About That Night Read online

  ABOUT

  that

  NIGHT

  Norah McClintock

  O R C A B O O K P U B L I S H E R S

  Copyright © 2014 Norah McClintock

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah, author

  About that night / Norah McClintock.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0594-1 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0595-8 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0596-5 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.C62A62 2014 jC813’.54 C2014-901559-3

  C2014-901560-7

  First published in the United States, 2014

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935377

  Summary: When Derek disappears in the snow, suspicion falls on Jordie.

  What does she know about that night?

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Chantal Gabriell

  Cover images by iStock and Shutterstock

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4 ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1

  To my girls

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  One

  It’s frigid—minus twenty—but Elise Diehl doesn’t notice. Nor does she notice the way the wind catches the fronts of her housecoat, which she hasn’t buttoned, and blows them out behind her like two quilted streamers. She is too enchanted to notice anything except the lacy flakes of snow that are floating down like so many tiny parachutists through the moonlit night. She sticks out her tongue. It isn’t long before one lone flake lands there like a tiny, icy doily and melts. She spreads her arms and begins a long, languid whirl. She has always loved the snow. She especially likes it at this time of year, when multicolored lights twinkle on the massive Scotch pine in the middle of the lawn. The time of year when she and Mama and Daddy would bundle themselves into Daddy’s big blue Pontiac and drive along the concession road, which is kept clear of drifts by the snow fences on either side, all the way to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where Daddy grew up and where Grandpa was born, right there in his ma’s bed, and has lived all his life. The house, after they had stomped their feet on the porch and then stepped onto the oval rag rug inside, would smell of turkey and gravy and pie, and Grandma would help her off with her coat and boots and press a piece of shortbread into her hand. She loves Grandma’s shortbread.

  Elise starts down the driveway toward the glowing pine. She doesn’t notice that the snow is accumulating faster now and that it won’t be long before it is higher than the slippers on her feet. She dances down the driveway, beaming at the tree and its lights and wondering what will be waiting for her under the tree at Grandma’s house. Grandma has beautiful colored-glass decorations that she inherited from her mother, who brought them all the way from England, wrapped in cotton and set into little compartments in the sturdy boxes where Grandma still keeps them. Grandma lights her tree the old-fashioned way, with little candles pressed into little metal candle holders with reflectors behind them to make them glow like fairy lanterns. Grandma strings popcorn and cranberries and garlands the tree with them. Later, after Epiphany, when the tree comes down, she takes off everything except these edible garlands, and Grandpa sets the tree out in one of the fields so that the birds can feast on the Christmas bounty. In a few places on the tree, Grandma hangs little wooden houses, painted in bright colors, with little doors in them that open. Elise hunts among the thickly needled branches for those houses. When she finds one, she is allowed to open its door and pluck out the piece of chocolate inside. Even if dinner hasn’t been put on the table yet, she is allowed to eat it. It is the one time of year that Mama allows such an indulgence. Elise dreams about those little houses the whole of Christmas Eve. She dreams about them now as she reaches the end of the driveway.

  She stands there a moment and looks across the street. What is that over there? Lights! The same bright multicolored lights that ornament the tree on her own lawn, but they seem to hang there in the air, a whole long line of them. And then she sees—there’s a house over there. Its discovery stops her in her tracks. A house—where has it come from? She looks back at the house behind her, the one she lives in with Mama and Daddy. The house that Daddy so proudly built way up here, north of town, on a good-sized piece of land. He never intended to farm like Grandpa. But Daddy likes his space. He doesn’t want to feel crowded by his neighbors the way the folks in town are—at least, that’s how Daddy sees it. He keeps saying, “I don’t know how those poor slobs can stand it, huddled down there cheek by jowl.” Mama always looks shocked when he uses the word slobs. Elise always giggles. Daddy says it’s not a bad word. He says that if Mama had been in the army like he was, if she’d spent the war years with all those other boys, boys who looked well brought up and well mannered, she would have been shocked. It seems that boys, left to their own devices, cuss like sailors. Or, as Grandpa puts it, like stevedores. Elise isn’t sure what stevedores are. She thinks maybe they have something to do with bullfighting, like the picadors and the matadors in her favorite storybook, the one about the little bull who loves to smell the flowers.

  Elise looks back at her house, and for a moment thinks she sees Daddy in the window. A snowflake falls into her eye. She blinks, and her eye waters. When she looks again, she can’t tell if she imagined Daddy or if he has turned away from the window in disgust. Maybe he’s calling Edgar Poole, who runs the RCMP detachment in town, the one that serves the whole county. Maybe he’s asking him where in blue blazes that house came from. Elise would like to know the answer to that question. But even more, she would like to get to Grandma’s house to help Grandma make shortbread. This is the year Grandma has promised to teach her and share her secret recipe. But first she has made Elise promise never to divulge the recipe to anyone, especially not to Mama. That’s the one thing that injects a bit of sour lemon into every family occasion—the way Grandma feels about Mama. Grandma can’t understand how her son, who fought against Hitler, turned around and married a German girl. Married her right over there in Germany, where he was stationed for nearly a year after the war. Imagine. Married an enemy! Married one of those very same people who is responsible for her losing her elder son.

