The Girl He Left Behind Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to Dawn and Sheldon Currie

  and for their beloved Rachel, ever present

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Ghosts

  Chapter Two: Silk Kites at Dawn

  Chapter Three: Murdoch’s Destiny

  Chapter Four: Knowledge on a Window Ledge

  Chapter Five: The Drowning of Stones

  Chapter Six: The Next Step

  Chapter Seven: Money and Magic Wands

  Chapter Eight: Mutiny on the Mountain

  Chapter Nine: The Announcement

  Chapter Ten: Premonition

  Chapter Eleven: The Introduction of Deceit

  Chapter Twelve: Satin Flames

  Chapter Thirteen: Out of Words

  Chapter Fourteen: Nightly Vigil

  Chapter Fifteen: Beauty and Blood

  Chapter Sixteen: Invisible Scribbles

  Chapter Seventeen: Slow Waltz

  Chapter Eighteen: A Mile of Grief

  Chapter Nineteen: A Voice in the Rain

  Chapter Twenty: Tea in a China Cup

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Long Road Home

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Lost Children

  Chapter Twenty-Three: A Paper-Thin Divide

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Deep Hunger

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Set Free

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Man in the Impala

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Secret of the Mountain

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Wednesday’s Children

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: United by Illness

  Chapter Thirty: The Appointment

  Chapter Thirty-One: A Tilted Tombstone

  Chapter Thirty-Two: One Crow Sorrow

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Slant in Stone

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  WILLOW ALEXANDER IS A CELTIC BEAUTY. HER large green eyes are epic in thought as she paces around her kitchen like a jungle cat, watching and listening from window to window for any sound or movement beyond her door. She runs her fingers through her wild reddish mane. Her naked body trembles, a moment hot, a moment cold, a moment unrehearsed as she waits on this thirteenth of May 1985, her birthday, for the police to come and arrest her.

  It was Willow who found their bodies. In the upstairs bedroom, there was a leftover smile on Kathleen’s face as she lay in her bed. Dr. Millhouse was in his office, with his eyes half-open, as though he were watching death approaching down the stairs. The autopsy reports are still pending. The Mounties are investigating. The last time Willow saw the Millhouses, she and Kathleen were having tea in their favourite china cups. Willow had gone to visit with Kathleen the night before they died. Dr. Millhouse had taken his tea in his downstairs office.

  “Mysterious and strange,” people rumoured, “that they died together like that.”

  The only thing visible beside their bodies were the beautiful bone china cups. Still half-full of tea.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE POLICE come to question her, Willow decides she must rid the parlour of its photos. The gold-, silver- and wooden-framed smiles of her dead relatives were on display on a fading doily on the side table beside a window. She has decided to burn some of them and will pack others in a trunk and have her neighbour store them for safekeeping while she is in jail.

  Nobody has tapped on her door all day, and she has ignored the ringing phone. Willow drops the photos of her maternal grandfather’s relatives into the flames of the kitchen stove. The photos curl like worms poked with a stick. They are the relatives she’s never met or ever cared to meet. Willow is soon covered in soot as she continues organizing things before the police arrive. She can’t leave anything behind when she is taken away. She does not want any intruders destroying the dignity of Murdoch Alexander’s home.

  At eight o’clock that evening, a cool fog surrounds the Alexander house like a net. Willow listens as a heavy rain shower begins to fall, creating little silver brooks that float down the windowpane.

  Willow realizes she forgot to give Sorrow, her pet crow, his special treat. Willow pulls the switch on the small lamp in the parlour as she leans her back up against the wall. She waits, just waits, in the dim light like a drifter in an empty church.

  The next morning, Willow wakens to the sound of banging at her porch door. She grips the edge of a chair to help herself up off the floor and quickly pulls on an old track suit and her rubber boots. She doesn’t remember falling asleep. It has stopped raining, and the sun is now blazing in through the window. When she opens the door, two Mounted Police officers are standing on the step.

  “Are you Willow Alexander?” asks the woman officer. An older male officer stands at her side. They exchange glances. Willow recognizes them as they introduce themselves. They were patients of Dr. Millhouse. And she knows they recognize her as well. The introductions are only a formality, she suspects; in their line of work, they have to introduce themselves even to someone they know.

