Blackthorn Winter (16 page)

"I can see why Mrs. Glendenning hated it," I said slowly. "But it's actually ... very good, isn't it? I mean—not pretty, but..."

"It's horrible," Oliver snapped. "Terrible insult to Celia. Can't imagine what Liza was thinking. Of course it's technically brilliant. Liza
was
a gifted artist. But she had a nasty streak, I'm afraid. No getting around that."

I gazed at the painting's hooded, shadowed, spiteful eyes. When I moved away, I thought I could feel them watching me.

"We did want to ask you about the night of the party—," began Duncan, but I cut him off.

"No, let's go now, Duncan," I said urgently. "I've got to get home."

He raised his brows, then shrugged. We said good-bye and left the gallery. The drizzle had stopped and the air was mild and damp. By the low stone wall around St. Michael's Church, in the yellow light of a streetlamp, I stopped and turned to Duncan.

"What was the rush to leave?" he asked. "I thought you
wanted
to keep him talking. Try to figure whether he's still our prime suspect."

"He's definitely my prime suspect—either him or Mrs.
Glendenning. Or both! What if they're in love, and Liza was standing in the way of their happiness?"

"But why not just ask for a divorce then?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I just get a weird feeling about that woman. And she's always watching me. Even her portrait was watching me."

Duncan laughed. "Lunatic American."

He was teasing, but I was serious. Somebody out here in the streets of this little village was a murderer. That person wouldn't be wearing a sign saying i'm the bad guy, but if I was clever, I might be able to figure out who had killed Liza. Duncan and I might figure it out together. "I am not a lunatic," I said. "Just listen to me! It could be anyone.
Anyone,
Duncan. A person no one would suspect."

"Like—who?"

"Someone who hated her."

"Yeah—but can you name names?" he challenged.

I could—but he liked Veronica Pimms. And he
loved
his own grandparents. And they were only
some
of the people who had hated Liza.

"Look, I'm thinking about that fight Mrs. Glendenning had with Liza the night of the party. It was pretty clear she hated Liza's guts. And remember—," I added, "Oliver Pethering wasn't the only one to leave the party early that night. If you'll think back, you'll remember that Celia Glendenning did, too."

"Yes, but she had Kate with her. If you're thinking that Oliver and Celia teamed up to get rid of Liza, how could they do that with Kate right there?"

"That
is
what I'm thinking," I said, and it did make as much sense as any other scenario. "Maybe Kate's in on it, too."

Duncan snorted. "What did I say about lunatic Americans? Kate's all right. You're starting to see criminals under every bush."

I could hear he was annoyed with me now, and I hadn't even told him of all my other suspicions. "Sorry," I said. "I like Kate, too. It's just ... I think we should talk to her. Ask her about her mother."

"Ask if her mum's having an affair with Oliver Pethering? Ask if her mum killed Liza?" Duncan shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Somebody killed Liza," I stated doggedly. "Somebody in your safe, perfect English village killed her. That isn't my imagination!" I reached out and touched his jacket sleeve, but he pulled away in irritation. "Okay, look—we won't ask Kate anything directly."

Now we had reached the door in the stone wall, and Duncan took out his key to unlock it. "We'll be subtle," I added softly.

Duncan stared down at me for a long moment. "I don't think subtlety is your strong point," he retorted. But then, relenting, he flashed me a smile. "We'll come by tomorrow after school, Kate and I. We have a half day, so we'll be early—and have lots of time to talk."

After Mom and I walked the Goops to school the next morning, I reluctantly settled in at the kitchen table with my algebra book. Mom bustled around in the small kitchen making a pot of tea to take up to her studio. She made a second pot just for me, covered it with a quilted sort of pot-holder thing she called a tea cozy, and set it on a little trivet with a tealight burning beneath to keep it all warm and snug. I had to laugh at her. "You're really getting into tea, Mom."

"I'm just reclaiming my English heritage," she countered, pausing on her way up the stairs. "And it feels
right,
Jule. I've missed living here, and I hadn't realized how much. If it weren't for Liza's death, I'd be perfectly happy here."

