A Place of Hiding

Ruth Brouard watched the boy’s flight. She was in Guy’s study when Paul emerged from the bower that marked the entrance to the ponds. She was opening a stack of condolence cards from the previous day’s post, cards that she hadn’t had the heart to open until now and she heard the dog barking first and then saw the boy himself pounding across the lawn beneath her. A moment later Valerie Duffy emerged, in her hands the shirt she’d taken to Paul, a limp and rejected offering from a mother whose own boys had fledged and flown far before she had been prepared for them to do either.

She should have had more children, Ruth thought as Valerie trudged back towards the house. Some women were born with a thirst for maternity that nothing could slake, and Valerie Duffy had long seemed like one of them.

Ruth watched Valerie’s progress till she disappeared through the door to the kitchen, which was beneath Guy’s study, where Ruth had taken herself directly after breakfast. It was the one place she felt that she could be close to him now, surrounded by the evidence that told her, as if in defiance of the terrible manner in which he’d died, that Guy Brouard had lived a good life. That evidence was everywhere in her brother’s study: on the walls and the bookshelves and sitting on a fine old credence table in the centre of the room. Here were the certificates, the photographs, the awards, the plans, and the documents. Filed away were the correspondence and the recommendations for worthy recipients of the well-known Brouard largesse. And displayed prominently was what should have been the final jewel needed to complete the crown of her brother’s achievements: the carefully constructed model of a building that Guy had promised the island which had become his home. It would be a monument to the islanders’ suffering, Guy had called it. A monument built by one who had suffered as well.

Or such had been his intention, Ruth thought.

When Guy hadn’t come home from his morning swim, she’d not worried at first. True, he was always punctual and predictable in his habits, but when she descended the stairs and didn’t find him dressed and in the breakfast room, listening intently to Radio News as he waited for his meal, she merely assumed that he’d stopped at the Duffys’ cottage for coffee with Valerie and Kevin after his swim. He would do that occasionally. He was fond of them. That was why, after a moment’s consideration, Ruth had carried her coffee and her grapefruit to the telephone in the morning room, where she rang the stone cottage at the edge of the grounds.

Valerie answered. No, she told Ruth, Mr. Brouard wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen him since the early morning when she’d caught a glimpse of him as he went for his swim. Why? Hadn’t he returned? He was probably on the estate somewhere...perhaps among the sculptures? He’d mentioned to Kev that he wanted to shift them about. That large human head in the tropical garden? Perhaps he was trying to decide where to put it because Valerie knew for certain that the head was one of the pieces that Mr. Brouard wanted to move. No, Kev wasn’t with him, Miss Brouard. Kev was sitting right there in the kitchen.

Ruth didn’t panic at first. Instead, she went up to her brother’s bathroom where he would have changed after his exercise, leaving his swimming trunks and his track suit behind. Neither was there, however. Nor was a damp towel, which would have given further evidence of his return. She felt it then, a pinch of concern like tweezers pulling at the skin beneath her heart. That was when she remembered what she’d seen from her window earlier as she’d watched her brother set off towards the bay: that figure who’d melted out from beneath the trees close to the Duffys’ cottage as Guy had passed. So she went to the phone and rang the Duffys again. Kevin agreed to set off for the bay.

He’d returned on the run but not to her. It was only when the ambulance finally appeared at the end of the drive that he came to fetch her. That had begun the nightmare. As the hours passed, it only grew worse. She’d thought at first he’d had a heart attack, but when they wouldn’t let her ride to the hospital with her brother, when they said she would have to follow in the car that Kevin Duffy drove silently behind the ambulance, when they whisked Guy away before she could see him, she knew something had dreadfully and permanently changed. She hoped for a stroke. At least he would still be alive. But at last they came to tell her he was dead, and it was then that they explained the circumstances. From that explanation had come her waking nightmare: Guy struggling, in agony and fear, and all alone.