Aunt Bessie Invites (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 9) (3 page)

Doona patted her friend’s hand.
 
“I’m sure you can be very scary,” she
said.
 
“But those are pretty large
sheep and I don’t want them to trample you if you do frighten them.”

Bessie put her hand on the door handle.
 
There had to be a way to get the sheep
out of the road.
 
She was about to
open her door when one of the nearby sheep suddenly stepped closer and pressed
its nose to the passenger side window.
 
Bessie gasped.

“That’s a big sheep,” Doona said.

“Much bigger than it looked when it was a
few paces away,” Bessie agreed; glad now that she’d stayed in the car.
 

They sat for a few minutes, nervously
watching the sheep as they strolled around the pasture.
 
Occasionally a small gap would open on
the road in front of Doona and she would inch forward
 

“Perhaps we should have gone the other way,”
Doona muttered as she was forced to stop again.
 

“Maybe we should go home that way,” Bessie
suggested.
 
They both silently watched
a large ewe as she nibbled on the grass in the centre of the road.
 

After a few more minutes, the sheep suddenly
seemed to tire of the game and they all moved away together.
 
With the road clear, Doona quickly made
her way through the field and across another cattle grid.

“Well, this part is just boring,”
Bessie
said a moment later as they bounced along the road.
 
Along both sides of them were immense
fields that had been ploughed and were now sitting empty for the winter.
 

“I prefer boring to dodging sheep,” Doona
told her.

Bessie wasn’t sure she agreed.
 
The sheep had been fascinating to watch,
and Bessie wasn’t really in any hurry today.
 

A few moments later Doona pulled up in front
of the farmhouse.
 

“This isn’t at all what I was expecting,”
she said.
 
“This looks new.”

“They tore down the original farmhouse about
ten years ago and built this one in its place,” Bessie told her.
 
“That was when Niall was still
well.
 
He suddenly decided that his
daughter deserved a more modern home than what they had before.
 
Repairing the old house would have cost
about twice what building this one did.”

Doona nodded.
 
She and Bessie climbed out of the
car.
 
“Did they put it in the old
house’s footprint?”

“They did,” Bessie said.
 
“And it really looks a lot like the old
house, just brand new.
 
In another
ten or twenty years no one will know it isn’t the original, at least not from
the outside.”

She walked towards the front door of the
large house.
 
Doona caught up to her
and took her arm.

“Careful in the mud,” Doona cautioned.

“It isn’t too bad,” Bessie told her.
 
“I’m fine.”

Doona nodded, but didn’t let go of Bessie’s
arm.
 
Bessie swallowed a sigh.
 
She hated when Doona fussed over her,
but she knew it made Doona feel better, so she tried not to complain too much.
 
At the door, Bessie pressed the
bell.
 

“Maybe no one is home,” Doona said after a
minute had passed.

“Someone is always home,” Bessie
countered.
 
“Anyway, I have an
appointment.”
 
She pressed the bell
again and then knocked loudly.

“Perhaps everyone is working in the barns,”
Bessie said after another minute passed.

“Do we go and hunt for them or wait here?”
Doona asked.

Bessie shook her head.
 
“I’m not thinking clearly,” she
said.
 
“I’ll just ring Fenella’s
mobile.
 
Wherever she is, she should
have it with her.”

Bessie found her phone in her handbag and
then found the number in the small notebook that was also in her bag.
 
After a few rings, Fenella answered.

“Ah, Fenella, it’s Bessie.
 
We’re here to talk to you about the
turkeys,” Bessie said.

“The turkeys?
 
Yes, of course, but well, I’m
sorry.
 
I’m rather flustered,” was
the reply.

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Fenella said.
 
“Or rather, yes, I think there is
something wrong, but I don’t know what to think.”

“Where are you?” Bessie asked.

“Where am I?
 
Oh, I’m at the lower barn.
 
Maybe you should come down.
 
You’ll know better than I do what I
should do next, I suppose.”

“Whatever is the matter?”

“Just come down to the lower barn,” Fenella
said.
 
She disconnected before
Bessie could ask any more questions.

“Fenella’s at the lower barn,” Bessie told
Doona.
 
“Something’s wrong, but she
wouldn’t tell me anything more than that.”

Bessie had Doona turn around and then follow
the road past the farmhouse.
 
“There
are several barns scattered around the site.
 
As far as I know, they use the lower one
for storage.”

“Storage for what?” Doona asked.

