The Phoenix Page 4

  Mary Newsome stared after Ella as she walked away.

  Beside her, Jim’s broad shoulders began to shake with laughter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ella woke late the next morning with a different kind of headache. The kind you get from drinking half a bottle of bourbon on your own, once all the guests and caterers and preachers have gone home, then passing out, fully clothed, on your childhood bed.

  The first thing she was aware of was the light, streaming in through every window like an assault. Ella’s grandmother had not believed in drapes or blinds. ‘A healthy person rises with the sun,’ was one of her favorite sayings. A lot of Mimi Praeger’s nuggets of wisdom began with the words ‘A healthy person …’ Most were variations on the theme of hard work, prayerfulness and self-sufficiency.

  ‘A healthy person never lets others do for them what they can do themselves.’

  ‘A healthy person keeps a clean gun, clean shoes and a clean mind.’

  Ella learned early that she was not a ‘healthy person’. At least, not by nature. She had to work at it, and she did work, to please her grandmother but also because, to put it bluntly, there was nothing else to do. Hunting and trapping and whittling and working with her hands became Ella’s ‘games’ – activities she learned to enjoy because, really, what was the alternative? After years of practice she excelled at them all, an achievement in which both she and Mimi took pride.

  ‘Look at you!’ Ella’s grandmother used to say, flashing a rare smile as she watched the eight-year-old pop a rabbit from two hundred yards. ‘There’s not a junior shot in San Joaquin County better than you, my darling.’ Once, when Ella was climbing rocks above one of their favorite fishing pools, Mimi told her she was as ‘nimble as a mountain goat.’ It was one of the happiest moments of Ella’s life, a true compliment. Her grandmother’s praise was sparing and hard won, but it meant everything to the little girl. Because of course, Mimi was all she had. And vice versa.

  There had been such love between them in those days.

  What happened?

  Crawling out of bed, Ella staggered to the cabin’s only bathroom (which hadn’t been installed until she was twelve – running water had been another grudging concession to social services) and splashed ice-cold water on her face angrily, as if it could wash away the regret. So much had been left unsaid between Ella Praeger and her grandmother, but it was all too late now. Wasted thoughts and feelings and emotions were left to trickle down the drain, like water from a forgotten faucet.

  ‘A healthy person never wastes God’s water …’

  Peeling off her crumpled funeral dress and black underwear, Ella freed her hair from its disheveled braid and stepped under the cold shower, gasping as the jets pounded into her bare skin like bullets. She had a good figure, toned and athletic with high, round breasts counterbalancing her narrow, boyish hips. Her hair was dirty blonde and unfashionably long, an old style she was oddly reluctant to part with. But it was Ella’s face that really caught people’s attention. Hers was a kooky, love-it-or-hate-it sort of beauty. Her green, wide-set eyes gave her face a look of aloofness when at rest, and her high cheekbones and pointed chin added to the overall feline effect. A childhood fall from an apple tree had left Ella with a permanent kink in the top of her nose, preventing her features from having the sort of perfect symmetry that might have left her looking cartoonishly ‘pretty’. Instead Ella Praeger was what you might call ‘striking’. ‘Sexy’ was another common epithet, among those who liked their women direct, to a degree that others found terrifying.

  Pulling on her spare set of clothes – she’d only brought one change with her, a reminder to herself that she wasn’t going to be staying long – Ella made a breakfast of beans and dry cured bacon from leftovers in the pantry, and drank two cups of coffee with powdered milk that she brewed on the stove. Then she found a shady spot on the porch, downed the last of her ibuprofen, which was like trying to put out a brush fire with a water pistol, and sat very still for an hour until her headache receded to something close to bearable.

  Mentally, she began running through her to-do list. If she worked hard – ‘a healthy person …’ she hoped to be able to tie things up and head back to the city tomorrow, or the following day at the latest. Before that, Bob had reminded her she still needed to settle up with the crematorium. And then her main job would be to empty out the cabin, packing up any personal or valuable items to take with her, boxing the rest and cleaning the place from top to bottom, so she could lock it up and leave it until she decided what to do.

