The Wife Before Me(33)
Despite the heat from her exertions, Elena shivers. She is not alone here. Someone else is breathing at the same rapid pace. An echo, she realises, as she stills her breath and collects herself. It would be all too easy to allow her overwrought imagination to take flight, yet she knows she came here for a reason. Amelia. Her awareness is instinctive. It explains the reason why she has been unable to stop thinking about her. An obsession, Nicholas called it, but it was her own intuition that led her to this earthy hole.
She shines the torch across stone shelves where beef and fowl and other perishable foodstuffs would once have been stored. Most of the shelves are at a uniform height. All are bare, apart from one, which holds a dusty, hard-backed folder. Cobwebs, glutinous and dense, cling to her hand as she pulls it out. An object on the ground makes a clinking noise when her foot kicks against an ice pick. She lifts it up and runs her hand over the smooth wooden handle. The rusting spike at the end is long and slender, the tip still sharp.
She runs through the trees and back to the house where she sets the folder on the kitchen table, wipes away the dust. Opening the metal clip, she sifts through the documents inside it, taking care to replace each one in the order she found it. She studies photographs of Amelia. Even as a small child, she had that short hairstyle, cut below her ears and framing her cheeks. Her parents are with her in some of the photographs but from her fifth year onwards, she has been photographed only with her father or another couple. She recognises Billy Tobin but not the smiling woman beside him.
Amelia had been a skinny child, the solemnity of her expression emphasised by those almond-shaped eyes that would, in time, become one of her most striking features. She was a typical teenager, pulling faces at the camera, often in the company of a second girl. In contrast to her, this girl was taller and thinner with pale-green eyes. Her long blonde hair, almost as white as her skin, gave her a wraithlike appearance. This image was particularly effective in her mid-teens when she and Amelia cultivated goth images. Dark and light – how arresting they looked, with their heavily pencilled eyes and deadpan expressions. Their appearances changed again, became sleeker, more androgynous as they grew older. Elena recognised the coffee shop in Kilfarran and the high clock tower in the village square, where teenagers still hang out together.
Two boys, in particular, feature in many of the photographs. Hard to tell if they were friends or boyfriends. Certainly, the blonde girl and one of the boys, slightly built and gangly, were just friends; the casual drape of their arms over each other’s shoulders and the funny faces they pull at the camera do not suggest romance. His casually tousled hairstyle changes over time: a flamboyant pink Mohican; a sophisticated topknot. She is not so certain about Amelia and the other boy, who was of mixed race, olive-skinned and black-eyed, a wide mouth, always laughing. He disappeared from the photographs after the goth phase. The split between the other three seemed to come in their early twenties. Elena stares at photographs of New York, where Amelia’s friend must have been living. They chart the nightclubs she frequented, her sporting activities, her jogs in Central Park. Her cool green gaze suggests she was as much at home in New York as in the small village of Kilfarran.
Elena looks for photographs of Amelia and Nicholas together and is surprised when she can’t find any. She opens an envelope and removes a document. Red block lettering states that this is the house deed to Woodbine, dated 1935. The owner’s name, Samuel Pierce, is written underneath. She finds birth and baptismal certificates in another envelope; some are yellowed and much-folded and others are more recent. John Pierce, an only child, it would seem, and his daughter, Amelia. She discovers a copy of John’s will and testament. His estate, including Woodbine, had been left to Amelia with a stipulation that Nicholas’s name could not be added to the deed.
She grapples with this new information. Why has Nicholas kept the ownership of Woodbine a secret from her? The realisation that he will harm her if she confronts him with this information settles like lead in her stomach. Had he told her he had bought this house with Amelia or did she simply make that assumption? It was his attitude, Elena realises, his confident, possessive tone whenever he mentions Woodbine, that has convinced her that it belonged to him. She won’t mention her discovery. Why stir dead dust when all that matters is the assuaging of his temper, that tortured fury that overwhelms him so suddenly and swirls her into its vortex?
She will return the folder to its hiding place and forget its existence. But not just yet. Unable to stop rummaging through it, she opens another envelope and spills out the contents. Torn pieces of paper scatter like scraps of confetti across the table. She attempts to join the fragments together and, finally, three frayed edges combine to reveal the word MARRIAGE. She moves with more determination and finds a fragment with the letters IFIC. From then on, the jigsaw visible in her mind takes a physical shape until she is staring at the heading IRISH MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE. She pieces together their names. Nicholas Madison and Amelia Pierce. Slivers of information that will disperse if she blows on them. Whose hand tore apart what should have been a cherished document? Amelia’s? The drama queen who was always demanding attention? The diva who was never satisfied? Or the hand of Nicholas, who once shattered the glass of a photograph containing his wife’s image into the same random pieces?
Elena sits stiffly on the kitchen chair. The only sounds she hears are the clock ticking and the rush of her breath. Her hands, she notices, are trembling. This folder has developed fangs, the charged bite of a dog turned savage. What other unsettling information is contained within it? How will she deal with what she has already discovered?