I didn’t mention this to Frank—he would only have switched from orgy comments to dark warnings about communism, and I liked the blurred boundaries. They reminded me of something warm and solid that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. There was a big green wax jacket, hanging in the coat closet left over from Uncle Simon, that belonged to anyone who was going out in the rain; the first time I put it on for my walk it gave me a strange, intoxicating little thrill, like holding hands with a boy for the very first time.
It was Thursday when I managed to put my finger on the feeling. The days were starting to lengthen towards summer and it was a clear, warm, graceful evening; after dinner we took a bottle of wine and a plate of sponge cake out onto the lawn. I had made a daisy chain and was trying to fasten it around my wrist. By this time I had given up on the not-drinking thing—it felt out of character, it made the others think about the stabbing and tense up, and besides, whatever antibiotics and booze do together could get me out of there when I needed it—so I was mildly, happily tipsy.
“More cake,” Rafe demanded, nudging me with his foot.
“Get it yourself. I’m busy.” I had given up on fastening the daisy chain one-handed and was putting it on Justin instead.
“You’re a lazy object, do you know that?”
“Look who’s talking.” I pulled one of my ankles round the back of my head—all the gymnastics as a kid, I’m flexible—and stuck my tongue out at Rafe from under my knee. “I’m active and healthy, look.”
Rafe raised one eyebrow lazily. “I’m aroused.”
“You’re a pervert,” I told him, with as much dignity as I could from that position.
“Knock it off,” Abby said. “You’ll burst your stitches, and we’re all too drunk to drive you to the emergency room.”
I’d forgotten all about my imaginary stitches. For a second I considered getting wound up about this, but I decided against it. The long evening sunshine and being barefoot and the tickle of grass, and presumably the booze, were making me light-headed and silly. It had been a long time since I’d felt like this, and I liked it. I maneuvered my head round to peer sideways at Abby. “They’re fine. They’re not even sore any more.”
“That’s because up until now you haven’t been tying yourself in knots,” Daniel said. “Behave.”
Normally I’m allergic to bossy, but somehow this felt nice; cozy. “Yes, Dad,” I said, and disentangled my leg, which sent me off balance so I fell over onto Justin.
“Ow, get off me,” he said, flapping a hand at me without much energy. “God, how much do you weigh?” I wriggled myself comfortable and stayed put with my head in his lap, squinting up into the sunset. He tickled my nose with a grass stem.
I looked relaxed, at least I hoped I did, but my mind was going fast. I had just realized—Yes, Dad—what this whole setup reminded me of: a family. Maybe not a real-life family, although what would I know, but a family out of a million children’s-book series and old TV shows, the comforting kind that go on for years without anyone getting any older, to the point where you start to wonder about the actors’ hormone levels. These five had it all: Daniel the distant but affectionate father, Justin and Abby taking turns to be the protective Mammy and the lofty eldest, Rafe the moody teenage middle kid; and Lexie, the late arrival, the capricious little sister to be alternately spoiled and teased.
They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common—Daniel orphaned, Abby fostered out, Justin and Rafe exiled, Lexie Godknowswhat but not exactly close to her parents. I’d skimmed over it because it was my default mode too. Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.
The four of them had been only eighteen or so when they had met. I looked at them under my lashes—Daniel holding a bottle up to the light to see if there was any wine left, Abby flicking ants off the cake plate—and wondered what they would have been if they had missed each other, along the way.
This gave me a whole bunch of ideas, but they were hazy and fast-moving and I decided I was too comfortable to try and put any shape on them. They could wait a few hours, till my walk. “Me too,” I said to Daniel, and held out my glass for more wine.
* * *
“Are you drunk?” Frank demanded, when I rang him. “You sounded langered, earlier.”
“Relax, Frankie,” I said. “I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. That doesn’t make me drunk.”
“It better not. This may feel like a holiday, but I don’t want you treating it like one. You stay alert.”
