Chapter 39: A Yellow Light

Only the Playhouse staff were in the foyer when Cully, Tom, and Joyce finally left, stepping into the chilly night air after Cully returned her final costume to the wardrobe manager. Her daughter shivered a bit, like she regretted picking out such a light jumper that morning. But it wasn't far to the car, fortunately. A grey fog was setting in, the first tendrils swirling across the quiet street on a gentle breeze, and in the snap of the cool evening, Cully yawned. "You must be exhausted," Joyce said quietly.

"A bit."

"It's been a long week for you," Tom said, tucking his hand into his pocket in the search for his keys.

"You, too, Dad!"

"I have three decades of practice."

"It's not a competition, dear," Joyce said, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders and holding her daughter's elbow back for a moment as she almost went straight across the street to follow her father, without a glance either way. If it had been another few seconds, she might have offered that shawl to Cully.

At last at the car, the glow of a street lamp just forward of its front bumper, Tom unlocked the driver's door, reaching in to pull the release for the others. "I know. I'm only making an observation. That is what they pay me to do."

Opening her own door, Joyce curled her hand around the upper frame, pulling it back almost immediately. The metal was much colder than she had expected. "You mean you're being tiring."

"Sometimes, that is the same thing."

Opening the door behind her father's Cully collapsed onto the back seat, sitting for a moment with her feet still on the pavement of the dark road. "Often, Dad," she said, drawing a deep breath as she swung her legs in and pulled the door closed. Her purse slid from her shoulder to the seat to her side without her making a move to stop it.

Drawing his seat belt across his chest, latching it into place, Tom smiled. "Well, how else to get a confession unless I irritate it out of someone?"

"I don't know," Cully said, her voice lower than usual. "Gavin's never told me how he does it."

Tom opened his mouth for a moment, then closed it. Do be nice, Joyce thought, settling her arm against the door as the engine churned, returning to life. Turning the wheel over, guiding the car into the left lane, he said, "There's a lot we don't talk about, Cully."

"Tom."

"It's not always a pretty world, where he and I work." A red light shone up ahead, and he let up on the accelerator, drumming the fingers of one hand on the steering wheel as the car came to a halt. "Medlars," he whispered, now tracing the wheel with the tip of one finger. "It often isn't."

"I know he doesn't like—" Cully stopped to yawn once more, and in the rear view mirror, Joyce saw her daughter's eyes close, drifting toward the door. "He doesn't like to talk about everything." The words were muddled at the end. "And there are so many other...other things."

"What things?" Tom asked.

"Tom, leave it." Their daughter's body relaxed after a moment, surely desperate for rest and quiet.

For at least a decade, Joyce hadn't bothered prying into her daughter's truly personal life and interests. When she was barely sixteen, it had been apparent that she was going to do what she wished, rather than what they wished, whether it be boyfriends in quick succession, perpetually ignored curfews, or dabbling in soft drugs with her friends at Causton Comprehensive. Not that there was anything wrong with her wanting independence earlier than they expected in and of itself—Joyce had taught too many children who were terrified of painting a wrong watercolor line —but they had very quickly found themselves wishing she had pursued that independence...differently.

Her eyes flicked up to the rear view mirror; Cully's head slumped against the window, her eyes closed with a few traces of makeup still staining her lids. Her chest rose and fell slowly, steadily: already fast asleep, Joyce knew. Working days had been very long lately, to the point that Cully had already left on the bus this morning before Joyce woke up. "I wish she didn't go through this every premiere," she said quietly. "She didn't look so tired when we saw her earlier this evening."

Tapping the indicator for a right turn, Tom nodded. "Understandable."

"I don't know how she does it."

Another right turn found them at the edge of Causton's urban core, buildings now farther apart, semi-detached houses replacing apartments, the car's headlights shining across carbon copied buildings. Those structures hid behind meticulously coiffed hedges that only loomed like shadows under the streetlamps, or wooden fences and gates not out of place in one of Midsomer's endless little villages and hamlets. Hiding everything, waiting...

