Page 45 of Autumn at the Willow River Guesthouse
‘Please be careful up there—’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve done this a million times,’ Uncle Gus said with a chuckle, reaching up and scooping a handful of leaves out of the drainpipe and attempting to deposit them into a bucket hanging on a hook by his side. While some made it, others didn’t, showering Lily with a cascade of wet, decomposing leaves. She managed to duck away from some, but one struck her right in the middle of the forehead.
‘There are people you can hire to do this kind of thing.’
‘It’s just this little bit where that sycamore hangs over. I should cut it back, but it’s a pretty tree, isn’t it? I remember you climbing up there and getting stuck once. I was all ready to start hauling the old mattresses out of the shed so you could jump, but someone went up and got you.’
Lily frowned, the ghost of an old memory slinking into focus. She hadn’t thought about that day in years, but now that she did….
‘I was trying to spy in through an upstairs window,’ she said, smiling. ‘There was that guy off children’s telly staying and I wanted to spy on him. Oh my god, I haven’t thought about that in … years.’
‘Andi Peters,’ Uncle Gus said. ‘He was opening the new restaurant up at Wright’s. ‘You kids were thrilled.’
‘I got his autograph in the end,’ Lily said, the memory flowing back like a river into a dry lake bed. ‘He signed my old Barbie Annual because that was all I could find.’
‘You were stuck in that tree for ages,’ Uncle Gus said with a chuckle, dropping another handful of leaves in the general direction of the bucket, making Lily duck to avoid another cascade of gunky leaves. ‘We thought you’d never get down.’
‘Who was it who got me down? Dad?’
‘It was some kid. I don’t remember his name now. The son of one of the guests. You were always over here in the summer, playing with the kids staying at the guesthouse. We had a lot of regulars, and you all knew each other. It was one of them, I expect.’
‘It was … oh, god.’
‘No, it definitely wasn’t him,’ Uncle Gus said, as he started to climb down the ladder. ‘That lazy old sod might have sent down a lightning bolt or whatever, but I can’t imagine he’d go to the trouble of climbing up a tree.’
Lily remembered now. The little boy in the photograph.
‘Michael,’ she said, as Uncle Gus reached the bottom of the ladder, then jumped down the last two steps, making it wobble and threatening to overbalance the whole thing.
‘You mean, Vicky’s boy?’
‘Yes.’
Uncle Gus shrugged. ‘I suppose it could have been. All looked the same to me. Right, that’s a job well done. Just got one more spot to do round the back.’
‘I think I’m falling in love with a ghost,’ Lily said, looking at her parents across the dinner table, a couple of glasses of wine having loosened her tongue.
‘Well, probably better than falling for a human,’ Sarah said, giving Pete a wry grin. ‘I imagine they smell better. As in, not at all.’
‘And eat less on dates,’ Pete said. ‘Got to save your pennies when you can. Which ghost will this be, out of interest? Not old Harry, who haunts the bridge down by the Moor Cross tunnel?’
‘Who?’
Pete laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I made him up. Are we going to have to guess?’
‘Dad, do you remember when I got stuck up the sycamore tree up at the guesthouse, and Michael Borton climbed up and helped me down?’
Pete shrugged. ‘Vaguely. I was at work. I remember Angus mentioning it offhand once or twice, but it wasn’t a big deal. You were only up there for five minutes.’
‘That’s not what he said.’
‘Ah, you can’t have been more than eight or nine. I imagine you kids got up to way worse than that. Do you remember the time you and Mary fell in the river and the police came out?’
Lily grimaced. ‘I was seventeen, and Colin’s older brother had been sneaking us drinks in The Crown’s beer garden. We stole a canoe and then capsized it. I remember the policeman laughing.’
‘You were such a tearaway in your teens,’ Sarah said. ‘I thought you were heading for a life of crime.’
‘I wasn’t that bad,’ Lily said, remembering a couple of other drunken escapades, and feeling glad her parents had no idea what she’d got up to at university. ‘Do you remember much about Michael?’
