Well, she was busy searching for her dad’s manuscript. After all, it was his last manuscript written about a subject he had kept secret. Not even his agent knew about it. If she left England without finding at least some remnant of the project, she could never forgive herself, and the office was her last hope. If only she wasn’t such a coward, she would have stepped into it weeks ago.
“Babe,” he croaked. “Why must you rush it? Stay a little longer in St. Austell to take the time to heal. I can take you to the cliffs like we talked about.”
She went rigid. Babe, darling, love, cutie pie, princess, nope, nope, nope…
“Can we talk about this later, please?” she said.
“All right.”
Her gaze slid past him to the office door. Dread overwhelmed her.
“It’s just a room, Eva,” he said.
She pressed her lips together. She didn’t need reminding that it was just a room; with four walls, a window, and lots of things that she probably needed to clean or fix. Fists clenched by her sides, any remaining will to keep her cool crumbled.
“Yeah, and it’s also just the room Dad was found dead in,” she shot back.
Silence followed.
“Eva,” Jack said. “I’m only trying to lighten the mood.”
“Oh.” She flailed her hands in the air. “Is that what you’re doing? I haven’t had the courage to walk into that room since landing in England eight weeks ago. Do you honestly believe I need to have your hard-on pushed against my back at a time like this?”
Jack’s mouth flattened.
The radio screeched out an eerie jingle. A woman’s echoing voice spoke. “If you could travel through time, what would you do? Where would you go? Follow the Doctor’s adventures in the next season of…”
Eva smacked the radio’s off button and a tense quietness permeated the kitchen. She could hear the bathroom tap dripping. Jack hurried past her toward the office door.
An alarming fright gripped her. “What are you doing?”
“Forcing you to face your fear.”
Her heart lurched. She stepped forward to stop him, but it was too late. The door was wide open, and to her horror, the office was empty. The stench of chemicals reached her nostrils.
Jack gave a muffled laugh. “Seems like the investigators already cleaned the place for you.”
She crept forward. A stiffness lanced her cheek, and she held her fingers to her left jaw to massage it. The bareness of the office mirrored the hollowness of her heart; like her teeth-grinding, it was another reminder of how much she’d changed over recent months.
After the investigators called Eva months ago, saying that her dad had died, life as she knew it derailed and hit a brick wall. No, make that five brick walls and maybe a steel one, for dramatic effect. Whatever she hit, it did a number on her emotions. It was as if the news had wrangled her soul and locked it away in a box deep within her gut. Occasionally, she felt the box wiggle with life, usually when she was provoked or when her favourite music played, but after two months of grieving, she still struggled to grasp it, and she was wondering if she would ever feel normal again.
She did not yell at Jack, nor did she glance at him as she walked into the room.
“I only want to help you,” Jack said.
Help.
She had known Jack for three weeks and not once had she asked him for help. She could do things perfectly on her own. As she always had. Life with Dad had prepared her for that independence. They were always on the move, never staying in one country for long due to his career as a true-crime author, hence her struggle to maintain long-term relationships with people. That was the dark side of her independence. She did not know how to connect with others.
“Were you expecting to find something regarding his last project?” Jack said.
“Yes,” she snapped.
“Did you try calling his agent?”
She went to the window. The stink in the room rattled her nerves. “She said Dad was adamant in keeping the subject a secret. I guess I have to accept that the book will be officially lost in the sands of time.”
“We can try to call the police again.”
Heat spread across her face as she fiddled with the window lock. “Jack, there’s no point, okay? I’m tired of asking questions and getting ignored. All I’ve been doing is running in circles, chasing my tail like I’m some dog. Besides, the police have more important things to do than return a dead man’s laptop to his daughter.”
“But aren’t his belongings your rightful property? Maybe if you tried again, it would give you a sense of peace.”
“Darn thing.” She pushed hard at the lock. “This stupid window better not be broken like the one in the living room, because I swear to God—”
There was a sigh from behind. “Here, allow me.”
“I can do it myself.”
Jack gave her a side glance and promptly pushed at the lock with his thumb. It clicked open. With one hand, he slid the window up and a cool sea breeze wafted in.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
There it was again. A quiver of emotion in her belly. If his arrogance continued to prod her, he would surely bust through the box of feelings she had buried. Maybe that was the key to feeling normal again. But hadn’t she tried that already? She had selfishly hoped that sex with Jack would ignite any emotion other than emptiness, but it had only led to an annoying relationship with a man who called her ‘babe’. Worse, a man who wanted to help.
