Page 26 of The Likeness

  It was so smooth, I didn’t even notice anything had happened. Abby and I split the cherries into four bundles and put them in with that day’s sandwiches, Rafe ended up eating most of them, and I forgot the whole thing, until the next evening.

  We had washed a few of the less fugly curtains and were putting them up in the spare rooms, to keep the heat in rather than as an aesthetic choice—we had one electric storage heater and the fireplace to heat that whole house, in winter it must have been Arctic. Justin and Daniel were doing the first-floor room, while the rest of us did the top ones. Abby and I were threading curtain hooks for Rafe to hang when we heard a tumble of heavy things falling below us, a thud, a yelp from Justin; then Daniel calling, “It’s all right, I’m fine.”

  “What now?” said Rafe. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, hanging onto the curtain rail with one hand.

  “Someone fell off something,” Abby said, through a mouthful of curtain hooks, “or over something. I think they’ll live.”

  There was a sudden low exclamation, through the floorboards, and Justin called, “Lexie, Abby, Rafe, come here! Come look!”

  We ran downstairs. Daniel and Justin were kneeling on the spare-room floor, surrounded by an explosion of weird old objects, and for a second I thought one of them was hurt after all. Then I saw what they were looking at. There was a stiff, stained leather pouch on the floor between them, and Daniel was holding a revolver.

  “Daniel came off the stepladder,” Justin said, “and knocked over all this stuff, and this just fell out, right at his feet. I can’t even work out where it was, in all this mess. God knows what else is in there.”

  It was a Webley, a beauty, glowing with patina between the crusted patches of dirt. “My God,” Rafe said, dropping down beside Daniel and reaching out to touch the barrel. “That’s a Webley Mark Six; an old one, too. They were standard issue during the First World War. Your crazy great-uncle or whoever he was, Daniel, the one you look like: this could have been his.”

  Daniel nodded. He inspected the gun for a moment, then broke it open: unloaded. “William,” he said. “It could have been his, yes.” He closed the cylinder, fitted his hand carefully, gently, around the grip.

  “It’s a mess,” Rafe said, “but it could be cleaned up. All it needs is a couple of days’ soak in a good solvent, and then some work with a brush. I suppose ammo would be too much to ask for.”

  Daniel smiled at him, a quick, unexpected flash of a grin. He tipped the leather pouch upside down and a faded cardboard packet of cartridges fell out, onto the floor.

  “Oh, beautiful,” Rafe said, picking up the box and giving it a shake. I could tell from the rattle that it was almost full; there had to be nine or ten cartridges in there. “We’ll have this up and running in no time. I’ll buy the solvent.”

  “Don’t mess around with that thing unless you know what you’re doing,” said Abby. She was the only one who hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.

  Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was seven. I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland—”

  “Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”

  “But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”

  Again with that we. “Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.

  Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me—”

  “I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”

  His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.

  That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.

  I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.

  “I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection—”

  “You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”

  “Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”

  Straight in with the diversion. “I did too have a collection,” I said. “I had all four sisters out of Little Women. You could get the mother, too, but she was such a horrible sanctimonious cow that I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I didn’t even want the others, but I had this aunt—”

  “Why don’t you get Little Women dolls?” Justin asked Abby, plaintively. “And get rid of that awful poppet?”

  “If you keep bitching about her, I swear, one of these mornings you’re going to wake up and find her on your pillow, staring at you.”

  Rafe was watching me, hooded golden eyes across his solitaire game. “I kept trying to tell her I didn’t even like dolls,” I said, over Justin’s horrified noises, “but she never got the hint. She—”

  Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.

  There was a long, not-quite-comfortable silence. The fire spat sparks up the chimney. Abby had gone back to trying bits of fabric against her doll’s dress. Rafe was still watching me; I had my head down over my book (Rip Corelli, She Liked Them Married ), but I could feel his eyes.

  For some reason, the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won’t answer questions beginning with “Where.”

  And another thing: Rafe had to know that. He had been nudging at the boundary on purpose. I wasn’t sure whose buttons he had been trying to push, exactly, or why—maybe everyone’s, maybe he was just in that kind of mood—but it was a tiny crack, in that perfect surface.

