Page 96 of The Dead Come to Stay
“No more words. You’re lucky I’m not taking you in with me.”
“I want you to.”
MacAdams flexed his fingers in exasperation.“Why?”
“To be there for Dmytro, of course.” He meant it, apparently.
MacAdams could not stomach him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Standish,” he said, opening his car door. He flopped into his seat and was about to shut the door.
“Nose rings,” Standish said. Which made no bloody sense at all.
“What?”
“My holy grail, the thing I’d been searching for. Just a small, perfectly common nose ring. But so very ancient. That’s the stuff of human civilization itself.” He was turning back toward his front stairs. “Hardly a crime, now, is it?”
Chapter 28
Thursday, 17:00
Jo had spent the last few hours in a haze.
Aiden Jones was a man of secrets, meticulous habits and a singular, abiding special interest. Like the receipts and backs of envelopes she’d found in his archive box, the book had been written in, written on, writtenaround, with text creeping up the sides when a new fact needed to be added in place. Interleaved between the dense-packed pages were letters, photocopies, newsprint, timelines, obituaries, photographs and enough minutiae and ephemera that would make Roberta Wilkinson blush.
Jo assumed the portrait of Evelyn drove his quest. She waswrong.Aiden had been reconstructing the entire family tree, a great flowering of data that put the genealogy sites to shame.
Chen had made green tea. Arthur needed time with his thoughts; Jo needed no walls and an open sky. She and Gwilym walked to the park and sat beneath old trees and green boughs. Even hyperlexic speed reading had been no match for Aiden’s curious scribbled spirals. There were places where the text opened up, became ropy and loose—a mind working faster thana pen. There were places where it narrowed, stuttered, shrank from cramped fingers afraid of losing a thought. Explosive excitement as he made connections, winnowed details, solved the miniproblems of lost family lines.
And as she went, a mantra repeated in her head:he was like me, he was like me, he was like me. She’d lost Aiden even before her mother, but reading his words, she’d never felt so close to anyone. She’d found the family she knew must be there. And through him, she found one thing more.
Her name was Violet. Just like the flowers decorating Evelyn’s portrait or those that sprang up over the buried hope chest: humility, grace anddelicate love. From scraps and letters, ancestry searches and medical records, Aiden pieced together the skeleton of the story. Evelyn had indeed died in childbirth.
But the baby survived. And as for the answer Jo had been seeking all this time: Gwen had given the child away.
The travel records before her now revealed that William was in London on business when Evelyn went into labor; he returned to her corpse. Did Gwen tell him the baby died? It seemed likely. Why not keep the baby; why not raise it as her own? She thought better of it, eventually. Strangely, Gwen’s own letters, preserved in Aiden’s notebook, were the first clue:
November 1910, Gwen to someone named Tomlinson: “Please,”she wrote,“if you know or can discover her whereabouts, I would be happy to pay for your trouble...”
January 1913: “I can pay for travel to abroad, but I cannot go myself. I have my reasons.”
Another came in the form of scrap paper, a note scrawled in uneven script, but not by Aiden: “Flooding—must get Hobarth.”
Jo looked at the torn paper, it’s edges rust brown. Aiden provided a caption: “Written by the midwife. Evelyn needed a doctor.”
—whom? Jo found some more notes that clarified Hobarth as Dr. Ida Hobarth, the only modern physician in Abington, thesame one who, in another letter, told Gwen she was barren and could never conceive. Jo understood the meaning of the other word, too, and it wasn’t about the creeks rising.Floodingstood in as the lingering Victorian word for preeclampsia, a hypertensive, multisystem disorder leading to severe convulsions and hemorrhage. By 1906 physicians could manage the condition with magnesium sulfate. Hobarth would have known that; she could even have performed an emergency C-section, risky as it was. But she didn’t. She never came. Because no one called her.
Aiden wrote more in the margins of these factual notations, as if trying to imagine the scene himself: Evelyn lying above in the secret nursery, alone, in labor, and everything going wrong. The midwife had written the notes tosomeone, but if it had been the good doctor, then there would be records. What happened?
Jo thought she knew. Ida Hobarth would know the baby was William’s, which meant she’d learned of the affair. To call her would be to invite calumny and shame. Did the midwife send that note to Gwen? Upon refusing to do as asked, did she stand in her nightdress at the bottom of those grand stairs and let her sister die? Or did she leave the house so she wouldn’t hear the cries?
Aiden filled in the details on his own:
Maybe she told herself Evelyn would survive on her own; perhaps she lied to her conscience. The midwife was local, low-class. Someone poor who could be paid off. She couldn’t save Evelyn. Managed to save the infant. Evelyn’s last words were the child’s name; call her Violet. Gwen forced the midwife to take the child with her. When it was over, the house was silent—so silent—too silent. Or did Gwen still hear the ringing of a babe’s weak cry?
Gwen didn’t murder her sister with the twist of a knife, but she killed her all the same. The greater crime came next; she rejected the baby—hid it from its father, sent it away. Records of work done by the gardeners reveal a cold cellar dug in the basement. It had only begun, but served as the perfect gravefor Evelyn. And when the deed was done? Jo imagined Gwen standing before the painting of Evelyn Davies where it hung in the library.
Letters, in the autumn years: April 1931 to “a friend”:
