Are You Haunted (part sixty)

Are You Haunted

(part sixty)

The room at this end felt chilly and airless. Powell had ended up here.

“No, don’t bother with that.” Summers caught her reaching for a wrist. He crouched and put two fingers on the side of Powell’s neck. “Now, this is gonna be a little tricky, getting him out of here. But don’t worry, Miss Gilshannon.”

He dragged Powell (with no practical help from Isobel, as there was none she could give) to the corridor.

They met Keegan, returning. “Is this one dead?”

“Give a hand, Keegan.”

After they had reached the kitchen, and Summers had wrapped Powell in his own jacket, they walked their patient outside, then up and down the lawn. Isobel moved backwards ahead, watching for any sign of revival.

“This one, you said, Keegan.”

“Down at the bottom where the water stands, face down in it. Didn’t seem possible he’d be living, but I turned him on his back.”

“And you could name him…? It’s for you to say, not me.”

“The professor, the German. Mr. Guy calls him Rodle.”

On about the sixth circuit, Powell looked at Isobel with dilated eyes, and said, “Drybrook bought the diamond for Em.”

Summers looked at Keegan. “Let’s go a little longer. I don’t like putting him in the car just yet.”

“It’s all right,” Powell said. “Em wants Dennis to have it.”

“Could he mean Dennis’s mother?”

She glues herself to him. She would not have done anything sensible.

Mrs. Drybrook, saying this to a man in a ranger hat, brown pants and khaki shirt; government, but in no familiar way. Isobel had walked by the north road, thinking of decency, duty, a daughter-in-law’s…

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Drybrook. May I help with anything?”

Mrs. Drybrook turned to the door—which Isobel had only pushed to enter; it hadn’t been shut—and peered long. “Oh.” To the investigator: “This girl knows how she was, how Emmaline made herself my son’s secretary, how she was with him at his work every hour. She might have stayed at a desk, at the telephone, but if Davis had gone to the tunnel, she would have gone.”

And Dennis had not found the story funny. “You let that guy write your name down?”

Everyone at the mill was either found living, or not. The meticulous effort spent; the money spent, too. The missing could not be left “presumed”, lest a spy escape.

But Dennis rarely talked about his mother…and if not to his wife, when to Powell?

59

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)