Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 5. Whole No. 855, November 2012

Lost Cause by N. J. Cooper

Natasha Cooper began writing fiction after ten years as a publishing executive. Her first books were historical novels but she soon turned to crime fiction, where her best-known creation to date is barrister Trish Maguire. Several years ago the London author launched a new series starring forensic psychologist Karen Taylor, and for those books she has signed herself N.J. Cooper. The third Karen Taylor novel, Face of the Devil, was published in June. The previous title in the series, No Escape, appeared in the U.S. in 2009 as a Pocket Books paperback.

It’s people you leave, not places. I’d been wrong about that too. For years, I’d told myself it was this empty landscape I’d hated. Only the shushing of the wind in the willows and the calling of birds broke the silence, and they’d never been any use to me.

I gazed at the garden, still a big semicircle with the grass bordered by flowering shrubs and the odd fruit tree among the willow saplings. Whoever the current owners were, they must have shared his taste for nature only barely tamed.

The river still ran along the bottom of the lawn, with the orchard on the far side and the wet empty fields beyond. I could just make out the distant hills, and I thought of how I’d hated the flatness and the loneliness.

A big white bird flapped down onto the rickety bridge he’d made when he bought the land for the orchard, and I heard his rich deep voice echo in my head: “That’s an egret, Kim. Have you ever seen one before?”

How could I? Only six when I’d first come here, but already the dangerous victor of eight failed fosterings, I’d never been outside a city.

This place had seemed like a prison, and he my jailer. I’d known he must be weird from the start. If I hadn’t hurt so many of the other children, I’d never have been sent here. He’d been the carer of last resort, a man who’d had some success with tough boys in the past. This time, when they’d run out of options, they’d given him a girl. Me.

The egret lifted itself from the bridge up into the sky. Today the great space above the wetland was clear bright blue. I didn’t remember that, any more than I remembered the wildflowers that were turning the fields ahead of me into a yellow and white froth. Everything here was beautiful. Why hadn’t I seen it then?

The low-built old farmhouse had friendly-looking green-painted windows in its sturdy white walls, and a steeply sloping roof of terra-cotta tiles, rippled like the sea.

“Double Romans, they’re called, Kim,” he’d once said, always teaching, pointing things out, trying to make me someone I wasn’t.

There were no cars at the front of the house and neither sound nor light from inside, so I let myself push open the side gate and walk right into the semicircular garden. If anyone challenged me, I could pretend I thought the house was for sale. I saw at once that someone had changed the scrubby vegetable patch into a neat set of raised beds, beautifully kept and showing pristine rows of new growth.

I thought of the slugs, horrible squelchy things, that I’d collected once when he’d pissed me off, nagging about my homework or my clothes or hair. I must have been eleven by then. The slugs had seemed fair revenge for the nagging and the way he’d fallen asleep in his chair, leaving his mouth open....

A cloud sidled across the sun and took away even the thin, inadequate English warmth I’d felt on my face, making me shiver. Or was that memory? Or guilt?

The slugs had been the least of it. I saw so much now, more or less the age he must have been when he’d taken me in. I hadn’t understood any of it then: how badly I’d needed him to be safe and kind and so how hard I’d pushed him to make him reveal himself the opposite.

I’d never known an adult who couldn’t be cruel. All those failed fosterings had proved to me that any one of them, however calm they’d seemed at first, could be driven to take off their masks of kindness. Only he had resisted nearly everything I’d tried to make him do.

None of my malice or my violence had made him hit me or lock me up. I still don’t know what a sight of my true feelings might have done because I’d never let him see those.

I used to watch him, tall and upright and shabbily dressed, smiling at me as he calmly talked on and on, using words as reins and bits and goads and whips. Now I wondered what would have happened if I’d howled and told him what it had been like before and flung myself into his arms. Would he have picked me up and cradled me and made it all safe and different?

Or would he have stuck to his line of teaching me the things he liked, trying to make me into what he wanted?

Sometimes I had tried. But never for long. Waiting for horror to descend had been unbearable. I’d always rather have done something to bring it down quickly and get it over.

“He’s a good man,” my social worker said. One of my social workers. I don’t remember which. They blurred at this distance.

I walked now across the lawn, remembering the opportunities for rebellion the grass had given me. I’d refuse to mow when he asked me to, or mess about with the straight lines he’d left on the lawn, or hide small dangerous stones in the longer grass to bugger up the mower blade and give him trouble.

Standing at last on the edge of the river, I wondered if I’d see the kingfisher today. I never had. I don’t think I’d even believed it existed. I’d thought he was lying about that too.

“You have to be quiet, Kim. And very still. And you have to watch. Once you’ve seen one for the first time, it’ll get easier. You’ll learn to recognise the flash of greeny blue, just above the water. Once they’ve let you see them the first time, they seem to slow down for you.”

