Squirrel Trouble at Uplands

Uplands, where Elsie would be safe, where Blake wouldn’t look for her, proved to be a large, lofty, white-clapboarded, black-shuttered cliff of a house five miles from what seemed to be the nearest village. Elsie reached it sometime after three in the morning. She turned off her engine and sat exhausted, looking at the house, at the woods behind and around it, at the cold northern stars in their rural profusion wheeling above the peaked gable. Her engine cooled, ticked, sighed, was still. She had been driving for thirteen hours.

She left the car and made her way to the house by starlight. She found the key on the nail where Helen had said it would be. Inside, in the kitchen, she put her suitcase down. She felt for a wall switch, found one, and turned on the lights. She should call Helen and tell her she had arrived. She didn’t. She didn’t have the strength. She might have called. Helen was five hours ahead: eight in the morning in London. She would be up, but Hugh might not have left for the embassy yet; he might answer the phone, and Elsie didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anybody. She left the kitchen and went through the downstairs turning on the lights.

In a sitting room, she found a couch with a heavy blanket folded on its back. She took off her shoes, she took off her dress, she lay down on the couch with her head on her arms. She would call Helen in an hour. She turned onto her side under the warm blanket.

She woke with a start, her heart galloping. Overhead, thumps and bumps and a kind of pattering and scrabbling. Immediately she thought: Blake. No. Impossible. (Or was what she thought: not yet?) She sat up. Yellow sunlight streamed through the windows, and in the bright day all the lights were on. Elsie listened to the noises above. Mice. An old, closed-up house far out in the country would of course be full of mice. She stood, wrapped the blanket around herself, and went to the stairs. As she began to mount, the noises stopped. On the second floor she found four bedrooms and a bath. All were empty, all were silent. Elsie turned to go back downstairs. As she reached the foot of the stairs, the telephone in the kitchen rang. Elsie went to it. She looked at it. She touched it. She picked it up.

“You’re there,” said Helen. The overseas connection echoed.

“Yes.”

“You got off all right, did you? No trouble?”

“No. I left for school as usual. He had a double shift. Has. He won’t know I’m gone, even now, maybe.”

“Good. What did you tell the school?”

“That my sister was ill. That I was needed, couldn’t say how long I’d be away.”

“They took that?”

“Sure. They know you’re over there. They know me. I never miss school. They’ll get a sub.”

“Good. What about the house? Is everything there all right?”

“I guess so. I went right to sleep, on the couch. There are mice upstairs. They woke me up. They run around.”

“They’re not right upstairs,” said Helen. “They’re in the attic. They’re not mice, either. They’re squirrels. Enormous great gray things. They live in the attic. We try to shut them out. But they get in somehow, don’t they? I’ll call Eli. He’ll come with his trap.”

“Who’s Eli?”

“Oh, Eli’s a kind of caretaker, I suppose,” said Helen. “He’s useful when he chooses to be. He lives on the next hill. Hugh calls him the spirit of the place. Quite a character, Eli is. You’ll enjoy him.”

“Does he have to come while I’m here?”

“Hugh will want him to. The squirrels make a mess. But Eli won’t come right along. He’ll come when he’s ready. He might not come at all. I’ll...