  “I’m sure you are aware of why we are here,” the male officer says.

  “Awareness can be a contemptuous vice, officer. I’ve been watching for you,” Willow responds.

  “We would like to ask you a few questions down at the station, Miss Alexander. We know you knew Dr. Millhouse and his wife better than most people in Glenmor,” the male officer continues formally.

  “You can wash up before we go,” adds the woman officer, as though she were speaking to a lost child.

  Willow’s voice is direct. “I don’t need to wash up. My answers will be the same whether I’m dirty or clean.”

  Again, the officers exchange glances. The woman officer returns to the cruiser, makes a call, and then brings a package of wet wipes from the cruiser and hands them to Willow.

  “Is there anything you’d like to do before we leave, Miss Alexander?”

  “Yes, sir, I would like to feed my pet crow. I forgot to give him his treat yesterday.”

  Willow trained Sorrow, a year or so ago, to call out her name. Willooo, it caws, whenever she brings him a special treat.

  Willow calls out to the crow but gets no response. She drops the treat on the gatepost, knowing the bird will find it later. The woman officer helps Willow gently into the back seat of the police car. Willow opens the back window and looks out just as the crow lands on the fence post a few feet from the cruiser.

  “Listen, listen!” she cries as the male officer gets behind the wheel and prepares to leave. “Sorrow heard my voice.”

  Sorrow caws loudly, Willoooo!

  The car pulls out of the driveway, the engine purring softly as they drive down the lane to the police station.

  Chapter One

  Ghosts

  CHRISTY’S MOUNTAIN, THE GRANDE DAME OF Glenmor in the northern highlands of Cape Breton, holds the sun close to her breast at dawn, slowly weaning slices of light down over the village to embrace the freshly fertile seeds that were planted in early spring.

  The mountain’s beauty is seductive and playful, haunting and inviting, swaying in the deepest greens and golds, with a pitch-black hue in her craggy seams. After dark, young people will gather like fireflies carrying lanterns to listen for the haunting, ragged voice of the man whose young bride vanished years ago into thin air before his eyes, never to be seen again. Legend has it that he stayed on the mountain to sing to her in their mother tongue, with his powerful Gaelic, pleading voice, hoping she might return to his side.

  As a child, Willow had rolled her eyes when her mother told her of the singin
g ghost. Now, at forty years of age, she allows a sprinkle of amusement to smear her disbelief in such tales. Secretly, she catches a thrill when the lanterns stop moving after dark, their flames held up evenly until the screeching begins. She hears the screams and sees a parade of lanterns rush by her house on the run. Willow applauds the screech owl. He has scared them once again after all these years.

  A busy breeze combs the uneven shades of grass covering the Alexanders’ property. The “sun patches,” the wide-open, deeper-green fields of Glenmor, stretch for miles. Paler greens whisper near the back porches and along the verandahs’ borders.

  The Bent River is close by. Full of winter’s gifts as it flows. Dead black branches twisted like wire, snapping. The wind offers up to the river the bleached carcass of a small wild animal. A child’s blue mitten coils around its rib cage by loose strands of wool. The river is respectful of its cargo. It runs smoothly and its voice is as thrilling as the whippoorwill.

  From the village barbershop, a slant of grey smoke thins out from the stovepipe as it rises to mingle with a low cloud. A small sign on the door reads OPEN DAWN TO DUSK. Inside, the tea is always piping hot. The old yellow dog, beside the stove, is bilingual. His owner, the barber, who lives in the back of the shop, is a wise little man who knows and keeps every secret that flows from the lips of his customers. Sometimes a customer or two will stay so long, it is said he will need another haircut before he leaves.

  Beside the barber shop, the Country Corner Store opens its creaking door at 7 a.m. Sharp. The owner, a cranky, stout woman in her sixties with eyes as cold as a winter stone, checks her doorbell, which acts as her guard dog when she has to go out back to slice bologna and other slabs of meat. She stands in the doorway of the back room, meat cleaver in hand, to check out who has entered.

  “Oh, it’s just you,” the shop owner whines. “Just you” is never named. She turns the doorbell off when she’s behind the counter, her hawk eyes alert, all-knowing. She knows where every item is located. She counts every peppermint in the jar at the end of the day. One can’t run a business on blind faith.

  On Saturday afternoons, the kids gather around in front of the barbershop as Felix the fiddler rosins his bow. At his feet is a small wooden box beside the fiddle case. He will raise his hand to stop anyone from dropping a coin in before he plays. He wears a long, dark overcoat down past his knees. A fedora is perched to the side of his head. He is young and he is old. In disguise and fully exposed. He can speak, but never a word leaves his tongue. He saves his words for his widowed mother, who cares for him, a mile beyond the Bent River. In his face are the colours of a pastel painting—gentle blue eyes, a pale, creamy complexion with strokes from the sun’s brush on his cheeks. His mouth is the fading hue of a dying rose. His hair, sprinkled with silver, hangs down past his collar.

  Felix scans the crowd with his soft eyes. He knows what music lives in the feet of the dancers. He begins with a jig and the kids form a circle. Dust clouds the air. Dogs scatter for a quiet place. The bell from the Country Corner Store howls in protest.

  The music grows closer to their feet, thundering up the ground, as Felix rattles the bow into a strathspey and reel with ease. And when the music stops, the older men move closer to the musician, standing as still as choir boys. The bow trembles and weeps into a Scottish lament. Nobody moves. No birds fly by. Children stop talking. The old bell from the Country Corner Store is silent. The barber stands on his step, ignoring the tears rolling down his face. Felix’s body moves in rhythm as if the music is breaking out through his skin. His eyes are closed, and when they open, they roll and close again in a quiet, quivering ecstasy. And then the music stops, and the silent musical genius of Glenmor prepares to leave. He closes the wooden box full of coins, packs the fiddle away in its case and moves in long strides towards the Bent River Road, oblivious to the applause that follows him like a clap of thunder.

  On Monday mornings, circles of schoolchildren gather along the sides of the country roads, along with a dog or two, as a yellow school bus wheezes around a turn and halts to a stop. They file in one by one as the dogs wag their tails and wait until the bus is out of sight before they return home. The children ride along as the day brightens, past clotheslines of freshly washed sheets, drifting like square clouds in the greening fields. Gentle and innocent laughter sneaks out an open window and is carried off to the sea. The younger children hug the driver before they leave. He calls them by name as he helps the smaller children down the steps.

  Glenmor’s fishermen are already on the sea, muted specks of colour seen from the shore when the sun rises. There are generations of families on the bending waves, burly eighteen-year-olds working side by side with their fathers and grandfathers. The eyes of the elderly, misty with knowledge, watching carefully.

  “Keep an eye on the sea and an ear to the wind,” they warn from the stern of the boat. “What watches you must always be watched. Nature has her own set of rules!”

  The old priest, in the parish church for daily Mass, raises a circular white host in mid-air before it is broken. Between his knotted fingers and thumbs, he divides it carefully and swallows it delicately. He too is respectful of his cargo. He adds a silent prayer for the safety of the fishermen dividing the waters of the Atlantic.

  * * *

  WILLOW ALEXANDER AWAKES before dawn. She has been dreaming in colour about the dead, but she is with them in this dream, a child in a green plaid dress, matching ribbons in her hair. Nobody appears to notice her watching them go by. The others are all grown women, walking in single file towards a pasture with the word Paradise scrolled on a wooden plank set against a tree. In the lead, her beautiful mother, pale as spring frost, smiling as the others follow her. Behind her is Kathleen, Willow’s dear friend, and wife of Dr. Millhouse, whom she worked for recently at the clinic. Kathleen had not walked on her own for some time before her passing. In the dream, she moves like a dancer, the tip of one golden shoe cupped in her hand in mid-air, the other touching down on soft sand along the path.