“Old equipment and furniture, mostly,”
Bessie said.
 
“I remember Niall
taking me in there one day to look at an old wardrobe that had been in his
father’s bedroom.
 
I had mentioned
that I was looking for a wardrobe for my spare room.
 
That one was far too massive for the
space I had, but I remember the barn being stuffed with furniture and
boxes.
 
I’ve no idea what is in the
boxes.”

“So what could possibly be wrong?” Doona
asked.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Bessie said,
forcing
herself
to ignore the feeling of dread in her
stomach.

“You don’t think...” Doona trailed off.

“I don’t know what to think,” Bessie
replied.

Doona pulled the car off to the side of the
road in front of the barn.
 
Fenella
was sitting on an old milking stool near the doorway.
 
Bessie and Doona crossed to her.

Like many women who farmed, Fenella had a
weathered and worn look about her.
 
She looked older than her sixty-odd years, watching Bessie through tired
brown eyes.
 
Her clothes were worn
and had been carefully mended in several places. A long grey plait of hair hung
down her back, and Bessie thought that she’d never seen the woman with her hair
done any other way.
 
Fenella didn’t
get up as the other women approached.

“Fenella, how are you?” Bessie asked when
they reached her side.

“I’ve been better,” Fenella replied.
 
“Eoin had to go across for some
tests.
 
The doctor sent him
yesterday after he went in to get his knee checked out.”

“That left knee still giving him trouble?”
Bessie asked.
 
She remembered hearing
about the tractor accident about five years earlier that had severely damaged
the man’s knee.

“Aye.
 
It’s worse when the weather’s damp and cold, but the new doctor said
there might be other problems with it and sent him off to Liverpool to get it checked
properly.”

“You could have rung me to reschedule,”
Bessie said.

“Aye, but if you don’t see the birds soon,
we’ll have to get them ready.
 
Eoin
likes to have your approval on his choices.”

Bessie nodded.
 
Somehow it had become tradition for her
to visit the farm about a week before the turkeys were due to be killed.
 
In the early days, Niall had quite
enjoyed her annual visit to see the birds.
 
Once Eoin took over, the tradition had carried on.
 
Really, all she ever did was agree with
Eoin, but they’d done it that way for many years now and there seemed little
point in changing things at this stage.

“So what’s wrong?” Bessie asked.

Fenella rubbed her forehead with a dry and
callused hand.
 
“I’ve been after
Eoin for years to sort through all of the junk in here, but he’s always too
busy with other things,” she told Bessie.
 
“I thought, while he was away, that I’d start going through some of the
boxes, just to see what we have down here.”

“And?” Bessie asked after a long pause.

“There are several boxes of Christmas things,
actually,” Fenella said.
 
“They must
have been my mother’s.
 
My father
never bothered to do any decorating for the holidays.”

“What a lovely thing for you to find,”
Bessie exclaimed.
 
“But I’m sure
it’s been something of a shock as well.”

Fenella shrugged.
 
“Not half as shocking as the skeleton
that was behind the boxes,” she said.

Chapter Two

Doona gasped, but Bessie simply nodded.
 
While she hadn’t exactly been expecting
the other woman’s words, they didn’t surprise her as much as they might have a
few months earlier.
 

“Where’s the skeleton?” Bessie asked in a
resigned tone.

“In the back corner,” Fenella replied.
 
“You’ll see it.”

“Maybe we should just ring John,” Doona
suggested.

“I’m just going to have a quick look,”
Bessie replied.
 
“Before we drag the
police in unnecessarily.”

Doona looked at Bessie and then nodded.
 
“That’s probably wise,” she said.

Bessie walked slowly into the barn.
 
She could see the route Fenella had
taken, as furniture and other items had been moved and stacked together to
clear a path to the very back of the room.
 
Carefully, Bessie and Doona made their way through the piles.

“You think she might be, um, confused?”
Doona whispered.

“I’m hoping she’s found the remains of an
ancient burial mound or something,” Bessie whispered back.
 
“Or old cattle bones or just about
anything other than recent human remains.”

Doona nodded.
 
“Let’s hope,” she muttered.

Bessie stopped and then sighed deeply.
 
“Time to ring John,” she said, gesturing
towards the far corner of the room.
 
All that was visible, half buried in the soil floor, was part of an arm,
but the watch on the skeleton’s wrist suggested that the burial was anything
but ancient.

Doona and Bessie quickly retraced their
steps to the front of the barn.
 