  Grandma speaks to Mama. But she doesn’t speak to her the same way she speaks to Elise. There is no warmth in her voice for Mama, and the smile on her lips, the rare times she offers it, is not the same smile that she flashes so easily at Elise or Daddy.
Once, when Grandma didn’t realize Elise was there, Elise heard her make fun of Mama’s accent. Mama pretends not to notice when she is at Grandma’s, but sometimes after she gets home, when she thinks Elise is asleep in her room, she cries, and Daddy comforts her and tells her that Grandma doesn’t know her the way he does and that if she did, she would realize what an angel Mama is, why she’s the best thing that ever happened to Daddy.

  Who knows, Elise thinks, maybe this will be the year that Grandma sees Mama for the sweet person she really is. Maybe this is the year Mama will be the Christmas angel. Elise smiles at this thought and pictures Mama in a long white robe, perched on the top of the tree, the light from her halo making a big bright circle on the ceiling. She looks up the road, smiling to herself and thinking that this might also be the Christmas she tells Grandma how wonderful Mama is, perhaps when they are in the kitchen together, rolling out the shortbread and cutting it into star shapes and Christmas-tree shapes and bell shapes. Grandma loves Elise. Maybe she will listen to her. Maybe she will be nice to Mama this year—really nice, not phony-baloney nice.

  As she stares at the thickening snow, Elise goes over in her head what she will say to Grandma. She thinks about the little houses on the tree. Grandma has been getting craftier about hiding them. Last year, there was one that Elise never did find. This year, she will not give up until she has located every single one, opened each of the little doors and popped each and every piece of chocolate into her mouth. What a nice thought.

  She shivers and turns back toward the house. Her house. For a moment, she remembers who lives there now. A vague memory envelops her. House equals safety. House equals warmth.

  Two

  Earlier that same night, Derek Maugham, seventeen going on eighteen, stares out the living room window of Jordie Cross’s house. He has been staying with the Crosses for the past couple of days while his parents are out of town visiting his grandmother. This is the first time they have let him stay back instead of dragging him along, and that’s only because he had to work up until two nights ago. At least, that’s the reason his mother gave for finally waving the white flag. He knows, because his dad told him, that his dad thinks he’s old enough to make his own decisions about whether he wants to tag along with them, especially when where they are going is to visit “some batty old dame,” which is how his dad refers to his grandmother when Derek’s mother is not around. Richard Maugham has never liked his mother-in-law, and now that she has remarried and is living with a man whom Richard calls a “goddamned miser,” he likes her even less. Richard Maugham hates having to visit her, and he is grateful that his wife, who makes the trek several times a year, insists on his company only at Christmas. Richard goes because he loves his wife and because it’s more trouble than it’s worth to tell her no.

  Derek has been insanely happy these past few days. He is madly in love with Jordie—how could he not be? She is smart and pretty and funny—and she likes him. That’s the part he still can’t believe. She likes him, and she doesn’t seem to mind when he calls her his girlfriend. She’s been his girlfriend for two months now, a status he dates from the first time he kissed her. He’d thought he was dreaming, fantasizing right there in the front seat of the car, or that maybe he’d drifted off while they sat parked there, but it turned out neither was true—it turned out it was real. She smiled at him afterward and told him how much she appreciated his difference.

  “Difference?”

  “You’re reliable,” she said.

  “That’s different?” If it was, well, vive la différence!

  Being here in this house with her is like taking a stroll in heaven—no matter where he goes or what he’s doing, there she is. She’s sitting across the table from him, eating oatmeal at breakfast or a sandwich at lunch. She’s making hot chocolate with marshmallows when he comes in from helping her dad shovel the driveway. She’s beside him after supper at the sink, where he is rinsing dishes and she is putting them into the dishwasher. She’s beside him on the couch down in the basement, where they are watching a movie or, if her little sister is miraculously absent, cuddling and kissing and touching each other. And when he lies in the foldout bed in the basement at night, he knows that she is two floors above him, in her pyjamas under her comforter, lying there and maybe, if he’s lucky, thinking about him down in the basement. Life couldn’t possibly be any better. At least, that’s what he’s been thinking up until now.

