There was no one there. The tree trunks and overgrown branches and ivy made an alcove against the wall, a little sun-splashed bubble. In it were two stone benches and, between them, a thread of water trickling through a hole in the wall and down shallow steps to a tiny, murky pond; nothing else. Shadows tangled together and for a second I caught the illusion again, the benches turning high-backed and sweeping, that slim figure sitting upright. Then I let the ivy fall and it was gone.
Apparently it wasn’t just the house that had a personality all its own. I got my breath back and checked out the alcove. The seats had traces of moss in the cracks, but most of it had been scrubbed away: someone knew about this place. I considered its potential as a rendezvous point, one way or another, but it was awfully close to the house to be inviting outsiders around, and the mat of leaves and twigs around the pond looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a while. I brushed at it with the side of my shoe and got wide smooth flagstones. Metal glinted in the dirt and my heart bounced—knife—but it was too small. A button: lion and unicorn, battered and dented. Someone, long ago, had been in the British army.
The hole letting the water in through the garden wall was choked with muck. I stuck the button in my pocket, knelt down on the flagstones and used the branch and my hands to clear it out. It took a long time; the wall was thick. When I was finished there was a miniwaterfall, murmuring happily to itself, and my hands smelled of earth and decaying leaves.
I rinsed them off and sat on one of the benches for a while, having a smoke and listening to the water. It was nice in there; warm and still and secret, like an animal’s den or a kid’s hideout. The pond filled up, tiny insects hovering above the surface. The extra water drained away through a tiny gutter into the ground, I picked out floating leaves, and after a while the pond was clear enough that I could see my reflection, rippling.
Lexie’s watch said half-past four. I had made it through twenty-four hours, and probably knocked a good handful of people out of the incident-room sweepstakes. I put my cigarette butt back in the pack, ducked out through the ivy, and went inside to catch up on thesis notes. The front door opened smoothly to my key, the air inside stirred as I came in and it didn’t feel over-intimate any more; it felt like a slight smile and a cool brief touch on the cheek, like a welcome.
7
That night I went for my walk. I needed to phone Sam, and anyway, Frank and I had decided that I was better off getting Lexie back into her normal routine as fast as possible, not playing the trauma card too hard, at least not yet. There were bound to be little differences anyway, and with any luck people would use the stabbing to explain those away; the more I pushed it, the more likely it was that someone would think, Gee, Lexie’s a completely different person now.
We were in the sitting room, after dinner. Daniel and Justin and I were reading; Rafe was playing piano, a lazy Mozart fantasia, breaking off now and then to repeat a phrase he liked or had messed up the first time; Abby was making her doll a new petticoat out of old broderie anglaise, head bent over stitches so tiny they were almost invisible. I didn’t think the doll was creepy, exactly—she wasn’t one of the ones that look like puffy, deformed adults; she had a long dark plait and a wistful, dreamy face, with a tip-tilted nose and tranquil brown eyes—but I could see the guys’ point, all the same. Those big sad eyes, staring at me from an undignified position on Abby’s lap, made me feel guilty in a nonspecific way, and there was something disturbing about the fresh, springy curl of her hair.
Around eleven I went out to the coat closet for my runners—I had wriggled into my supersexy girdle and tucked my phone in there before dinner, so I wouldn’t have to break routine by going up to my room; Frank would be proud of me. I did a wince and a little under-my-breath “Ow” as I sat down on the hearth rug, and Justin’s head snapped up. “Are you all right? Do you need your painkillers?”
“Nah,” I said, disentangling my shoelace. “I just sat down funny.”
“Walk?” Abby asked, glancing up from the doll.
“Yep,” I said, pulling on one of the runners. It had the shape of Lexie’s foot, a fraction narrower than mine, printed on the insole.
That tiny suspension all through the room again, like a caught breath. Rafe’s hands left a chord hanging in the air. “Is that wise?” Daniel inquired, putting a finger in his book to mark his page.
“I feel fine,” I said. “The stitches don’t hurt unless I twist sideways; walking isn’t going to burst them or anything.”
“That’s hardly what I had in mind,” Daniel said. “You’re not concerned?”
They were all looking at me, that unreadable quadruple gaze with the force of a tractor beam. I shrugged, pulling at a shoelace. “No.”
“Why not? If I may ask.”
Rafe moved, threw a taut little trill somewhere in the piano’s upper octaves. Justin flinched.
“’Cause,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Shouldn’t you be? After all, if you have no idea—”
“Daniel,” Rafe said, almost under his breath. “Leave her alone.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go out there,” Justin said. He looked like his stomach hurt. “I really do.”