  The strange man in a suit yesterday had all but convinced her to sell. And he probably wasn’t even a real-estate agent! In any case, Ella was confident that sorting through her grandmother’s things wouldn’t take too long. A survivalist to her bones, Mimi Praeger had only owned three dresses (two for church, one for every day) two pairs of pants (winter and summer), a couple of heavily darned sweaters and the overalls she’d been cremated in. The only book in the house was the Bible, and other than her guns, fishing tackle, a chess set and a few pieces of ‘family’ china, there were really no objects for Ella to salvage. The one, precious photograph of Ella’s parents, William and Rachel, on their wedding day, which Mimi used to keep by her bed, Ella had taken long ago and installed in her own apartment in San Francisco.

  That picture had been the cause of one of the worst fights she ever had with her grandmother. Ella showed up at the cabin the morning after her college graduation to try and sort things out with Mimi, but the old woman had been hurt and reacted angrily, unreasonably. She wouldn’t talk to Ella, wouldn’t listen. When Ella asked for the photograph, Mimi refused to give it to her.

  ‘It doesn’t belong to you!’ she’d hissed unkindly, her wizened features twisting into an ugly mask of rage. ‘You can’t simply come here and take things, Ella.’

  ‘But they were my parents!’ Ella yelled back. ‘It’s the only image I have of them. The only link. You destroyed everything else.’

  Mimi rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not still talking about those clothes, are you?’

  Ella dug her fingernails into her palms so hard she bled. It was the one thing, as she got older, for which she found she could never forgive her grandmother. The suitcase her mother had packed for her, when she first came to stay at the cabin at four years old, and which had contained some of Ella’s clothes and toys and a blanket that, in Ella’s memory at least, still smelled of her mom, had disappeared from her room one day while she was at school. When Ella asked Mimi where it was, her grandmother replied nonchalantly that she’d ‘got rid of it’ – or rather burned the contents, as Ella later learned – because ‘it’s time to look forward, Ella, not back. What use do you have now for a little girl’s clothes?’ Those clothes, those few items packed with love by a mother who believed she would only be leaving her daughter for a few weeks, were Ella’s last physical link to her parents. And Mimi had taken them and burned them, on a whim. Without permission, without thought, it seemed, for Ella’s feelings. It was almost as if it had been done in anger, although what that anger could possibly have been prompted by, Ella had no idea, either at the time or later.

  ‘I’m taking the picture.’ Ella glared at her grandmother. ‘I’m taking it and there’s nothing you can do about it!’ Marching into Mimi’s bedroom like an amazon warrior, she snatched the framed photograph from the dresser. Her grandmother followed, frail arms flapping uselessly, shrieking at Ella like a trapped animal as she tried to grab the precious object back out of her hands. To her shame, Ella had physically pushed the old woman aside, years of her own pent-up rage exploding out of her as she stormed to her car and drove back to Berkeley without a backward glance.

  The argument was never mentioned again. Nor did anyone apologize. As with Mimi’s burning of the clothes, the entire incident was swept away. Buried. But in Ella’s heart, all these things lived.

  Healthy people perform jobs methodically, starting at the beginning and ending at the end. El
la packed and organized and scrubbed and disinfected the cabin from the bottom up, starting with the kitchen, then the living room, the tiny bathroom and her own box bedroom, little more than a single built-in bed, a wooden chair, and a sawn-off plank that had served as a desk. To her surprise she found her mood improving as she worked, the exertion bringing a sort of peaceful satisfaction that drove away insistent memories of loneliness and pain. Lifting the striped rug to beat out the dust, Ella pressed down gently on the loose floorboard, her secret compartment where as a teenager she’d hidden such verboten items as a portable radio (Mimi strictly banned all ‘technology’, whether or not it had been invented in the 1920s), trashy, romantic novels borrowed from the school library (mostly Jackie Collins with all the sexiest parts double-folded at the corners of the page) and a small make-up bag and mirror. Later, Ella had added packets of Yasmin, her contraceptive pill, and miniature bottles of coconut Malibu liqueur that Jacob Lister, whose parents ran the Prospect Road convenience store, traded her in return for an opportunity to touch her bare breasts, an excellent deal in Ella’s opinion: win-win. The board lifted easily, and although its contents were long since gone, Ella still felt a nostalgic thrill that this small act of defiance on her part had remained undetected.