“I think we should talk,” he said.
“Yes, me too,” she blurted.
I want to break up our non-existent relationship.
He furrowed his brow. “About you, I mean.”
Nope.
Turning around, she searched for the next distraction. One lonely whiteboard hung on the wall. That would do. She was sure the next happy couple to move in wouldn’t appreciate such a blank, uninteresting, vacant object.
“I’m worried about you, Eva,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” he urged. “I don’t think you realize how ‘not fine’ you are. Have you considered a therapist?”
She held either side of the whiteboard. “Jesus, Jack. You’ve known me for three weeks. How would you know what the ‘fine’ me looks like?”
“Because beneath all that muted emotion, I can see the real you shining.”
She snorted. Good Lord, was he trying to be romantic?
“Thank you for your concern, but I’m fine.” She lifted the board. The sound of ripping Velcro followed. “I only need time—”
Something fell onto her foot. She looked down at an old black-and-white photograph.
What the hell?
Setting the board aside, she bent to pick it up. It showed a large man sitting rigid in a wooden chair. With his head slumped between his shoulders, his startling, ghostly eyes stared off to the side at something out of frame.
She narrowed her eyes.
Was this a crime-scene photo?
Jack appeared at her side. “What’s that?”
She stammered. “Some dead guy … I think.”
They studied the photograph. As the seconds trickled by, it became apparent that, yes, it was the photo of a crime scene. Light bruising marked his fat neck, there were blemishes on the knuckles of his stiff fingers, and a sheet of paper with unreadable handwriting lay between his bare feet.
Eva flipped the photograph and read the neat handwriting in black ink. “Benjamin Cooper. General Manager of Asheford Sons. Murdered. 1881.”
The words hovered in the air like a cloud of hope. Was this the subject of her dad’s manuscript?
Photograph in hand, she fell to her knees, grabbed the whiteboard and spun it around. A busy wall of documents appeared. Pinned to a corkboard were antique letters, photographs of people and postcards of a place called Asheford Hall.
Her pulse raced. The quiver in her belly pulsated with newfound energy, nearly urging her box of emotions to burst free. This was the secret project her dad had been working on.
***
The whiteboard lay atop the kitchen table and the scent of coffee lingered in the air, enticing Eva to wrap her fingers around a warm mug that said World’s Best Author Dad. This mug had been a handmade gift for her dad when she was eight and he always claimed it gave him writing superpowers; having gone as far as crediting the mug in all his books as a source of motivation.
Jack crossed his arms and leaned over the whiteboard. “So, your dad was writing about an old murder case from the Victorian era. Not exactly a bestseller.”
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“What will you do with the information? Finish the book for him?”
“I was thinking about it.”
She was not a writer, and she hadn’t studied the craft. What she knew about writing bestsellers came from her dad, who had published nine of them, all about true crime. Even if she wanted to complete his tenth book for him, where would she start? The only information she had was behind that whiteboard, just antique documents, photographs and letters she struggled to read – all pointing to the murder of a general manager who worked for the Asheford Sons company in the late nineteenth century. Maybe Jack was right – not exactly a bestseller. And yet, something irked her. If her dad had gone to the trouble of hiding his research and not telling his agent or his daughter about it, there was probably something special about this case.
“It’s dangerous to chase ghosts, Eva,” Jack said.
“I’m not chasing ghosts.” She lifted her mug to her nose and inhaled. The scent of coffee always calmed her. “Dad dedicated the last year of his life to working on this project, and I want to learn more.”
“And now that you’ve discovered it, you will obsess over it.”
Eva sighed and set her mug on the counter. She hated people analyzing her. “You know what, Jack, it’s late and I think we should—”
“You’re kicking me out,” he said flatly.
“I’m tired.”
“Tired or annoyed?”
She crossed her arms. “What are you trying to say?”
“You’ve been nothing but highly strung since I arrived on your doorstep.”
Anger flared in her chest. “The housekeeper found my dad dead in that room eight weeks ago! Obviously, I’d be highly strung about seeing the office for the first time. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
“I do understand.”
