“Miss Pauline Mays,” replied Miss Harkwood. “Her friend.” The word “friend” seemed to be in quotes, and I looked up. She was gazing at me intently, as though hoping I was receiving some sort of signal.
“Oh, Miss Mays,” I said, as though I knew who she was. “And did she live here too?”
“Oh, yes,” Miss Harkwood said, nodding. “It was her house.”
The estate had told me it was Ricks’s house. “And is Miss Mays still living here?” I asked.
“She died ten years ago. No, I lie, it was twelve.”
I tried to date my last visit to the house. Was it eight years ago? Ten? Twelve? And who had opened the door? I remembered the dark, pupilless eyes. What story had I been writing? Why was I there?
“Could you tell me a bit about Miss Mays?” I asked. “Where did she come from?”
Miss Mays came from a very grand family in Ireland, Miss Harkwood said proudly, and grew up in a very grand house. She had no family now, her parents had died when she was a child.
I asked if there any photographs of her, and Miss Harkwood got up and led me into the library.
It was a high-ceilinged room, with tall bookcases and bottle-green curtains at the windows. Against the wall stood a mahogany partner’s desk, and along the back of it were framed photographs. Miss Harkwood stood beside me while I picked these up. Here was Alison as a toddler, smiling sunnily, standing by a little lake somewhere in Cornwall. Here was Alison sitting on a huge-wheeled bicycle, wearing a hat that tied under her chin.
“Miss Ricks was ever so much fun,” said Miss Harkwood with satisfaction. She was a heavy woman, and she stood with her feet spread apart, supporting her weight.
I was surprised to hear that Ricks had been the party organizer, the one who was so much fun. Miss Harkwood talked more and more about them, how they all laughed. How they hated dogs and loved cats. How they had gone to Spain for Christmas every year, it was very odd, but it was what they did, said Miss Harkwood, reminiscing happily.
“And then what happened as they got old?” I asked. “Did Miss Mays die here? Was she ill?”
“Oh, Miss Mays faded away, really.” Miss Harkwood’s eyes took on a sentimental look. “She got a bit furry in the head. You know,” she said, and I nodded. “Finally she didn’t know where she was, poor thing, and she just sat in a chair all day. After that she lay in bed, and then she died.”
“Poor Miss Mays,” I said facilely, writing it all down. Actually, it sounded like a pretty easy way to go. “And Miss Ricks? What happened to her?”
Miss Harkwood folded her arms over her big bosoms as though she’d been waiting for this. “Pneumonia. My fahver called it the old people’s friend, and so it proved to her. She was ninety-three, did you know that?” She nodded her head. “She slipped away too.”
I wanted to know if the two had shared a bedroom, but it was a nosy question and I didn’t want to scare her off. “Could you show me the upstairs?” I asked. “I’d love to see the rest of the house.”
By now Harkwood was full of pride and information, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days. She took me all over the house: every bedroom (they each had their own, each with a big double bed, which didn’t tell me much), and the spare rooms, and the sewing room, and even the linen closet, which Harkwood informed me was very large for a London house. I took notes on everything. We ended up in the kitchen again, and I was beginning to hear the stories for the second time.
“Could I look again at the photographs?” I asked. “I’d like to take pictures of them with my camera.”
We went back in and this time I picked up each one and asked about it. One showed a pretty, laughing woman with dark eyes, wearing a full-skirted dress, with a hat and gloves.
“Is that Miss Mays?” I asked.
“Miss Ricks,” said Miss Harkwood.
“I thought she had blue eyes.” Surely the jacket photographs showed her with blue eyes?
Miss Harkwood shook her head. “Miss Ricks had very dark eyes, nearly black,” she said. “They were strange, they looked as though they were solid black. No student.”
“Pupil,” I said, trying to process this. Suddenly I remembered the story I’d been writing when I’d come to the house: it was on the Chelsea Flower Show, and that was 2008. Mays had died by then, so the woman who had answered the door must had been Alison Ricks herself. But I’d have recognized her, even thirty years older than the photographs I’d seen. I’d memorized her features, I knew them from poring over those books.
“Are Miss Ricks’s books here?” I asked, glancing around the room.
Miss Harkwood shook her head virtuously. “Miss Mays said it was poor form to keep your own books on the shelf. She wouldn’t have a single one on the premises.”
I turned back to the table again, thinking of the woman who had opened the door to me. Those black eyes, the thin white hair. The nick from the earlobe. I picked up another photograph, this one a close-up from the sixties. The same smiling, black-eyed woman, with a flirty smile. This was a three-quarters view, and it showed her right ear. There was no nick in it. Surely this was the same woman: maybe she’d gotten the nick later on?
“This is Miss Mays,” I said, to see if she’d agree.
Miss Harkwood shook her head again, smiling. “No, Miss Ricks. Here’s Miss Mays.”
She held up another picture from the sixties, a woman with her hand over her forehead against the sun, smiling into it, at the camera. It was the picture I knew from the dust jacket of Stone Caveat, and I felt that electric jolt.
“I see,” I said. “Is there another close-up of Miss Ricks?”
Miss Harkwood picked up another. This was taken from the other side, and the nick in the lobe was visible: I’d seen her in real life, but the camera had reversed the image. The nick was on her left ear.
“Thank you,” I said, closing up my notebook. “You have been very kind.”
Back in New York, jetlagged and exhausted, I called Jake. “I got it,” I said. “You won’t believe what happened. I’ll come in and tell you.”
We sat on either side of his desk and I held the cup of cold coffee again as I explained what had happened.
“I’m pretty certain she was gay,” I began. “Which is why people were so closemouthed about her, and why those files were sealed.”
He waved his hand.
“Wait,” I said. “That’s just the beginning. She moved to London so she could live with her girlfriend. But once she was there they switched identities. She stopped publishing, and she never gave interviews or allowed photographs, even when she won prizes. She had no copies of her books in her house, and over the years the new identity became real.”
Jake stared at me, leaning back in his chair, his long arms sticking out at angles. “Switched? But what about Mays? She was English. People would have known her. How could she change her identity?”
“I found out more about her. She wasn’t English but Irish. She must have arrived in London with Ricks and the two of them did it together.”
“But why?”
“Ricks did it because she had dried up as a writer. You can see it in the letters to her editor at the end of the decade. She couldn’t write, and it was painful to be asked about her work, and what she was doing, when she knew she couldn’t do it anymore. Remember poor Hemingway, trying to walk into the airplane propeller because he couldn’t write? I think she wanted to put that part of her life behind her, not be that person anymore.”
Jake nodded slowly. “I like it,” he said. “And then what about the new book?”
“Mays wrote it. I don’t know when. It’s probably in those secret X-files in the staff room. Then after Ricks died she got up her nerve and published it.”