The Haunted Season (2 page)

She put the magazine aside, leaving it for the next person. Somehow, this sort of tabloid “news” had in recent years lost much of its appeal for her.

Once vainer than
Little Women
's Amy March (and still given to perusing fashion magazines as if they alone held the secrets of the universe), Destiny had, at the age of thirty-five, undergone what most would call a conversion but she thought of as a wake-up call. The first thing that had had to go was her job. She had spent many years in the world's most superficial pursuit (copywriting) in the most superficial of industries (advertising). When the press had begun to reveal more and more that the products she polished and shellacked to a glossy sheen were often produced by slave labor, or were created by destroying the environment, it provided one of the catalysts that propelled her out of her old life and into her new.

Now clutching about her a too-small towel, Destiny warily approached the steam room with all the reluctant wonder of a missionary being asked to witness a pagan ritual for the first time. She had, in fact, never set foot in a steam room before, and she was sure there must be a certain etiquette involved. Did one knock on the door, or just burst in unannounced? Not to mention, surely some sort of safety measures were called for, and she didn't know what they were. If she were to collapse in there alone, would someone come to her aid before she lost two dress sizes? The whole thing was so, well, so Finnish—so very foreign to a girl conventionally raised in a two-up, two-down terraced house in a Plymouth suburb.

In the end, she entered the room slowly, without flourish or announcement, and carefully shut the glazed door behind her. She could just make out two other bodies inside, sitting with legs dangling over an upper wooden ledge. Deep in conversation, they paid her no mind as she entered. They both were wearing white towels wrapped turban-style about their heads and sarong-style around their bodies, so their only identifying markers were their red and pink pedicures. A wall of steam obscured their faces. Destiny tucked herself onto a seat nearest the door, settling into place on a lower bench. She wished she'd thought to wrap her own hair in a towel, as the steam would turn it into the sort of Bride of Frankenstein coils it reverted to when left to its own devices.

All was silence for a long while. Destiny, wondering if she was supposed to chant Viking songs or something, found the novel experience of damp silence so restful, she soon fell asleep, head back and mouth open. She awakened on hearing, in some subconscious way, the two words that had been on her mind for months, and she fully awoke to a shushing sound from one of the women.

“Nether Monkslip,” she had heard one of them say. She was sure she hadn't been dreaming.

Then: “It's all right,” the other woman said. “She's sound asleep.”

Destiny assumed she'd been snoring, a habit brought to her attention by more than one peevish roommate or ex-boyfriend. But some instinct—the tone in the second woman's voice—prevented her from announcing her newly alert state. Instead, she resumed making a snuffling noise interspersed with a snort she hoped approximated the sound one boyfriend had described as the noise a train loaded with panicking donkeys might make as it pulled too fast into the station.

Instinct—plus the fact that she also had heard, very clearly, just as she had awakened, the word
murder
.

When God hands you a coincidence like that, she thought, it is probably good to pay attention. Required, even. There would, or so she reasoned, be ample opportunity to make her presence known to the women once she knew exactly what it was they were saying about her soon-to-be new home. To say anything now, she'd be butting into a conversation that didn't include her. It would be quite rude, really.

She couldn't tell much about the women from their voices as they resumed their conversation. In a locker room, there was ample opportunity to observe the vast variety and shapes of the human body: the yoga practitioners versus the foodies, as it were. Here in this pea soup–like fog, given that the women were dressed in identical towels, there were no visual clues. With their hair covered, and arms and legs mostly obscured in clouds of moist air, they were hard to identify or classify. She would have hazarded that they were both Caucasian, and that was about as far as she was prepared to go.

From their voices, they were young. One quite young, the other possibly older. Well spoken. Posh. Their upper-class accents sounded alike to her ears, except that one had a deeper voice.

Now one woman said, “I can't tell you how ready I am to leave him. But the
stu
pid prenup…”

“The solicitor did warn you.”

“Yes, I know, thanks. I really never thought it would be an issue. I thought I could cope. I didn't think it would get to be this bad. He's changed so.”

“They all do, once the courtship is over.”

“Not yet. I don't believe that.”

“That, my dear, is because you are a romantic. And look where it's got you.”

“Duh. I feel some days as if I'm living out a life sentence. A nice, cushy life sentence. The only thing that livens up that village is the occasional sighting of that heavenly vicar, and he's taken now.”

In good conscience, Destiny asked herself later, what could I have done? Snapped my towel at them to get their attention? Loudly cleared my throat and announced that I knew exactly whom and what they were talking about?

But she kept quiet, in fact, because this seemed too good an opportunity to learn more about her soon-to-be village and its people. Nether Monkslip—the village she thought of as battle stations.

Max Tudor's galvanizing effect on the female half of a population she had already witnessed for herself, many times.

But above all, of course, there was that word:
murder.
Had one of the women said “I could murder him”? Or was it “I'm
going
to murder him”? That there had been in the past, or would be in the future, a murder? Destiny wasn't sure exactly what she had heard or what she had dreamed. Only that one word jumped out of the air, as if illuminated in flashing neon lights.

The one word seemed to hang there still, like a word in a cartoon balloon.

Murder.

She again wrestled, but fleetingly, with the thought of chiming in, of announcing herself, but she quickly dropped back into her role of eavesdropper. Well, it was not really eavesdropping, was it? So she assured herself. She sat in plain view—couldn't get much plainer, now could she, nearly naked as she was in this scanty towel?—and the women themselves made little attempt to hide their discussion or even to lower their plummy voices. They assumed discretion, rather like the wealthy and privileged might when speaking in front of their servants. Or perhaps it was anonymity they assumed, like strangers passing time in a train. Destiny had overheard the most amazing arguments and confessions whilst sitting on trains. People assumed they were among people they'd never see again, and somehow it lowered their inhibitions.

