Careless In Red (7 page)

At least ten months earlier, she’d said to Alan, “Please don’t do this. It won’t work out. It’ll be—”

And he’d cut into her words, which he rarely did, which should have told her something about him that she hadn’t yet learned, but which did not. “Why won’t it work out? We won’t even see each other much, if that’s what worries you.”

It wasn’t what worried her. She knew what he was saying was true. He’d be doing whatever one did in the marketing department—which was less a department and more an old conference room located behind what used to be the reception desk in the mouldy hotel—and she’d be doing her thing with the trainee instructors. He’d be sorting out the chaos that her mother had wrought as the nominal director of the nonexistent marketing department while she—Kerra—tried to hire suitable employees. They might see each other at morning coffee or at lunch, but they might well not. So rubbing elbows with him at work and then rubbing other body parts later in the day was not what concerned her.

He’d said, “Don’t you see, Kerra, that I’ve got to get some solid employment in Casvelyn? And this is it. Jobs aren’t dangling from trees round here, and it was decent of your dad to offer it to me. I’m not about to look a gift horse.”

Her father was hardly a gift horse, Kerra thought, and decency had nothing to do with why he’d offered the marketing job to Alan. He’d made the offer because they needed someone to promote Adventures Unlimited to the masses but they also needed a certain kind of someone to do that marketing, and Alan Cheston appeared to be the kind of someone Kerra’s father had been looking for.

Her father was deciding based on appearance. To him, Alan was a type. Or perhaps better said, Alan was not a type. Her father thought the type to be avoided at Adventures Unlimited was a manly sort: grit under the fingernails, throw a woman across the bed, and have her till she saw stars. What he didn’t understand—and had never understood—was that there actually was no type. There was just maleness. And despite the rounding of his shoulders, the spectacles, the bobbling Adam’s apple, the delicate hands with those long, probing spatulate fingers, Alan Cheston was male. He thought like a male, he acted like a male, and most important, he reacted like a male. That was why Kerra had put her foot down, which had ultimately done no good because she wouldn’t say more than, “It won’t work out.” That proving useless, she’d done the only thing she could do in the situation, which was to tell him they’d likely have to end their relationship. To this, he’d calmly replied without the slightest tinge of panic to his words, “So that’s what you do when you don’t get what you want? You just cut people off?”

“Yes,” she’d declared, “that’s what I do. And it’s not when I don’t get what I want. It’s when they won’t listen to what I’m saying for their own good.”

“How can it be for my own good not to take the job? It’s money. It’s a future. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Apparently not,” she’d told him.

Still, she hadn’t quite been able to make good on her threat because in part she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have to work with Alan daily but not see him nightly. She was weak in this and she despised her weakness, especially when she’d chosen him primarily because he’d seemed like the weak one: considerate, which she’d taken for malleable, and gentle, which she’d taken for diffident. That he’d proved himself exactly the opposite since coming to work at Adventures Unlimited scared the hell out of her.

One way to terminate her fear was to confront it, which meant confronting Alan himself. But really, how could she? So at first she’d fumed, and then she’d waited, watched, and listened. The inevitable was just that—inevitable—and since it had always been that way, she spent the time attempting to harden herself, becoming remote within while playing the part of certain without.

She’d carried the act off until today, when his announcement of “I’ll be gone a few hours down the coast” sent the sirens off in her brain. At that point her only choice was to ride fast and far, to exhaust herself beyond thinking so that she exhausted herself beyond caring as well. Thus, despite her other responsibilities that day, she’d gone on her way: along St. Mevan Crescent and over to Burn View, down the slope of Lansdown Road and the Strand, and from there out of town.

She’d kept riding eastward, long after she should have turned back for home. For this reason, darkness had fallen by the time she’d geared down to make the final climb up the Strand. Shops were closed; restaurants were open although meagerly peopled at this time of year. A dispirited line of bunting crisscrossed the street, dripping water, and the lone traffic light at the crest of the hill cast a streak of red in her direction. No one was out on the soaked pavement, but in another two months that would all change when summer visitors filled Casvelyn to take advantage of its two broad beaches, of its surf, of its sea pool, of its fun fair, and—one hoped—of the experiences offered by Adventures Unlimited.