  * * *

  Frank’s FBI buddy got back to him on Wednesday. I knew the second Frank picked up the phone that something had happened, something big.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “Some lane, I don’t know. Why?”

  An owl hooted, close behind me; I whipped round in time to see it drifting into the trees only a few feet away, wings spread, light as ash. “What was that?” Frank asked sharply.

  “Just an owl. Breathe, Frank.”

  “Got your gun?”

  I hadn’t. I’d been so wrapped up in Lexie and the Fantastic Four; I’d completely forgotten that what I was s
upposed to be after was outside Whitethorn House, not inside, and was very likely also after me. That slip, even more than the note in Frank’s voice, sent a sharp warning twist through my stomach: Stay focused.

  Frank caught the second I hesitated, and pounced. “Go home. Now.”

  “I’ve only been out for ten minutes. The others will wonder—”

  “Let ’em wonder all they like. You don’t go wandering around unarmed.”

  I turned around and headed back up the lane, under the owl swaying on a branch, silhouetted sharp-eared against the sky. I cut round towards the front of the house—the lanes that way were wider, less cover for an ambush. “What’s happened?”

  “You heading home?”

  “Yeah. What’s happened?”

  Frank blew out a breath. “Brace yourself for this one, babe. My mate in the U.S. tracked down May-Ruth Thibodeaux’s parents—they live somewhere in the mountains in Arsefuck, North Carolina, don’t even have a phone. He sent a guy out there to break the news and see what else he could pick up. And guess what he found out.”

  In the instant before I told him to quit playing games and get to the point, I knew. “It’s not her.”

  “Bingo. May-Ruth Thibodeaux died of meningitis when she was four. Your man showed the parents the ID shot; they’d never seen our girl before.”

  It hit me like a huge breath of pure wild oxygen; I wanted to laugh so badly I was almost dizzy with it, like a teenager in love. She had fooled the hell out of me—pickup trucks and soda fountains, my arse—and all I could think was Fair play to you, girl. Here I had thought I lived light; all of a sudden that felt like an adolescent game, like some rich kid playing at poor while the trust fund piled up, because this girl had been the real thing. She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “How many times did she do this?”

  “What I want to know is why. This is all backing up my theory: someone was after her, and he wasn’t giving up. She picks up the May-Ruth ID from somewhere—a graveyard, maybe, or an obituary in an old newspaper—and starts over. He tracks her down and she takes off again, out of the country this time. You don’t do that unless you’re running scared. But he got to her in the end.”

  I reached the front gates, got my back against one of the gateposts and took a deep breath. In the moonlight the drive looked very strange, cherry blossom and shadow scattering black and white so thick that the ground blended into the trees without a seam, one great patterned tunnel. “Yeah,” I said. “He got to her in the end.”

  “And I don’t want him getting to you.” Frank sighed. “I hate to admit it, but our Sammy may have been right about this one, Cass. If you want out of there, you can start playing sick tonight and I’ll have you out tomorrow morning.”

  It was a still night, not even a breeze in the cherry trees. A thread of sound came drifting down the drive, very faint and very sweet: a girl’s voice, singing. The steed my true love rides on . . . A tingle ran up my arms. I wondered then and I wonder now whether Frank was bluffing; whether he was actually ready to pull me out, or whether he knew, before he offered, that by this time there was only one answer I could give.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll be OK. I’m staying.”

  With silver he is shod before . . .

  “Fair enough,” Frank said, and he didn’t sound one bit surprised. “Keep that gun on you and keep your eyes open. Anything turns up, anything at all, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks, Frank. I’ll check in tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

  It was Abby who was singing. Her bedroom window glowed soft with lamplight and she was brushing out her hair, slow, absent strokes. In yon green hill do dwell . . . In the dining room the guys were cleaning the table, Daniel’s sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, Rafe waving a fork to make some point, Justin shaking his head. I leaned against the broad back of a cherry tree and listened to Abby’s voice, unfurling out under the window sash and up to the huge black sky.