“We’re worried, Lex,” Abby said quietly. “Even if you’re not.”
The trill was still going, on and on like an alarm bell. “Rafe,” Justin said, pressing a hand to his ear. “Stop.”
Rafe ignored him. “Like she’s not enough of a drama queen without you three encouraging her—”
Daniel didn’t seem to notice. “Do you blame us?” he asked me.
“So you’ll just have to worry,” I said, shoving my other foot into its shoe. “I don’t care. If I get all jumpy now, I’ll be jumpy forever, and I’m not doing that.”
“Well, congratulations,” Rafe said, ending the trill with a neat chord. “Take your torch. See you later.” He turned back to the piano and started flipping pages.
“And your phone,” Justin said. “In case you feel faint, or . . .” His voice trailed off.
“It doesn’t seem to be raining any more,” Daniel said, peering at the window, “but it might be chilly. Are you going to wear the jacket?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. This walk seemed to be turning into something at the organization level of Operation Desert Storm. “I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Hmm,” Daniel said, considering me. “Maybe I should go with you.”
“No,” Rafe said, abruptly. “I’ll go. You’re working.” He banged the piano lid down and stood up.
“Bloody hell!” I snapped, throwing my hands up and giving the four of them an outraged glare. “It’s a walk. I do it all the time. I’m not taking protective clothing, I’m not taking emergency flares and I’m definitely not taking a bodyguard. Is that OK with everyone?” The thought of a private chat with Rafe or Daniel was interesting, but I could get those some other time. If someone was waiting for me out in the lanes, the last thing I wanted was to scare him off.
“That’s my girl,” said Justin, giving me a faint smile. “You’ll be fine, won’t you?”
“At the very least,” Daniel said, unperturbed, “you should take a different route from the one you took the other night. Will you do that?”
He was watching me blandly, one finger still caught between the pages of his book. There was nothing in his face except mild concern. “I’d love to,” I said, “if I remembered which way I went. Since I don’t have the first clue, I’ll just have to take my chances, won’t I?”
“Ah,” Daniel said. “Of course. I’m sorry. Ring if you want one of us to come meet you.” He went back to his book. Rafe thumped down onto the piano stool and crashed into the Rondo alla Turca.
* * *
It was a bright night, the moon high in a clear cold sky, flicking chips of white off the dark hawthorn leaves; I buttoned Lexie’s suede jacket up to my neck. The torch beam lit up a narrow bar of dirt path and the invisible fields felt suddenly huge around me. The to
rch made me feel very vulnerable and not very smart, but I kept it on. If anyone was lurking out there, he needed to know where to find me.
No one came. Something shifted off to one side, something heavy, but when I whipped the torch around it was a cow, staring back at me with wide, sorrowful eyes. I kept walking, nice and slow like a good little target, and thought about that exchange back in the sitting room. I wondered what Frank had made of it. Daniel could have been simply trying to jog my memory loose, or he could have had very good reasons for wanting to check whether the amnesia was real, and I had no idea which it was.
I didn’t realize I was heading for the ruined cottage until it rose up in front of me, a smudge of thicker dark against the sky, stars flickering like altar lights in the windows. I switched off the torch: I could find my way across the field without it, and a light in the cottage was likely to make the neighbors very antsy, possibly even antsy enough to come investigating. The long grass swished, a soft steady sound, around my ankles. I reached up and touched the stone lintel, like a salute, before I went through the doorway.
The quality of the silence was different inside: deeper, and so thick I could feel it pressing softly around me. A slip of moonlight caught the crooked stone of the hearth in the inner room.
One wall sloped jaggedly down from the corner where Lexie had curled up to die, and I pulled myself up onto it and settled my back against the gable end. The place should probably have freaked me out—I was so close to her dying, I could have leaned down across ten days and touched her hair—but it didn’t. The cottage had a century and a half of its own stillness stored up, she had taken only an eyeblink; it had already absorbed her and closed over the place where she had been.
I thought about her differently, that night. Before, she had been an invader or a dare, always something that set my back stiffening and my adrenalin racing. But I was the one who had flashed into her life out of nowhere, with Sticky Vicky for a pawn and a wild why-not chance dangling from my fingertips; I was the dare she had taken, years before the flip side of the coin landed in front of me. The moon spun slowly across the sky and I thought of my face blue-gray and empty on steel in the morgue, the long rush and clang of the drawer shutting her into the dark, alone. I imagined her sitting on this same bit of wall on other, lost nights, and I felt so warm and so solid, firm moving flesh overlaid on her faint silvery imprint, it almost broke my heart. I wanted to tell her things she should have known, how her tutorial group had coped with Beowulf and what the guys had made for dinner, what the sky looked like tonight; things I was keeping for her.
