A Place of Hiding

“She had the damn facts. She just didn’t want to see them. Jesus. Why couldn’t she ever let anything go? God, everything festered inside her. She couldn’t get past how she thought things should be.”


Deborah knew he was right in at least that one respect: China had put a price tag on things, always feeling herself owed far more than was actually on offer. Deborah had finally seen that in her last conversation with the other woman: She’d expected too much of people, of life. In those expectations she had sown the seeds of her own destruction.

“And the worst of it is that she didn’t need to do it, Debs,” Cherokee said. “No one was holding a gun to her head. He made the moves. I put them together in the first place, yeah. But she let it happen. She went on letting it. So how the hell could that’ve been my fault?”

Deborah didn’t have the answer to that question. Too much fault, she thought, had been assessed upon or rejected by members of the River family through the years. A quick knock on the door brought Simon into the room to join them. He carried what she hoped was the paperwork that would release her from Princess Elizabeth Hospital. He nodded at Cherokee but directed his question to Deborah.

“Ready to go home?” he asked her.

“More than anything else,” she said.





Chapter 32


Frank Ouseley waited till the twenty-first of December, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Sunset would come early, and he wanted sunset. The long shadows it provided felt comfortable to him, giving him protection from any prying eyes who might inadvertently witness the final act in his personal drama.

At half past three he took up the parcel. A cardboard box, it had sat on top of the television set since he’d brought it home from St. Sampson. A band of tape kept its flaps closed, but Frank had earlier lifted this tape to check on the contents. A plastic bag now held what remained of his father. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The colour of the substance was somewhere between the two, lighter and darker simultaneously, ridged by the occasional fragment of bone.

Somewhere in the Orient, he knew, they picked through the ashes of the dead. The family gathered and with chopsticks in hand, they lifted out what remained of the bones. He didn’t know what they did with those bones—they likely used them for family reliquaries much as the bones of martyrs had once been used to sanctify early Christian churches. But that was something he didn’t intend to do with his father’s ashes. What bones there were would become part of the place to which Frank had determined to deposit the rest of his father. He’d thought first of the reservoir. The spot where his mother had drowned could have received his father with little trouble, even if he didn’t scatter the remains into the water itself. Then he considered the tract of land near St. Saviour’s Church, where the wartime museum had been meant to stand. But he concluded that a sacrilege existed in disposing of his father at a site where men utterly unlike him were meant to be honoured. Carefully, he carried his father out to the Peugeot and rested him snugly on the passenger seat, cushioned all the way round by an old beach towel that he’d used as a boy. Just as carefully, he drove out of the Talbot Valley. The trees were completely bare now, with only the stands of oaks still leafy on the gentle slope of the valley’s south side. And even here, many of the leaves lay on the ground, colouring the comforting, large trunks of the trees with a cape of saffron and umber. Daylight left the Talbot Valley sooner than it did the rest of the island. Folded into a landscape of undulating hillsides eroded by centuries of stream, the occasional cottage along the road already showed bright lights in its windows. But as Frank emerged from the valley into St. Andrew, the land itself changed and so did the light. Hillside grazing for the island cows gave over to agriculture and hamlets, where cottages with a score of greenhouses behind them all drank in and reflected the last of the sun. He headed east and came at St. Peter Port on the far side of Princess Elizabeth Hospital. From there, it was no difficult feat to get to Fort George. Although daylight was fading, it was too early for the traffic to be a problem. Besides, at this time of year, there was little enough of it. Come Easter, the roads would begin to fill.