  Kathleen was a brilliant woman and a psychologist, gone now after what seems like years, yet it has only been weeks. Willow’s mother would have called the Millhouse deaths a mixed blessing, since Kathleen and Dr. Millhouse left this world together. It was an ending Willow’s mother might have wished for herself when her husband, Murdoch, died at age fifty. Her husband’s death left her with the sacraments of bereavement, the distance that the heart has to cover in order to bleed out its denial, its anger, its sorrow and finally its acceptance, her passport for moving on. Willow believes her mother never really knew what distance she had covered after her husband passed away. Rhona Alexander died less than four years later, shortly after revealing the intimate details of their wedding night to Willow. The memory makes Willow chuckle despite it all.

  In Willow’s dream, a young woman moves slowly from a shadow behind the others, her black hair in French braids, her smile a dangerous red. Willow attempts to speak to her, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice her. And suddenly, as the procession reaches the pasture, they all disappear.

  Willow believes the unknown woman is the one she and her lover, Graham Currie, fashioned a fictional story around for years. Willow had always imagined her with hair as black as midnight. Her name is Mary Ann MacIver, a teacher and spinster, as she is referred to when her name is spoken, who passed away in 1867. Beside her in the Journey’s End Cemetery lies John Duncan MacSween, a bachelor, who died a week after Mary Ann. Graham and Willow spun tales like cotton candy about the spinster and the bachelor. Mary Ann refused his offer of marriage and left his heart as empty as a dry well. He became a recluse, seldom seen, except at sunset, that seam between dawn and dusk when the heart is most vulnerable, when he’d venture out into his field to watch the orange sunset before returning to silence behind his locked door. Willow is a frequent visitor to their graves in the old section of the Journey’s End Cemetery.

  It is 3 a.m., hours before the dawn will bloom, and Wil
low’s room is surrounded by the dead. She is not frightened by the dream. The dead looked very content. On the go, even. Mary Ann, vibrant, with her full red mouth visible. Where were they going with her lovely mother in the lead? What lay ahead in the pasture? The lead was something Rhona Alexander had rarely taken in her life. Willows smiles at the image of Kathleen, the dancer, her small hand cupped around a golden shoe. Willow can’t remember her role in the dream, or if she ever made it to Paradise. There were no men in the dream. Perhaps they were already there, waiting. Maybe there is no need for love beyond the point of no return. Or was the dream a reflection of her life at the moment? Alone. Pale-lipped. And she has not danced in years.

  “Dead end,” she mutters to herself as she pulls the quilt over her head.

  Under the blanket, Willow’s dream lingers. How would Kathleen, her dear friend, have analyzed this dream? A child dressed in plaid. Willow hates plaid. She wishes she had Kathleen’s insight on this one.

  Chapter Two

  Silk Kites at Dawn

  FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW, WILLOW WATCHES A pair of cardinals—a rare sight in Glenmor—mating on her wild rose bush. She is sure that the female is deliberately keeping her beak closed as long as she can while her masked suitor offers up seeds, beak to beak, in the artful aggression of hormonal mating. Perhaps it is Mother Nature herself who sets the discord. The female’s olive plumage with its reddish-tinged tips is no match for the male’s rich crimson plumage. Sweet whistles marinate the soft wind as the male’s wings burst in mid-air. The morning sun sets a golden yoke upon them as they fly towards the tall trees and disappear.

  Willow cannot imagine how the so-called experts, whoever they are, can tell that cardinals mate with the same partner for life. The idea of grown men and woman recording the sex lives of birds in the trees makes no sense to her. Useless information annoys her like an open pin on bare flesh. For some reason she regards it as another form of male domination.

  She pulls down her blind as the bold sun flares into her kitchen. The room is spotless, its perfection disturbed only by her light footsteps moving towards the flames in the kitchen stove. She has let the fire settle into a blue haze, while a shiny steel kettle gargles up a head of steam. A bowl of oatmeal, drowned in cream, sits marooned at the back of the stove. In silence, a pot of tea brews. The green teapot cover lifts slightly, takes a short breath, then sinks back down. In a moment of fading memories, Willow gives the calendar a quick eye. The red circle around the thirteenth of May surprises her. Why had she bothered to lasso her birthday, now two weeks past already? At forty, she tries to ignore any intrusion of celebratory reminders.