I phoned him anyway. We had already talked that night and it was late, but he answered fast. “Yeah? You OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted to ask you something, before I forget again. Has the investigation turned up a guy about six foot tall, solid build, late twenties, good-looking, fair hair with that trendy quiff thing going on, fancy brown leather jacket?”
Frank yawned, which made me feel guilty but also slightly relieved: it was nice to know he actually slept sometimes. “Why?”
“I passed a guy in Trinity a couple of days ago, and he smiled at me and nodded, like he knew me. He’s not on the KA list. It’s not a big deal—he didn’t act like we were supposed to be bosom buddies or anything—but I thought I’d check. I don’t want to get blindsided if we run into each other again.” This was true, by the way, although the guy in question had been small and skinny and redheaded. It had taken me about ten minutes of racking my brains to figure out how he knew me. His carrel was in our corner of the library.
Frank thought about this; I heard the rustle of sheets as he turned over in bed. “Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said. “The only person I can think of is Slow Eddie—Daniel’s cousin. He’s twenty-nine and blond and wears a brown leather jacket, and I guess he could be good-looking, if you go for big and dumb.”
“Not your type?” Still no N. Why the hell would Slow Eddie be wandering around Glenskehy at midnight?
“I like them with more cleavage. Eddie says he never met Lexie, though. There’s no reason why he would have. He and Daniel don’t get on; it’s not like Eddie’s popping over to the house for tea or joining the gang on nights out. And he lives in Bray, works in Killiney; I can’t see any reason why he’d be in Trinity.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s probably just someone who knows her from around college. Go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you.”
“It’s grand,” Frank said, through another yawn. “Better safe than sorry. Put a report on tape, with a full description—and if you see him again, let me know.” He was already about half asleep.
“Will do. Night.”
I stayed still in my tree for a few minutes, listening for out-of-place noises. Nothing; just the undergrowth below me tossing like ocean in the wind, and that prickle, faint and unignorable, scratching at the top of my spine. I told myself that if anything was going to send my imagination into overdrive, it would be the story Sam had told: the girl stripped of her lover, her family, her future, knotting a rope to one of these dark branches for everything she had left, herself and her baby. I phoned Sam back before I could think too hard about that.
He was still wide awake. “What was that all about? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that. I thought I heard someone coming. I was picturing Frank’s mystery stalker with a hockey mask and a chain saw, but no such luck.” This was also true, obviously, but twisting facts for Sam wasn’t like twisting them for Frank, and doing it made my stomach curl up.
A second of silence. “I worry about you,” Sam said quietly.
“I know, Sam,” I said. “I know you do. I’m grand. I’ll be home soon.”
I thought I heard him sigh, a small resigned breath, too soft for me to be sure. “Yeah,” he said. “We can talk about that holiday then.”
I walked back home thinking about Sam’s vandal, about that prickling feeling, and about Slow Eddie. All I knew about him was that he worked for an estate agent, he and Daniel didn’t get on, Frank didn’t think much of his brainpower, and he had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to call his grandfather a lunatic. I bounced a few scenarios around in my head—Homicidal Maniac Eddie picking off the occupants of Whitethorn House one by one, Casanova Eddie having a dangerous liaison with Lexie and then flipping out when he found out about the baby—but all of them seemed pretty far-fetched, and anyway I liked to think that Lexie had had better taste than to boink some dumb yuppie in the back of an SUV.
If he’d wandered around the house once and not found what he was looking for, the chances were that he would come back—unless he’d just been taking a last look at the place he had loved and lost, and he didn’t strike me as the sentimental type. I filed him under Things to Worry About Some Other Time. Right then, he wasn’t at the top of my list.
The part I wasn’t telling Sam, the new dark thing unfurling and fluttering in a corner of my mind: someone was holding a high-octane grudge against Whitethorn House; someone had been meeting Lexie in these lanes, someone faceless who began with an N; and someone had helped her make that baby. If all three of those had been the same person . . . Sam’s vandal wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but he could well be smart enough—sober, anyway—to hide that; he could be gorgeous, charming, all kinds of good stuff, and we already knew that Lexie’s decision-making process had worked a little differently from most people’s. Maybe she had gone for the angst boys. I thought of a chance meeting somewhere in the lanes, long walks together under a high winter moon and branches filigreed with frost; of that smile slanting up under her lashes; of the ruined cottage, and shelter behind the curtain of brambles.
If the guy I was picturing had found himself with a chance at getting a Whitethorn House girl pregnant, it would have seemed to him like a God-given thing, a perfect, blinding symmetry: a golden ball dropped into his hands by angels, not to be refused. And he would have killed her.