"For the love the theater, I expect," Joyce said quickly, looking back at her daughter again, the young woman's face rising for a moment before settling back against the glass after a gentle cough. "I really am so happy Gavin came."

"I suppose," Tom said, his voice low as he glanced over his shoulder to change lanes. "Cully might have slapped him around the head if he hadn't."

"And it would have served him right!"

But, really, Joyce couldn't imagine Gavin neglecting this evening. After so many weeks of helping Cully with...everything, missing the opening night would have been unimaginable. Yet, he had been almost...distant when Cully opened the door to her dressing room. Like he was determined to stay away from her.

Almost like he was afraid of something. It was ridiculous, but that was all she could call it. Rather than hug Cully as Joyce had expected, or at the very least shake her hand with congratulations (though in her mind, even that was silly), Gavin had held back, keeping his distance...except for those moments when he almost forgot.

And what of Cully? For a brief moment, she had taken his hand, like she had forgotten anyone else was in the room, that there would be no one curious and wanting an explanation. But it had lasted such a short time, Joyce wondered if she was thinking too much about it; Gavin had slipped his hand from Cully's after a few seconds, looking like he was ready to grab on to his trousers to keep it from happening again. But in that first moment, she saw him nearly smile.

Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise after all. Cully and Gavin's time together was no longer just focused on the play and reading lines, and sometimes their togetherness appeared more important than Pygmalion. Their goodbyes lingered longer and longer, as though there were no longer just words. And that day, after Gavin's cricket match...well, now Joyce was quite certain she had seen her daughter kiss him.

If it was what Cully truly wanted, there was no dissuading her; Joyce knew that well. Hopefully, Tom would see it sooner rather than later. But his worry was inevitable, something he could not simply dismiss. No matter how many times she had pointed out to Cully that her father saw the worst in people day in, day out, she still railed against it. It was in her daughter's nature to rebel, but now Joyce couldn't decide what she was seeing in the worst light: Cully's frustration for her father's worry about her, or his worry about Gavin.

"Joyce?"

"Hmm?" She shook as Tom's voice yanked her from her thoughts, back to the car.

"We're home."

"Oh, sorry," she said, unbuckling her seat belt and pushing her bag back onto her shoulder. A breeze was picking up along the drive, twisting through the bristling bushes and blooming flowers gently, occasionally whipping along with the threat to snap off a few blossoms.

"Don't get too lost in your thoughts," Tom said with a smile, releasing the buckle on his own belt as he twisted his keys out of the ignition.

Turning around, Joyce looked back to her daughter. "Cully." She hardly moved, her face heavily pressed to the back window, still sound asleep. "Cully," Joyce called again, louder this time.

Now the younger woman stirred, stretching her arms out toward the front seats of the car, lifting her face from the glass for a moment. "Hmm? Is it much farther?" she asked. Well, Joyce assumed that was what she asked. The words were rather muffled, laden with sleep, and she refused to open her eyes. "Isa mu father?", quite frankly, was what Joyce thought Cully said.

Tom smiled, settling his hand on the door handle, ready to allow the chill of summer evening air into the warm interior of the car. "We're already home."

"You slept the whole way," Joyce added.

Cully rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes, collapsing into the back seat again, her shoulders sagging. "It feels like I only just sat down."

"I'm sure." Joyce had to smile for a moment as Cully gave a large yawn, trying to hide it behind her other hand. "Well, the sooner you get out of the car, the sooner you can get to bed."

When she finally did open her eyes, Cully closed them immediately, then squinted as the overhead light came on when Tom opened his door. As Joyce looked back again, she saw her daughter yawn once more as she reached for her purse—well, more like she searched for it blindly, trying to find it with an outstretched hand. By the time Joyce had her feet on the concrete driveway, Tom had already offered Cully his hand, which she saw her often fiercely independent daughter take without hesitation. "Thanks, Dad," she said, stepping back with her purse dangling from her shoulder for him to close the door with a gentle thud.