Fenella was still sitting where they’d left her.

“Going to ring the police, then?” she asked,
sounding bored with the whole thing.

“Yes, I think we’d better,” Bessie told her.

“I reckoned you’d know who to ring, seeing
as how you find dead folks all the time,” Fenella said.

Bessie swallowed an angry retort.
 
On some level the woman was right;
Bessie had found rather a lot of bodies lately, and she did know whom to ring.
 
Doona took care of that detail, however,
pulling out her mobile and tapping in some numbers.

“John?
 
It’s Doona.
 
We’re just out
at the Clague farm and we’ve found, well, it might be a body,” she said when
the call was answered.

Bessie wished she could hear John’s reply,
which seemed to take a while.
 
Eventually, Doona continued.
 
“We’re at the lower barn,” she said.
 
Bessie listened as her friend gave the
police inspector directions to both the farm and the barn itself.

“What did he say?” Bessie asked as soon as
Doona disconnected.

“Something along the lines of ‘not again,’
of course,” Doona told her.

Bessie shook her head.
 
Ever since March her life seemed to have
taken a very strange turn.
 
Was she
going to keep finding bodies everywhere she went?

“This is nothing to do with you,” Doona said
quietly to her friend.
 
They both
glanced over at Fenella, but she was staring off into the distance and didn’t
seem to be paying any attention to them.

“I know.
 
It was just an accident of timing,”
Bessie agreed.
 
“But for everyone
else on the island, this will be more evidence that I’m cursed or something.”

Doona shook her head.
 
“Of course you aren’t cursed,” she
began.
 
Bessie held up a hand.

“I know that, but persuading others might be
difficult once word of this gets out,” Bessie said.
 
“But frankly I’m more interested in who
we’ve found than in my reputation.”

“I think I was assuming
it’s
Nicholas Faragher,” Doona said.
 
“He
certainly seems most likely, based on everything you’ve told me.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Fenella
demanded suddenly.
 
“I hope you
aren’t suggesting that I had anything to do with whatever happened.”

“Of course not,” Bessie said
soothingly.
 
She walked across to
where Fenella was sitting.

“Pull up a stool,” Fenella suggested.
 
“Or a folding chair, whatever you can
find.”

Bessie glanced at Doona.
 
“I’m not sure we should be moving
anything out of the barn.”

“There are more stools right by the door,”
Fenella pointed out.
 
“We just put
them in there last month when we replaced the ones in the milking barn.
 
They can’t have anything to do with
what’s in the back of the barn.”

“How long has it been since you put anything
back there?” Bessie asked as Doona pulled out a couple of stools for them.

“I haven’t ever been back there,” Fenella
told her.
 
“My father put all of my
mother’s things in the very back after she died.
 
I never felt like it was the right time
to look through them until now.”

“So the body has been back there since
when?” Doona asked.

“Mum passed in nineteen-forty,” Fenella
answered.
 
“But I’m not sure that
proves anything.
 
It wouldn’t have
been hard to shift the boxes around and put the body under them, I don’t
think.”

“I don’t suppose there could be any innocent
explanation for someone being buried back there?” Bessie asked.

Fenella shrugged.
 
“I suppose there could have been an old
cemetery here and the barn was built on top of it, but it would have had to
have been a long time ago.
 
There’s
been a barn on this site for at least a couple of hundred years, at least
that’s what my father always said.”

“I don’t think the body has been here for
that long,” Bessie said thoughtfully.

“Do you have any idea who it might be?”
Doona asked after a long pause.

“Maybe some vagrant managed to break into
the barn and hid in the back, and then died of old age or something,” Fenella suggested.

“I suppose that’s a possibility,” Bessie
said.
 
“The police will have to
start going through all of their missing person reports for the last fifty or
so years.”

“Do you remember anyone going missing in the
area?” Doona asked.

Fenella shrugged.
 
“Young men used to disappear all the
time,” she said.
 
“We didn’t have
mobile phones and the like.
 
If a
boy grew up and decided to move across, he would just go.
 
Sometimes he wouldn’t even bother to let
anyone know.
 
The next you’d hear
would be when he’d made some money and came back to show off, or sometimes if
he got arrested, we’d hear about that.”

Bessie nodded.
 
“Young women sometimes went as well,”
she added.
 
“For a lot of people
moving across represented all sorts of wonderful opportunities.”

“But surely their family would miss them
eventually,” Doona said.

“The police might have a big job on their
hands figuring out who we’ve found,” Bessie said.