Funny she should think of that—that film
Strangers on a Train,
because now one of the women said something about its being a service to humanity if someone would please rid the world of Harold. Or did she say Harry?

The other woman grunted something unintelligible. Then she went on, her voice lower now, saying something like “Too bad: We could have done a swap, helped each other out. Like in that old film.”

An unintelligible reply, then: “But God knows where he went to, and good riddance. I'd have been glad of a helping hand.”

She laughed, however, so clearly it was meant as a joke.

Wasn't it?

“It's a wonder he's still alive, the bloody old trout.” Destiny wasn't sure who was talking now or whom she was talking about. The slight hiss of steam being expelled through the pipes obscured the sound, distorting it. “Something something,” whispered one of the women—it sounded complete gibberish. Then: “Most of these bad-tempered men get a spike or two of high blood pressure and they're gone.”

“You remember Bethany? I always suspected—”

“He used to hit her, you know … justified. No woman should put up with—”

“When he drinks…”

“There are poisons that … with alcohol—”

“Shhh.”

It was turning into a truly disturbing conversation. A thoroughly detached and unpleasant discussion of the wished-for demise of another human being. But it didn't rise to the level of something Destiny felt she had to put a stop to or intervene in somehow. No one's life was being threatened, after all. Not really. It was just that Harold's and some other man's passing were being considered as events to be anticipated and not regretted.

Bonuses, as it were.

“Nothing to be done about it now.”

Another silence, longer this time.

“Isn't there?” the other woman prompted, but softly.

“Sometimes I think … You do remember Bethany? No one believed it was an accident.”

Destiny, electrified by that one, final word at the end of the sentence—
accident
—forgot to snore. One of the women—the second woman?—gasped softly, and then the room grew very still, the only sound the slight hiss of steam. Both women seemed again to become aware of her, for the shushing sound was heard again, and the second woman said, in a voice that showed the strain, “You're joking of course.”

“Yes, yes, that's it. Of course I'm joking.”

“Good.”

But it was clear from the tone that the other woman did not believe her. And neither did Destiny, who resumed her snoring, more quietly now.

After a very long pause: “I have a friend…”

“Good for you.”

“No, I mean the kind of friend who can, you know … Get things done. Take care of things that need to be taken care of. Obit someone. The kind of person with connections—”

“I should go soon,” replied the other woman, hastily cutting her off. She sounded horrified by the drift the conversation had taken.

Destiny, below them, scowled in frustration.

“That mouthbreather of a stepdaughter is coming to collect me in the car. I told her to wait in the library.”

“I thought the son was the mouthbreather.”

“Him, too. He also chews with his mouth open, for God's sake. How long can male adolescence last, one wonders.”

“I could give you a lift.”

“Thanks, but I promised I'd take her shopping. The poor thing really is clueless. I'm embarrassed to be seen with her. Oh, did I tell you I saw that guy from the village—what is his name? I thought he never came to London.”

As their conversation drifted more into the trivial, it seemed to Destiny it was time either to make her presence known or get the heck out of there. Or stay until she'd lost thirty pounds. The women seemed disinclined also to clamber down and make themselves known, so for a while they all sat in stony silence. Finally, when she could take no more, Destiny created a smoke screen by pouring water on the rocks in the center of the room, and made her escape. It was hard to run with dignity in a towel, but she just managed it.

The two women turned to each other.

“How much do you think she heard?”

“No matter, we won't see her again. Not that she'd recognize us or know who we are. And she couldn't know who or what we were talking about anyway. No one's ever heard of Nether Monkslip, that is certain.”

“I'm sure you're right, but that was foolish of me. He just gets me so angry, so … so
frus
trated. Just boiling, you know? I forget myself.”

Meanwhile, Destiny quickly showered and dressed. Curious as she was about the two women, she was anxious to avoid a meeting that would be embarrassing for all concerned. Surely they were just blowing off steam—and the perfect place for that was a steam room, come to think of it.

By now there were quite a few people in the dressing area. She supposed afternoons before dinner were popular. She heard someone call out, “Eugenia! What on earth are you doing here!” and thought what a nice, old-fashioned name it was. She couldn't help noticing there was a stunned reaction from some of the women in the locker room as she put on her clerical collar. They had all been rather freely discussing their sex lives, along with their rather riotous plans for the evening.

She was getting used to that reaction.

A few days later, she had mostly forgotten the overheard conversation, caught up as she was in enjoying her last few days of freedom. And strange as the steam room conversation had been, she never made a connection between it and the car that narrowly missed her the next day, speeding by and forcing her to jump back on the curb.

She hadn't been watching where she was going, and London was notoriously dangerous.

Thank God she'd soon be in Nether Monkslip, where it was safe.

 

Chapter 1

MAX TUDOR

It was fall, and the patchwork fields around Nether Monkslip were changing color from gold and jade to bronze and topaz in that strange alchemy of the turning seasons.

Father Maxen Tudor sat at his desk in the mellow old vicarage of St. Edwold's, watching his own patch of garden change with the breeze and the moving sunlight. The room was quiet, the only sound the occasional whimper of his dog, Thea, as she chased rabbits in her dreams by the fireplace. A blank word-processing document was open before him and the cursor of his bulky computer blinked, the page waiting empty and undisturbed for his thoughts. It was, he told himself, too nice a day to work.

Autumn was his favorite time of year, and morning his favorite time of day, when his daily parish obligations had been met and he could sit with a cup of coffee, reading and ruminating and planning his next sermon. Time slowed, as if there were nothing to do but wait for the Japanese maple in the garden to cast its shifting red light into the room. While spring was about life and beginnings, fall was, to him, a reminder of the endless cycle-through of seasons: Spring flowers would always return, no matter how bleak their prospects at the moment.