  Now he is in the living room, checking up on her while her parents wait for him in the den, and Jordie is outside on the porch with Ronan Barthe. The guy showed up out of the blue—or so Jordie said when she answered the door and Ronan was standing there. Derek wants to believe her. But if this is such a surprise—a supposedly unpleasant surprise because, after all, Ronan is the ex-boyfriend—then why did he catch a look of excitement on Jordie’s face, and why did she agree so quickly—she didn’t offer any protest at all—when Ronan said he wanted to talk to her in private? And, more important, why has she been out there so long?

  While he peers out the window at them, Jordie’s kid sister Carly drifts past on her way to the den. Derek can’t keep his eyes off them, Ronan in a leather jacket that can’t possibly be keeping him warm in this subzero weather, and Jordie with a thick sweater wound tightly around her, held there by her arms, which are also wrapped around her. She must be freezing, but as far as he can see, she has made no move to hurry Ronan along so that she can get back inside where it’s warm—and where Derek is waiting. Derek doesn’t begin to understand what’s so special about Ronan. He knows the girls all think he’s cute, and grudgingly supposes he is, if you like those dark and dangerous looks and that sullen I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-anything expression. But Derek? Jeez, Derek can’t stand the guy. He used to look at them together—Jordie and Ronan. They were a couple all last year, and Derek, who has been smitten with Jordie ever since he started high school, used to pray for the day she would come to her senses and dump Ronan’s sorry ass.

  Then it happened.

  Status change: Jordie Cross declares herself single.

  And Derek Maugham sees his chance.

  Now, though, Derek remembers that he never managed to get to the bottom of what happened between Jordie and Ronan. She has steadfastly deflected all questions—“Why dwell in the past?”—and no one else seems to know or, frankly, even care, least of all Derek himself. Because, really, why should it matter to him if it doesn’t seem to matter to Jordie? In all the time she has been with Derek, she has never mentioned Ronan, never spoken to him (that Derek is aware of), never even glanced at him across a classroom or in the cafeteria. She’s been a hundred percent Ronan-free, which is exactly how Derek likes it.

  But she is not Ronan-free now. He wishes he knew what they were talking about, but with the weather so cold, there are two tightly sealed doors between him and the front porch. But Derek watches them. He keeps his eyes on them the whole time, sees Ronan talking earnestly from behind the puffs of frosty breath, sees Jordie nod. What is she nodding about? What is she agreeing to? Why is she even talking to him?

  It occurs to Derek for the first time that maybe the breakup didn’t happen the way he’s always assumed it did. Maybe Jordie didn’t dump Ronan. Maybe it happened the other way around. And maybe Ronan has finally seen how wrong he was—only an idiot would dump a girl like Jordie—and has come to get her back. Maybe that’s why she’s nodding.

  They finally stop talking, but instead of Jordie coming back inside right away, she stands there shivering—her whole body is trembling—and watches Ronan walk down off the porch, along the path that leads to the curb and then down the street. She doesn’t come inside until he is out of sight. Then, instead of joining the family in the den, she says, “I need to get something,” and she disappears up the stairs. She doesn’t come down again for nearly an hour, during which Derek has to restrain himself from racing up to her room to ask her what the hell is going on, what Ronan wanted, why he came to the house. But Mr. and
Mrs. Cross are both there in the den, watching The Lion in Winter. Mr. Cross has poured himself a Scotch, neat, and looks relaxed now that the Christmas festivities are over. Mrs. Cross is engrossed in the movie, which, according to Jordie, she has watched every Christmas that Jordie can remember (an odd choice, Derek thinks, until Jordie points out that the action takes place at Christmas). Even so, relaxed as they are, engrossed as they are, there’s no way they will let him go up to Jordie’s room, even if he’s been up there plenty of times when they weren’t around. All he can do is wait.

  For what seems like forever.

  When Jordie finally comes back downstairs, she hangs in the entrance to the den and speaks his name the way a teacher would: “Derek!” Like it’s a command or a caution. Even her parents notice. For the first time since Ronan left the porch, Mrs. Cross’s eyes stray from the TV.

  “Is something wrong, dear?” she asks her daughter.

  “I need to talk to Derek.”

  Derek excuses himself and gets up off the couch. He follows Jordie into the kitchen, puzzled by what he reads as ill humor, which only deepens when she closes the kitchen door behind them. She faces him, her arms crossed teacher-like over her chest.

  “Did you take something out of my room?” It comes out like an accusation, as if she already knows the answer and the answer is yes.

  “No. Why? What do you think I took?”

  “Some jewelry.”

  Derek is stunned. “You think I stole jewelry from you? Why would I do that?”

  “I know you have it, Derek.”

  “Have what?”

  “My bracelet.”

  “What bracelet?” What’s the matter with her? “Wait a minute. Does this have anything to do with Ronan?” He’s never been able to say the guy’s name without disdain, and Jordie picks up on it.

  “What if it does?”

  “What was he doing here anyway?”

  “That’s none of your business.”