—
Ellis returned to the inn that night sober and courteous to a fault. His calm exterior and placid expression were too calm, too placid, and I wondered whether he was masking terrible hurt or terrible anger.
I began to second-guess myself.
If he really was color-blind and I’d accused him of faking it, I was no better than all the other judgmental people. But if he was faking it and knew I’d found out, I was as lethal to him as a loaded gun.
If the Colonel discovered that Ellis had lied to shirk duty, he’d disown him immediately and permanently, and there would be nothing Edith Stone Hyde or anybody else could do about it.
Either way, I’d made a mistake and was going to have to fix it.
—
When Ellis laid eyes on me the next morning, his expression confirmed how critical it was for me to get things back on an even keel. The second he saw me, his jaw clenched and he stared at his logbook.
I hated what I had to do, and hated even more that I knew how. I would be drawing directly from my mother’s playbook.
“Good morning, darling,” I said, joining him. “Where’s Hank?”
He made a great show of licking his finger and turning the page.
“Sweetheart, please tell me what I’ve done,” I said. “You left in such a hurry yesterday, and then you barely spoke to me at dinner. I know I’ve done something, but I don’t know what.”
He continued to look down at the book, pretending I wasn’t there.
“Except that’s not true,” I said miserably. “I do know why you’re angry. It was my pitiful attempt at a joke, wasn’t it? Ellis, please look at me.”
He lifted his face. His expression was glacial, his eyes hard.
“My joke about the gloves,” I went on. “I was trying to be funny, not make fun of you. But I should have known better than to joke about your condition. It was awful of me.”
He had no reaction at all. He simply stared, his lips pressed into a grim line.
I had no choice but to barrel on, because I had no other plan.
“I thought if I told you my gloves were green, you’d think Hank had pulled a prank on you by picking the wrong color case for my gas mask, but then it all went wrong. As soon as I saw your face I should have stopped, but I was so far in I kept going and tried to turn it around instead. It’s all so stupid—I really do need new gloves, and I was just trying to come up with a clever way of asking. It was the vaudeville in me trying to come out, but I’m no star. I’m meant to be a supporting act. So rest assured that yesterday’s performance marked both the debut and finale of my solo career in practical jokes.”
He finally spoke. “Not vaudeville. Burlesque.”
My cheeks burned. “Yes. Of course. It’s just we don’t usually call it that.”
“My mother always said that blood will out. I wish I’d paid attention.”
My mouth opened and closed a couple of times before I could respond. “I suppose I deserved that, after what I said to you.”
He laughed once, a short, harsh bray.
—
The two of them didn’t return to the inn that night or the next, so I had no idea if Ellis had bought my story about the gloves. They left no note or any other indication of where they had gone.
Chapter Twenty-six
When Anna finally returned, five days after learning of Hugh’s death, she accepted my condolences and otherwise simply carried on, although there was a heaviness in her step that hadn’t been there before. She let me resume doing the rooms, for which I was very grateful, because I’d been losing my mind trying to stay out of Rhona’s way and had no idea what I’d say to Angus if I found myself alone with him.
The crone apparently shared Anna’s view about picking up after others, because Ellis’s dirty socks and underpants lay exactly where he’d stepped out of them three nights before, and his pajamas lay in a crumpled heap in the corner. Hank had at least tossed his clothes onto the chair.
Of the hundred pills I’d initially found in Ellis’s room, only thirty-six were left.
—
Hank and Ellis returned that night. When they came through the door, I took a deep breath, steeling myself.
“Darling!” said Ellis. He swooped over and kissed my cheek before sitting next to me on the couch. He stank of paraffin oil, but not liquor.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, trying to read his face.
Hank plopped down on one of the chairs opposite. “You’ll never guess where we’ve been.”
“She doesn’t care about that,” said Ellis, rubbing his hands together. “Quick—get her prezzie!”
Hank dug around in one of the duffel bags and handed Ellis a thin gift-wrapped box, which he solemnly presented on the palms of both hands.
I pulled off the satin bow and lifted the lid. A pair of red kid gloves lay inside, on tissue paper flecked with gold.