In the first few months after Operation Vestal I thought a lot about leaving. It seemed, paradoxically, like the only way I could ever feel like me again: pack my passport and a change of clothes, scribble a note (“Dear everyone, I’m off. Love, Cassie”) and catch the next flight to anywhere, leave behind everything that had changed me into someone I didn’t recognize. Somewhere in there, I never knew the exact moment, my life had slipped through my hands and smashed to smithereens. Everything I had—my job, my friends, my flat, my clothes, my reflection in the mirror—felt like it belonged to someone else, some clear-eyed straight-backed girl I could never find again. I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past.
I don’t know why I stayed. Probably Sam would have called it courage—he always goes for the best angle—and Rob would have called it pure stubbornness, but I don’t flatter myself that it was either one. You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.
Lexie had run. When exile somehow hit her out of a clear blue sky, she didn’t fight it the way I did: she reached out for it with both hands, swallowed it whole and made it her own. She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.
And then, after all that, someone had strutted up to her and whipped that hard-won new life away, casually as plucking a daisy. I felt a sudden zip of outrage—not at her but, for the first time, for her.
“Whatever it is you want,” I said softly, into the dark cottage, “I’m here. You’ve got me.”
There was a tiny shift in the air around me, subtler than a breath; secretive; pleased.
* * *
It was dark, big patches of cloud covering the moon, but I already knew the lane well enough that I barely needed the torch, and my hand went straight to the latch of the back gate, no fumbling. Undercover time works differently; it was hard to remember that I’d only been living there a day and a half.
The house was black on black, only a faint crooked line of stars where the roof ended and the sky began. It seemed bigger and intangible, edges blurring, ready to dissolve into nothing if you came too close. The lit windows looked too warm and gold to be real, tiny pictures beckoning like old peep shows: bright copper frying pans hanging in the kitchen, Daniel and Abby side by side on the sofa with their heads bent over some huge old book.
Then a cloud skated off the moon and I saw Rafe, sitting on the edge of the patio, one arm around his knees and a long glass in the other hand. My adrenaline leaped. There was no way he could have followed me without me seeing him, and I hadn’t done anything dodgy anyway, but still, the look of him made me edgy. The way he was sitting, head up and ready, at the edge of that great spread of grass: he was waiting for me.
I stood under the hawthorn tree by the gate and watched him. Something that had been taking shape in the back of my mind had just made it to the surface. It was the drama-queen comment that had done it: the snide edge to his voice, the irritable eye roll. Now that I thought about it, Rafe had barely said a word to me since I arrived, apart from “pass the sauce” and “good night;” he talked around me, at me, in my general direction, never to me. The day before, he was the only one who hadn’t touched me to welcome me home, just taken my suitcase and gone. He was being subtle about it, nothing overt; but, for some reason, Rafe was pissed off with me.
He saw me as soon as I stepped out from under the hawthorn. He raised his arm—the light from the windows sent long, confusing shadows flying down the grass towards me—and watched, unmoving, as I crossed the lawn and sat down next to him.
It seemed like the simplest thing to go at this head-on. “Are you mad at me?” I asked.
Rafe turned his head away with a disgusted flick, looked out over the grass. “ ‘Mad at me,’ ” he said. “For God’s sake, Lexie, you’re not a child.”
“OK,” I said. “Are you angry with me?”
He stretched out his legs in front of him and examined the toes of his runners. “Has it even occurred to you,” he asked, “to wonder what last week was like for us?”
I considered this for a moment. It sounded a lot like he was in a snot with Lexie for getting stabbed. As far as I could see, this was either deeply suspicious or deeply bizarre. With this gang, it got hard to tell the difference. “I wasn’t exactly having fun either, you know,” I said.
He laughed. “You haven’t even thought about it, have you?”
I stared at him. “That’s why you’re pissed off with me? Because I got hurt? Or because I didn’t ask how you’re feeling about it?” He shot me an oblique look that could have meant anything. “Well, Jesus, Rafe. I didn’t ask for any of this to happen. Why are you being such a dickhead about it?”
Rafe took a long, jerky swallow of his drink—gin and tonic; I could smell it. “Forget it,” he said. “Never mind. Just go inside.”
“Rafe,” I said,
hurt. I was only mostly faking it: there was an icy cut to his voice that made me flinch. “Don’t.”
He ignored me. I put a hand on his arm—it was more muscular than I had expected, and warm right through his shirt, almost fever hot. His mouth set in a long hard line, but he didn’t move.