I was loitering along a potholey lane, uphill from the ruined cottage. I had been thinking, a lot, about how Lexie had ended up in that cottage. We had all taken it for granted that she was running for cover and couldn’t make Whitethorn House or the village, either because the killer was blocking her way or because she was fading fast, so she made for the nearest hiding place she knew. N changed that. Assuming N was a person, as opposed to a pub or a radio program or a poker game, they had had to meet somewhere, and the fact that no places were marked in the diary said they had used the same meeting point every time. And if those times were nights rather than mornings, then the cottage made total sense: privacy, convenience, shelter from wind and rain and no way for anyone to sneak up on you. She could have been heading there anyway that night, long before someone jumped her, and just kept going—maybe on autopilot, after N ambushed her on her way; maybe because she hoped N would be there to help her.
It wasn’t the kind of lead detectives dream of, but it was about the best I’d got, so I was spending a lot of my walk lurking in the general area of the cottage and hoping N would help me out by showing up some night. I had found myself a convenient stretch of lane: it had a clear enough view that I could keep an eye on the cottage while I talked to Frank or Sam, enough trees to hide me if I needed it, and enough isolation that no farmer was likely to hear me on the phone and come after me with his trusty shotgun. “I’m alert,” I said. “And I’ve got something to ask you. Remind me: Daniel’s great-uncle died in September?”
I heard Frank moving stuff around, flipping pages; either he had brought the file home with him, or he was still at work. “February third. Daniel got the keys to the house on September tenth. Probate must’ve taken a while. Why?”
“Can you find out how the great-uncle died, and where these five were that day? Also, why probate took so long? When my granny left me a grand, I got it six weeks later.”
Frank whistled. “You’re thinking they bumped off Great-uncle Simon for the house? And then Lexie lost her nerve?”
I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, trying to work out how to explain. “Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But they’re weird about that house, Frank. All four of them. They all talk about it like they own it, not just Daniel—‘We should get double-glazing, we need to decide about the herb garden, we . . .’ And they all act like this is a permanent arrangement, like they can spend years doing it up because they’re all going to live here forever.”
“Ah, they’re just young,” Frank said tolerantly. “At that age, everyone thinks college mates and house shares are forever. Give them a few years and it’ll be all semi-ds in the suburbs and Sunday afternoons buying decking at the home-and-garden shop.”
“They’re not that young. And you’ve heard them: they’re way too wrapped up in this house and each other. There’s nothing else in their lives. I don’t really think they knocked off the great-uncle, but I’m shooting in the dark here. We’ve always thought they were hiding something. Anything weird is worth checking out.”
“True,” Frank said. “Will do. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve been doing with my day?”
That undercurrent of excitement in his voice: very few things get Frank that worked up. “Damn straight,” I said.
/> The undercurrent broke through into a grin so wide I could hear it. “FBI got a hit on our girl’s prints.”
“Shit! Already?” The FBI guys are good about helping us when we need it, but they always have a spectacular backlog.
“I’ve got friends in low places.”
“OK,” I said. “Who is she?” For some reason my knees felt shaky. I got my back up against a tree.
“May-Ruth Thibodeaux, born in North Carolina in 1975, reported missing in October 2000 and wanted for car theft. Prints and photo both match.”
My breath went out with a little rush. “Cassie?” Frank said, after a moment. I heard him draw on a cigarette. “You still there?”
“Yeah. May-Ruth Thibodeaux.” Saying it made my back prickle. “What do we know about her?”
“Not a lot. No info till 1997, when she moved to Raleigh from someplace in the arsehole of nowhere, rented a fleabag apartment in a crap neighborhood and got a job waiting tables in an all-night diner. She had an education somewhere along the way if she was able to jump straight into a postgrad at Trinity, but it’s looking like self-taught or homeschooled; she doesn’t show up on the register at any local college or high school. No criminal record.”
Frank blew out smoke. “On the evening of October tenth 2000, she borrowed her fiancé’s car to get to work, but she never showed up. He filed a missing-person report a couple of days later. The cops didn’t take it too seriously; they figured she’d just taken off. They gave the fiancé a little hassle, just in case he’d killed her and dumped her somewhere, but his alibi was good. The car turned up in New York in December 2000, at long-term parking at Kennedy Airport.”
