The Death of Mrs. Westaway(99)

There were a few pieces of coal left in the scuttle, and with the comforting knowledge that she would not be around for very long in the morning to face Mrs. Warren’s censure, Hal screwed up a page of newspaper, placed the coals in the grate, and put a match to the fire.

As it flared up, she sat, hunched in front of it, thinking about her mother crouching here so long ago, tearing the pages from her diary, and everything Hal had learned since finding it.

Edward. Could it really be true?

It must be—but when she thought of him, of his smooth blond hair, carefully coiffed mustache—she felt nothing. No sense of connection. Just a faint loathing for the man who had impregnated her mother and then left her, ignored her letters, leaving her to the mercy of a woman like Mrs. Westaway.

Part of her wanted to push the knowledge aside and move on, into the future, as Ezra had suggested. But the questions still niggled. Why had Abel lied so transparently? Had he banked on her not asking the same questions of Ezra?

If only her mother hadn’t scrubbed all the mentions of Hal’s father from the diary.

Hal sat, staring into the flames, too tired to rouse herself sufficiently to go to bed. She was almost beyond thought now—and she had the strangest feeling that history had looped around, putting her here, in her mother’s place, where Maggie herself had crouched so long ago, watching the flames burn the name of her lover to ashes, so that she, Hal, could discover a truth that had been buried long ago. But what was that truth?

Not just the name of her father.

There had been something else . . . something Ezra had said that was bothering her, but she could not pinpoint what it was. Was it during their conversation in the service station? She cast her mind back, running through everything he had said, but whatever it was, it kept slipping through her fingertips, a truth too insubstantial to catch hold of.

At last she stood, stretching her stiff limbs, the air of the room cool on her cheeks after the heat of the fire. Her case lay at the foot of the bed. In the pocket was the old tobacco tin, and she opened it and drew out her cards. Shivering a little, she cut the deck.

The card that stared up at her was the Moon, inverted.

Hal frowned. The Moon meant intuition, and trusting your intuition. It was a guiding light, but one that could be unreliable—for it was not always there, and sometimes when you needed it most, the night would be impenetrably dark.

Inverted, it meant deception, and especially self-deception. It meant the intuition that could lead you astray, down a false path.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing your own lies . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear, warning, always warning. You want to believe as much as they do.

And she did. She did want to believe. After her mother’s death, she had found herself dealing out the cards night after night, trying to make sense of it all, trying to find answers where there were none. She had spent hours poring over her mother’s cards, running her hands over them, looking for meaning.

But always that voice of skepticism in her ear, her mother’s voice: There is no meaning, apart from what you want to see, and what you are afraid of turning up.

She put her hands over her ears, as if she could shut out that voice of whispered sense and logic.

When had her mother become so cynical?

The girl in the diary, with her superstition and her obsessive reading of the cards, she was like a different person from the woman who had taken herself to the pier every day to read for fools and strangers. Tarot had been a job for Hal’s mother—nothing more. It had been something she was good at, but she had never believed, however convincing her patter was to strangers, and she had never hidden that skepticism from Hal. How had she turned from this questing, openhearted young girl into the disillusioned, weary woman Hal remembered?

They’re not magic, sweetheart, she had said to Hal once, in answer to her question. Hal could not have been more than four or five. You can play with them all you like. They’re just pretty pictures. But people like to pretend that life has . . . meaning, I suppose. It makes them feel happy, to think that they’re part of a bigger story.

Then why, Hal had asked, confused, did people come to see her every day? Why did they pay money if none of it was true? It’s like going to see a play, she had explained. People want to believe it’s true. My job is to pretend it is.

The girl in the diary had not been pretending. She had been in love—with the power of the cards, and the power of fate. She had believed. What had that changed? What had happened to make her stop believing in that power?

There is something I’m not seeing, Hal thought, and she picked up the Moon card and stared down at it, at the shadowy face in the bright orb. Something I’m missing.

But whatever it was, it lay just out of reach, and at last she put the cards away, and slid between the sheets, fully clothed, to try to sleep.

She was almost asleep, drifting in the strange no-man’s-land between waking and dreaming, the firelight making patterns on the insides of her lids, when an image came to her.

A book. A buttercup-yellow book with no lettering on the cover or spine.

It wasn’t hers, and she could not place where it had come from, and yet . . . and yet it was somehow familiar. She had seen it before. But where?

Hal sat up, feeling the chill air of the room at the back of her neck, and she pressed her fingers to her closed lids, trying to picture it, where she had seen it, why her subconscious was needling her now.