This holiday business was her father’s dream: taking the abandoned hotel—a 1933 derelict structure sitting on a promontory above St. Mevan Beach—and turning it into an activities-oriented destination. It was an enormous risk for the Kernes, and if it didn’t work out, they’d be destitute. But her father was a man who’d taken risks in the past and had seen them bear fruit because the one thing he wasn’t afraid of in life was hard work. As to other things in her father’s life…Kerra had spent too many years asking why and receiving no answers.

At the top of the hill, she turned into St. Mevan Crescent. From there, along a line of old B and Bs, older hotels, a Chinese takeaway, and a newsagent’s shop, she reached the driveway to what had once been the Promontory King George Hotel and what was now Adventures Unlimited. The old hotel stood, barely illuminated, with scaffolding fronting it. Lights were on in the ground floor, but not at the top where the family quarters were.

In front of the entry, a police car was parked. Kerra drew her eyebrows together when she saw it. At once she thought of Alan. She didn’t consider her brother at all.

BEN KERNE’S OFFICE AT Adventures Unlimited was on the first floor of the old hotel. He’d fashioned it out of a single that had once undoubtedly been used by a lady’s maid, since directly next door to it—and formerly with an adjoining door—was a suite. That he’d had converted to a unit suitable for one of the holidaying families upon whom he’d bet his economic future.

The time had seemed right to Ben for this, his biggest venture ever. His children were older and at least one of them—Kerra—was self-sufficient and completely capable of obtaining gainful employment elsewhere should this venture go under. Santo was a different matter, for more than one reason that Ben preferred not to consider, but he had become more dependable of late, thank God, as if he finally understood the weighty nature of their undertaking. So Ben had felt the family was with him. It wouldn’t be just himself upon whose shoulders the responsibility rested. They were fully two years into it now: the conversion complete save for the exterior painting and a few final interior details. By the middle of June, they would be up and running. The bookings had been coming in for several months.

Ben was looking through these when the police arrived. Although the bookings represented the fruits of his family’s labours, he hadn’t been thinking of this or really even thinking of them at all: the bookings. Instead he’d been thinking of red. Not red as being in the red, which he certainly was and would be for any number of years until the business earned back what he’d spent upon it, but red as in the colour of nail varnish or lipstick, of a scarf or a blouse, of a dress that hugged the body.

Dellen had been wearing red for five days. First had come the nail varnish. Lipstick had followed. Then a jaunty beret over her blond hair when she went out. Soon, he expected a red sweater would top snug black trousers as it also revealed just a bit of cleavage. Ultimately, she would wear the dress, which would show more cleavage as well as her thighs, and by that time, she’d be in full sail and his children would be looking at him as they had looked at him forever: waiting for him to do something in a situation in which he could do nothing at all. Despite their ages—eighteen and twenty-two—Santo and Kerra still persisted in thinking that he was capable of changing their mother. When he did not do so, having failed at the effort when he was even younger than they were now, he saw the why in their eyes, or at least in Kerra’s eyes. Why do you put up with her?

When Ben heard the slam of a car door, then, he thought of Dellen. When he went to the window and saw it was a police car below and not his wife’s old BMW, he still thought of Dellen. Later, he realised that thinking of Kerra would have been more logical since she’d been gone for hours on her bicycle in weather that had been growing ever worse since two o’clock. But Dellen had been the centre of his thoughts for twenty-eight years and since Dellen had gone off at noon and had not yet returned, he assumed she’d got herself into trouble.

He left his office and went to the ground floor. When he got to reception, a uniformed constable was standing there, looking about for someone and no doubt surprised to find the front door unlocked and the place virtually deserted. The constable was male, young, and vaguely familiar. He’d be from the town, then. Ben was getting to know who lived in Casvelyn and who was from the outlying area.

The constable introduced himself: Mick McNulty, he said. And you are, sir…?

Benesek Kerne, Ben told him. Was something wrong? Ben switched on more lights. The automatic ones had come on with the end of daylight, but they cast shadows everywhere, and Ben found he wanted to dispel those shadows.

