For the next two weeks Jackson’s life could not have been any happier. Isabella came to visit him every day. They went for walks around the town and the nearby countryside, he took her for drives in his car to nearby towns including a delightful morning at Sutton On Sea where they walked on the beach, and strolled through the shops.
One day in Alford they went to the pet shop and she helped him pick out six goldfish to put in his fishpond.
“It’s a big pond,” she remarked as they released the fish into their new home, “So they will grow to be quite big.”
Yes life was wonderful for Jackson. He spent so much time with Isabella that he was falling behind with his I.T. work, although most days Isabella went home after they had finished dinner so he was able to spend evenings catching up with his work.
Soon Jackson was madly head over heels in love with the beautiful Isabella.
“Will you be my girlfriend?” he asked her one day over dinner in his dining room.
She replied with a big smile and reached across the table to squeeze his hand. “Oh course, Mr Jackson, You may consider yourself as my suitor.”
“Suitor?” he laughed, “Okay then, I am your suitor, and by the way please no more ‘Mr Jackson’. It’s just Jackson.”
“All right then, Jackson it is. But Jackson, now that we have known each other for nearly two weeks I have something to tell you. I wasn’t sure before, but now I am ready to tell you this.”
She paused.
Jackson looked at her, “Please tell me, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“I used to live here in this house.”
Jackson looked at her in surprise, “What? Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? How long ago was it?”
“It was many years ago, long before your uncle bought it, and I didn’t tell you sooner because I thought you might think that was the only reason I was being friendly with you.”
“Of course I wouldn’t think that,” Jackson leaned across the table and kissed her, “So you must have been a child when you lived here. Wait, the room upstairs second from the left. No wonder you knew where the furniture was because it was your bedroom, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, that was my room. But Jackson there’s one more thing. I lost something here in the house or maybe in the yard way back then. It has great sentimental value to me. Could you help me look for it?”
“Of course. So what are we looking for?”
“It’s a pendant on a gold chain, a crystal in the shape of a heart. My parents gave it to me when I was eight, and I treasured it all those years right up until…” Her voice trailed off as she took on a faraway sad look as if she had gone back in time, “They said it had mystical properties, my aunt had originally bought it in a market in India and given it to her sister, my mother, who said I would be safe as long as I always wore it. Jackson, what’s wrong?”
He stared at her with a look of amazement. “I don’t believe this, he said, “What you just told me, it’s like deja’vu.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well that night after I first saw you standing at the front gate I dreamed about you, the ‘woman in white’. I dreamed that one day I saw you in the garden and you told me you used to live here and that you had lost something. In my dream you said it was a heart shaped pendant on a gold chain, and now here you are telling me virtually the same thing.”
Isabella nodded. She didn’t seem surprised at all.
“It was just a dream my darling,” she murmured, “An amazing coincidence, but just a dream.”
The next day they thoroughly searched the top floor of the house for the missing pendant, starting in Isabella’s former bedroom.
Jackson had thought there might be a crack in the floorboards through which it had fallen, but alas no cracks could be found.
Finally after no success they sat down in the late afternoon on the couch in the living room.
“Don’t worry,” Jackson said giving Isabella a hug, “Tomorrow we’ll search here in the ground floor, and if we have no success we’ll try the gardens the day after.
“Thank you, my darling,” she whispered giving him a long kiss, “With your help I know we’ll find it.”
The next morning after Jackson finished breakfast he started the search in the living room, but by eleven o’clock Isabella hadn’t arrived. She usually turned up on his doorstep most mornings by nine thirty.
By twelve thirty Jackson was starting to worry. She had told him when she left the previous night that she would see him early the next morning. He reached for his phone, but then remembered Isabella did not have a mobile phone. He couldn’t call her.
Okay then he would go to her house. Only just the other day she had pointed out her house to him on one of their walks.
“It’s the light blue house down there,” she said pointing down a side lane from Mulligan’s Lane, “The fourth on the right.”
So Jackson jumped in his car and drove to the light blue house, fourth on the right. He stepped out of his car and looked with dismay at the ‘For Sale’ sign out the front and the overgrown lawn. He walked up to the front verandah and looked in through several of the curtainless windows. There was no furniture, the house was empty.
With a sinking heart he called the real estate agent whose name was on the sign.
“Number nine Back Lane?” the man said, “The owners moved out about six months ago. No one has lived there since. Are you interested in buying it?”
Jackson couldn’t understand it. Why would she tell him she lived in this house when she obviously didn’t?
He returned home hoping to find Isabella there waiting for him, but she wasn’t there.