  By four o’clock, the entire ground floor was organized and sparkling. A growl from her stomach reminded Ella she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. There was nothing but canned goods left in the pantry, so she opted for a plate of Spam followed by a tin of peaches with condensed milk, all of which tasted oddly delicious. Fortified and delighted by her swift progress – she would definitely be able to lock up and head home tomorrow – Ella climbed the ship’s-ladder staircase to the loft space that had also served as her grandmother’s bedroom.

  For the first time all day, she paused. Here, where the smell of Mimi’s skin still lingered on the pillowcase, and her shawl still hung from the back of the chair, the magnitude of what she was doing struck Ella. I’m scrubbing out my childhood. Packing away Mimi’s life, and a huge part of my own. Forever. She waited for the sadness to hit her. The grief that she’d read about and been told about and been waiting for. But instead she felt something else, something terrible. She felt a sort of joy. Angry, defiant, exuberant joy. Survivor’s joy. And it swept through Ella like a wave, lifting her up, filling her lungs with laughter and her limbs with an overwhelming urge to kick and punch and lash out with wild relief. Before she even knew what she was doing, she’d taken the bottle of cleaning fluid in her hand and hurled it with full force against the wall, splitting the plastic and splattering lavender-scented bleach over everything within a five-foot arc.

  Laughing harder now, she picked up Mimi’s solid oak cane and started lashing out with it like some sort of deranged ninja, slamming it into the floor and walls and then finally jumping up on her grandmother’s bag and jabbing it hard into the ceiling. Most of the roof was made of split-log beams, impervious to Ella’s blows. But there was one small plastered section directly above the headboard that seemed to Ella to be positively begging for destruction. With a banshee yell of delight and an almighty, full-arm swing, she connected the cane to the plaster like a bat to a baseball. White dust and debris rained down everywhere, on the counterpane and all over Ella’s hair. Flinging herself back on the bed, she was still laughing when the rest of the plaster gave way and a cast-iron strong box, easily heavy enough to kill her, plunged out of the hole she’d just created, missing Ella’s skull by millimeters.

  ‘Jesus!’

  For a full minute Ella stared at the box lying on the bed beside her. The near-death experienced had sobered her instantly. If I’d died, she wondered, how long would it be before somebody found me? Weeks? Maybe a month? Embarrassed by her earlier hysteria, her thoughts quickly shifted from herself to the box beside her. Clearly, Mimi must have hidden it. And not just hidden, but built an entire false ceiling to conceal the thing, to keep it safe. That must mean its contents were either valuable, or secret, or both. Ella couldn’t imagine her grandmother hiding anything illegal. On the other hand, she couldn’t really imagine her hiding anything at all. ‘Healthy people are honest and open. There are no secrets from the Lord.’ It was strange that it took a person dying to find out things about them that you never knew.

  Tentatively, Ella ran a finger over the box’s clasp. Perhaps there were love letters inside, from Mimi’s long-dead husband Bill? Or from someone else – a secret lover! The idea made Ella smile. It would be a relief to learn that her grandmother had not always been such a prude when it came to sex, but it was hard to imagine. Whatever was inside, Ella knew that once she opened the box, Mimi’s ‘secret’ would be out. It would be too late to go back. She took a deep breath, savoring the sanctity of the moment, and lifted the lid.

  Letters.

  I was right!

  Some were loose and folded, others slipped back inside opened envelopes, all lovingly tied together with a length of gingham ribbon. It looked as if there were cards at the bottom too, flashes of color and glitter glinting out from beneath the faded yellow parchment.