"Of course," he said, sorting through his keys with his fingers to find the one to the front door. "You look ready to fall asleep standing up."

"You really should just go straight to bed," Joyce added, touching her daughter's elbow as she joined them on the walk to the front door.

"Probably," Cully said with a nod, covering another yawn with her palm. "But I need to shower. I feel like I'm covered with half an inch of sweat." She rubbed her hands over arms, like she was feeling the sticky skin beneath the sleeves. "It's been a long day."

"It wouldn't be the end of things if you waited for morning."

"No—I feel wretched, Mum," her daughter said as Tom finally turned over the lock and opened the door, reaching for the foyer's overhead light switch as soon as he was inside.

"Well, so long as you don't fall asleep."

"It would be embarrassing to investigate a drowning in my own home."

"Dad," Cully whispered, rolling her eyes as she so often did.

"Well, never forget—" He paused, and Joyce watched his eyebrows furrow, like he meant to choose his words carefully. "'A daughter is a daughter all of her life.'"

"I haven't been your little girl for years."

"Don't put words in my mouth," he answered, kissing her cheek again. "Good night, Cully, get some rest."

"Night, Dad."

"You coming, Joyce?" he asked, reaching out a hand.

"You go on up. I'll be along in a minute." With a nod, Tom began to loosen his tie as he set his foot to the first of the stairs.

"Trying to make sure I don't stay up too late?" Cully asked as they both heard a door upstairs close.

"Hmm?" Joyce looked back at her, something suddenly...off. But she couldn't say what, for it had just begun to trouble her mind. "Perhaps."

"I didn't realize I had a curfew inside the house." She shook her head for a moment. "At least not now."

Joyce pressed a hand to Cully's shoulder. "You're too much your father's daughter. You've both run yourselves down before without realizing it."

She laughed for a second, rubbing one her her hands over her eyes. "You can go, Mum. It's fine. I just need some water."

Stepping into the kitchen, her daughter opened one of the cabinets for a glass, half filling it from the tap. She yawned again before downing it in two or three gulps, setting her glass by the sink, ready to fold it into the next day's washing up. For a moment, she pressed a hand to the counter's edge, the other to her neck, rubbing the base of it, to just down below the collar of her tan jumper. But...was that it, what had suddenly begun to trouble her?

"Cully, isn't that the same jumper you wore yesterday?" It surely was: clearly lightweight, tan, not long enough to hide the lower hem of her blouse beneath it.

"Oh." She looked down, tugging at the thin fabric and pulling it forward to see it better. A quiet cough broke the silence after a couple seconds. "I guess it is. I didn't realize..." Her daughter's fingers began to twist in the hem, and she kept her eyes down, peering at it like she had a mystery of her own to solve.

Cully could be a painfully honest person—she had been since childhood—eager to share her thoughts and opinions; but she could also be closed, hiding everything as she wished, burying it so deeply that no one else need know it existed. There was never a way to know, Joyce had learned, whether the Cully she saw at any moment was acting. Not that she thought her daughter did so on purpose. But just as Tom never truly ceased to be a policeman even when he reached the end of his day, Cully never quite stopped being the talented actress Joyce knew she was at the end of any rehearsal or production. God forsake guests, Cully could be anything.

Finally looking up, Cully said, "I best go to bed, now. I'm sure tomorrow we'll learn everything that went wrong tonight."

"He sounds exacting," Joyce said with a quiet laugh.

"'Eye for detail', that's what he always says. He might get on well with Dad."

"I don't know if I'd go that far."

As her daughter began to leave the kitchen, Joyce caught her arm for a moment, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek, just as Tom had done a few minutes earlier. "Good night. You really were wonderful."

Cully smiled as they pulled apart. "Thanks again, Mum."

