The Likeness

  I hoped to God we wouldn’t run into a situation where I needed to show off my equestrian skills. “And then there’s Abby,” Justin said. “Has Abby ever talked to you about her mother?”

  “Bits,” I said. “I got the idea.”

  “It’s worse than she makes it sound. I actually met the woman—you weren’t here yet, it was back in about third year. We were all over at Abby’s flat one evening, and her mother showed up, banging on the door. She was . . . God. The way she was dressed—I don’t know if she’s actually a prostitute, or just . . . well. She was obviously out of it; she kept shouting at Abby, but I barely understood a word she said. Abby shoved something into her hand—money, I’m sure, and you know how broke Abby’s always been—and practically hauled her out of the door. She was white as a ghost, Abby was; I thought she was going to faint.” Justin looked up at me anxiously, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Don’t tell her I told you that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “She’s never mentioned it since; I doubt she wants to talk about it now. Which is sort of my point. I’m sure you’ve got reasons, too, why you thought the no-pasts thing was a good idea. Maybe what happened changed all that, I don’t know, but . . . just remember you’re still fragile, right now. Just give it a little while before you do anything irrevocable. And if you do decide to get in touch with your parents, maybe the best thing would be not to tell the others. It would . . . Well. It would hurt them.”

  I gave him a puzzled look. “You think?”

  “Well, of course. We’re . . .” He was still messing with the cling-film; there was a faint pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “We love you, you know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re your family now. All of one another’s family—I mean, that’s not right, but you know what I mean . . .”

  I leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Course I do,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Justin’s phone beeped. “That’ll be Rafe,” he said, fishing it out of his pocket. “Yes: wanting to know where we are.”

  He started texting Rafe back, peering nearsightedly at the phone, and reached over to squeeze my shoulder with his free hand. “Just have a think about it,” he said. “And eat your lunch.”

  * * *

  “I see you’ve been playing Who’s the Daddy,” Frank said, that night. He was eating something—a burger, maybe, I could hear paper rustling. “And Justin’s out, in more ways than one. Place your bets: Danny Boy or Pretty Boy?”

  “Or neither,” I said. I was on my way to my lurk spot—I was ringing Frank almost as soon as I got out the back gate, these days, rather than wait even a few extra minutes to hear if he had anything new on Lexie. “Our killer knew her, remember; no way to be sure just how well. That’s not what I was after, anyway. I was chasing down the no-pasts thing, trying to work out what these four aren’t sharing.”

  “And all you got was a nice collection of sob stories. I grant you the no-pasts thing is fucked up, but we already knew they were a bunch of weirdos. No news there.”

  “Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that afternoon had been useless, even if I didn’t know how it fit in yet. “I’ll keep poking around.”

  “It’s been one of those days all round,” Frank said, through a mouthful. “I’ve been chasing our girl and getting zip. You’ve probably noticed: we’ve got a gap a year and a half long in her story. She ditches the May-Ruth ID in late 2000, but she doesn’t show up as Lexie until early 2002. I’m trying to track down where and who she was in between. I doubt she went home, wherever that is, but it’s always a possibility; and even if she didn’t, she might have left us a clue or two along the way.”

  “I’d focus on European countries,” I said. “After September 2001, airport security tightened up a lot; she wouldn’t have made it out of the U.S. and into Ireland on a fake passport. She had to be this side of the Atlantic before then.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what name to chase. There’s no record of May-Ruth Thibodeaux ever applying for a passport. I’m thinking she went back to her own identity or bought herself a new one in New York, flew out of JFK on that, switched identity again once she got wherever she was going—”

  JFK—Frank was still talking but I’d stopped dead in the middle of the lane, just forgotten to keep walking, because that mysterious page in Lexie’s date book had gone off in my head with a flash-bang like a firecracker. CDG 59 . . . I’d flown into Charles de Gaulle a dozen times, going to spend summers with my French cousins, and fifty-nine quid sounded just about right for a one-way. AMS: not Abigail Marie Stone; Amsterdam. LHR: London Heath-row. I couldn’t remember the others but I knew, sure as steel, that they would turn out to be airport codes. Lexie had been pricing flights.

  If all she wanted was an abortion she would have headed to England, no need to mess about with Amsterdam and Paris. And those were one-way prices, not returns. She had been getting ready to run again, right off the edge of her life and out into the wide blue world.

  Why?

  Three things had changed, in her last few weeks. She had found out she was pregnant; N had materialized; and she had started making plans to take off. I don’t believe in coincidences. There was no way to be sure of the order in which those three things had happened, but by whatever roundabout path, one of them had led to the other two. There was a pattern there, somewhere: tantalizingly close, popping in and out of view like one of those pictures you have to cross your eyes to see, there and gone too quick to catch.

  Up until that night, I hadn’t had much time for Frank’s mystery stalker. Very few people are willing to ditch their whole lives and spend years bouncing around the world after some girl who pissed them off. Frank has this tendency to go for the more interesting theory rather than the more likely one, and I’d filed this one somewhere between Outside Chance and Pure Hollywood Melodrama. But this made three times, at least, that something had smashed broadside into her life, left it totaled, irreclaimable. My heart twisted for her.

