CHANCE ENCOUNTER

Can you find the common thread?

Rebecca Elstree loved staying at the Jamaica Inn, a habit she had cultivated when she was still young and innocent. She had been in love once, long ago, with a lady who had held her heart spellbound but it ended much like a story of the London fog: the clock strikes midnight, a cold, wet mist rolls in, a lady and a somewhat younger girl locked in an ardent embrace, the lady vanishes, and the girl, Rebecca, crushed and left alone, must find the strength to move on with her life.

That had been so many years ago and she no longer cared to think about it. The Jamaica Inn provided a comfort and a solace after the breakup with the lady who had stolen her heart.

Her favorite room was Number 13. She loved peeking out through the torn curtain of her rear window, through which she could see the statue of Juno and the Paycock and watch the birds, especially the mountain eagle, spiraling north by northwest above the pleasure garden that ran out to the edge of Bodmin Moor.

She rarely ventured out onto the moor itself. She feared she might fall prey to a creeper or a psycho—who is to say? The papers and tabloids had been consumed with printing such dreadful stories of late. She could not bring herself to read about them without feeling like someone or something was watching her.

Additionally, just the simple act of reading about such awful business always threatened to bring on a dizzying sense of vertigo and she would have to lay down her paper to prevent herself from falling into the dark abyss of her imagination, a country she neither desired nor was prepared to visit.

No, Rebecca would rather limit herself to the confines of her room or the rather wider context of the inn itself than tempt fate. In fact, there were widespread reports from the other guests staying at the inn that Rebecca was often heard to remark that she preferred the door marked No Entrance to the one that read No Exit.

Rebecca moved from her window seat to the door, cracked it open, and peeked down the hallway. There were three rooms between hers and number seventeen: two along the corridor opposite and one on her side. She began to count the squares running down the middle of the carpet that stretched the length of the hallway. She calculated their number at 39.

“If I wanted to,” she thought to herself, “I could walk the thirty-nine steps it takes to reach number seventeen, tap on the door, and visit the lodger staying within, the guest whose name is Mary—Mary something… I cannot remember the last name. Why can’t I remember? What did she say when we spoke on the train—Daniels? Danvers? Carmichael? Carstairs? Oh, fuss and bother, WHAT was it?”

Rebecca and Mary had met as strangers on a train while traveling through Cornwall. There were only a very few passengers aboard the train and not very much conversation was in evidence.

Although she could not be certain, it seemed likely that the woman seated across from her was travelling to the same destination as she and if they were both staying at Jamaica Inn, they were bound to meet there anyway, so why not break the ice now, spend a bit of time passing pleasantries with this fellow traveler, and become better acquainted?

“If you’ll pardon my asking,” Rebecca began, “will you be stopping at the Jamaica Inn or travelling on elsewhere? I only ask because I’m stopping there myself and it would be nice to see a friendly face among all the strangers.”

“How kind of you to ask.” the woman replied. “I’m on holiday for another week or so and I thought a trip to Cornwall would be fun and, yes, I’ll be staying at the inn. They’re keeping room seventeen for me, I think.”

“How lovely. I’ll be in room 13. It’s just down the hall from you. By way of introduction, my name is Rebecca Elstree.”

“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Elstree. My name is Mary—” just then the carriage lurched forward violently, sending luggage sliding down the aisle and Mary’s last name into oblivion. Both Rebecca and Mary took a moment to compose themselves, then went on with their conversation, which continued until they reached the Jamaica Inn.

Thus, although Rebecca could not remember Mary’s last name, she did manage to glean a good deal of pertinent information about her. She was Austrian by birth, rich and strange, a woman of easy virtue who was not about to spend her life playing the farmer’s wife. She had spent much of her time in the capital plying her trade in the skin game but latterly her life had begun to run downhill.

After a bit too much champagne and an elastic affair with Harry, the Manxman, she had moved herself as far away from the capitol as she could, at least several waltzes from Vienna.

Mary was, astrologically speaking, an air sign, with a quick and nimble mind, and the trouble with Harry was that he was a zodiacal misfit born under Capricorn. There were days when he played at being a secret agent, and others where he told her he worked for the papers as a foreign correspondent from Cairo. Even so, Mary was quite taken with Harry and poured out all her secrets to the man until she heard a mutual friend confide in him and leave, saying “Always tell your wife.”

She decided without delay that Harry was the wrong man in her life. He was the man who knew too much—about her—and all the secrets she had revealed about her life in the skin game would make her a ripe target for extortion or blackmail. She dumped him unceremoniously. She knew, given enough rope, he would eventually hang himself.

Rebecca was interested in this Mary who sounded bold and daring. She felt nostalgic for the past, for a love she had lost in the London fog. She visited the innkeepers, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, to inquire about Mary’s last name and to obtain any other information that might prove to be useful. However, she found Mr. & Mrs. Smith caught up in a frenzy over their daughter, Marnie, who was momentarily absent from the inn, having been pinched by the coppers at a local shop over a slight mistake regarding the presence in her handbag of a large blue topaz for which she hadn’t paid.

The innkeepers were aghast with fear, quite like actors with stage fright, as if Marnie, their very own daughter, had committed murder rather than copped the ring from a display case.

Rebecca thought of calling her friends two towns over to make her inquiry about Mary but the operator making the connection thought the call was an emergency of some kind and routed it to the local police constabulary. The clerk answering the call kept pressing Rebecca as to the nature of the emergency—was it a noise complaint, domestic abuse, an intruder?

“No,” Rebecca told the woman speaking at the other end of the line, “I am not trying to catch a thief. This is Rebecca Elstree calling for information.” The woman hung up on her after saying she should dial m for murder, if that is what she wanted.

The call was not quite the lifeboat she thought it would be. Indeed, she had a sinking suspicion, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mary might be in danger, that Harry was a saboteur, or someone sent to muck up Mary’s life, to unearth old bones or secrets long hidden in the family plot. For some reason beyond rational explanation, she began to think of Harry as the sort of sly man who might have figured in the Paradine case, legal goings-on that had recently made the papers.

Just then, a soft rain began to fall, and she stopped looking down the long stretch of hallway outside her doorway. She lay down on the chaise, closed her eyes for a moment, and thought to herself, right before she fell asleep, “I hope I don’t dream of Manderley again.”