The Old Silent

the dog heard its name. 'I don't own anything,' she repeated, and her face whitened with the dreadful thought of something she couldn't handle dropped in her lap like the book she'd just discarded.

'You'll be able to do anything you want, almost.'

'I have enough as it is.' She retrieved the metal box and held it on her lap, her hands locked over the top.

'You wouldn't really have to do much. Nothing would really change. Cook would still be here, and Mrs. Braithwaite. And Ruby.'

Quickly, she looked up at him, her eyes narrowed as if assessing the desirability of Ruby staying on as one of her staff. Then she said, 'I know one thing. If I owned this place, there's certain people would have to leave.'

'Such as?'

'Malcolm!' Again, she managed to turn her face to putty by pulling down on her cheeks with her fingers so that the red underlids of her eyes were visible.

'He tried to kill my other cat. The earl saved it. I expect he's all right.'

Jury thought she meant the cat until the lid of the box came up and, after rummaging about, she handed over a card. It was one of Plant's. Title, address. A trifle nicked round one edge because Lord Ardry was no longer Lord Ardry and he carried them only for emergencies. Jury smiled. 'I know him. He's definitely all right.' He handed back the card.

Abby took it absently, pondering over whatever valuables she had inside the box. She drew out a locket and held it swinging hypnotically from its golden chain. 'Billy's mum gave it to me.'

It was pure gold, twenty or twenty-two carat, he thought. Jury snapped it open and saw, side-by-side in a double frame, two boys looking out at him. That they resembled one another was owing to the slightly fuzzy sepia tint of the photos, to their similar smiles and sweaters. Another look told him that the one on the right was older. Four years would make quite a difference at eleven and fifteen. What a treasure, he thought, for Nell Healey to give away.

Jury said, 'It's Billy and Toby, isn't it?'

'We were all best friends. I always went over there to play with them and climb the trees. From the top of the highest one-it's this biggiant tree-I could see everywhere.' She raised her eyes, looked at the old beams of the high roof, and grew almost breathless thinking about it. 'Everywhere. All of the moors and Haworth. Goose Eye and Keighley. Even Leeds,' she added, considerably expanding her horizon. 'I've never been there,' she added flatly, and sifted again through the box.

How much was remembrance and how much fantasy?

Jury handed back the necklace and, wordlessly, as if this were a solemn rite of exchange, Abby handed over a white envelope, dirty around the edges with fingering. The inscription was written in flowing letters, the postmark was faded. He could make out Venezioand the year. It was the same year that Billy and Toby had disappeared. The notecard inside was a duplication of the Magritte print.

He looked up. She shrugged its importance off and said, 'You can read it.'

' 'Dear Abby, I like this picture. Love, Nell,'' Jury raised his eyes, but she was looking everywhere else and pulling back her black hair, twining it tightly as if she were going to pin it there, then letting it fall and giving Stranger some brusque and vocal command which seemed to surprise the dog. Immediately, he went to the door of the barn to stand lookout.

Then Abby slid off her cot, pounded her booted feet about on the rug, and kneeled down to mess with her records. 'I expect you'll have to go now; after I listen to my record I'm going to have a lie-down,' she said.

'Okay,' said Jury, rising.

'I've got three Ricky Nelsons-or Ethel does-and one Dire Straits and two Elvises.'

Brian Macalvie's all-time favorite. He smiled. 'I've got a good friend who likes Elvis.'

'He's dead.' She put the needle on a few bars into the song. Elvis was singing 'The Impossible Dream.' They listened. 'What's an 'unrightable wrong'?' She pointed at the record. 'And if it's something so bad you can't put it right, then why's he trying to do it?'

She wasn't angry; she was anxious. Surely there had to be an answer.

Jury stared at the record. He thought for a while and said, 'Because some people never give up, no matter what the odds.'

One puzzle answering another. This, apparently, made total sense, for she returned to her ever-so-slightly deprecating air and asked, 'Don't you have a card?'

Jury pulled out his wallet and handed her one.

As he looked back she was studying it, hard.

26

Melrose was flooded with relief.

Trying to break the sound barrier, the motorcycle ripped up the rocky road and came spitting to a halt in the gravel outside of the drawing room. The room itself vibrated and the gray cat went rolling off the sill when Malcolm threw open the casements, leaned out, and shouted something lost in the January night.

Music in the form of a death-beat of drums that sounded like a funeral dirge came with her through the door.

Ellen came pounding down the hall, threw open the door, and stopped there, with the sort of portable stereo propped on her shoulder that Melrose had seen being carted about Piccadilly by gangs of thugs. Now a voice had joined the drum-bass-beat which seemed surprisingly inappropriate for the background havoc: it was grainy but soft:

Caroline says-

as she gets up off the floor

'Hi,' said Ellen, in a general salute and with a particular look at Jury. She had not changed her clothes, although she wore different earrings: they were long overlapped triangles of dull black that looked heavy enough to anchor a small boat. There also seemed to be a different layering of chains around her neck.

life is meant to be more than this

and this is a bum trip

sang the mournful voice raised now against the dirge of drums and guitars.

Ellen turned the volume down, and handed the set to Melrose, general dogsbody, before she turned to Jury, who had risen from the sofa and was introducing himself as a friend of Mr. Plant.

Melrose sighed. He set the stereo on one bookcase shelf and leaned against the row of John D. MacDonalds.

but she's not

afraid to die

all of her friends call her A-las-ka

He was getting interested in Caroline, who appeared to be mainlining drugs.

when she takes speed,

they laugh and ask her

'… one of the funniest books I've ever read,' Jury was saying to Ellen.

It was the first time Melrose had seen Ellen Taylor lose her cool. She gaped. 'Are you saying you've actually read Sauvage Savant?'

'Not all of it…'

How, wondered Melrose, had he read any of it? He hadn't even heard of the girl until yesterday. Were they selling her books at Haworth parsonage?

Melrose turned up the volume on the stereo. There was the sound of tinkling glass. Caroline had thrust her hand through a window-

it's so cold in A-las-ka