Not for me, I’d thought then. I thought it still. No beautiful wild thing would change its course for me. Why should it? I’d always been a lost cause. The source of endless trouble for anyone who’d ever been lumbered with me. That’s what one set of foster parents had said. Dangerous, too.

In England, anyway. Out in Australia, I’d learned to be different. Someone else. I’d had friends and work and my own money. Never much money. With a messed-up education like mine, you didn’t get well-paid work. But I’d done okay. I’d even found a bloke. He was a good man, as well as the reason why I was here now, smelling the wetness of the peat and clay all around me, the squashed grass, the horses in the far field, and the sweetness of the wildflowers, remembering.

“You’d better go back, Sally,” Sam had said a week ago, using the name I’d chosen for myself when I’d run away to become someone else. “Something’s not right in you and you’re talking more and more about England. Go back and lay the ghosts. Make your peace with your memories, whatever they are. I’ll buy you an open ticket so you can take your time. We can afford it. Don’t come back until you’re ready.”

“When will that be?” I’d asked, standing on the beach, with the sun drilling down into my shoulders, my ears full of the crashing surf and the shrill calls of happiness from the unknowing people all around us. I’d felt sullen in a way I’d almost forgotten, ready to dump it all on someone else again.

“You’ll know when you’re ready,” Sam had said, tucking stray wisps of hair behind my ears under the sun hat. “I can’t tell you.”

When I was six my hair had been white blond, then it had darkened. Later, I’d dyed it all kinds of colours, chosen to make him angry. By the time I’d stolen the passport at Heathrow, I had a mousy-brown ponytail, like the girl I’d picked out of the London-bound taxi queue as my target. The Aussie sun had bleached it since.

Looking back, I can’t see why I wasn’t afraid at Heathrow. I’d had a bagful of his money — all I could get from the house and the cash machines — and the nicked British passport. Why hadn’t I been afraid a report of what I’d done might get to Sydney before me so that I’d be arrested on the plane? Why had I felt cocooned in some transparent casing no one would be able to break?

I still didn’t understand it, but once I’d got to Sydney unmolested I chucked the passport into the sea, then found the kind of bar where they’re happy to give you work for cash, even if you haven’t any proof of identity. It was also the kind of place where people who offer fake ID documents can be found. I’d waited till I was sure of one, then paid his price without letting him know how much I hated him. Once I’d paid I was free. For the first time in my life, I was free.

No one could do it now. Not with CCTV cameras everywhere, and DNA and e-mail.

It was the first thing I’d ever done well. I’d tried to make it the start of someone I could like. Sally. For a time I’d thought I’d won. But memories had grown in the dark silence until they’d devoured my sleep and my health.

He walked with me everywhere now, and his face hung over me as I lay in bed. I couldn’t forget the warmth in his dark eyes when I’d done something that pleased him, or their hardness when I’d failed.

He must have been lonely too. I can see that now. But then he’d seemed all-powerful, without feelings or fears or needs.

I turned my head away from the river. His voice sounded again, bumping around in my mind, as smooth and comforting as rich hot chocolate:

“Sometimes they say that only people who deserve it actually see the kingfisher, but I think that’s sentimental, Kim.”

“Then I am sentimental,” I said aloud to the space he’d once inhabited. “I don’t deserve it.”

I turned my back on the river and walked at last towards the rhubarb patch, where we’d had our last encounter. It was a mound, carefully sloped to make the water drain away so that it wouldn’t rot the crowns. How well I remembered the care he’d lavished on those red stalks and their poisonous yellowy-green leaves. Bending down over them, he went on talking to me even as he weeded around his acidic, horrible fruit.

“I know you’ll be legally free to go on your birthday, Kim. But you can’t. You may be nearly old enough, but you’re not fit to live alone. Not yet. One day, I’ll help you go. But for now you must stay here. And I...”

He’d never managed to say whatever it was he’d do because I’d raised the old iron bar like an axe above my head and brought it crashing down onto the back of his head and then his spine.

Now I looked at the scarlet stalks of rhubarb, asking the old questions that had come to torture me: Had he died at once? Who had found him? Could he have been saved? Why hadn’t they come after me?

Tyres squeaked on the paving, like something out of one of my nightmares of retribution. I thought of hiding, or climbing the wall into next-door’s garden. But I had to face it. I’d always known it would come. And better here than in Australia with Sam. At least Sam would never have to know who I really was, what I’d done. I turned to face it.

A wheelchair came to a stop just by the rhubarb bed. He raised his head, white-haired now, and stared right at me. His dark eyes were the same. His voice too:

“Thank God you’re safe, Kim.”

Copyright © 2012 by N.J. Cooper