“Sweep her off her feet,” Susanna said, tossing her cigarette butt into the last of the fire. “Live happily ever after.”
Rain swept softly against the window, the fire fluttered. I felt like there was something else they should be telling me, some crucial secret that would illuminate this whole story so that all its rotten shadows blazed to life with a great transforming meaning, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what that might be.
Twelve
It seems obvious that, just like Leon said, that revelation should have improved things. I wasn’t a murderer after all; what could be better news than that? Plus—yay for Toby the Boy Detective—I had finally found out what had happened to Dominic, just like I had wanted to; and to put the cherry on top, it was pretty clear that Rafferty couldn’t do anything to anyone, we were all home free and clear. Everything should have felt, within the limits of the situation, just creamy-peachy.
And yet, somehow, it didn’t. I had no idea what to do with this new state of affairs. Just for example, probably I should have at least done a little bit of ethical debating with myself about whether or not to tell anyone (my father, for one, didn’t he deserve to know that Hugo and I were both innocent?), but I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me; I had nothing left with which to debate this, assess this, think about this at all. It was like Susanna and Leon had dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.
I went about my routine methodically: breakfast and a shower, then up to the study for my day’s work. While I didn’t go as far as actually cooking, I did take breaks at the proper times to eat random assortments of things I found in the kitchen—someone, probably my mother, kept it stocked up with lavish quantities of stuff that didn’t need preparation. After dinner I sat in the living room with Hugo’s laptop and clicked around the internet until my brain shut down, at which point I went to bed. You’d expect I would have spent the nights tossing and turning, racked by grief and moral dilemmas and whatever else, or at least having more of those gruesome nightmares, but actually I slept like the dead.
I was doing well with Haskins’s diaries; now that I’d got the hang of his handwriting, I was ripping through them at a great pace. He went through a stage of trying to get the baby’s father’s name out of Elaine McNamara, who pissed him off royally by refusing to say. Haskins’s voice had become very clear in my head: nasal, heavily emphasized, overwhelmingly genteel, with a triumphant little throat-clear every time he had made some irrefutable point. One time, when I had been working for too long on a little too much Xanax (I was taking a fair amount again, not because I was tense exactly—I hadn’t gone back to pacing all night or beating myself up, none of that—but because it seemed like a much more sensible way to live), I asked him if he wanted coffee.
The only real change to the routine was the Sunday lunches, which by unspoken agreement weren’t happening any more. Someone called in every couple of days, presumably to make sure I wasn’t rocking and mumbling in a wardrobe or decomposing at the foot of the stairs, but I wasn’t very good conversation and they never stayed for long. Oliver gave me some speech about how we were all grieving but life went on, which I had absolutely no idea how to respond to; Miriam gave me a purple rock that promoted psychic healing, which I promptly lost. Leon rang me a few times; when I didn’t pick up, he left long, tentative, confused voice messages. I didn’t hear from Susanna at all, which was fine with me.
In April of 1888 Elaine McNamara had her baby—a boy, just like Hugo had figured, presumably Mrs. Wozniak’s grandfather. She “protested very vehemently and in great distress” when they took him away to give to the nice O’Hagans. Haskins explained to her that the way she was feeling was punishment for her sin, and she should be grateful that God still loved her enough to chasten her thus, but he didn’t think she really got it.
The house was going downhill, gradually enough that I didn’t notice it unless some chance thing caught my attention: weak wintry light picking out the cobwebs that festooned the high corners of the living room, a brush of my arm along a mantelpiece sending a swirl of dust motes into the air and leaving a thick streak down my sleeve. Lightbulbs blew and I didn’t replace them. In Leon’s old bedroom a stain was spreading across the ceiling, and there was a growing smell of damp coming from somewhere; I knew a plumber should take a look, but it felt impossible to make that kind of arrangement when I wasn’t sure whether I actually lived there or not, or for how long. No one had mentioned Hugo’s will, but it lurked uneasily in the corners of my mind: had he ever made the one he’d talked about, leaving the house to all six of us? who got it if he hadn’t? was someone going to be delegated to explain to me very tactfully that there was no hurry of course, so grateful for everything you did for Hugo stay as long as you like just with property prices doing so well and all the work to be done before we put it on the market . . . I thought of my apartment, tight-drawn curtains and stale air, alarm lights blinking and the red panic button hunched low beside my bed waiting for its moment.
I did think, a lot, about trying to talk to Melissa. Now that I hadn’t killed anyone, there seemed to be no reason why I shouldn’t. She hadn’t left—incredibly—because she had stopped loving me; she had only left because I was poking around playing detective, and she had in fact been right that that was a horrible idea, but now I could look her in the eye and swear that I was done with all that for good, also that the next time she told me something I would listen. Somehow I didn’t worry about convincing her I wasn’t a murderer. It made me cringe that I had ever thought she would believe that. Melissa had been way ahead of me, the whole time.
And yet I didn’t ring her. Because—when I got down to it, when I actually had the phone in my hand—why would I? What, from this dim house where ivy crisscrossed the windows and all my clothes smelled faintly of mildew, did I have to offer?
It was cold out. I didn’t go outside much; popping to the shops or going for a walk felt like bizarre foreign concepts, and although I occasionally wandered around the garden with some vague idea about healthful fresh air, I didn’t like it out there. My and Melissa’s optimistic marigolds and whatever had mostly died off—probably we had planted them wrong, or it had been the wrong season or the wrong soil, who knew. A few patches of skimpy, diseased-looking grass had sprouted, and there were some tall muscular gray-green weeds that looked like dandelions on steroids, but apart from that the earth was still a bare mess. The gap where the wych elm had been bothered me; even when I wasn’t looking that way it scratched at the corner of my eye, something essential missing and I needed to fix it, it was urgent— The sky was always gray, there were always crows flapping and conferring among the oak branches, the cold always bit straight down and sank deep, and I always went back inside within a few minutes.