Leaving her daughter in the kitchen—she was about to gulp down another glass of water—Joyce took the stairs slowly, just as she had descended them a few hours earlier. One thought after another twisted around in her head as she reached the hallway, the guest bedroom and Cully's to the left, the master to the right. It was so...confusing, really. And it had been for some time. Perhaps if she had seen nothing beforehand, Joyce wouldn't have thought anything of it. But so many things—those little things—clung to her memory. Turning the knob on the door to the master bedroom, Joyce stepped in—only Tom's bedside lamp was turned on—closing the door gently.

He was already changed for bed, brushing his teeth in their washroom as he stepped back from the basin to find the source of the noise. Investigating. Joyce waved him back as she unwrapped her shawl from around her shoulders and set her purse on the dark wooden dresser beside it. She still held the playbill, wanting to read through it again with more time to give it proper attention. Setting it on the table on her side of their bed, she removed her necklace as she walked to the dresser, ready to change into her own nightclothes. But first things first: she slipped her feet from her shoes, which despite being low to the ground, were tight and had pinched her toes for the past few hours.

"You never did tell me how it sorted itself out," Joyce said, loosening the button at the back of her neck before pulling open the second drawer, where they both stored their pajamas. "Everything in Midsomer Malham."

The sound of the tap muted everything else for a few seconds, then vanished just as suddenly. "I suppose I didn't."

As she searched for a shirt and bottom, she asked, "But—it is done, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, very much so. We even have a confession."

Peeling her dress and stockings from her skin, Joyce sighed. "That will calm Cherrie," she said, tugging the short-sleeved nightshirt over her torso and stepping into the matching bottoms.

"I hope so," Tom muttered as he reentered their bedroom, hair tousled around his forehead, probably from the process of washing his face.

"But—who?" Taking her husband's place before the wash basin, she placed a dollop of toothpaste on her brush, wetting it briefly before beginning to scrub her teeth. "And why?" she added, the words a bit mangled around the foam in her mouth.

"Georgina Canning, Joyce."

What? she thought, desperate to say something, but the only noise she had was garbled as she kept her mouth closed. The name was familiar, like Tom had mentioned her before—but never often, the woman appearing as a side player in the drama of Midsomer Malham, lurking in the wings rather than standing center stage in the glare of burning stage lights.

"Murdered a young woman"—his voice had dropped, and the words were muffled over the distance—"and a blackmailer..." He was still talking, but Joyce could no longer understand what he said. "In the end, I suppose it was vanity."

Almost finished seeing to her teeth, Joyce stepped towards the door back into their bedroom. "Hmm?" Her husband still stood, gazing out the window into the back garden, lost in his thoughts as he often was at the end of cases like these.

"Mistakes and vanity," he said quietly as Joyce returned to the basin, spitting out the toothpaste and rising her mouth with fresh water. "Drink driving is poor judgment enough, but to lay the blame...on someone who couldn't defend herself..." He released a deep breath. "It wasn't even the legal mess she was really afraid of, just avoiding scandal to get on the board of the local horse club or horse society. Murdered her own husband to keep face."

Joyce nearly missed her face as she began to splash it with water. "What?"

"Raif Canning, yesterday. Stabbed him with a syringe of barbiturates from his own veterinary clinic."

"That's horrible," she said, now patting her face dry with a clean cloth. Lord, perhaps it was time for a move—a true move. What had Tom said before they moved into this house, about the Midsomer villages? "Every time I go into any Midsomer village, it's always the same thing: blackmail, sexual deviancy, suicide, and murder. How could you possibly expect me to go and live in one of them?" Sometimes, she thought he exaggerated everything he saw—the motives, the murders, the victims—but so often, now, it played itself out for her as well.

"She said Raif saw her with it—the saw—going to the barn," he added.

"To murder Adam..." As she hung the small cloth on the towel rod, Joyce struggled to remember the last name. Tom had surely mentioned it before, but the names of the men and women he pursued in his cases often blurred together; she could only keep Cherrie and Hugo right in her mind from this one, them only because she had encountered Cherrie so many years earlier at the WI.