She shook her head. “You don’t. You don’t understand how hard it is to wake up in this house every morning. You’re not the one questioning how this happened when he was healthy and fine and everything was … everything was normal and now that I’ve found something important, something that meant the world to him, something that may help me grieve and move on, all you can do is insult his legacy.”
“I didn’t insult his legacy.”
“You did, Jack.”
“I didn’t.”
She shook her head. “I’m not gonna argue with you about this.”
“Right,” he stated plainly.
“Is that all you can say?”
“My God, Eva, learn to grieve and not be a bitch about everything.”
She recoiled against the counter. “Excuse me?”
“All you do is roam around the cottage obsessing over things to fix. When did you last cry or show an ounce of emotion, apart from the stupid desire to sing to old-man music and complain—”
“How I cope is none of your business,” she said, sneering.
“Do you even feel anything for me?”
She threw her head back and raised her arms. “Oh my God, you would make this about you. We’ve known each other for three weeks, Jack. Three freaking weeks. I told you I wasn’t ready for a relationship and yet, you continue to push and push and push.”
Jack’s nostrils flared, and he pointed at her. “Because you keep reeling me back in. Am I just an easy lay to you?”
“Maybe you are! Hell, you’re the one who keeps showing up on my doorstep.”
“For God’s sake, you’re an adult. Shouldn’t you know by now it’s rude to string people along? No, not rude, it’s the very definition of selfish!”
A lump formed in her throat and her cheeks burned. She shook her head and turned away.
“What is it you want, Eva?”
She rolled her lips inwards.
“What do you want?” Jack shouted.
She flinched. “To be alone!”
“Then I’ll make it easy for you.” He left the room and returned with his briefcase, opened it and firmly slapped a paper onto the counter. “Sign the contract for the listing and I’ll go.”
Her stomach tensed as she looked at the whiteboard. Thoughts chased around her head like a wild hunt. She could sign it and leave England next week. But then what? She would return to Canada, sit at her dead-end office job fixing computers; a job she knew was only temporary because who wanted to fix things for the rest of their life? Besides, how could she return to her old life when the mystery of her dad’s tenth book lingered in her mind? Oh, God. Maybe this was her duty as his daughter – to piece the puzzle together, reach out to his agent and publish the story he wanted to make public, effectively bringing closure to his legacy as an author.
“You won’t sign, will you?” Jack said.
She lowered her head. “I think I need more time.”
“More time … all you’ve done is waste my time,” he muttered and ripped the contract from the counter. “If you change your mind about the listing, call for Gwen. She will handle your application from now on.”
She rolled her eyes. “Honestly, you’re such a child. And while we’re talking about wasting time, you live in England, Jack. Did you really think I’d pursue a serious relationship when I know it will end in a few weeks?”
“Earth to Eva, we live in the twenty-first century. The internet exists. It’s not the Victorian era or something.” He picked up one of the other photographs from the back of the whiteboard. “While you’re chasing ghosts, why not hook up with this bloke? A rotting skeleton without a beating heart would be right up your street.”
He dropped the photo onto the floor, spun around and marched toward the front door.
Eva followed him. “Oh no, you don’t get the last word.” Her breath came out like a hot burst of air. “For God’s sake, I didn’t come to England to fall in love, you egotistical idiot!”
He slammed the front door, and the cottage stilled to the dull ticking of the clock in the hallway.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The sound of silence always creeped her out, but then came the dripping of the bathroom tap, a reminder that there was still work to be done. With a huff, she returned to the kitchen, flipped the radio back on and felt her tension lift as Elton John’s Your Song filled the room.
She picked up the black-and-white photograph that Jack had dropped. As she hummed along to the song, she observed the man in the image.
He sat stiffly in a chair, his arm resting atop a book. He wore typical clothing of the period: a black fitted jacket, light-coloured buttoned-up waistcoat, dress shirt with a stiff collar and a dark necktie. He had a full head of dark, wavy locks parted to the side, a straight nose, sculpted jaw and inviting eyes that she imagined could once have been a startling blue. The slight smile that curled his narrow lips added emphasis to the dimpled ridges around the edges of his mouth.
Her heart gave a confused thud.
“I hope your story is worth stopping my life for a few months,” she whispered to him.