He was very pleased with himself. “Nice one, Frank,” I said automatically. “Fair play to you.”
“We aim to please,” Frank said, trying to sound modest.
She was only a year younger than me, after all. I was playing marbles in soft rain in a Wicklow garden and she was running wild in some hot small town, barefoot at the soda fountain and jolting down dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck, till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.
“Cassie?”
“Yeah.”
“My contact’s going to do some more digging, see if she made any serious enemies along the way—anyone who might’ve tracked her here.”
“Sounds good,” I said, trying to pull my head together. “That sounds like the kind of thing I might want to know. What was the fiancé’s name?”
“Brad, Chad, Chet, one of those American yokes . . .” Papers rustling. “My boy made a couple of phone calls, and the guy hasn’t missed a day of work in months. No way he hopped across the pond to kill off the ex. Chad Andrew Mitchell. Why?”
No N. “I just wondered.”
Frank waited, but I’m good at that game. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “I’ll keep you posted. The ID might take us nowhere, but still, it’s nice to have some kind of handle on this girl. Makes it easier to get your head round the idea of her, no?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
It wasn’t true. After Frank hung up I spent a long time leaning against that tree, watching the broken outline of the cottage slowly fade and reappear as clouds moved across the moon, thinking about May-Ruth Thibodeaux. Somehow, giving her back her own name, her own hometown, her own story, brought it home to me: she had been real, not just a shadow cast by my mind and Frank’s; she had been alive. There had been thirty years in which we could have come face to face.
It seemed to me suddenly that I should have known; an ocean away, but it seemed like I should have felt her there all along, like every now and then I should have looked up from my marbles or my textbook or my case report as if someone had called my name. She came all those thousands of miles, close enough to slip on my old name like a sister’s hand-me-down coat, she came pulled like a compass needle and she almost made it. She was only an hour’s drive away. and I should have known; I should have known, in time, to take that last step and find her.
* * *
The only shadows over that week came from outside. We were playing poker, Friday evening—they played cards a lot, late into the nights; mostly Texas Hold-’em or 110, sometimes piquet if only two people felt like playing. The stakes were just tarnished ten-pence pieces from a huge jar someone had found in the attic, but they took it seriously all the same: everyone started with the same number of coins and when you were out you were out, no borrowing from the stash. Lexie, like me, had been a pretty decent card player; her calls hadn’t always made a lot of sense, but apparently she had learned to make the unpredictability work for her, especially on big hands. The winner got to choose the next day’s dinner menu.
That night we had Louis Armstrong on the record player and Daniel had bought a huge bag of Doritos, along with three different dips to keep everyone happy. We were maneuvering around the various chipped bowls and using the food to try and distract each other—it worked best on Justin, who lost his concentration completely if he thought you were about to get salsa on the mahogany. I had just wiped out Rafe head-to-head—on weak hands he messed around with the dips, if he had something good he shoveled Doritos straight into his mouth by the handful; never play poker with a detective—and I was busy gloating, when his phone rang. He tilted his chair backwards and grabbed the phone off one of the bookshelves.
“Hello,” he said, giving me the finger. Then his chair came down and his face changed; it froze over, into that haughty, unreadable mask he wore in college and around outsiders. “Dad,” he said.
Without an eyeblink, the others drew closer around him; you could feel it in the air, a tightening, a solidifying as they ranged themselves at his shoulders. I was next to him, and I got the full benefit of the bellow coming out of the phone: "... Job opened up . . . foot on the ladder ... changed your mind . . . ?”
Rafe’s nostrils twitched as if he had smelled something foul. “Not interested, ” he said.
The volume of the tirade made his eyes snap shut. I caught enough of it to gather that reading plays all day was for pansies and that someone called Brad-bury had a son who had just made his first million and that Rafe was generally a waste of oxygen. He held the phone between thumb and finger, inches from his ear.
“For God’s sake, hang up,” Justin whispered. His face was pulled into an unconscious, agonized grimace. “Just hang up on him.”
“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but . . . Someday.”
Abby shrugged. “Well, then . . .” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.
The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.
The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot—a seven and a nine, not even suited—but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”