Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles Page A

the office was in better order than when Cleo started. Maybe she could have made a good secretary after all. Perish the thought.
    It didn’t take her long to turn over everything back to Muriel, and before she left, she assured her father she’d done this – including the Sara Ruby case. She’d wondered at first if the woman who’d drowned could have been Sara Ruby, but the dead woman had been several inches too tall and many years too old. How terrible such a death was, thought Cleo, haunted by a sadness she couldn’t explain whenever she thought about her, the fact that no one yet had claimed to have known her. How lonely.
    ‘Don’t you worry about me, Dad,’ she told George when she was ready to leave. ‘It’s just that I have to earn some money, I can’t go on living with you and Mum indefinitely.’
    ‘Why not? It’s your home, and always will be,’ he said, but he was just being kind. Strained politeness had ruled at 26 Ellwood Street for the last few weeks, but they all knew that it was only a matter of time before Cleo and Daphne began to have some very real differences of opinion. Her mother, thought Cleo, expected too much. They got on fine, when they were apart. It was living together they couldn’t stand.
    ‘All right,’ George said suddenly, with the air of a man coming to a decision. ‘I might as well tell you now. I wasn’t going to mention it until your mum and I had given it a bit more thought. But we’ve already decided, really. Phoebe’s house has just come vacant.’
    ‘The Honeybuns are leaving?’ Cleo could never remember
their real name, a lovey-dovey married couple, Americans who’d come to live in her great-aunt’s house after she died. The one time she’d met Mrs H she’d thought her a silly, wilting sort of creature who looked as if she wouldn’t say boo to a goose. What was her name? Oh yes, Angela. Mr Honeybun had called her Angel.
    ‘They’ve already gone. Back to America. The people at the place he worked for over there suddenly decided they wanted him back, urgently, and the college agreed to let him go. I don’t know the details.’
    Cleo remembered that Brad – Hunnicliffe, that was it – had been over here on some sort of exchange. Teaching science or something at Lavenstock College. When Daphne, working in the Bursar’s office, had heard that he and his wife were seeking accommodation, it had seemed to her that Phoebe’s house, which was standing empty after her death, though still furnished, could be of some use to someone, rather than standing idle … not to mention bringing in some cash.
    ‘You might just as well stay in the house until we get another tenant – or for as long as you like as far as I’m concerned, Cleo,’ George said now.
    Cleo could hardly speak, unable to believe that her luck could change so dramatically. Phoebe’s lovely little house! Not lovely in the sense that most people would regard as such, but lovely to her because it had been dear and familiar all her life, just as Phoebe had been.
    Phoebe had been George’s aunt. She had married just before the war. Hardly had the wedding bells ceased to ring, however, than war had been declared and Jack, her young husband, had been called up into the Navy, where he’d gone down with his ship almost as soon as he’d finished training. Poor Phoebe. She and her Jack had had so little time together, but at least he’d never known that she’d lost the baby she was expecting. After that, she’d just gone back to work, never remarried, and lived alone, until she was eighty-four, in the house she’d come to as a bride. In many ways she’d had a sad life, but a busy, and in the end, Cleo thought, a contented one. When she died, she left the house and contents to George. He’d had some idea of tarting it up, like some of the neighbouring houses, before selling it, but Phoebe, quiet, determined, austere little Phoebe, had been very
special to him, and to all the family, and he hadn’t