A Place of Hiding

“Are you here?” she asked. “Ah. There you are. You gave me a real fright. I thought...” She laughed quietly, but Paul could tell she was nervous and ashamed of being nervous. He knew how that felt.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked him. “Is it...well, is it about that picture?”

He’d nearly forgotten. The sight of that box, open and displaying and telling him things...He’d nearly forgotten. He’d wanted her to know and to understand because someone had to. Miss Ruth didn’t think he’d stolen anything from Le Reposoir, but there would always be suspicion in everyone else’s eyes if he didn’t somehow explain where he’d got the painting. He couldn’t bear seeing it among them—that suspicion—because LeReposoir was his sole refuge on the island and he didn’t want to lose it, couldn’t bear to lose it, couldn’t face having to be home with Billy or at school listening to taunts and jeers with no hope of escape and nothing on earth ever to look forward to again. But to tell someone from the estate itself about this place would be to betray the secret he’d sworn to keep forever: where this dolmen was. He couldn’t do that so all he could do was to tell a stranger who wouldn’t care and wouldn’t ever come here again. Only now...He couldn’t show her the exact spot. He had his own secret to protect. Yet he needed to show her something, so he went to the low altar stone and he knelt just in front of the crevice at its base behind it, which ran along its length. He brought the candle out from that crevice and lit it. He gestured downward so the lady could see.

“Here?” she said. “The painting was here?” She looked from the shallow depression to him and it felt like she was studying his face, so Paul nodded solemnly. He showed her how it might have lain in the depression and how, if it had done so, it would not have been visible to anyone who did not come to the far side of the altar stone and kneel as Paul himself was kneeling.

“How odd,” the lady said quietly. She offered him a kind smile, however. She said, “Thank you, Paul. You know, I don’t think you were ever going to keep that painting for yourself, were you? I’ve a feeling you’re not that type of person at all.”

“Mr. Ouseley, it’s our job to make this transition as easy for you as we can,”

the girl said to Frank. She sounded more sympathetic than he would have thought possible in someone her age. “We’re here to help you through your loss. So anything you’d like us to handle from the mortuary, we can handle from the mortuary. We’re here for your convenience. I encourage you to take advantage of that.”

What Frank thought of all this was that she was far too young to be the person who did the meeting and greeting, the arrangement making, and the selling of talents provided by Markham & Swift Funeral Services. She looked about sixteen, although she was probably somewhere in her twenties, and she had introduced herself as Arabella Agnes Swift, oldest greatgranddaughter of the founder. She’d clasped his hand warmly and had taken him into her office which, with consideration for the grief-stricken people with whom she generally met, was as unofficelike as possible. It was fitted out like a grandmother’s sitting room with a three-piece suite and a coffee table and family pictures on the mantel of a faux fireplace in which an electric fire glowed. Arabella’s picture was among them. In it, she wore the robes of a university graduate. Hence, Frank’s conclusion about her real age. She was waiting politely for him to reply. She’d discreetly positioned a leather volume on the coffee table, within which were doubtless photographs of the coffins from which the bereaved could choose. She held a flip-up spiral notebook on her lap, but she didn’t pick up the pen that she’d laid neatly across it when she’d joined him on the sofa. She was every inch the modern professional and not a single inch the lugubrious Dickensian character that Frank had expected to find behind the doors of Markham & Swift Funeral Services.

“We can also do the ceremony here in our chapel, if that’s what you prefer,” she said, her tone quite kind. “Some people aren’t regular churchgoers. Some prefer a more agnostic approach to a funeral.”

“No,” Frank finally said.

“So you will be holding the service in a church? If I could make a note of the name? The minister as well?”

“No ceremony,” Frank said. “No funeral. He wouldn’t want that. I want him...” Frank stopped himself. I want was not the way to put it.

“He preferred cremation. You handle that, don’t you?”