FOSSILIZED TEARS

Excuse me… " Judith began, and stopped. She pressed her lips tight, then with an uncharacteristic flutter of the hands, "The doctor is already out on a call-he won't be here for an hour. Please… "

I belted my dressing gown and followed; Judith was half running a few paces ahead. We went up and down flights of stairs, turned into passages and corridors, arrived back on the ground floor but in a part of the house I hadn't seen before. Finally we came to a series of rooms that I took to be Miss Winter's private suite. We paused before a closed door, and Judith gave me a troubled look. I well understood her anxiety. From behind the door there came deep, inhuman sounds, bellows of pain interrupted by jagged gasps for breath. Judith opened the final door and we went in.

I was astonished. No wonder the noise reverberated so! Unlike the rest of the house, with its overstuffed upholstery, lavish drapes, baffled walls and tapestries, this was a spare and naked little room. The walls were bare plaster, the floor simple boards. A plain bookcase in the corner was stuffed with piles of yellowing paper, and in the corner stood a narrow bed with simple white covers. At the window a calico curtain hung limply each side of the panes, letting the night in. Slumped over a plain little school desk, with her back to me, was Miss Winter. Gone were her fiery orange and resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved chemise, and she was weeping.

A harsh, atonal scraping of air over vocal cords. Jarring wails that veered into frighteningly animal moans. Her shoulders heaved and crashed and her torso shuddered; the force traveled through her frail neck to her head, along her arms into her hands, which jolted against the desktop. Judith hurried to replace a cushion beneath Miss Winter's temple; Miss Winter, utterly possessed by the crisis, seemed not to know we were there.

"I've never seen her like this before," Judith said, fingers pressed to her lips. And with a rising note of panic, "I don't know what to do." Miss Winter's mouth gaped and grimaced, contorted into wild, ugly shapes by the grief that was too big for it. "It's all right," I said to Judith. It was an agony I knew. I drew up a chair and sat down beside Miss Winter.

"Hush, hush, I know." I placed an arm across her shoulder, drew her two hands into mine. Shrouding her body with my own, I bent my ear close to her head and went on with the incantation. "It's all right. It will pass. Hush, child. You're not alone." I rocked her and soothed her and never stopped breathing the magic words. They were not my own words, but my father's. Words that I knew would work, because they had always worked for me. "Hush," I whispered. "I know. It will pass."

The convulsions did not stop, nor the cries become less painful, but they gradually became less violent. She had time between each new paroxysm to take in desperate, shuddering breaths of air.

"You're not alone. I'm with you."

Eventually she was quiet. The curve of her skull pressed into my cheek. Wisps of her hair touched my lips. Against my ribs I could feel her little flutters of breath, the tender convulsions in her lungs. Her hands were very cold in mine.

"There. There now." We sat in silence for minutes. I pulled the shawl up and arranged it more warmly around her shoulders, and tried to rub some warmth into her hands. Her face was ravaged. She could scarcely see out of her swollen eyelids, and her lips were sore and cracked. The birth of a bruise marked the spot where her head had been shaken against the desk.

"He was a good man," I said. "A good man. And he loved you."

Slowly she nodded. Her mouth quivered. Had she tried to say something? Again her lips moved. The safety catch? Was that what she had said? "Was it your sister who interfered with the safety catch?" It seems a brutal question now, but at the time, with that flood of tears having swept all etiquette away, the directness did not feel out of place. My question caused her one last spasm of pain, but when she spoke, she was unequivocal.

"Not Emmeline. Not her. Not her."

"Who, then?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, began to sway and shook her head from side to side. I have seen the same movement in animals in zoos when they have been driven mad by their captivity. Beginning to fear the renewal of her agony, I remembered what it was that my father used to do to console me when I was a child. Gently, tenderly, I stroked her hair until, soothed, she came to rest her head on my shoulder.

Finally she was quiet enough for Judith to be able to put her to bed. In a sleepy, childlike voice she asked for me to stay, and so I stayed with her, kneeling by her bedside and watching her fall asleep. From time to time a shiver disturbed her slumber and a look of fear came on her sleeping face; when this happened I smoothed her hair until her eyelids settled back into peace.

When was it that my father had consoled me like this? An incident rose out of the depths of my memory. I must have been twelve or so. It was Sunday; Father and I were eating sandwiches by the river when twins appeared. Two blond girls with their blond parents, day-trippers come to admire the architecture and enjoy the sunshine. Everyone noticed them; they must have been used to the stares of strangers. But not mine. I saw them and my heart leaped. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself complete. With what ardor I stared at them. With what hunger. Nervous, they turned away from the girl with the devouring stare and reached for their parents' hands. I saw their fear, and a hard hand squeezed my lungs until the sky went dark. Then later, in the shop. I on the window seat, between sleep and a nightmare; he, crouched on the floor, stroking my hair, murmuring his incantation, "Hush, it will pass. It's all right. You're not alone."

Sometime later, Dr. Clifton came. When I turned to see him in the doorway I got the feeling that he may have been there for some time already. I slipped past him on my way out, and there was something in his expression I did not know how to read.

UNDERWATER CRYPTOGRAPHY

I returned to my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had interfered with the safety catch on the ladder. It can't have been the boy. Miss Winter's story gave him a clear alibi: While John and his ladder were tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have been Emmeline. Except that nothing in the story suggests that Emmeline would do such a thing. She was a harmless child, even Hester said so. And Miss Winter herself couldn't have been clearer. No. Not Emmeline. Then who? Isabelle was dead. Charlie was gone.

I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too dark to see; there was only my reflection, a pale shadow you could see the night through. "Who?" I asked it.

At last I listened to the quiet, persistent voice in my head that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline.

No, I said.

Yes, it said. Adeline.

It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if she had killed him, could she? No one could murder a man she loved enough to cry those tears for?

But the voice in my head recounted episode after episode from the story I knew so well. The violence in the topiary garden, each swipe of the shears a blow to John's heart. The attacks on Emmeline, the hair-pulling, the battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator and left carelessly, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a murderess I had held in my arms and comforted? Was this the secret Miss Winter had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspicion revealed itself to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter's story? To make me sympathize with her, exonerate her, forgive her? I shivered.