Downfall

  Chapter 3: Prodigal

  Dusk. I hadn’t told Jude I was coming along but I figured I was invited back to his secret meeting place, regardless. If no one else was there I could just take the opportunity to have a look around for myself. It was a public location, right? I felt rebellious enough to not much care whether I was invited or not. I deliberately didn’t think about Cain.

  Before I left for the ruin I checked my email. There were the usual panicky questions from Starr but Dad had also emailed me for the first time since he went away.

  Dear Francesca,

  I know you start at college next week and want you to know I am proud. I believe in you. Trust your inner guide to light your path, and you will not go astray.

  I’m sure I’ll hear from you soon.

  God bless.

  Dad

  I re-read it with bitter disbelief. Thanks for talking to me like one of your fans, Dad. Underneath his message was an email signature I had created for him just a couple of months before. Don Carver, Author. Always remember the saints walk among us. Are You the One? Click here for tour dates. Had Starr told him about all those emails she sent me every day, and how I wrote out painstaking replies so she wouldn’t screw up Dad’s entire tour? I doubted it.

  I told Albion I wanted to practice my night-time driving and left him nursing his post-party exhaustion. Somehow I remembered how to get back to Gaunt House ruins. Four vehicles were already parked there, including Jude’s bomb and Cain’s bike. I climbed from the little pink car and approached the building, the electrical tower crackling like it might burst into flame. Why did I feel so weird? Maybe the tower was releasing some kind of static energy into the air. I got myself down through the trapdoor and ladder, feeling my way along the wall to the door of the underground chamber. At last I slipped inside and sank onto a mattress with a breathless, “Hi.”

  There were varying degrees of welcome, but Jude beamed a relieved grin. I didn’t meet Cain’s eyes.

  “Where have you been for the last couple of weeks?” Owen asked.

  I was affronted. “Just living my life. Why?”

  He didn’t answer so Liz spoke. “We were hoping you’d come back and hang around with us.”

  “I didn’t say I was definitely coming back ... and anyway, I’m here now, right?”

  Cain was silent. Maybe he didn’t care whether or not I came back. I made myself check his face, just for an instant so I wouldn’t get sucked under his spell again. He was still amazing, but his expression was unreadable. I deflated slightly.

  “You in for the next round, Frankie?” Owen asked, dealing cards.

  “Okay.”

  Jude passed me a beer and I took it, although I’d never even tasted beer. I sipped tentatively. Not as bad as it smelled. I could pretend to drink it―no one would notice that my drink was hardly touched by the end of the night.

  “Frankie’s first poker game with us,” Liz said, giving me a warm smile.

  “Is that like our first kiss? Does it mean we’re going steady? My first kiss was terrible,” I warned. “Doesn’t bode well for my first poker game.”

  All of a sudden I disliked myself. Had Olivia and her ‘Virginity Guard’ comment really made me this person―this dumbass trying to prove she wasn’t as saintly as everyone thought? Much faster than it had brewed, Olivia Ranford’s provocation subsided. I looked around at them all, reviewing the situation without the lens of insecurity. Okay. That was better ... although I still found it hard to look at Cain.

  “My first kiss was lovely,” Liz was saying. “Why was yours terrible?”

  “It was at a school disco when I was thirteen,” I replied. “I had to dance to a slow song with Kyle Grubb.” Jude snorted, remembering. “He stuck his tongue in my mouth. I was disgusted. I punched him in the ribs.” Jude, Liz and Owen fell about laughing and I turned to Cain. My pulse hammered in my throat but I made my tone bright. “How about you? What’s your first kiss story?”

  He smiled, looking self-conscious. “It was behind the changing rooms at a high school swimming carnival,” he said. “I was fourteen.”

  I burst into laughter at how normal―how banal―his story was. No one else laughed. Liz started talking as though she wanted us to forget what we’d just heard.

  “I was fourteen, too. I was at the movies with my friends. A boy from school came over and told me his friend wanted to talk to me. The friend’s name was Peter. When I got there, Peter asked me to sit with him and he held my hand. Then he kissed me―a little peck―and asked me to go around with him.”

  “Go around?” Jude repeated, mystified.

  “That’s what we called it,” she said. “It just meant going steady, or whatever they call it now.”

  “Oh, you hooked up with him.” Jude was enlightened but Liz looked horrified.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Not that kind of hooking up,” he laughed.

  “Tell us yours,” she said.

  I grinned at Jude. He was waiting for it.

  “I know Jude’s story,” I said. “I saw it happen. He kissed my best friend Marnie when we were twelve, in a game of spin the bottle. She said it was terrible.”