"Even without Dad?" I muttered under my breath.

She heard, and nodded. "For now, yes. I need to be here, Juliana. And it's not just the tea! It's the pace of life, the sounds and smells, the feel of the air, the quality of sunlight—"

I rolled my eyes at her. Mom was an artist, through and through. She laughed and went up to work in her studio for the first time since Liza's death.

I sat alone at the table and looked out the window. The Mill House garden shimmered green through the mist.
Green shoots of flowers were starting to poke through the ground. Crocuses and daffodils everywhere. I got up from the table and opened the front door. The air was damp but warmer than inside the cottage. The old stone walls held the chill, I realized, and I left the door open when I returned to the table.

As I poured out another cup of tea just to warm my hands on the hot mug, I found myself unable to concentrate on my math. Instead, I sat there at the table, sniffing the garden scent that wafted in through the open door. I was quite sure, suddenly, that old Mr. Cooper was wrong this time. It was truly spring. It just didn't feel like winter anymore. Much balmier—like a California spring with hints of dark soil and wet blossoms and salt from the sea. It was the salt smell that always made me try to capture the
other
memory—the elusive threads of memory that flickered tantalizingly just out of reach.

In California we lived about an hour's drive from the ocean, so my memory wasn't stirred up unless we made a special trip to the beach. As a young child, I never really enjoyed having a picnic or building a sand castle because the beach would make me agitated. I didn't want to play or wade; I wanted only to run along the water's edge. I wanted to run until I was exhausted and needed to be carried back to the car—although whether I was running away from something or toward something in my memory, I could not say. Later, when I was older and the Goops begged for a day at the beach, I would come with my family reluctantly. I learned to sit still and enjoy sharing a picnic. I helped Edmund and Ivy build sand castles. But the urge to get up and race across the sand was always with me, as were
the tendrils of memory that blew through my mind like ghosts.

Whenever I tried to pin those memories down, tried to think back, back, back—I felt I was looking through murky water or smoked glass.

I felt that same barrier now—but now, here in Blackthorn, I felt a sense of danger, too. I felt as if whatever separated me from my past was not just the usual murky water but fathomless depths in which I could drown; not just the usual dark glass, but a hard, impenetrable surface that would cut me if I broke through it. Whatever I was almost remembering, I suspected, was something about my childhood, about my first five years in another family. It had to be. And I both longed to remember—and dreaded remembering.

I knew the basic story, the one my parents had told me, of how they'd been contacted by a social worker who knew they were looking for a young child to adopt. They were told how I'd been found wandering on the beach in Santa Cruz late one night, drenched with salt spray. The people who found me were two teenagers on a date, sneaking off to the dunes for some private cuddling or a midnight swim. They were shocked to find a little girl there in the inky darkness, all alone. They called the police, and the police didn't even cite them for being on the beach after it had officially closed for the night. Instead, they were heroes.

I wouldn't talk, except to whisper that my name was Jewel Moonbeam and I was five. I knew when my birthday was, but that was all. Some investigation led the police to find the apartment where I'd been living. It wasn't the sort of place where people knew their neighbors. Everybody
kept to themselves, and people came and went weekly. But the police learned from one of the tenants that "Her Highness"—a young woman with some sort of accent (maybe British, or Australian, or New Zealand, or something)—had a little girl. She'd told neighbors she once had a husband who got himself killed in a motorcycle wreck. The other tenants didn't know anything else, and the police couldn't find any papers of identification in the apartment. No letters, no bills, no passport or wallet with a driver's license. They had searched all records for anybody with the unlikely surname of Moonbeam and came up with nothing.

Nothing.

My own memories started out of that nothingness and formed a cloudy picture of how I'd sat at a table, the table where I learned to do puzzles with the foster mom, and how a policeman sat across from me, asking about my mother, the one with the accent. Not the woman I knew now as Mom. My
birth
mother.

I remember how I just shook my head, not having any words at all. Not knowing anything at all. It was as if that first day in foster care was the first day of my conscious life. I had no birth certificate. I became Juliana Martin-Drake, beloved first child of Hedda and David, and we celebrated my adoption date as well as my birth date, and as far as I was concerned the adoption date
was
when I had come to life.

