The Old Silent

landscape.

Ricky Nelson had died some years ago, but perhaps in what looked to Jury like Abby's very patchwork past, events stitched together from piecework left behind by others-she had only recently come to realize that something else was gone from it. The mismatched clothes she wore fit the image, too: the somewhat muddy white shawl that reached down her back to her ankles, the zigzag-striped jumper and brown wool skirt, its hem covering the tops of old boots.

Thus when she raised her face to give him a grim look, Jury was startled by its beauty. Her eyes were a deep blue that sea beyond Cornwall could never match. She said: 'I don't think it's right to have a poster up of somebody dead.' Here he saw her glance quickly toward Elvis pinned to the far wall near whom the Sirocco poster had been fixed. 'I don't care if Ethel's mad. It's my barn.' From a pocket hidden beneath the shawl, she took out a wad of stuff that looked like tangled string, found a rubber band, and rolled it carefully over the poster. Then she returned the blue eyes to him, apparently waiting.

'Do you want me to help you tack that up?'

She was not, clearly, to be fooled by some offer of help. 'I expect you're another policeman.'

Under that blue stare, he felt more like a suspect. He smiled a little. 'Was there one here before, then?'

'Two. They kept asking questions. One was nearly as tall as you. He asked me did I like rock music.' She looked at Jury, waiting.

He might be taller, but was he smarter? 'That's sort of obvious, isn't it?' She didn't verify this. 'I don't ask a lot of questions.'

'They all ask questions.' She was still clenching the rolled-up poster and Jury could see a slick of sweat from her palms where they'd moved up and down. 'But they never tell you nothing. Except Aunt Ann had some kind of accident.'

The words came out slow and fine, as if they'd been ground like grit from millstone. She had found the lie in them.

Silence filled the barn, broken only by the shuffling of the cow in its stall.

'I've got to give it its medicine,' she said quickly, the sick cow a welcome distraction from the topic at hand. 'You can watch.'

'Sometimes I have to take care of Mr. Nelligan's sheep.' She gave Jury a quick look to see, apparently, if he believed in this vetting of animals by a person so young.

'Who's he?'

Abby stoppered up the bottle and got down from the stool. 'He lives out on the moor in an old caravan. He doesn't take care of them at all.' She picked the poster from the dirt floor. Jury looked at the two doors of the empty stalls. On one was a poster of Mick Jagger, on the other, Dire Straits.

'I'm putting this away,' she said, walking over to an old steamer trunk. She bent down and unclasped the tarnished brass buckles, lifted the lid, and carefully placed the poster in it. Then she stood quickly, a furious look on her face, and let the coffin lid thunk down. 'We're having our tea,' she said, turning to the fireplace, where the collie now lay, beside the larger dog, paws outstretched, eyes drawing a bead on Jury's every move.

Jury smiled slightly, assuming that 'we' meant Abby and the dogs.

'You can have some too,' she said, without a clue as to whether she looked forward to this addition.

'Thank you.' In the grave preparation of the tea things, Jury said nothing; he doubted he could penetrate her thoughts, as tangled as the load of strings in her pocket.

'I've only got tea bags,' she said, lifting the top of a box of P &G's and setting several of them on the table.

Jury smiled. 'If they're good enough for Prince Edward they're good enough for me.'

Gazing at him over a little dish of buns, she looked puzzled.

'There was a picture in the paper over a year ago of Edward going to his first job-he wants to be an actor. He was holding a box just like that.' Jury nodded toward the P &G box.

Still frowning, she dropped three tea bags in the pot. 'Well, if I was his mother I'd see he got a proper tea.' In a pique of anger, she plunked a bun apiece on two small plates. 'He's all she's got left.'

This sad estimation of the sinking family numbers at the palace forestalled any comment on Prince Charles and his brother and sister. Those three were married and gone. 'It must be hard on the Queen watching her children grow up and move away.'

She fiddled with her shawl, said nothing.

Jury looked round the walls of the barn. 'You have some very nice posters and pictures.'

After she'd wetted the tea, she said, 'Ethel gave me the cat one.' Abby pointed to a picture, one corner curling in for lack of a drawing pin. Her tone was uncertain, and she glanced at the trunk, as if the gift from Ethel was a task as yet unfinished in her mind, still causing her a muddle. The picture was one Jury had seen several times before-a popular and sentimental interpretation of childhood; a little girl in a thick, rich frock, holding a bowl of milk in her lap. Her dimpled smile was directed at an assortment of starveling cats meant to look sleek and rather rich, all waiting for their dinner.

It must have reminded Abby of her dog, for she picked up the enamel pitcher and poured milk into a tin plate by the fire. The collie went busily to work on it. 'She gave it to me probably because she thinks that girl looks like her. Ethel has reddish hair in curls like that. And white skin.' Abby pulled her cheeks out with her fingers, distorting the heart-shape to something cartoonishly plump. 'It's round, her face is,' she said through tightly drawn, rubber-band lips. 'Ethel's my best friend. What do you think?' she asked, waiting for the verdict to be handed down. That Jury and Ethel had never met presented no problem to Abby. He should be able to decide from a combination of her description and the picture.

He rose from his seat and walked over to the picture. The child there was snub-nosed, dimpled and too prissily dear to be believed.

Until Abby cleared her throat, he hadn't realized she'd come up behind him. 'Ummm.' He cocked his head this way and that and said, 'She looks sticky-sweet. And she also looks underneath as if she'd dump that basin of milk over that black cat that's clawing her dress.'

'That's Ethel,' said Abby. She walked away.

Jury's eye took in the rest of the barn at this end: the corner with the cot and the crate that held a stash of books and comics. 'May I look at your books?'

'Yes,' she called over to him. 'But I wouldn't look at Jane Eyre.'

'No? Why not?'

'If you want to be sick.'

But Jane Eyre seemed to have got some rather thorough handling, despite its sick- making propensities. He leafed through it and saw the many downturned tips of pages. It was a heavy old volume, illustrated.

'This one's better,' she said, kneeling down to remove the black drape from the box that Jury could see now had held boots. She lifted the lid and pulled out a small book. 'Mrs. Healey gave it to me. Her aunt brought it. I wish she'd come instead.'

It was the book of poetry Nell Healey had been holding when he saw her on the path. And it was a duplicate of the one in Billy Healey's room. He thumbed through it. Many of the same markings were there, and the same notes in the margins. 'This looks like it might have been a favorite book.'

'It was.' She took it back, returned it to the box, refitted the black cover.

Jury frowned. 'Why do you keep it in there?'

'It's a hiding place. Come on.' She rose and pulled at him, still crouched down.

'Why is the box covered in black, then?'

'Because it's for Buster's funeral. She died.'

She? 'Was she a pet?'

'My cat.'

Jury was fascinated. 'Did you bury her?' Abby seemed surrounded by death.

'Not yet. Come on.'

Back at the table, he watched her pour milk into her cup and add four teaspoons of sugar. She poured the same amount of milk into his and added the same four teaspoons of sugar.