That afternoon passed, then the evening. He spent a sleepless night wondering what had happened to his beloved.
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The following morning he waited again in vain for her to appear at his house.
It occurred to him that she may have been in an accident, so he called the hospital in Alford and two other hospitals in nearby towns with no result.
Finally he decided to go to the library where she said she worked as a librarian. Maybe they would know where she was. Isabella had told him she was on a three week vacation from the job which was why she was able to spend so much time with him.
The Alford library was a single story building in the main street. He had visited it once a couple of months ago looking for historical information on Oakhaven, although he had not seen Isabella there on that day.
“May I help you?” the elderly lady at the desk asked him.
“I was wondering if Isabella is working today?”
The lady frowned, “Isabella? We don’t have anyone on staff here with that name.”
“Are you sure? Her name is Isabella Thorne.”
“Sir, I can assure you there is no one working here by that name.”
Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Isabella had told him she worked here. He pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled through his photos until he found one he had taken of her in the garden a few days earlier.
“This is her,” he said holding the phone up for the lady to see.
She looked closely at the photo. “A woman in white,” she muttered, then she said, “No, I’m sorry I don’t recognise her.”
Jackson left the library with his thoughts in a whirl. Isabella didn’t live in the blue house and she didn’t work at the library. Why had she lied to him? In a desperate effort to try and find her he went to the town’s only supermarket and showed some of the staff Isabella’s photograph. No one recognised her. He tried the post office with the same result. How could no one in a relatively small town like Alford not know her or recognise her photograph?
He drove back home and spent the next half hour calling several libraries in nearby towns in case she worked in one of them, but again no one had heard of her.
What could he do but wait and hope she turned up. To occupy himself he tried to do some work for his employer, but it was so hard to concentrate.
The next day dawned and still no Isabella, so Jackson decided to report her to the police as a missing person. He drove to the police station.
“Well Mr Turner,” the sergeant at the desk said, “You haven’t given us much to go on. You can’t tell us where your friend lives or works. All you have for us is this photo.” He pointed to Jackson’s phone.
He sat down at a computer. “I’ll see if she is listed on the electoral roll for this district. I don’t suppose you happen to know her middle name or date of birth?”
Jackson didn’t.
A minute later the sergeant shook his head, “No listing for an Isabella Thorne is this electorate. Okay well all we can do is keep an eye out for her. Just text us her photo and we’ll do what we can.”
As Jackson walked back along the street towards his car a woman’s voice called to him from behind. “Excuse me, sir.”
Jackson turned to see the woman from the library hurrying up to him.
“I’m glad I caught you,” she said, “I remembered you coming in the other day asking about that woman. Well the strangest thing happened yesterday. There’s a local historian who is writing a social history of the town. He asked if I had old records of the people who worked at the library, like names and dates. So I dug into our old filing cabinet of staff records which go back about a hundred years, and as I was copying the names and dates I came across the same name you asked me about, Isabella Thorne.”
Jackson stared at her in surprise, “Did the record have any information about her?” he asked.
“Only the dates she worked at the library. November 1932 to July 1936. I’m sorry but that’s all there was. Obviously it can’t be the same woman you’re looking for, but maybe it was a relative. Oh wait a minute, there was one more thing. Her address was listed as Oakhaven in Mulligan’s Lane.”
Jackson walked slowly back to his car in a daze. Maybe this Isabella Thorne from the 1930s was his Isabella’s grandmother. He decided to go and see the historian who was writing the book and see if he could shed any light on the mystery.
When he got back home he called the man Donald Robinson, who said he would be able to meet with him the following week as he was out of town at the time.
The days dragged by. Jackson resumed the search for the pendant. On the fifth day after Isabella’s disappearance he started in the old library room.
He was examining the floor for gaps through which it may have fallen, and as he searched along the bottom of one of the large shelves with the dusty old books the title of one of the books on the bottom shelf caught his eye.
Oakhaven of Alford: A History
Wow! He had tried to find information on Oakhaven at the town library with no success. It had never occurred to him that there might be such a book here in his own house. He removed it from the shelf and wiped the dust off the cover.
He then took the book into the living room, poured a glass of wine, sat down on the couch and opened the cover.
The book was written in 1951, and the author’s name was James Robinson. Maybe he was related to Donald Robinson the historian. Jackson glanced down the chapter titles and froze with surprise at the title of Chapter 12. The Mysterious Disappearance of Isabella Thorne.
How could this be? Here was the name of his beloved again. This must have been the Isabella Thorne from the library in the 1930s.
He carefully leafed through the pages to Chapter 12.
