Mimi turned towards me, her bony elbow knocking over the glass of water that stood on the nesting tables beside her bed. I cried out in dismay as it soaked into her sheets and lap, but she barely noticed. She looked at me curiously, her pale eyes searching my face.
‘Who’s William?’
‘Come on, let’s sit you up, get you out of that wet bed.’
‘He boiled the bones in pots on the stove.’
I froze then, in the act of helping her out of the bed. That image, of bones boiling in pots on the stove, made my blood turn cold and fast-moving, like a river of melting snow. Mimi’s thin legs hung over the edge of the mattress like sticks. I could see the blue tinge of her skin, burst blood vessels beneath the surface like tangled threads. Mimi was looking straight ahead, past me, out the window into the garden. Her voice trembled.
‘We return to the earth. That’s why the tomatoes taste so good. Where’s that robin?’
Mimi fell silent as I helped her into the armchair, smoothing back the wisps of grey hair that floated about her face. Her teeth chattered, although she wasn’t cold.
I pressed on, stripping the bed quickly. ‘Did you ever see him making the bonemeal, Mimi?’
Silence. Outside, the empty bird feeder swung gently in the breeze.
‘Alex said he kept the bones in the cellar. That must have been horrible. I’d say it wa—’
Mimi turned her head towards me so slowly I could almost hear the creak of her vertebrae. Her eyes fixed on me, as pale as winter. They were no longer vague, but as precise and keen as a knife blade. Her voice was lower, denser somehow. It was like another person was speaking right through her.
‘You want to watch where you’re poking your nose, Mimi, he said. Someone might snip it right off!’
She made a gesture with her fingers of scissors cutting and laughed girlishly, drawing her legs up off the floor. I stood motionless, unblinking. Who was she talking about? Edward? Is that what he said to her? My mind returned to those bones in pots on the stove, filling the air in the shed with a rich odour, leaving long grease marks down the wall. Alex had told me Edward had taken the bones from roadkill and the old meat factory, because you fed the soil, not the plant. Old bones make strong plants, I thought, watching Mimi’s scrawny hands settle into her lap as slow and delicate as feathers. Her face fell still, her eyes shifting to the right, back to the window.
‘There he is,’ she said quietly, and when I looked outside I saw the robin on the bird feeder, scarlet feathers ruffled by the wind.
I walk slowly with my hands in my pockets. It’s so peaceful here, with birdsong high in the trees. I’m heading towards the small, contained woodland at the back of the churchyard, past the outbuilding painted a municipal green. The breeze stirs the grass. It feels good to be out of the house, out of that room where Mimi sits with her newspaper folded and untouched on her knees. William has told me not to mind the things she says, but she frightened me this morning, the way her voice seemed to deepen and rasp at me, so unlike her normal softness. Head injuries will do that to you, the doctor said, and then it brings my thinking round again to Mimi slipping and falling down the stairs alone and in the dark. Not quite alone, I remind myself. Alex was there. There’s something unsettling in that too, isn’t there? I take a deep breath, and then another. It’s good to be out of that house.
The path is narrowing, bordered by nettles, long whispering grasses and choking weeds. I suppose back here are the older graves, the ones left untended as family trees and bloodlines branched away. The headstones are smaller and rougher, like hewn lumps of stone. I’m looking at the inscriptions more carefully now, looking for the one in particular that both Alex and Nancy mentioned to me. Quiet Mary, the drowned girl. It was at her grave that Edie Hudson had been standing when she walked away for the last time and disappeared into the trees. Had someone been waiting in the darkness back there for her? Peter Liverly, the caretaker? How about Quiet Mary herself, wrapped in a water-stained burial shroud, hooded and silent, floating an inch or so from the ground?
I shudder. The wind picks up. The trees sigh and press together, conspiring, whispering their perennial secrets. I don’t see the figure kneeling among them until I have almost tripped over her. In her dark coat and jeans she is barely visible in the gloom. A cap has been pulled down over her head, obscuring her face and her ashy grey hair.
‘Jesus!’ I jump back, heart pounding.
She looks up at me, unfazed. ‘Watch where you’re going.’
‘I’m sorry! I didn’t – it’s hard to see you in the dark.’
She turns away from me, back towards the ground. She is kneeling near the roots of a tree, carving out a little hole in the earth with a trowel.
‘Whatever you’re planting there is going to struggle,’ I tell her. ‘There’s not nearly enough light in here for a young plant.’
She doesn’t turn around. ‘Are you a botanist?’
‘No. I’m a – a therapist.’
‘Pass me that bag, would you?’
I hesitate. There’s a strange feeling in the air, like the approach of a monsoon. Anticipation and a sense of unease. Still, I lift the bag she points at and hand it to her. She rummages inside with dirt-streaked hands, finally pulling an item out. It’s a stained-glass suncatcher in the shape of a bluebird, about the size of her palm. It twists in the breeze as she holds it towards the light.
‘That’s lovely,’ I say.
‘It is, isn’t it? It’s so hard to buy for someone you don’t know.’
Even with the brim of the cap pulled low I can see this woman is older than I’d first thought. Although her face isn’t lined, it has a weathered quality, abrasive, like her voice. She has crystal pendulum earrings and silver rings stacked on her fingers. I bet she does tarot cards, I think, and burns incense in wooden holders until the air is smoky and thick. I am about to say goodbye and turn away – hey, nice to meet you here in this dark and hallowed ground, you mad old lady scrabbling around in the dirt – but then she does something strange. She takes the suncatcher and gently, reverentially, places it in the hole she has dug. Then she lifts the trowel and begins to heap the earth back over it.
I can’t help myself. I’ve always been nosy. Ask William. Ask Kim. ‘I can’t help but think that suncatcher would be better placed in a window somewhere,’ I say, forcing myself to laugh.
She doesn’t look up. She pats the earth with her hands as if she is building a sandcastle, firming it. When she sits back on her heels, her knees crack like pistols. ‘It’s her birthday today. She’d be thirty-three.’ She pulls a pack of cigarettes from her bag and puts one between her teeth. ‘You have any kids?’
‘No. We haven’t – we haven’t got round to it yet.’
‘Huh. Edie wasn’t planned. I had her young. You look like a good age for a child, and you seem nice. You’d be a great mum.’
I stand very still as she pulls herself to her feet and asks me if I want a cigarette. I shake my head, tell her no, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke. I’m thinking, Edie. That name again. The disappearing girl on everyone’s lips.
When the woman removes her cap a spill of long grey hair falls over one eye. Her face is familiar to me, and it takes me a moment in my shock to place her. Then, ‘You were in the cafe,’ I tell her. ‘You saw me talking to Nancy Renard.’