  Carefully, Ella lifted the stack out of the box and placed it on top of the bed. With a gentle tug she untied the ribbon, picking up the first letter and unfolding it as delicately as she could with her long fingers.

  ‘Dear Mother,’ the letter began.

  Ella’s heart was already in her mouth. The letter was from her father!

  ‘I don’t want to argue with you any more. I know you disapprove of my work, and Rachel’s. But not everybody sees the world as you do. What we’re doing is important, not just for us but for the world. You think you’re protecting Ella with this lie, but you aren’t. It’s cruel and it’s wrong. Please, Mother, for her sake if not for mine, tell her the truth. Give Ella our letters. She doesn’t understand now, but one day she will. Your loving son, William.’

  Ella’s hands trembled. She read her father’s words a second and third time, trying to decipher every possible drop of meaning from the few short lines. What did he mean that Mimi ‘disapproved of his work’? Both Ella’s parents had been doctors. How could anybody disapprove of that? They were tending to the poor in India when the taxi they were traveling in was hit head-on by a truck, killing them both instantly.

  And what ‘lie’ had her grandmother told her?

  Most importantly of all, what were these letters her father mentioned? Had her parents really written to her? If so, surely Mimi would have kept those letters? She wouldn’t have destroyed those too, would she, like she did with the suitcase of clothes?

  Frantic, Ella shuffled through the rest of the stack, opening up letters and quickly scanning each for her own name.

  ‘Dear Mother …’ the next one began. And the one after that, and the one after that. ‘Dear Mother’, ‘Dear Mother’, ‘Dear Mother’ … And then at last there it was.

  ‘My darling Ella …’

  Ella ran a finger lovingly over the paper as if it were the Holy Grail, tracing each inked letter with infinite slowness.

  ‘I hope you are well and helping Granny as much as you can around the ranch. I know you miss us, and we miss you too, very very much. I wish I could explain more to you, but it’s not safe for you to be with Mommy and me right now. One day, I hope, it will be. But until then please know you are always, always in our hearts. Your ever-loving, Dad.’

  Ella’s eyes welled with tears. Why hadn’t Mimi given this to her? Surely she would have known how much it would have meant?

  There was no address at the top, but there was a date: 2 September 2000.

  Ella stopped breathing. That must be wrong. That’s two years after they died.

  She looked at the date again, staring at it, almost in a trance. Then reaching down to the bottom of the pile of papers, she pulled out each of the cards – there were eight in total. Four for Christmas and four for her birthday. Trembling in disbelief, Ella read them all.

  ‘Happy 6th Birthday!’

  ‘Now you are SEVEN!�
�

  A cartoon dog in a top hat held up a balloon. ‘To the World’s Coolest Eight-Year-Old.’

  All of them were signed. ‘All our love, Mommy and Dad.’

  ‘No,’ Ella said out loud. No. She wouldn’t have. She couldn’t!

  She told me they’d died.

  She told me they’d died when I was five.

  Ella felt her breathing grow ragged. She felt dizzy all of a sudden, and sick. Sliding to the edge of her grandmother’s bed, she leaned forward with her head between her knees.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  She told me they were dead.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  She lied to me!

  Ella stood up, then sat down, then stood up again – a cartoon display of indecision. Her head began to hurt again, pressure building up inside her skull as if some evil sprite were in there, inflating a giant balloon. It wasn’t voices this time, or static white noise – strangely she never seemed to get those symptoms at the cabin, only in the city – but it was debilitating nonetheless. She needed to read the rest of the letters but it was impossible. The whole room was spinning and images swam before her eyes.

  I need a doctor, Ella thought, as the pain in her head brought her to her knees and she felt herself edging slowly towards unconsciousness. But there was no phone at the cabin and no cell reception for miles. If only she’d taken Bob up on his offer and let him come with her, he could have gone for help.

  Her last thought was how ironic it would be if she died on the day she found out that her parents weren’t dead after all. And how dared her grandmother die without explaining any of this to her?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gary Larson crossed his fat thighs and leaned back in his chair, a pained expression on his face.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ella. But I’m going to have to let you go.’