  “Hello? Ground control to Cassie?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Frank, can you do something for me? I want to know anything out of the ordinary that happened in her May-Ruth life in the month or so before she went missing—make it two months, to be on the safe side.”

  Running away from N? Running away with N, to start a whole new life somewhere, him and her and their baby?

  “You underestimate me, babe. Already done. No strange visitors or phone calls, no arguments with anyone, no odd behavior, nothing.”

  “I didn’t mean stuff like that. I want anything that happened, anything at all: if she switched job, switched boyfriend, moved house, got sick, took a course in something. Not ominous stuff, just your basic life events.”

  Frank thought about this for a while, chewing his burger or whatever. “Why?” he asked, in the end. “If I’m going to call in more favors from my friendly Fed, I need to give him a reason.”

  “Make something up. I don’t have a good reason. Intuition, remember?”

  “OK,” Frank said. He sounded disturbingly like he was picking bits out of his teeth. “I’ll do it. If you do something for me in exchange.”

  I had started walking again, automatically, towards the cottage. “Hit me.”

  “Don’t relax. You’ve started to sound way too much like you’re enjoying yourself in there.”

  I sighed. “Me woman, Frank. Woman multitask. I can do my job and have a laugh or two, all at the same time.”

  “Good for you. All I know is, undercover relax, undercover in big trouble. There’s a killer out there, probably within a mile or so of wherever you’re standing right now. You’re supposed to be tracking him down, not playing Happy Families with the Fantastic Four.”

  Happy Families. I had been taking it for granted that she’d hidden the diary to make sure no one found out about her N appointments, whoever or whatever N was. But this: she had had a whole other secret to keep. If the others had found out that Lexie was about to slash herself straight out of their interlaced world, shed it like a dragonfly shrugging out of its skin and leaving behind nothing but the perfect shape of its a
bsence, they would have been devastated. I was suddenly, almost dizzily glad I hadn’t told Frank about that diary.

  “I’m on it, Frank,” I said.

  “Good. Stay on it.” Paper crumpling—he had finished his burger—and the beep of him hanging up.

  I was almost at my surveillance spot. Snippets of hedge and grass and earth sprang alive in the pale circle of the torch beam, vanished the next moment. I thought of her running hard down this same lane, this same faint circle of light ricocheting wild, the strong door to safety lost forever in the dark behind her and nothing up ahead but that cold cottage. Those streaks of paint on her bedroom wall: she had had a future planned here, in this house, with these people, right up until the moment the bomb dropped. We’re your family, Justin had said, all of one another’s family, and I had been in Whitethorn House long enough to start understanding how much he meant it and how much it meant. What the hell, I thought, what the hell could have been strong enough to blow all that away?

  * * *

  Now that I was looking, the cracks kept coming. I couldn’t tell whether they had been there all along, or whether they were deepening under my eyes. That night I was reading in bed when I heard voices outside, below my window.

  Rafe had gone to bed before I had, and I could hear Justin going through his nighttime ritual downstairs—humming, puttering, the odd mysterious thump. That left Daniel and Abby. I knelt up by the window, held my breath and listened, but they were three stories down and all I could hear through Justin’s cheerful obbligato was a low, fast-paced murmur.

  “No,” Abby said, louder and frustrated. “Daniel, that’s not the point . . .” Her voice dropped again. “Moooon river,” Justin sang to himself, hamming it up happily.

  I did what nosy kids have done since the dawn of time: I decided I needed a very quiet drink of water. Justin didn’t even pause in his humming as I moved across the landing; on the ground floor, there was no light under Rafe’s door. I felt my way along the walls and slipped into the kitchen. The French window was open, just a thumb’s width. I went to the sink—slowly, not even a rustle from my pajamas—and held a glass under the tap, ready to turn the water on if anyone caught me.

  They were on the swing seat. The patio was bright with moonlight; they would never see me, behind glass in the dark kitchen. Abby was sitting sideways, her back against the arm of the seat and her feet on Daniel’s lap; he had a glass in one hand and was covering her ankles casually with the other. The moonlight poured down Abby’s hair, whitened the curve of her cheek and pooled in the folds of Daniel’s shirt. Something fast and needle-fine darted through me, a shot of pure distilled pain. Rob and I used to sit like that on my sofa, through long late nights. The floor bit cold at my bare feet and the kitchen was so silent, it hurt my ears.

  “For good,” Abby said. There was a high note of disbelief in her voice. “Just keep on going, like this, for good. Pretend nothing ever happened.”

  “I don’t see,” Daniel said, “that we have any other option. Do you?”

  “Jesus, Daniel!” Abby ran her hands through her hair, head going back, flash of white throat. “How is this an option? This is insane. Is this seriously what you want? You want to do this for the rest of our lives?”

