Bridesmaids Revisited (31 page)

“Edna, dear, do be careful!” Jane quavered. “You could cut yourself, and we wouldn’t want that. It would spoil Sophia’s homecoming.”

Edna ignored her. “Oh, I did have a good laugh when Miss Dobson put that poultice on my bruise that was made up with food coloring. Think you’re Miss Medicine Woman, don’t you?”

She now swiveled the knife in Rosemary’s direction. “Or it could have been you that was suspected. So sad her having those nervous breakdowns, I would have said. Never been quite right since; and then there’s you!” The blade was now pointed at Jane. “A woman that sees and hears things that aren’t there. Of course that was all my doing. So that if one or both of the other two dear ladies had gone upstairs with Sophia’s look-alike granddaughter when she arrived, and had smelled the orange blossom and seen the confetti, they would have thought you’d done it to convince them you were potty after all. You all thought I was still at the hospital.”

She now addressed all three bridesmaids. “Weeping buckets for my precious hubby, but I had Tom bring me back as soon as you two left.” Eyeing Thora and Jane: “The doctors had already told me Ted was dead. But I’d kept that to myself. I came in through the cellar door and saw you”—hatred glowed in her eyes as she looked at me—“open the one at the top of the stairs. I tiptoed to the top after you closed it and watched you go up the hall stairs. And quick as lightning I went up the ones to the blanket chest and sang you that pretty song.”

“Edna”—Sir Clifford released Sophia and took a couple of steps towards her—“give me the knife and let me get help for you. It will be the very best that’s available.” She did not look at him.

“You can’t know”—she eyed the bridesmaids venomously—“how good it feels to have the whiphand after all these years of being at your beck and call. Seeing how you pitied me for being married to Ted and never having the sort of life where I went out to tennis parties.”

Everyone in the room stood transfixed in position as if participating in a tableau. Sir Clifford again had his arms around Sophia. And Hope stood close to them. It was Mrs. Malloy who suddenly moved.

“You’re a disgrace, Edna Wilks, that’s what you are, to charwomen everywhere. A proud profession like ours. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And doing what you did to your own cousin. Encouraging her to bump off Mr. Fiddler’s first wife. Telling Gwen that if hiding her glasses so she’d fall down the stairs didn’t work, it would be a snap to give her some herb that would do the trick. And when the poor woman died right after, without Gwen having the heart to do it, you blackmailed her all these years.”

“I never could squeeze much money out of Gwen, not with her having to account to Barney Fiddler for every damn penny, but it made our little visits interesting.” She chewed on her lip. “Even so, I’d always go home properly ticked off. She’d become such a snob.” Edna smirked. “But she had her uses. Like my going over to stay there that night and getting her to say I’d slept in bed with her so that I’d have a nice tight alibi. Never suspected it was me, did you?” She waved everyone back towards the wall before moving closer to me, the knife steady in her hand.

“No,” I admitted, “not until I was standing at the top of the underground steps this morning and I remembered how I’d felt when I came here as a child and someone came up behind me and bent to give me a kiss. Someone who was chanting a nasty little rhyme that I afterwards thought I’d made up. I had always pictured three bridesmaids, as my mother called them, and it came to me that Jane had said she wasn’t here then, so the third woman had to have been you. I also realized that today is Thursday, and that my mother’s accident happened on a Thursday, your day off. When no one would question your whereabouts.”

“And what else do you have on your little mind?”

“You said yesterday that you didn’t know where Sophia got the paper to write to Hawthorn, when you had to have known it was taken from her diary. The printed dates alone would have told you that.”

“Oh, aren’t we smart, Miss Ellie! Tuck any other clues up your sleeve?”

“Your engagement photo that’s on Gwen’s piano. You looked so in love. And so you were ... with the man who
took
the photograph. Hawthorn Lane.”

She finally looked at him. “You’re an old man,” she said. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. If I couldn’t have you with me through the years, then I wanted you to stay as you were in my mind and in those drawings of Sophia’s. Mina wasn’t going to have them. I’d already had enough taken away from me.”

“That wasn’t why you killed Sophia’s and my daughter.” Sir Clifford’s eyes glittered with grief and rage. “You were afraid that not only would she bring those drawings to me, she would tell me what Rosemary had confessed and the past would be torn open. I haven’t forgotten your screaming rage when I refused to take up with you after Sophia’s marriage. And I’ve often wondered why you agreed to carry those notes back and forth when she was kept in her room. If Mina had come to me, I would finally have seen the light—that you had schemed to win my gratitude so that when you had accomplished your diabolical scheme, and I was left heartbroken, you’d be the woman to console me.”

“And so I should have been. I was prettier than your darling Sophia. I was prettier than the whole lot of them!” Edna flashed the knife at the bridesmaids. “I just didn’t get to wear the expensive frocks and had a mother that was a drunk.”

