“Well, for instance …” The woman paused, savouring the past, trying to sort out the flavours. “She was feisty. Easy, because I admired her causes. But, oh, she could be determined.”
“How so? Tell us about her.”
“She would take control of a situation. When she was just little, in late November of grade one, yes, and she walked home from school. Well, that was four miles, and it was bitterly cold. When she didn’t get off the school bus over by the mill, I was worried. I phoned around, and the bus driver thought she hadn’t been to school that day. Her teacher said of course she had and I’d better notify the police. I called the police and was just going out to the car to search for her when she came walking down the lane — I used to drive then, but now I get my groceries delivered. I told her I was worried sick and the police were looking for her, and she was as calm as could be.
“‘The bus driver smokes,’ she said. ‘He’s not supposed to smoke.’ ‘No, dear,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he smokes in the bus and it’s cold out now, so he drives with his window closed. So I walked home.’ Just then the OPP cruiser pulled in past the mill and parked behind my car. The officer got out and asked if she was the missing girl. ‘I’m not missing,’ she announced. ‘I walked home from school because Mr. Poole smokes on the school bus, and he drinks, too.’ ‘How on earth do you know that?’ I demanded. ‘Well, he does,’ she said.
“I don’t even know if she knew what drinking meant. There was never anything here except cooking sherry. But the policeman talked to the driver and then to the bus operator and Poole was reprimanded and the next school year he was replaced. I was that proud of Molly I didn’t scold her for walking home, and I was even more proud when she went out the next day and climbed up into that bus without the slightest fear of recrimination for what she had done, though I imagine Roger Poole scowled as mean as he could. They were a nasty bunch, the Pooles. They’ve died out now, or all moved away.”
“Sounds like an amazing little girl,” said Morgan.
“I told you she was feisty. Do you know that in grade eight she took on a child abuser and beat him at his own game?”
“Good grief!” said Miranda. “How did she do that?”
“It was that same family, the Pooles. The old man used to beat up his son, Troy, who was in school with Molly. After Roger Poole stopped driving the school bus — that was his only job — he mostly just sat around the house, and I hear he would get drunk. If he wasn’t too drunk to move, he’d beat up the kids, especially young Troy. And his wife, too. She was a sorry case. One day Troy came to school all bruised where no one could see — the teachers are supposed to report when they suspect domestic violence — but the other kids knew by the way he was moving that he was hurt pretty bad.”
Miranda grimaced and glanced at Morgan, who was listening intently.
“Molly was twelve years old, and she marched right into the Poole house after school with Troy in tow — he was three inches shorter then. She confronted Roger Poole — it was a village legend for years — and called him a bully and dared him to hit her. Of course, he didn’t. He wasn’t drunk enough, or he was too drunk, or he had a streak of decency or whatever. Instead he backed off, and she screamed at him so that the closest neighbours all heard. Then she backed him against the wall and yelled that if he ever touched one of his kids again, or his wife for that matter, he would have to deal with her and she would tell the police and say he attacked her and he’d go to jail and he was a despicable bully.
“Well, he never touched those children again, and the next time he hit his wife, she called the police herself. They didn’t do anything, but Roger Poole stamped around the village all through the night, wailing about being violated, and in the morning he was gone and nobody ever saw him again, not in Detzler’s Landing.”
“My goodness,” said Miranda, “and you said she grew up easy.”
“She certainly understood power,” said Morgan.
“She did,” said the old woman.
“But not necessarily its consequences,” he added.
“No,” she agreed. “You know, Troy Poole was never her friend. After that, when they went to high school together, he wouldn’t speak to her, and he dropped out and moved away, too. By then he was a foot taller than her, but scared of her because she was tougher than his father.”
“Stronger,” said Miranda. “Did she learn that from you?”
“I think she came with her character already complete. I raised her from the start. She was magic, you know. A girl I never saw before in my life turned up at the door one day. Nineteen seventy-two. Held out a fresh new baby and said, ‘Her name’s Molly Bray.’ I took hold of the baby, then the girl walked smartly away and I never saw her again. The baby was a little beauty.
“I called old Dr. Howell, and we registered her right off. I don’t know what he put down for her parents. Maybe my name — a virgin of fifty. Ha! And his own. He was always interested in me! Might have seemed odd that we named her by her own name, but we did. Doc Howell would have known how to do it. He called in on Molly Bray regularly until two days before he died. I told him he looked rundown. She was too young to remember. Well, I brought her up and was glad of the company.”
“Miss Clarke, have you seen her recently?” asked Miranda.
“No, dear. When she was sixteen, she had to go away.”
“She had to?”
“I was sad. Oh, I was sad when she went.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No, dear. She said goodbye to me, and I’ll love you for always. She wanted to go, so that’s what she did, and I knew she would be all right.”
“Miss Clarke, we’re police officers,” Miranda said.
“Oh, no, dear. I don’t want to hear it. You finish your tea. Would you like a refill? I’ll get some more biscuits. No, you’d better go, dear. I’m tired. Thank you so much for visiting. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. I’ll just go into the other room. If you’ll see yourselves out …”
When they were on the porch, Morgan leaned into Miranda and said, “There was no point …” He let his voice trail off.
Miranda gazed up at him and smiled. For an instant she felt small and secure, then looked away to the mill, annoyed with herself. It had never occurred to her before that Morgan was taller.
They walked across the lawn and along the drive, stopping where it passed over the dam. R. Oxley had opened the sluice gates on the pond side of the road, and water was gurgling underneath them, rising to fill the flume. They could hear the low rumble of antique wood and iron machinery inside the mill gathering force to begin work.
At the car Miranda asked Morgan if he wanted to drive. He shrugged in the negative, and she got behind the wheel. Morgan appreciated the way she had offered — not as if she were submitting to social convention, but just that he might want to give a vintage sports car a try.
They pulled away from the village and within twenty minutes had entered more prosperous terrain. He observed her watching the road, seemingly oblivious to his gaze. She was enjoying the drive, as if Detzler’s Landing, like an inversion of Brigadoon, had slipped off into another reality when they left, a place where time and customs conformed to different imperatives than the ones shaping the world everyone else shared. Or maybe, he thought, everyone lived in different worlds that overlapped at the edges, creating the illusion that everyone was in the same place. The only thing to prove Detzler’s Landing still existed would be its mark on a map. He took a road map out of the glove compartment and checked. “There is no Detzler’s Landing,” he told Miranda.
“No,” she said.
“You’re probably right.”
“It’s not on the map.”