* * *
The next morning someone spat on our car. We were on our way to college, Justin and Abby up front, me and Rafe in the back—Daniel had left early, no explanation, while the rest of us were halfway through breakfast. It was a cool gray morning, dawn hush left in the air and soft drizzle misting the windows; Abby was flipping through notes and humming along to Mahler on the CD player, switching octaves dramatically in midphrase, and Rafe was in his sock feet, trying to disentangle a massive knot in his shoelace. As we went through Glenskehy Justin braked, outside the newsagent’s, to let someone cross the road: an old guy, hunched and wiry, in a farmer’s tired tweed suit and flat cap. He raised his walking stick in a kind of salute as he shuffled past, and Justin waved back.
Then the man caught Justin’s eye. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared through the windscreen at us. For a split second his face contorted into a tight mask of pure fury and disgust; then he brought down his stick on the hood, with a flat clang that split the morning wide open. We all shot upright, but before any of us could do anything sensible the old man hawked, spat on the windscreen—straight at Justin’s face—and hobbled on across the road, at the same deliberate pace.
“What the—” Justin said, breathless. “What the hell? What was that?”
“They don’t like us,” Abby said evenly, reaching over to switch on the windscreen wipers. The street was long and deserted, little pastel houses closed down tight against the rain, dark blur of hills rising behind them. Nothing moved anywhere, only the old man’s slow mechanical shuffle and the flick of a lace curtain down the street. “Drive, hon.”
“That little fuck,” Rafe said. He was clutching his shoe like a weapon, knuckles white. “You should have floored it, Justin. You should have splattered whatever he’s got instead of a brain across this wretched street.” He started to roll down his window.
“Rafe,” Abby said sharply. “Roll that up. Now.”
“Why? Why should we let him get away with—”
“Because,” I said, in a small voice. “I want to go for my walk tonight.”
That stopped Rafe in his tracks, just like I had known it would; he stared at me, one hand still on the window handle. Justin stalled the car with a horrible grinding sound, managed to jam it into gear and hit the accelerator hard. “Charming,” he said. There was a brittle edge to his voice: any kind of nastiness always upset him. “That was really charming. I mean, I realize they don’t like us, but that was completely unnecessary. I didn’t do anything to that man. I braked to let him cr
oss. What did he do that for?”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one. Sam had been busy in Glenskehy, the last few days. A detective swanning down from Dublin in his city-boy suit, walking into their sitting rooms asking questions, patiently digging for their buried stories; and all because a girl from the Big House had got herself stabbed. Sam would have done his job gently and deftly, he always does; it wasn’t him they would hate.
“Nothing,” said Rafe. He and I were twisted around in our seats to watch the old man, who was standing on the pavement outside the newsagent’s, leaning on his stick and staring after us. “He did it because he’s a knuckle-dragging bog monster and he loathes anyone who isn’t actually his wife or his sister or both. It’s like living in the middle of bloody Deliverance.”
“You know something?” Abby said coldly, without turning around. “I’m getting really, really sick of your colonial attitude. Just because he didn’t go to some fancy English prep school, that doesn’t necessarily make him your inferior. And if Glenskehy isn’t good enough for you, you’re free to find somewhere that is.”
Rafe opened his mouth, then shrugged disgustedly and closed it again. He gave his shoelace a vicious jerk; it broke, and he swore under his breath.
If the man had been thirty or forty years younger, I would have been memorizing his description to pass on to Sam. The fact that he wasn’t a viable suspect—this guy had not outrun five students out for blood—sent a nasty little ripple across my shoulders. Abby turned up the volume; Rafe tossed his shoe on the floor and shoved up two fingers at the back windscreen. This, I thought, is going to be trouble.
* * *
“OK,” Frank said, that night. “I got my FBI friend to have his boys do some more digging. I told him we have reason to believe that our girl took off because she had a nervous breakdown, so we’re looking for signs and possible causes. Is that what we think, just out of interest?”
“I have no idea what you think, Frankie boy. Don’t ask me to climb into that black hole.” I was up my tree. I wriggled my back up against one half of the trunk and braced my feet against the other, so I could lean my notebook on my thigh. There was just enough moonlight, between the branches, that I could see the page. “Hang on a sec.” I clamped the phone under my jaw and hunted for my pen.
“You sound cheerful,” Frank said, suspiciously.
“I just had a gorgeous dinner and a laugh. What’s not to be cheerful about?” I managed to extract the pen from my jacket pocket without falling out of the tree. “OK, shoot.”