  Daniel turned to look at her; I could only see the back of his head. “In an ideal world,” he said gently, “no. I’d like things to be different; several things.”

  “Oh, God,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyebrows as if she had a headache starting. “Let’s not even go there.”

  “One can’t have everything, you know,” Daniel said. “We knew, when we first decided to live here, that there would be sacrifices involved. We expected that.”

  “Sacrifices,” Abby said, “yes. This, no. This I did not see coming, Daniel, no. None of it.”

  “Didn’t you?” Daniel asked, surprised. “I did.”

  Abby’s head jerked up and she stared at him. “This? Come on. You saw this coming? Lexie, and—”

  “Well, not Lexie,” Daniel said. “Hardly. Although perhaps . . .” He checked himself, sighed. “But the rest: yes, I thought it was a distinct possibility. Human nature being what it is. I assumed you’d considered it too.”

  Nobody had told me there was a rest of this, never mind sacrifices. I realized I had been holding my breath for so long that my head was starting to spin; I let it out, carefully.

  “Nope,” Abby said wearily, to the sky. “Call me stupid.”

  “I would never do that,” Daniel said, smiling a little sadly out over the lawn. “Heaven knows, I’m the last person in the world who has any right to judge you for missing the obvious.” He took a sip of his drink—glitter of pale amber as the glass tilted—and in that moment, in the fall of his shoulders and the way his eyes closed as he swallowed, it hit me. I had seen these four as safe in their own enchanted fort, with everything they wanted within arm’s reach. I had liked that thought, a lot. But something had blindsided Abby, and for some reason Daniel was getting used to being terribly, constantly unhappy.

  “How does Lexie seem to you?” he asked.

  Abby took one of Daniel’s cigarettes and snapped the lighter hard. “She seems fine. A little quiet, and she’s lost some weight, but that’s the least we could expect.”

  “Do you think she’s all right?”

  “She’s eating. She’s taking her antibiotics.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about Lexie,” Abby said. “She seems pretty settled to me. As far as I can tell, she’s basically forgotten about the whole thing.”

  “In a way,” Daniel said, “that’s what’s been bothering me. I worry that she may be bottling everything up and one of these days she’s going to explode. And then what?”

  Abby watched him, smoke curling up slowly through the moonlight. “In some ways,” she said carefully, “it might not be the end of the world if Lexie did explode.”

  Daniel considered this, swirling his glass meditatively and looking out over the grass. “That would depend very much,” he said, “on the form the explosion took. I think it would be as well to be prepared.”

  “Lexie,” Abby said, “is the least of our problems here. Justin—I mean, it was obvious, I knew Justin was going to have trouble, but he’s just so much worse than I expected. He never saw this coming, any more than I did. And Rafe’s not helping. If he doesn’t stop being such a little bollocks, I don’t know what . . .” I saw her lips tighten as she swallowed. “And then there’s this. I am not having an easy time here either, Daniel, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that you don’t seem to give a damn.”

  “I do give a damn,” Daniel said. “I care very much, in fact. I thought you knew that. I just don’t see what either of us can do about it.”

  “I could leave,” Abby said. She was watching Daniel intently, her eyes round and very grave. “We could leave.”

  I fought down the impulse to slap a hand over the mike. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on here, but if Frank heard this, he would be positive that the four of them were planning some dramatic getaway and I was about to find myself bound and gagged in the coat closet while they hopped a plane to Mexico. I wished I had had the sense to test out the mike’s exact range.

  Daniel didn’t look at Abby, but his hand tightened around her ankles. “You could, yes,” he said, eventually. “There would be nothing I could do to stop you. But this is my home, you know. As I hope . . .” He took a breath. “As I hope it’s yours. I can’t leave it.”

  Abby let her head fall back against the bar of the swing seat. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Me neither. I just . . . God, Daniel. What do we do?”

  “We wait,” Daniel said quietly. “We trust that things will eventually fall into place, in their own time. We trust one another. We do our best.”

  A draft swept across my shoulders and I whipped round, already opening my mouth on my drink-of-water story. The glass clanged against the tap and I dropped it in the sink; the clatter sounded enormous enough to wake up all of Glenskehy. There was no one there.

  Daniel and Abby had frozen, faces tu
rned sharply towards the house. “Hey,” I said, pushing the door open and going out onto the patio. My heart was pounding. “I changed my mind: I’m not sleepy. Are you guys staying up?”

  “No,” Abby said. “I’m going to bed.” She swung her feet off Daniel’s lap and brushed past me, into the house. A moment later I heard her running up the stairs, not bothering to skip the creaky one.

  I went over to Daniel and sat down on the patio beside his legs, with my back up against the swing seat. Somehow I didn’t want to sit next to him; it would have felt crude, too much like demanding confidences. After a moment he reached out one hand and set it, lightly, on top of my head. His hand was so big that it cupped my skull like a child’s. “Well,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

  His glass was on the ground beside him, and I took a sip: whiskey on the rocks, the ice almost melted. “Were you and Abby fighting?” I asked.