"Adam Keyne, yes. In the end, it had to be her or him."

"That's the end of it, then?" Joyce asked, stepping in from the washroom.

Tom was already sat up in bed, setting his alarm for the next day. "It would seem so. Vile business, all of it."

"It's so sad, isn't it? Such...emptiness in some people. Choosing prestige over her husband?"

"More common than you'd think."

"Surely not," Joyce said, turning back the covers, settling in beside her husband. She propped her pillow up against the headboard, reaching for the program that sat on her table. "What a way to live."

"More than a few people are just shells," he said, gently rubbing her arm, "nothing under the surface."

"I suppose." She flicked the playbill open, the quality of this printing somewhat nicer than the Playhouse usually managed. A smattering of advertising preceded the cast listing, Cully's name second only to the actor playing Higgins. The synopsis followed, its listing of acts and most basic plot preceded by a short comment she thought she remembered from the few times she read lines with Cully: "The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like..." With any of the other plays her daughter had performed in at the Playhouse, either she or Tom knew much of the script by the time the curtain rose opening night, readings and whatnot. But this, she hardly knew any of it, for Gavin had been the one to read with her.

"So how long is this Pygmalion going to run?"

"Hmm?" Tom's voice broke into her thoughts, but she hadn't really heard what he said. "What?"

"How long is the run?"

"Oh—three, three and half weeks, I think," she said, flipping through the pages to see where the performance dates and times were listed. They must be somewhere.

"Joyce?"

"What is it?"

"Is everything all right?" he asked quietly, resting his hand on her shoulder for a moment.

She left the playbill fall closed. "Of course."

"You were rather quiet on the drive."

"I didn't want to trouble Cully, that's all."

"She was sound asleep in the back—"

"All the more reason to be quiet," Joyce said loudly, dropping the playbill back onto her bedside table.

Tom pulled his hand from her shoulder. "No reason we couldn't talk quietly—"

"She's exhausted—"

"Something is bothering you."

Joyce almost laughed; he never truly left his work at CID. "Someone might think you're interrogating me."

"Only at work, love."

Turning to him, she said, "Then why ask at all?"

He shrugged. "Because it looked like something was—bothering you."

Always observing, Joyce knew, at least most things. Perhaps his focus had been on Cully rather than anyone else earlier, or only she noticed what with everything else she had seen over the last few weeks. "Well, it was rather strange, right at the end."

"What?"

"In Cully's dressing room."

"What about it?" Tom asked, now yawning himself. She didn't know who had left the house first that morning, her husband or her daughter.

"Everything was quite tense. Didn't you notice?"

He nodded, rubbing his fingers on the back of his neck. "I did. I'd be a poor copper if I didn't."

"I know you've—" Joyce paused for a moment, tracing her fingers along the quilt for a second, shaking her head, her just greying blond hair flapping as she did. "You've had words in the past, Tom."

Another yawn. "Who wouldn't?"

She took his hand, twining her fingers through his tightly. "Was it because you wanted to or because it was what you should have done?"

"Those moments often overlap," Tom said, sighing as he looked down to her grasp.

"Not always."

"But often."

With a squeeze of her hand, she asked, "Did they this time?"

His eyebrows knitted together. "What do you mean?"

Stop, Joyce thought. This isn't the time or place. "I'm sorry, it's late—"

"Just one more thing."

"Tomorrow, Tom," she said, tugging her hand from his, the exhaustion of the day finally crashing over her as well.

Her husband smiled again, kissing her cheek. Sometimes, even after so many years, she still blushed when he did; she did so now, the levity in her belly just the same as ever. "Good night, love," he whispered.

A/N: I freely admit, this was a difficult chapter to write; Joyce is always pretty challenging, I think because she's such a secondary character, both in the program and in this story. Or at least she's less of a main character, so I just haven't had as much time with her voice. And yes, Joyce's memories of Cully as a teenager are book canon.