And then there were the cats. All of those cats. Twenty-five? A hundred? They were too bountiful to estimate. The cats were the reason for the unplugged refrigerator, as it turned out. Whenever a feline met its demise, Mrs. Spencer stored it in the icebox to be dealt with later. Of course, later never came.
The work was dull, but constant, Pru’s hours mostly packed. When she had a spare moment, Pru meandered into town to grab a bite of something perishable, a treat she couldn’t enjoy at home thanks to the cat-in-the-icebox arrangement. For her part, Mrs. Spencer ate minimally, which matched up with her gaunt frame well enough.
Charlie would’ve been horrified to see his fiancée reduced to such circumstances, but Pru didn’t mind all that much. More puppies nipping at her legs meant less time thinking of Charlie, dusty and alone in the family mausoleum. Where did he die first? she often wondered. Was it in his head, or at his heart?
And Mrs. Spencer had a knack for detecting when her employee’s mind began to stray. The second she noticed Pru was not fully engaged with the task at hand, Mrs. Spencer dialed up a ribald Parisian tale or yet another reference to the barn man Tom.
“Did I tell you about the time he kidnapped those German POWs for me?” Mrs. Spencer asked one afternoon while they waited for a dog to finish laboring.
“Kidnapped? Why, Mrs. Spencer? Banbury too short on men for you?”
“Very funny, Miss Valentine. No, my apple trees required pruning and Tom is afraid of heights.”
“And you desperately needed your trees cut back?” Pru said. “In the middle of a war?”
“It was 1945 thus hardly the middle. Regardless, Tom showed up with two Krauts and they got to it straightaway. The men were knowledgeable, quick, and well behaved. Those are the Germans for you. Oh look! Here comes the first puppy of the litter!”
Mrs. Spencer was not the only individual who liked to raise the topic of Tom. Locals were also keen to discuss the man, though they didn’t know what to make of him either.
It was universally agreed upon that Tom had lived among them at one time but fell into a black hole of existence around 1953. One person seemed to recall the German POW story, but couldn’t be sure.
“Have you seen him?” they all asked.
“Have you found the body?”
“There must be a body.”
“How about bones?”
“A mummified corpse?”
Pru didn’t fault them for their macabre assumptions. Who hadn’t seen the movie Psycho? Possessed by a dead mother, or a dead landscaper, it was all the same. Plus Mrs. Spencer was considered a bit of a psycho herself, given her propensity to tear through town shouting obscenities and threatening peoples’ lives.
“You speak to me that way again, Mr. Haverford, and you’d better check for a bomb beneath the hood of your precious lorry!”
“It’s Harris, not Haverford. And I’m a missus, not a mister!”
“Car bomb, old man! Beware the car bomb!”
“I don’t mean it,” Mrs. Spencer would insist later, at home, by the stove. “Some people like to hunt. This is my sport.”
After only a few weeks, Pru had several dozen stories like these to tell.
Was she afraid of the old woman? Perhaps. But a month in, Pru had sustained no serious injuries, physical or otherwise. Even the verbal insults did not much sting. The most threatening aspects to life at the Grange were the partially collapsed ceilings and gaping holes in the floors.
“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Pru would say to the night sky. “Guns? Rumored dead bodies? That’s nothing. It’ll be rotted wood that does me in.”
In the end, Pru decided tales of Tom were nothing more than village scuttlebutt. And the voices she heard were probably the adolescent boys who skulked around the property, using slingshots to hurl pebbles and other projectiles through the windows. Pru herself had been beamed in the head with a turnip.
Plus it was in Mrs. Spencer’s very nature to play up rumors of the man. The woman knew full well the townsfolk longed for a gothic tale. Everyone loved a ghost story and so she gave them one. There’d probably never been a Tom at all. It’s what Pru told herself anyhow. She had to find some comfort, enough to allow for a little rest.
Eighteen
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
DECEMBER 1972
“I’m going to make Christmas dinner!” Mrs. Spencer announced.
“Hmm,” Pru answered, on reflex.
Christmas dinner. It was probably another of the woman’s ambitious schemes that never came to fruition. Just like the proposed freight elevator and in-ground swimming pool.
“What do you think, Miss Valentine?”
“Sounds fab,” she said.
Pru glanced down and made a face. Puppy gunk. Everywhere.
“Does he really need to be hand-fed?” she asked.
This particular dog was fed via eyedropper three times per day, for no discernible reason other than he was particular, like so many other creatures in that house. Meanwhile they had no shortage of runts and spaniels with eating problems that were left to fend for themselves.
“Miss Valentine? Are you listening?”