For a second I considered the possibility, but paying change fees on three separate flights, assuming I could get them, wouldn’t just stretch my budget to the breaking point, it would do a number on my finances for the next couple of months. It would also—and I couldn’t believe I actually felt this—feel rude, walking out on the others, on Simon and Melissa, who had spent so much time and energy hosting the reunion. And then there was Marcus.
No. You can’t leave yet. Not with things as they are. Get through this, and everything will get better.
But even with this half-assed resolve in place, I had caught something of Gretchen’s fear and felt sure that someone in the house knew much more than they were letting on.
We’re in danger. Not just me. All of us. You, I think, most of all.
I didn’t know what to do with that. Maybe Gretchen was the deranged obsessive. Maybe she had felt thwarted in her attempt to bag Marcus and had staged the whole absurd pantomime for dramatic effect.
Maybe. But I didn’t think so. The fear that had been writhing in my belly like a basket of snakes since Gretchen’s strange confession on the stairs now hardened and chilled till it felt like a stone in my gut, weighing me down, a constant, pulling dread.
“I don’t want to go upstairs,” said Kristen. “Can we sleep down here? All of us?”
“What about Brad?” said Marcus.
“What about him?” Kristen replied. “Apparently, he’s fine where he is. I’m not. Not there, I mean. I want to stay here.”
“OK,” said Simon, carefully, like he was setting down a fragile vase or pitcher. “We can do that. Everyone?”
Melissa nodded. Marcus shrugged and said, “OK.” Simon turned to me, and everyone turned with him.
“Jan?” he said.
“If I’m welcome,” I said.
If I had expected a chorus of encouragement, I was disappointed. No one spoke. Kristen frowned, uncertain. Marcus tipped his chin up, his face blank. Melissa looked hawkish.
“Of course you’re welcome,” said Simon.
I didn’t feel it, but I also didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. There was certainly nothing I could say. So I went up with Kristen and Simon to get my bedding, all three of us going into each bedroom, not talking, and then rolled out my duvet and pillows in front of the hearth in the living room. Brad came down with Kristen, but he didn’t speak, merely throwing himself onto the couch away from her and covering himself with a blanket they had found in a hall closet, rolling to bury his face in the cushions. Kristen watched him, her lips so thin they seemed to vanish, then made herself a bed on the other side of the room. Marcus curled up in an armchair. He had always been able to sleep in almost any position. He did not look at me. I considered marching over to him, yelling at him, slapping him, but I didn’t.
When you lie all the time, you get used to people losing faith in you, even the ones you want most desperately to believe you, and you know in your heart that it’s your own fault. Not in the present, but in the past, where all those little evasions and misdirections burrowed into the bedrock of your relationship and left it prone to tremor, sinkhole, and collapse. I couldn’t really blame him.
Except, of course, that I could and I did. I told him I never lied to him anymore, and I meant it. He knew me well enough. He should have trusted me.
I looked at him now, and he seemed more than sad and confused. He looked distraught. Bereft. Suddenly I wondered if I hadn’t been the only one hoping to rebuild our friendship, our love, and a new impulse to speak to him, to make it all right, ran through me like fire. I was trying to think what I would say when he shifted in his chair, nestling, his face turned away from me, and I knew that the moment had passed.
Simon didn’t want to run the generator just to keep a nightlight on, so he left the hurricane lamp burning on the stone counter in the adjoining kitchen, making sure there was nothing flammable close by. It lent the room a soft and shaded glow, like firelight, and might, in other circumstances, have been warm and evocative. Even romantic.
Not now.
“Should one of us . . . I don’t know, keep watch?” said Marcus, stirring.
“It’s not the Lord of the fucking Rings, professor,” said Brad.
Marcus scowled and looked away, then turned quickly back and said to Melissa, “Did Gretchen spend the whole afternoon with you?”
“What?” said Melissa, who was already lying down.
“You went shopping together when the rest of us went to the fort. Did she stay with you the whole time?”
“No,” said Melissa. “Just an hour or so. I felt like doing my own thing so . . .”
So she dumped her. That sounded like Mel.
“You know where she went? What she did?”
“No,” said Melissa. “Why?”
“No reason,” said Marcus. “Just wondering.”
“Can we go to sleep, please, Nancy Drew?” said Brad. “Miss Marple, or whoever the fuck you are. Or would you like to arrest the butler?”
Marcus said nothing and shifted again, closing his eyes. Brad settled down and started snoring softly almost immediately, but I lay awake, eyes open, going over and over what I had heard and seen, listening to the house settling. Simon fell asleep next, I thought, and within another half hour or so, I was fairly sure I was the only one still awake. I kept quite still, watching the black cedars swaying through the tall windows, listening for footsteps upstairs, for the sound of a door opening or closing, for anything—anything—out of place.
There was nothing.
As I lay there, I tried to make sense of Gretchen’s words but I couldn’t. People were keeping secrets, I was sure of that, but I couldn’t grasp how we might be in real danger. Even the underwear incident, nasty though it was in every sense, felt more like a mean-spirited and possibly deviant prank than a threat. Melissa had said as much to Gretchen as she tried to talk her into staying. Gretchen had been appalled, said Mel was blowing it off like it was just a kind of bad-taste joke. Melissa had abandoned the argument gracelessly, making it very clear in her slamming and banging around the house as she helped prepare for Gretchen’s departure that she didn’t approve of this running off to the airport. It was, unsurprisingly, Brad who added his own hard and dismissive brand of wit to the matter as he made himself toast the following morning.
“You know what I always say,” he mused to whoever might be listening. “It’s no good crying over spilled panties.”
He grinned to himself. Kristen, still in her makeshift bed, sat up and glared at him for a long moment, then lay down again, teeth clenched, eyes fixed on nothing.
The rest of us got up slowly and quietly, all the energy and fun long gone, the weight of my supposed guilt hanging over the room like a storm cloud. It reminded me of the final day of our last visit, the day after the cave.
I went to the bathroom upstairs and checked my room, half expecting to find my suitcase ransacked, my clothes torn to shreds and patches, but there was no sign that anyone had been in, and with the window bathing the room in golden morning light, it was hard to believe that we had been too scared to sleep upstairs.
In fact I had barely slept at all. The floor, in spite of the comforter, had been hard, and with my mind as preoccupied as it was, and with one ear open for the sound of unwelcome movement in the house, I had hardly shut my eyes. Bizarrely, however, I felt less tired than I had the previous morning, and my mind was clear. I confess to hesitating before drawing the shower curtain, but there was no Norman Bates lurking, and I emerged comparatively refreshed and determined to do one thing.
I had to bide my time because Marcus was, predictably, avoiding me. This was an old strategy of his when there were problems or the possibility of confrontation. I used to call him Old Ostrich Face, because of his ability to bury his head in the sand when things got rough, but since my coping mechanism involved inventing an entirely fictitious version of the universe, I guess I didn’t really have the high ground. In the end, I snuck up when he was taking his shower and ambushed him as he came out.
“I didn’t do it, you know,” I said to him.
“Jan, I don’t know what to think right now,” he said. “So I think it’s best if you just let me be.”
“I told you I’d never lie to you.”