Wren scuffed her toes against the dock, glancing away, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “And this morning?” she said, in a very small voice.
“Nobody ever comes out here besides the seven of us,” Alexander said. “So we say we’ve just found him.”
“And what are we supposed to have been doing up ’til now?” I asked.
“Sleeping,” Meredith said. “The sun’s not even up.” But as she spoke, the shrill call of a bird echoed between the trees and we knew—it wouldn’t be long. I glanced toward the end of the dock where Richard lay unmoving in the water, unable to push Hamlet’s poor fallen sparrow out of my head. The readiness is all.
Alexander said as much, in humbler words: “What time is it? Are we sure he’s … shuffled off?”
“No,” Filippa said. “But before we call the police, we need to be.”
Another silence, just long enough for the fear we’d briefly forgotten to come creeping back.
“I’ll do it,” Meredith said. She dragged her fingers through her hair, then let her arms fall to her sides again. I’d seen her do it a thousand times before: push her hair back from her face, steel herself, and step into the spotlight. But to watch her disappear into the freezing water was more than I could stomach.
“No,” I said. “I’ll go.”
Everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind except Meredith. A kind of desperate gratitude flitted across her face, so fast I almost didn’t see it. “All right,” she said. “Go.”
I nodded, mostly to myself. When I’d spoken, I’d done it thinking only of her, not of what I would have to do in her place. The others drifted apart, leaving a narrow path for me to walk to the end of the dock. I stood numb and unmoving for a second or two, then put one foot forward. Three slow steps put them all behind me. I paused, reached down to pull my shoes off. Three more steps. I unzipped my jacket and dropped it on the dock, tugged my sweatshirt off over my head. The cold air stung my bare skin, and goose bumps crept from my scalp down my spine and my arms and legs until every hair on my body was standing on end. Three more steps.
The lake had never seemed so enormous, so dark or so deep. Richard had sunk almost beneath the surface, like a toppled statue, and only marmoreal fragments emerged—three fingers loosely curled, the slope of a collarbone, sensuous twist of the throat. Misery set in stone. A thin film of crimson clung to his skin, too bright, too lurid, for that place of misty grays and evergreen. Fear seized my heart in a pitiless grip and crushed it to a small, hard lump like a cherry stone.
I stared down at him until I thought my blood would freeze if I didn’t move. I looked back to tell the others that I couldn’t do it—couldn’t go any closer, couldn’t plunge into that black water, couldn’t prod his crooked throat in search of a pulse. But the sight of them huddled together, like five children afraid of the dark, watching me and waiting for some kind of reassurance, made my own fear seem selfish.
I held my breath, closed my eyes, and stepped off the dock.
SCENE 2
Two hours later I hadn’t stopped shivering. We sat in a line against the wall in a third-floor hallway, where it was more than warm enough. I’d been given a blanket and a dry pair of jeans but no time to shower. Worse than the lingering chill was the sensation of the lake water and Richard’s blood seeping into my skin, burning and itching on every inch of my body. Filippa, sitting uncomfortably close on my left, lifted one hand without looking at me and placed it so lightly on the inside of my wrist that I barely felt it. She, James, Alexander, and Wren had already given their statements. Meredith was in the office giving hers, while I waited, in a state of catatonic anxiety, to give mine.
The door opened with a heavy scrape and Meredith reappeared. I tried unsuccessfully to catch her eye until I heard Holinshed say, “Mr. Marks.”
Filippa’s hand slid off my arm. I stood and moved toward the door with the brittle, mechanical motion of the Tin Man. Pausing on the threshold, I glanced at my classmates again. They sat with their faces all turned away, looking anywhere but at me or one another—except Alexander, who gave me the smallest secret nod. I bowed my head and ducked into the room.
It was bigger than I expected, like the gallery but lower-ceilinged, not as bright. The windows gazed out over the long sweeping drive at the front of the hall, the stately iron gate reduced to thorny black bars in the distance. I twitched as the door boomed shut behind me. There were four other people in the room—Frederick, standing in the corner by the window; Holinshed, leaning on the enormous claw-footed desk with his chin tucked against his chest; