It was cold inside, too. The heating system couldn’t cope with the size of the house, I was running out of firewood and no one had thought to bring me more. Drafts surged up out of nowhere like someone had stealthily opened a door or a window, but when I went looking for the crack I could never find it. Spiders were coming in for the winter; I saw more and more of them, in corners and along skirting boards, chunky gray-brown things with vaguely sinister markings. Woodlice trundled around the crack beneath the French doors.
A few weeks after she had her baby, Elaine McNamara went home, much to Haskins’s relief. He didn’t mention her again. She didn’t show up anywhere in Ireland in the 1901 census, but there was a woman in the right part of Clare who matched her mother’s info, with six kids born alive and six still living, so it looked like Elaine had married or emigrated or both. I couldn’t find any marriage record for her. Hugo would have known how to go about it, and about looking for the baby’s father, running complicated software to compare various DNA profiles, but I didn’t have a clue where to start.
Instead I wrote Mrs. Wozniak a report. I didn’t know the right format so it was short, just the bare facts and a few lines at the end, as close as I could get to what I thought Hugo would have written: Unfortunately I don’t have the skills to pursue this any further. Another genealogist might be able to do more. I hope this new information doesn’t come as too much of a shock, and I sincerely wish you all the best of luck in your search.
When I was done I read it out loud, into the empty air of the study, to the dusty books and the wooden elephants and Hugo’s old slippers left askew under his chair. “Hugo,” I said. “Is this right?” I had started asking him questions occasionally—not that I had lost the plot completely and believed he would answer, just that it got awfully quiet in that house. Some days the silence felt like an actual substance, thickening subtly but implacably with every hour, till it got hard to breathe. I emailed off the report to Mrs. Wozniak, along with DNA analysis results and scans of the most important diary pages, and didn’t open her reply.
It was worse after that. With nothing and no one to keep me on a schedule, my body clock went completely out of whack. I had gone from sleeping too much to sleeping way too little—the Xanax weren’t working any more, they just threw me into a nasty limbo where I couldn’t go to sleep but I was never quite sure whether I was actually awake. I wandered the house in half-light, between rooms dense with blackness and pale rectangles that could have been windows or doorways. Occasionally I got dizzy—I was never sure when it was time to eat—and had to sit down for a while. When I groped for something to tell me what room I was in, my hands found only unfamiliar objects: a table leg thick with carvings my fingers couldn’t decipher, a ribbed wallpaper pattern I didn’t recognize, an edge of curled linoleum when there had never been linoleum in the Ivy House. Things turned up in strange places, a heavy old 1949 penny on my pillow, Miriam’s purple psychic rock in the bathroom sink.
When I thought about Susanna and Leon it was, strangely enough, not with horror or condemnation or anger but with envy. They came to my mind drawn in strong indelible black that gave them a kind of glory; Dominic’s death defined them, immutably, not for better or for worse but simply for what they were, and it took my breath away. My own life blurred and smeared in front of my eyes; my outlines had been scrubbed out of existence (and how easily it had been done, how casually, one absent swipe in passing) so that I bled away at every margin into the world.
I think Rafferty knew. I think wherever he was, miles away, pulling out his notebook at some murder scene or raising the sail on a rugged little boat, he raised his head and sniffed the wind and smelled me, finally ready.
* * *
?He came for me on a cold late afternoon that smelled of burning tires. It had somehow penetrated to my brain that it had been days or possibly weeks since I had seen sunlight, so I had gone out to sit on the terrace, and by the time I realized that dusk was starting to fall and it was freezing I didn’t have the energy to get up and go back inside. The clouds were dense and winter-white, unmoving; under the trees the ground was thick with sodden layers of leaves. A squirrel was scrabbling and dashing under the oaks and the gray cat was back, crouched in the rutted mud, tail-tip twitching as he slunk towards an oblivious bird.
“That your cat?” a voice asked, behind me and much too close.
I was up and hurling myself backwards across the terrace before I knew it, a shout ripping out of me, grabbing for a weapon, rock, anything— “Jesus, man,” Rafferty said, holding up his hands. “It’s only me.”
“What the fuck—” I was gasping for breath. “What the fuck—”
“Didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry about that.”
“What—” He looked taller than I remembered him, ruddier, strong high sweeps of jaw and cheekbone more sharply defined. For a moment, in the gray light, I wasn’t positive it was him. But the voice, rich and warm as wood, that was Rafferty all right. “What are you doing here?”
“I was knocking for ages, couldn’t make you hear. In the end I tried the door. It’s not locked. I thought I should check that you were OK.”
“I’m fine.”
“No offense, man, but you don’t look fine. You look in tatters.” He strolled closer, across the terrace. He made my adrenaline spike and keep spiking. There was something around him, a buzz and thrum, a vitality that ate up the air like fire and left me with nothing to breathe. “Can’t be good for the head, being cooped up here on your own. Would you not go stay with your folks for a bit, something like that?”
“I’m fine.”
That got a twitch of his eyebrow, but he left it. “You should keep that door locked. It’s a lovely neighborhood, but still: better safe than sorry, these days.”
“I do. I must have forgotten.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened that door. It could have been unlocked for days.
“We’re after wrecking his hunt,” Rafferty said, nodding towards the cat. The birds were gone; the cat had frozen, one paw lifted, giving us a wary stare and deciding whether to run for it. “He’s not yours, no?”
“It hangs around sometimes,” I said. I was still shaking. I didn’t actually feel any better now that he had turned out not to be a burglar. Like an idiot I had believed Susanna, It’s over, the cops are gone, we can forget the whole thing . . . “I don’t know who owns it.”
“I’d say he’s a stray. He’s awful bony. Got any ham slices, anything like that?”
For some reason I plodded obediently into the kitchen and stared into the fridge. He can’t do anything to me, I told myself. He’ll have to go away soon. I had forgotten what I was looking for. In the end I spotted a packet of deli chicken slices.
When I got back outside, Rafferty and the cat were still staring each other out of it. “Here,” I said. My voice sounded rusty.
“Ah, lovely,” Rafferty said, taking the packet from me. “Now. You don’t want to throw it to him, or he’ll think you’re throwing a rock or something, and he’ll be gone. What you want to do—” Wandering casually down the steps and into the garden, face still turned towards me, talking evenly and calmly: “Just get as close to him as you can, yeah? and leave it down, and then back away. I’d say—” The cat flinched, ready to run; Rafferty stopped instantly. “Yeah. Here ought to do it.” He stooped and laid a slice of meat on the ground. The cat’s eyes followed every move.
Rafferty straightened smoothly and meandered back to the terrace, dropping a couple more slices of chicken on the way, big clear gestures so the cat wouldn’t miss them. “Now,” he said, flipping back his coattails and taking a seat at the top of the steps, easy as if he lived there. “Do that every day or so, and he’ll keep coming round. Keep the rats down for you.”
“We don’t have rats.”
“No? Something dragged Dominic’s hand out of that tree for a snack. What was it, if it wasn’t rats?”