The Snow Globe Read Free

all some sort of game.”
    â€œI don’t believe we’re going to find Mrs. Christie—or any clues to her disappearance—around here, that’s all. Her car was left at Newlands Corner, Daisy. That’s some miles away.”
    â€œThen why bother to come along? You were the one who first suggested we look here.”
    He stood up, took off his cap. His hair
was
dirty. He looked a state.
    â€œWere you perchance at the Coach and Horses last night?” she asked, kicking at the soft earth with her boot.
    He took a moment to reply. He said, “Yes, I was. And I’m sorry for being late, and for being . . . flippant.”
    She nodded.
    â€œWill you forgive me?”
    She turned to him, blinked and shrugged her shoulders. “I always do, don’t I?”
    â€œYes, you do,” he said, newly contrite, unsmiling, staring back at her. “Always.”
    â€œIt’s important for a Theosophist to give back and to forgive,” she said, walking on.
    Stephen smiled. “Remind me again what it’s all about.”
    â€œIt’s about the reciprocal effects the universe and humanity have on each other . . . the connectness of the external world and inner experience,” she said, stopping to pick up a tiny piece of bark and looking at it closely. “To acquire wisdom one has to examine nature in its smallest detail . . . Like this,” she said, stretching out her hand.
    He took the bark, stared at it for a moment or two, then looked back at her. “What wisdom is there to be gleaned from this?”
    â€œThat’s for you to find out.”
    He put it inside his jacket pocket and they walked on beneath the pines, then out into the beautiful wild expanse, following the old packhorse tracks of smugglers, sandy pathways through tall gorse and dark holly, juniper and thorn. Daisy spoke at length about what she had read of the case in the preceding days’ newspapers, pausing every once in a while to summarize her conclusions or pose a question to herself or simply to stare out across the wilderness and say, “Hmm, I wonder . . .”
    It was shortly after midday when they sat down on the wall under the stunted tree by the deserted cottage some three miles from Eden Hall. Daisy lifted two hard-boiled eggs from the canvas fishing-tackle bag she had worn strapped across her, as well as a bottle of Mrs. Jessop’s homemade ginger beer.
    â€œSo very peculiar,” she said for the umpteenth time. “No sign ofa struggle . . . no ransom . . . no body . . . no witnesses,” she went on. “And yet, I can’t help but feel the answer’s right in front of us all.”
    Stephen said nothing.
    Other than a child’s shoe—which, for some reason, Daisy had picked up and put into her bag—and, here and there, the remains of campfires and discarded bottles, they had found nothing. They had passed some of the other searchers, heading back in the direction of Eden Hall and shaking their heads, and walked through a small gypsy encampment where a grubby-faced boy had raised his hands to his ears and stuck his tongue out at them.
    â€œPerhaps she’s taken a turn, like Noonie,” Stephen said, using the family’s nickname for Daisy’s grandmother, Mabel Forbes’s mother. “Perhaps she’s suffering from amnesia.”
    Daisy turned to him. “But Mrs. Christie’s not old. She’s younger than my mother.”
    â€œJust a thought . . . and I hope for your sake it’s not what I think it is. Otherwise, she’s made a bit of a laughingstock of us all.”
    Daisy shook her head. She passed him the brown bottle.
“This,”
she said, “is no publicity stunt, Stephen, I can assure you. It’s gone beyond anything like that.”
    They sat in silence for a while, peeling hard-boiled eggs, flicking small pieces of shell