This was all wrong.
Her height. And something else, a tiny detail, I’d seen it only very recently, it was …
“You’re not Anabel,” I said slowly. An icy certainty rose in me, almost choking me. “Your eyelid. When we were talking beside my locker yesterday, it twitched just like that.” For a moment even the twittering of the birds seemed to stop.
“Arthur!” I whispered, and his name echoed almost like a scream in the silence.
“Oh, damn it,” said Anabel in Arthur’s voice. “You really are good.”
27
AND NOW IT was Arthur standing in front of me, beautiful as an angel, and all at once the whole thing seemed to me so logical that I could only wonder how I hadn’t seen through him at once.
“Oh, come on, Liv, you didn’t really think we were friends again, did you?” he asked.
Yes. No. Not directly, but I’d believed there was a truce between us.
“So it was you all the time.” I realized myself how resentful that sounded, and I was annoyed. I quickly added, “By the way, you’ve forgotten to take my ball gown off.”
The fact that for half a second Arthur looked down at himself, taken aback, gave me a brief moment of satisfaction. Of course he wasn’t wearing my dress anymore, but black jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that made him look perfect. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a pair of huge black angel’s wings had spread wide on his back.
“Ha-ha, very funny,” he said. “And yes, it was me all the time. It wasn’t particularly difficult to trick your little sister. She’s not a complicated character—the opposite, if anything.”
“Hey!” said Mia indignantly.
“That was a compliment,” Arthur told her. “You’re darned straightforward for a girl. Nice to find there are still some like that.”
Failing to take this as flattery, Mia wrinkled her nose.
“So you’ve been spying on her to provide Secrecy with information?” I was trying hard to sound superior, but not succeeding very well. Especially as I realized that that certainly hadn’t been his only reason.
Arthur smiled at the way my voice shook. “Of course I knew you wouldn’t like the whole school to know your secrets, but that was just a side effect, for fun.”
“The sleepwalking…”
“The sleepwalking,” Arthur imitated me. “Yes, the sleepwalking—brilliant, don’t you agree? It took me weeks to find out how to get someone to walk in her sleep, and I have to admit that it doesn’t work with everyone. Obviously you need a basic tendency to do it. Luckily your sister has that.” He paused for a moment. The birds were still silent, and a misty veil had come over the sun. “Isn’t it weird to think that she could simply get up one night and hang herself in your garden shed?” said Arthur.
My fingers clenched convulsively. “Arthur, Mia has never harmed you.”
“That’s true, poor thing. She has to suffer just because it’s her bad luck to be your sister.” He looked at me attentively, and now his tone of voice was spiteful. “Smart, brave little Liv who’s wound Grayson and Henry around her little finger. And who’s so good at kung fu…”
“You’re still annoyed with me.”
“Annoyed?” he interrupted. He wasn’t looking amused now, on the contrary. His eyes were sparkling with pure rage. I instinctively took a step back.
“Annoyed?” he repeated. “I might be annoyed if you’d left a scratch on my car. Or if I’d lent you my iPad and you wrecked it. No, I’m not annoyed with you; I never was. I hate you.”
Okay. So now we knew.
“You’ve destroyed my life, Liv Silver. You’ve ruined all my plans. It’s your fault that Anabel and I aren’t together anymore. It’s your fault I’ve lost all my friends. And it’s your fault that chewing still hurts me.”
Arthur almost shouted that last bit. All his self-confidence seemed to have left him, and Mia was so startled that she slipped off the swing and came over to me.
“You—broke—my—damn—jawbone,” Arthur went on a little more quietly, as if he still couldn’t grasp that.
“Really? That was you?” asked Mia. “Secrecy wrote that it was an accident.”
“Yes, an accident called Liv Silver,” said Arthur bitterly.
I supposed it wouldn’t be any use reminding him of the circumstances leading up to that. A dark cloud came in front of the sun. More clouds were towering up above the meadow where the sheep were grazing. A summer storm was brewing. Uneasily, I looked around at the cottage. This was probably the time to go out into the corridor and tell Grayson and Henry what had happened.
But there was one thing that I wanted to know first.
“Why—” I began, but Arthur didn’t let me finish.