All these years later, I still knew nothing. But where, then, were these feelings coming from now, these uneasy glimmers of panic and that voice, a child's voice—
my voice?
—crying out:
wake up, wake up!
Why could I recall nothing of that birth mother, my first mom? I wanted to know and at the same time was afraid to know.

And ... why did I now feel that the memories were linked to Liza Pethering's murder? That was the strangest thing of all.

I set down the mug of tea and slowly wound my long braid around and around my hand, biting my lip, staring out the window. Through the mist in the garden I could see a light from Quent Carrington's Old Mill House.

I reached for my pencil and tried to work a math problem, but the numbers blurred on the page. I reached up to wipe my eyes and was startled to find tears.

Mom's voice called down to me, asking if I'd mind making some toast for "elevenses" and bringing it up to her. I jumped up gladly, relieved to have something to do besides sit lost in my thoughts.

"What in the world is 'elevenses'?" I yelled up the stairs.

"Late-morning tea break!" she called back.

That figured, this being England. "How many pieces of toast?" I shouted up to her.

"Lots," replied her laughing voice. "And make some for yourself. We'll have a study break together. Then maybe you can help me tackle the last of these boxes up here."

I might as well,
I thought morosely. It wasn't as if I was really getting any schoolwork done. I wished again that I hadn't decided to do homeschool. On a balmy springlike day such as this, school with Duncan and Kate—even an unfamiliar school in an unfamiliar land—would be a lot nicer than sitting here with my own muddled thoughts and no computer from which to e-mail my friends back home.

I turned on the broiler (the
grill
) and laid six slices of bread on the metal rack. I had to watch carefully because the bread would crisp and burn quickly. Deftly I turned the
slices over with tongs, and then stacked the perfect pieces of toast onto a plate. I turned off the grill, then arranged the plate along with butter, jam, knives, and napkins on a wooden tray. I carried the whole thing up to Mom's studio.

Mom's paintings were colorful, detailed scenes of people going about their lives. Her settings were mostly imaginary, but they sprang to life on the canvas, full of tiny stories. The longer you looked at Mom's paintings, the more you saw. My family still liked to tease me about the painting Mom hung in my bedroom at home—a busy village with a parade down the main street and a carnival in full swing in one of the lush fields bordering the town. The painting had hung on the wall next to my bed for nearly two years before I noticed that the twists and turns in the carnival maze spelled out J-u-l-i-a-n-a. I'd studied that picture every night, marveling at the tiny scenes—the little boy who was afraid of the clown, the little girl eating a huge fluff of cotton candy, the couple daringly setting off in a hot-air balloon—but I'd never noticed my own name, right there.

"Some things are best hidden right in plain sight," Dad had told me, laughing. "So the moral is, always keep your eyes open. If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you!"

In this new little sunroom studio, Mom had unpacked most of her canvases and hung about a dozen. There wasn't enough wall space for more. She had several others stacked by the door. Those, she told me, we would hang down in the sitting room, and in the bedrooms. Someday maybe she'd be able to rent a little studio on Castle Street. The five boxes of books and supplies she had not yet unpacked were over by the windows. Three boxes were stacked in a leaning tower. Two were shoved up against the wall.

"The same rules apply here as at home," Mom said, also eyeing that unstable stack of boxes. "All kids out of my studio unless invited in!"

"I never touched your old boxes," I said indignantly, setting the tray of toast on an unpacked box. "Don't go blaming me if the Goops have messed with your stuff"

"Not messed with, just moved," Mom said. "I don't know why Ivy and Edmund would drag them to the other side of the room and pile them up that way—they're heavy boxes!"

"Maybe they needed a throne for a king or queen," I suggested. The Goops were big on fantasy stories as well as orphanage tales.

We both started slathering the butter and jam onto our toast and gobbling it up. While we ate, my eye fell on a new blank canvas Mom had set on the easel. "So, what are you going to paint?" I asked.