“Merciful heavens! I do feel my emanations failed me where Edna was concerned,” said Jane plaintively to the rest of us.

“Cod’s wallop!” Thora put an arm around her, and another around Rosemary. “Anyone could have been deceived.”

“We all get duped once in a while,” responded Richard sadly.

“Shut up! Everyone into that corner!” Edna began backing out into the hall the instant her order was obeyed. And it is impossible to know what would have happened next, if the cellar door hadn’t opened and Leonard Skinner hadn’t spoken from behind her.

“The game’s up!” His voice radiated triumph. “I know my little Roxie’s here! I saw her arrive in a taxi. Knew if I kept watching the place I’d get lucky.”

“Who is this idiot?” inquired Sir Clifford.

“Don’t everyone look at me,” Mrs. Malloy bridled, “I married him, it’s true, but I didn’t give birth to him.”

“Now, then, Roxie, me darling!” Leonard wagged a remonstrative finger. “It’s not all been fun and games. I had to slash that Mrs. Haskell’s tires,” he added piteously, “so she’d have to go on foot or by bus and I’d have a better chance of keeping up with her. But I lost her yesterday when that chap in the fish van gave her a lift.”

“And you all think
I’m
mad!” complained Edna.

“Leonard, you’re embarrassing me in front of me new chums. I don’t like that new way you’ve done your hair.” Mrs. M. glowered at him from under neon-coated lids.

“So this is the thanks I get.” He was beginning to look the least bit offended by the lack of welcome on all sides. He had yet to be offered a cup of tea. “Sleeping in the garden shed isn’t yours truly’s idea of posh, but it did prove useful when I spotted you, dearie”—he placed an arm around Edna’s shoulders—“coming and going through that cellar door and found you’d kindly left it unlocked. That way I didn’t have to worry about not being allowed in the front. But now I’m here, is anyone going to ask me to join the party? It’s not like I’ve come empty-handed. I’d have been here sooner if I hadn’t gone off—after I saw Roxie—to get that pound and a half of stewing steak that seems to be all that’s standing in the way of our beautiful reunion.”

“You think that’s all it’ll take to get me back!” Undaunted by the possibility of having her bosom deflated by a plunge of Edna’s knife, Mrs. Malloy lunged out of the conservatory at him. “Me, a woman that’s forged a career for herself with the granddaughter of a peer of the realm!”

Edna came back to life—I suppose even murderers become discombobulated at times. She pulled away from Leonard, seemingly uncertain whether to stab him or Mrs. Malloy first. Leonard toppled forward in a faint and knocked Edna off balance. Mrs. M. grabbed up the package of stewing steak and hit her over the head with it. There followed a stampede of footsteps mingled with a lot of shouting, which was suddenly reduced to a murmur when the conservatory door, which apparently no one had thought to lock, burst open. And the neighbors—Tom, Irene, and Frank, led by the inappropriately named, massively built Susan—burst in upon the scene. It turned out later that they had seen Sir Clifford’s car draw up and had been waiting outside at the front listening for sounds of trouble, before they thought to go around the back.

After that, things calmed down considerably. The police were phoned and after a brief interrogation Edna was taken away. Rosemary, Thora, Jane, and Richard agreed to go down to the station and give statements. Leonard departed, saying the fall had brought back his amnesia, and Mrs. Malloy, after tossing the package of stewing steak out the door after him, said that she thought she would go upstairs and read a nice scary book. I recommended
Secrets of the Crypt.

In a moment I would join my grandfather and grandmother and my mother’s twin sister in the sitting room. But I thought they needed just a little time of its being just the three of them. And I needed time to absorb these new additions to my family.

So I went into the kitchen and sat at the table. My mother would be so happy for me, I thought. And feeling as though I had finally laid her to rest, I went back into the hall and peeked into the sitting room. Hope sat watching her reunited parents holding hands. The illusion in the conservatory had passed. They were two elderly, if still good-looking, people, but the expressions on their faces were more beautiful than youth. It was, I thought, eternal. And even though, like Hope, I didn’t claim to have any extrasensory gift, I felt my mother’s presence. I could picture her sitting there with them, not outside the circle but at its core. As I was about to go in and join them, the telephone rang and I went to pick it up. When I heard Ben’s voice I felt my world become complete.

“Don’t say anything,” I said, “just let me hear you breathe. The redecorating can wait—for fifty years if it has to. I’m coming to join you and the children tomorrow. I want to talk to you about Memory Lanes.”

To my daughter, Shana, for all the journeys taken together

Acknowledgments

Much love and appreciation to Barbara and Uncle John, who are always there when needed.

And to my cousin Rosaleen, who is like a sister. Thank you for going out in the middle of the night with your father to say that last goodbye to your Auntie Charlotte. She loved you very much.

Copyright © 2000 by Dorothy Cannell

Originally published by Viking (ISBN 978-0670892051)

Electronically published in 2013 by Belgrave House

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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.