The blood drained from my face.
“What do you think? Do you like them?” he asked.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“More importantly, what color are they?”
“They’re red,” I said in a near-whisper.
“Good,” said Ellis, smiling broadly. “That’s what Hank said, too, but I never know with you two jokers.” He held a hand over his head and snapped his fingers. “Bartender! Two whiskeys. Actually, just bring the bottle.”
Angus glared, but pulled out two glasses. Meg picked them up and tucked a bottle under her arm, her expression conveying every word that didn’t come out of her mouth.
The gloves were a message, obviously, but what did they mean? Had I managed to convince Ellis that I still believed he was color-blind? Or had he interpreted my desperate soliloquy as a promise to keep his secret? Or was he actually color-blind?
—
Over the course of the evening, Ellis drank almost a whole bottle of whiskey, but he remained—at least outwardly—jovial.
He kept a proprietorial hand on my shoulder or leg the entire time, and it was a constant struggle to keep from shrinking away. I stole occasional glances at Angus, whose face was unreadable.
I’d been back to the graveyard twice since seeing his scars, and had myself mostly convinced that he was the Angus on the stone, the one who’d lost everything in the space of six weeks.
I thought often of our embrace by the fire, and wondered if he did, too.
—
They never told me where they’d been, and I didn’t ask. Despite Hank’s promise to straighten Ellis out, they fell right back into their old pattern of returning to the inn plastered and then continuing to drink until they were both in a stupor. Judging from his fast-diminishing stash, Ellis was also gobbling pills. By my estimation, he was taking anywhere from eight to ten a day.
On the night I knew he’d run out, he knocked on my door and asked if he could have one. After popping one into his mouth, he shook more into his hand and slid them into his pocket. From what remained, I figured he’d taken about fifty, enough to last him five or six days.
—
We achieved a tenuous kind of normal. Ellis seemed to have completely forgotten about the glove incident, and while he was consistently drunk, he never tipped into a rage.
Every day he looked for a letter from his mother, and every day it didn’t come. He began to say he didn’t need her anyway—he was more certain than ever that when he found the monster, he would clear both his and his father’s names, and that the Colonel would welcome him back with open arms and checkbook.
Finding the monster in Loch Ness was all he cared about. He remained as ignorant as ever about the monster facing the rest of the world.
I began to iron the newspaper, in the hope that he—or Hank—might start to read it. They did not.
—
Although there was no question that it was selfish and cowardly to blinker themselves against the chaos and horror, there were times I almost understood.
At the end of January, the Red Army had liberated a network of death camps in Auschwitz, Poland, and the details that trickled out over the days and weeks were so excruciating I fought a very real urge to remain ignorant myself.
Hundreds of thousands of people—perhaps many, many more, because the reports were often contradictory—had been interned and killed, most of them simply for being Jewish. They’d been rounded up and transported in cattle cars, and assigned to either death or hard labor as soon as they climbed out. Death was by gas chamber, and the chambers and crematoriums ran night and day. Many of those spared immediate death died anyway, from illness, starvation, torture, and exhaustion. There were rumors of a mad doctor and unthinkable experiments.
When the SS realized the Red Army was closing in, they tried to destroy the evidence. They blew up the gas chambers and crematoriums and set fire to other buildings before retreating on foot, forcing tens of thousands of starving inmates—every last person who was capable of walking—to march further into Nazi territory toward other death camps. The only people they left behind were those they were certain were dying. They shot people randomly as they retreated.
Even the hardened soldiers of the Russian army were unprepared for what they found: 648 corpses that lay where they’d fallen, and more than seven thousand survivors in such terrible condition they continued to die despite immediate rescue efforts.
They discovered that the SS had burned the infirmary with everyone inside it, 239 souls in all. One of the six storage buildings the SS had not had time to destroy was filled with tons—literally tons—of women’s hair, along with human teeth, the fillings extracted, and tens of thousands of children’s outfits.
I despaired of humanity. Although the Allies were making progress, I thought maybe it was too late, that evil had already prevailed.