Doona looked as if she wanted to say
something, but she didn’t speak.
 
Bessie was trying to work out how to ask what she knew Doona was
thinking.
 

“How is your father?” Bessie asked after a
moment, choosing to change the subject.

“He’s okay,” Fenella replied with a
shrug.
 
“He doesn’t remember me,
mostly, but sometimes he recognises Eoin and gives him jobs to do.
 
Eoin’s really good about visiting him
regular, like.
 
It makes me sad when
I go to see him and he thinks I’m the nurse or a stranger.”

“I’m sorry,” Bessie said softly.

“I should probably ring Eoin,” Fenella
said.
 
“Let him know about the body
and the police coming.
 
I’m sure
half the island will be talking about it before he gets home.”

“Maybe he’ll have some idea who it is,”
Doona suggested.

“That probably depends on how long it’s been
there,” Fenella said.
 
“He didn’t
start working here until the mid-fifties, long after my father put my mother’s
things in the barn.”

“What about Nicholas?” Bessie asked.

“What about him?” Fenella said, looking
confused.

“He worked here for a while, too, didn’t
he?
 
Maybe he’ll have some idea
about the body,” Bessie said.

“He did work here for a short while, just
waiting for his eighteenth birthday so he could go across.
 
Eoin had high hopes of convincing him to
stay on the island, but Nicholas hated it here.
 
He was something special, was Nicholas.”

“I seem to remember that he got himself into
a lot of trouble when he did go across,” Bessie said.

“A little bit of trouble,” Fenella corrected
her.
 
“He fell in with a bad crowd
and they led him astray a bit, but once he did his time, he’d learned his
lesson.
 
He turned out just fine,
our Nicholas did.”

“Where is he now?” Bessie asked.

“He and his wife have a little farm in
Derbyshire,” Fenella replied.
 
“Funny that he ended up farming.
 
He couldn’t wait to get away from it here.”

“Do you see him often?”

“Farmers are too busy to go visiting.
 
We send cards at Christmas and for
birthdays.
 
He’s been suggesting
that he and his wife might visit for years, but we haven’t seen them yet.”

“What’s his wife like?” Bessie wondered.

“I’ve never met her.
 
Eoin went across for the wedding.
 
That was, oh, thirty-odd years ago.
 
He said, at the time, that she was a
pretty little thing, but not very bright.
 
I gather she had a small inheritance and that was what they used to buy
their farm.”

“Do they have children?” Doona asked.

Bessie smiled to herself.
 
Doona was still strangely worried about
who might inherit the farm, it seemed.

“Aye, they had five, but lost one
young.
 
The other four are all over
the world now.
 
Only the oldest boy,
Ned, he’s called, is at all interested in farming.
 
I hear he runs the place for Nicholas
now, at least that’s what Nick says in the letters.”

“So he and his wife should be able to
visit,” Bessie said.

“I suppose,” Fenella shrugged.
 
“That’s between Eoin and Nick, that is.”

The conversation was interrupted by the
arrival of a police car.
 
Bessie
smiled as Hugh Watterson emerged from behind the wheel.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted the trio of
women.

Bessie got up and gave the man a hug.
 
He flushed but returned the affectionate
gesture.

“I do believe you’re taller again,” she told
him as she sat back down.
 
He was
still
blushing
as she looked him up and down. Now in
his mid-twenties, Hugh should have stopped growing, and Bessie supposed it was
just because he was somewhere over six feet tall and towered over her that made
her think he hadn’t. The fact that he looked no more than fifteen, at least in
Bessie’s opinion, may have also been a factor.
 
His brown hair looked as if it had been
recently cut and Bessie noted that it was styled differently to Hugh’s normal,
slightly untidy look.
 
Sunglasses
hid his brown eyes, but now he slid them off and looked towards the barn.

“John said you found a body,” he said.
 
“I gather it’s in there?”

“Yes, in the very back corner.”

Hugh nodded.
 
“I’ll just take a quick look while we
wait for the inspector,” he said.
 

Bessie and the others were silent while Hugh
was gone.
 
He returned in less than
a minute.

“We’re going to have get a crime scene team
here,” he said.
 
“There’s an awful
lot of stuff to move out of there, as well.”

“I can have an empty lorry brought down,”
Fenella offered.
 
“We can load
everything into it and move it to another barn.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Hugh
said.
 
“Not that we’ll move anything
before the inspector arrives, but at least we can be ready.”