Ah, McNulty said. Could he speak to Mr. Kerne, then?

Ben realised the constable meant could they go somewhere that was not the reception area, so he took him one floor above, to the lounge. This overlooked St. Mevan Beach, where the swells were of a decent size and the waves were breaking on the sand bars in rapid sets. They were coming in from the southwest, but the wind made them rubbish. No one was out there, not even the most desperate of the local surfers.

Between the beach and the hotel, the landscape was much changed from what it had been during the heyday of the Promontory King George. The pool was still there, but in place of the bar and the outdoor restaurant, a rock-climbing wall now stood. As did the rope wall; the swinging bridges; and the pulleys, gears, cords, and cables of the Canopy Experience. A neat cabin housed the sea kayaks and another contained the diving equipment. Constable McNulty took all of this in, or at least he appeared to be doing so, which gave Ben Kerne time to prepare himself to hear what the policeman had come to say. He thought about Dellen in bits of red, about the slickness of the roads and Dellen’s intentions, which likely had been to get out of town entirely, to go along the coast, and perhaps to end up at one of the coves or bays. But getting there in this weather, especially if she hadn’t stuck to the main road, would have exposed her to danger. Of course danger was what she loved and wanted, but not the sort that led to cars skidding off roads and down the sides of cliffs.

When the question came, it was not what Ben expected. McNulty said, “Is Alexander Kerne your son?”

Ben said “Santo?” and he thought, Thank God. It was Santo who had got himself into trouble, no doubt arrested for trespassing, which Ben had warned him about time and again. He said, “What’s he done, then?”

“He’s had an accident,” the constable said. “I’m sorry to tell you that a body’s been found that appears to be Alexander’s. If you have a photo of him…”

Ben heard the word body but did not allow it to penetrate. He said, “Is he in hospital, then? Which one? What happened?” He thought of how he would have to tell Dellen, of what route the news would send her down.

“…awfully sorry,” the constable was saying. “If you’ve a photo, we—”

“What did you say?”

Constable McNulty looked flustered. He said, “He’s dead, I’m afraid. The body. The one we found.”

“Santo? Dead? But where? How?” Ben looked out at the roiling sea just as a gust of wind hit the windows and rattled them against their sills. He said, “Good Christ, he went out in this. He was surfing.”

“Not surfing,” McNulty said.

“Then what happened?” Ben asked. “Please. What happened to Santo?”

“He’s had a cliff-climbing accident. Equipment failure. On the cliffs at Polcare Cove.”

“He was climbing?” Ben said stupidly. “Santo was climbing? Who was with him? Where—”

“No one, as it seems at the moment.”

“No one? He was climbing alone? At Polcare Cove? In this weather?” It seemed to Ben that all he could do was repeat the information like an automaton being programmed to speak. To do more than that meant he would have to embrace it, and he couldn’t bear that because he knew what embracing it was going to mean. “Answer me,” he said to the constable. “Bloody answer me, man.”

“Have you a picture of Alexander?”

“I want to see him. I must. It might not be—”

“That’s not possible just now. That’s why I need the photo. The body…He’s been taken to hospital in Truro.”

Ben leapt at the word. “So he’s not dead, then.”

“Mr. Kerne, I’m sorry. He’s dead. The body—”

“You said hospital.”

“To the mortuary, for the postmortem,” McNulty said. “I’m very sorry.”

“Oh my God.”

The front door opened below. Ben went to the lounge doorway and called out, “Dellen?” Footsteps came in the direction of the stairs. But then it was Kerra and not Ben’s wife who appeared in the doorway. She dripped rainwater onto the floor, and she’d removed her bicycle helmet. The very top of her head was the only part of her that appeared to be dry.

She looked at the constable, then said to Ben, “Has something happened?”

“Santo.” Ben’s voice was hoarse. “Santo’s been killed.”

“Santo.” Then, “Santo?” Kerra looked round the room in a kind of panic. “Where’s Alan? Where’s Mum?”

Ben found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Your mother’s not here.”

“What’s happened, then?”