Alison had the heater going full blast to keep the windscreen defogged, so I adjusted the dashboard air vent to blow upward and unbuttoned my slicker. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever asked you, but where did you and Jon meet?’
Next to me, I saw her smile. ‘In a tiny village in Wiltshire. I’d gone there with a friend on bank holiday weekend to attend the Edington Music Festival. I ran into Jon outside the tea hut.’
‘I didn’t know you and Jon were into classical music.’
She shook her head so emphatically that her teardrop earrings bounced against her neck. ‘You’re thinking of the Three Choirs Music Festival. Edington’s not a series of classical concerts like that. It’s music within the liturgy.’ She smiled at me again. ‘Basically, you go to church four times a day for a week. Very smells and bells.’
‘So, the choir is singing masses? Sounds divine.’
‘Not choir. Choirs. It’s August and most of the choirs in England are on hiatus, so Edington is able to attract choristers from all over the country. There’s a choir of men and boys, a mixed group called the Consort – counter-tenors and all! – and the Schola. They’re my favorite.’ She was grinning hugely. ‘Twelve guys singing Gregorian chant by candlelight. To. Die. For.’
‘Sounds like you and Jon hit it off right away.’
‘He was so depressed, Hannah. He’d just lost Beth, and Kitty was only six. He told me later that he hoped the music would bring him closer to God, help fill the vast emptiness inside him.’ Alison glanced into the rear-view mirror, tapped the brakes, then turned left into a narrow country lane. ‘We were both a little surprised at how quickly it seemed to happen. One minute we’re drinking instant coffee in a sunny churchyard, the next minute we’re tearing at each other’s clothes and falling into bed at the Travelodge near the Little Chef at Warminster.’
‘How come you never told me about this?’
‘I guess we were both a little embarrassed about moving in together so soon after Beth’s disappearance.’ Alison braked hard as a pheasant flapped its way out of the hedgerow, narrowly missing the windscreen. As the car sat idling on the lane, she faced me and said, ‘It sounds ghoulish, I know, but God, I wish they’d found her body!’ She shifted the car into park. ‘The first year we were together, I lived every day in fear that Beth would come back. Then what would I do? “Hello, Jon, I’m back. You can go away now, Alison.”’ She made a brushing, run-along-now motion with her hand.
‘At dinner that night, when Beth tried to come through? I rejoiced, Hannah! Rejoiced! Because that meant…’
‘She was really dead.’ I finished the sentence for her.
‘Yes! God forgive me, but I was happy about that. Jon was crazy about Beth, Hannah. When we first met, he talked about her constantly. I always felt I could never measure up. You always said that I had impeccable taste in decorating, but it was all Beth. Jon didn’t want me to change anything, at least not at first. Kitty’s bedroom was a shrine to Beth. Photographs, Beth’s hairbrush, her little bottle of Chanel Number Five. Every time I went in to clean… well, it broke my heart. All that moved out with Kitty when she married, thank goodness, but I know that Jon kept a picture of Beth in his wallet for the longest time.’
I wondered if that was the same picture of Beth that had been published in all the newspapers. If so, I thought Alison’s resemblance to Beth was superficial, more like a second cousin than a sister, but I didn’t say so.
Next to me, Alison leaned back against the headrest. ‘Maybe if we’d been able to have children of our own…’ She let the sentence die.
I didn’t know what the laws were in Britain, but in the United States, one had to wait seven years before a missing person could be declared officially dead. Unless Jon had divorced Beth for ‘desertion,’ or petitioned the court to have her declared dead, I imagined he and Alison would have had to wait quite a while before they could legally marry.
‘But, after a while, when it must have been clear that Beth was never coming back?’
‘Oh, I wanted to marry and have babies of my own, but it wasn’t to be. It wasn’t Jon’s problem, obviously, since he’d already had Kitty.’
‘Does the National Health cover fertility treatments?’ I asked.
‘They do now,’ she explained, ‘but the waiting list can be very long. Most couples opt for private treatment, but that can be very expensive.’ She turned her face toward me and smiled wanly. ‘And we could never be one hundred per cent certain about Beth, could we?’
A stray thought wafted into my head, took root, and blossomed. Before Alison could put the car into drive and begin moving forward, I touched her hand where it rested on the gear lever, and said, ‘Alison. You and Jon never married, did you?’
I watched as a blush of embarrassment turned Alison’s cheeks from white to pink. ‘Please, Hannah. Don’t tell my father! It would kill him.’
‘Now why would I do that?’
‘Kitty doesn’t know, either.’
‘Jeeze, Alison!’
‘I know, I know. We’ve meant to tell her, of course. I’ve started to many times, but the time just never seemed to be right. We just let everyone assume we’d eloped to Gretna Green or somewhere, like that silly Bennett girl in Pride and Prejudice.’
‘Seems to me that the right time would be for you to turn this car around, drive back to Dartmouth, brew up some tea and have a little chat with your daughter.’
Alison bit her lower lip, nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, but it’ll have to wait until Jon gets back from Cowes. This is something we need to do together.’ As she accelerated down the lane, she added, ‘Besides, I have to take care of this business with my father right now.’
‘If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,’ I said as the Peugeot slid around a curve.
‘Shit!’ Alison wrenched the steering wheel right, then left, finally regaining control of the vehicle. ‘That low spot is always a bloody mess!’
‘Are we there yet?’ I sing-songed, channeling my four-year-old grandson.
‘Yes, sweetheart. And if you’re especially good, Mummy will give you a lolly.’
Alison ducked her head and pointed left through the windscreen. ‘See that stone farmhouse at the crest of the hill? That’s Dad’s. The property starts right… about… here. See where the fence line changes?’
I did. In contrast to barbed wire draped almost casually from wooden post to wooden post, Three Trees Farm was enclosed by a neat stone wall. We followed the wall for about a quarter of a mile, then turned into an even narrower lane, beginning a steep, winding ascent to the farm proper. I had the farmhouse in view the whole time, first to my left, then to my right. Behind the house was a long, low barn built of the same honey-colored stone as the house and roofed with thatch. Stephen Bailey’s Prius was parked next to the barn. I was wondering where the cows were when Alison pointed them out, a patchwork of brown and white, huddled under a tree in the pasture, mud coating their legs up to their hocks. ‘Meet Graceless, Aimless, Pointless and Feckless,’ Alison said with a grin. ‘Daddy named them after the cows in Cold Comfort Farm.’
We had passed through a gateway marked by two stone pillars and a hand-painted sign that said Three Trees Farm when Alison muttered, ‘What the hell?’ She braked suddenly and I instantly wrenched my gaze from the poor, rain-soaked cows to whatever had attracted her attention. ‘What is that silly man doing?’
As we watched, Alison’s father climbed into the driver’s seat of the Prius. After a few seconds, the car began rolling down the hill in our direction. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Has he forgotten we’re coming?’ Alison accelerated, causing the Peugeot to fishtail on the muddy track, so she cut back to a crawl.