  God only knew how many lives this girl had left behind to find her way here, home. I can go in there, I thought. Any time I want, I can run up those steps and open that door and walk in.

  * * *

  Small cracks. On Thursday evening we were out in the garden again, after dinner—huge mounds of roast pork and roast potatoes and vegetables and then apple pie, no wonder Lexie had weighed more than me. We were drinking wine and trying to work up the energy to do something useful. The strap had come off my watch, so I was sitting on the grass, trying to reattach it with Lexie’s nail file, the same one I had used to turn the pages of her date book. The rivet kept flying out.

  “Dammit to hell and blast and buggeration,” I said.

  “That’s a highly illogical thing to say,” said Justin lazily, from the swing seat. “What’s wrong with buggeration?”

  My antennae went up. I had been wondering if Justin might be gay, but Frank’s research hadn’t turned up anything one way or the other—no boyfriends, no girlfriends—and he could just as easily have been a nice sensitive straight guy with a domestic streak. If he was gay, then there was at least one guy I could cross off the Baby-Daddy list.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Justin, stop flaunting,” Rafe said. He was lying on his back on the grass, with his eyes shut and his arms folded behind his head.

  “You’re such a homophobe,” said Justin. “If I said ‘Dammit to fuck’ and Lexie said ‘What’s wrong with fucking?’ you wouldn’t accuse her of flaunting.”

  “I would,” said Abby, from beside Rafe. “I’d accuse her of flaunting her love life when the rest of us don’t have one.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Rafe said.

  “Oh, you,” said Abby. “You don’t count. You never tell us anything. You could be having a torrid affair with the entire Trinity women’s hockey team and none of us would ever know a thing about it.”

  “I have never had an affair with anyone on the women’s hockey team, actually, ” Rafe said primly.

  “Is there a women’s hockey team?” Daniel wanted to know.

  “Don’t go getting ideas,” Abby told him.

  “I think that’s Rafe’s secret,” I said. “See, because he keeps up this mysterious silence, we all have this image of him getting up to unspeakable things behind our backs, seducing hockey teams and shagging like a bunny rabbit. I think actually he never tells us anything because he never has anything to tell: he has even less of a love life than the rest of us.” Rafe’s eyes slid sideways and he gave me a tiny, enigmatic grin.

  “That wouldn’t be easy,” said Abby.

  “Isn’t anyone going to ask me about my torrid affair with the men’s hockey team?” asked Justin.

  “No,” said Rafe. “Nobody is going to ask about any of your torrid affairs, because for one thing we know we’re going to hear all about them anyway, and for another they’re always boring as shit.”

  “Well,” said Justin, after a moment. “That certainly put me in my place. Although coming from you . . .”

  “What?” Rafe demanded, propping himself up on his elbows and giving Justin a cold stare. “Coming from me, what?”

  Nobody said anything. Justin took off his glasses and started cleaning them, too thoroughly, on the hem of his shirt; Rafe lit a cigarette.

  Abby cut her eyes at me, like a cue. I remembered those videos: There’s an understanding there, Frank had said. This was Lexie’s job, breaking tension, coming in with some cheeky comment so everyone could roll their eyes and laugh and move on. “Ah, dammit to hell and blast and nonspecific fornication, ” I said, when the rivet went shooting off into the grass again. “Is everyone OK with that?”

  “What’s wrong with nonspecific
fornication?” Abby demanded. “I don’t like my fornication specific.”

  Even Justin laughed, and Rafe snapped out of his cold sulk and balanced his smoke on the edge of the patio and helped me find the rivet. A shot of happiness went through me: I had got it right.

  * * *

  “That detective showed up outside my tutorial,” Abby said Friday evening, in the car. Justin had gone home early—he had been complaining about a headache all day, but to me it looked more like a sulk, and I got the sense it was aimed at Rafe—so the rest of us were in Daniel’s car, going nowhere on the highway, gridlocked in with thousands of suicidal-looking office workers and underendowed prats in SUVs. I was breathing on my window and playing tic-tac-toe with myself in the steam.