  Jude gave a wry smile. “Thanks a lot, Frankie.”

  Owen’s story was the most impressive. “My older sister had her friends staying for a sleepover. They wanted to practice on someone and I was there. My sister surrendered me to them all. I actually can’t remember who went first.”

  “That’s the stuff of legends!” Jude exclaimed.

  “How old were you?” Liz wanted to know.

  “Twelve.” Owen shook his head at the memory. “My friends never even believed me!”

  I was giggling. I’d drunk more of the beer than I’d intended to. I put the bottle away from me while no one was looking so I wouldn’t inadvertently drink more. I still needed to drive home. I tried not to think about what Dad would say.

  But what an icebreaker. After those confessions we were instantly on the intimate footing of a group of old friends. We played cards, laughed, and swapped jokes late into the night. It felt good. It felt real. Dad told me when he sacked me from being his PA that I didn’t seem to fit in with other young people anymore. He was concerned I was ‘maturing before my time’ because of the responsibilities I’d taken on. At the time it seemed like another excuse to give Starr my job but maybe there was something to it, after all. I certainly felt more at ease with this mostly-older crowd than I had with the kids at Albion’s pool party.

  After a couple rounds of poker Owen went to get a drink from the cooler room but didn’t come back. Cain went after him. Was Owen upset or something? No one else seemed worried. Liz and Jude simply packed up the cards to start a game of Scrabble. Curious about what was going on down the corridor, I half-watched them start the game and half-watched the doorway to see when Cain and Owen would come back. I could go back there, too, couldn’t I? I would pretend to get myself a drink from the cooler so I could eavesdrop. But just as I made to rise, Jude scooched over to me.

  “Frankie, I need help.”

  “With what?”

  “You know I got accepted into Augur’s Well Tech to study auto-electrics? I was gonna work part time at the auto shop while I took the course but now my boss has offered me full time work. It’s a real opportunity. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I can’t help you make that choice,” I said, checking for Cain again.

  Jude shifted closer. “Yeah, I know but I want your opinion. I was stoked to get into the auto-electrics course but my boss’s offer ... well, it’s kind of like jumping the queue into a job in the industry. I dunno if I want to be a mechanic forever but I’m not much good at anything else. I hate studying. What would you do?”

  “I think you should do your course. If you bail now you’re cutting off your options.”

  “But if I tell my boss no he might have to employ someone else full time. Then I won’t even have a job.”

  “You could get an
other part time job.”

  “Like flipping burgers or something?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I don’t know,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I might regret throwing away this job. What if I end up flipping burgers for the rest of my life?”

  I had to repress an eye roll. He didn’t seem interested in my advice so why was he asking? Owen and Cain reappeared and Jude returned to his Scrabble game with Liz. I had a moment of suspicion. Was Jude’s question meant to distract me from following Cain and Owen? I dismissed the thought. Paranoid much, Frankie?

  “I’ve got to go out for a while,” Cain said as Owen joined the game.

  “Look, I got czar. Double word score, see?” Liz told Owen.

  “I’m still leading.” Jude gave them both a triumphant grin.

  “Where are you going?” I asked Cain, standing up. “Can I come along?”

  That was way more brazen than my usual style. Maybe the almost one full beer was talking. My pulse leapt up a setting when Cain gave me careful consideration, a full once over. He flicked a look at Owen, who reached over and touched my ankle.

  “Frankie, you any good with words? Look at my letters.”

  I glanced down at Owen’s seven Scrabble letters and saw a word. “Snicker.” Then I looked back at Cain but to my utter astonishment he was gone. I whirled around, thinking he must have merely stepped across the room but he wasn’t there either. Nor was he in the corridor. Had I looked at Owen’s letters longer than I’d thought? I hadn’t even heard the door open. I gazed around at the other three. No one looked at me but there seemed to be a smirk or two going around.

  Cain didn’t come back for nearly two hours. I asked more than once but he wouldn’t say where he’d been, except to fob me off with a vague line about meeting a friend. No one else even asked him about it. The card games and drinks continued but when he thought I wasn’t watching I saw a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head directed at Owen.

  Covertly I kept watching him. He ate ravenous handfuls of peanuts and a chocolate bar Liz gave him, sugaring up as if he were an athlete running a marathon. Then, quite abruptly, he fell into a deep slumber. Everyone packed up and went home, leaving Cain stretched out asleep on his sofa.

  What the heck?

  So the guy had a secret. I considered staying behind after the others left, going back inside to wake him up and interrogate him. But wouldn’t that look like a clumsy attempt at seduction? Crap.

  The only thing I could do was go home and wait an interminable twenty four hours to come back to Gaunt House the next night.