Frank made an exasperated noise. “Lovely for some. Just don’t get too chummy. There’s always a chance you may have to arrest one of these people.”
“I thought you were gunning for the mysterious stranger in the black cape.”
“I’m keeping an open mind. And the cape’s optional. OK, here’s everything we’ve got—you did say you wanted ordinary stuff, so don’t blame me. On the sixteenth of August 2000, Lexie-May-Ruth switched mobile-phone providers to get cheaper local minutes. On the twenty-second, she got a raise at the diner, seventy-five cents extra an hour. On the twenty-eighth, Chad proposed to her, and she said yes. The first weekend of September, the two of them drove to Virginia so she could meet Chad’s parents, who said she was a very sweet girl and brought them a potted plant.”
“The engagement ring,” I said, keeping my voice easy. This was setting ideas exploding in my head like popcorn, but I didn’t want Frank to know that. “Did she take it with her when she split?”
“No. The cops asked Chad at the time. She left it on her bedside table, but that was normal. She always left it there when she went to work, in case it got lost or fell in the hash browns or whatever. It wasn’t a big fancy rock or anything. Chad’s the bassist in a grunge band called Man From Nantucket, and they have yet to get their big break, so he makes a living as a carpenter. He’s skint.”
My notes were scrawly and went at a funny angle, on account of the light and the tree, but I could just about read them. “Then what?”
"On the twelfth of September she and Chad bought a PlayStation on their joint credit, which I suppose is as good a statement of commitment as any, these days. On the eighteenth, she sold her car, an ’86 Ford, for six hundred bucks—she told Chad she wanted to get something a little less beat-up, now that she had the extra money from the raise. On the twenty-seventh, she went to her doctor with an ear infection, probably contracted from swimming; he gave her antibiotics and it cleared up. And on the tenth of October, she’s gone. Is that what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind. Thanks, Frank. You’re a gem.”
“I’m thinking,” he said, “something happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth of September. Up through the twelfth, everything says she’s planning on staying put: she’s getting engaged, she’s meeting the parents, she and Chad are buying stuff as a couple. But on the eighteenth she sells her car, which tells me she’s getting together the money to split. That the way you’re thinking?”
“Makes sense,” I said, but I knew Frank was wrong. That shifting pattern had slid into focus with a soft, final click, and I knew why Lexie had taken off running from North Carolina; knew it as clear as if she were sitting weightless on a branch beside me, swinging her legs in the moonlight and whispering in my ear. And I knew why she had been about to take off running from Whitethorn House. Someone had tried to hold her.
“I’ll try and find out more about that week, maybe get someone to re-interview poor old Chad. If we can figure out what changed her plans, we should be able to put our finger on the mystery man.”
“Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. Let me know how you get on.”
“Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do,” he said, and hung up.
I angled the screen of my mobile towards the page, so I could read over my notes. The PlayStation meant nothing; it’s easy to buy on credit with no plans to pay it off, no plans to be anywhere within reach. The last solid thing that said she intended to stay put was the phone-provider switch, back in August. You don’t care about cheaper minutes unless you’re going to be around to use them. On August 16, she had been tucked snugly into her May-Ruth life and going nowhere.
And then, less than two weeks later, poor grunge Chad had proposed. After that, not one thing said Lexie was staying. She had said yes, smiled and bided her time till she got the money together, and then run as far and as fast as she could and never once looked behind. It hadn’t been Frank’s mystery stalker after all, it hadn’t been some masked menace slinking out of the shadows with a glinting blade. It had been as simple as a cheap ring.
And this time, there had been the baby: a lifelong tie to some man, somewhere. She could have got rid of it, just like she could have turned Chad down, but that had been beside the point. Just the thought of that tie had sent her slamming off the walls, frantic as a trapped bird.
The missed period and the flight prices; and, somewhere in there, N. N was either the trap trying to hold her here or, in some way I needed to find, her way out.
* * *
The others were sprawled on the sitting-room floor in front of the fire, like kids, rummaging through a wrecked traveling case that Justin had found somewhere. Rafe had his legs flung companionably across Abby’s—they had apparently made up their fight from that morning. The rug was strewn with mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits and a medley of small battered things: pockmarked marbles, tin soldiers, half of a clay pipe. “Cool,” I said, dropping my jacket on the sofa and flopping down between Daniel and Justin. “What’ve we got?”
“Odd oddments,” Rafe said. “Here. For you.” He wound up a moth-eaten clockwork mouse and sent it ticking along the floor towards me. It ground to a halt halfway, with a depressed scraping sound.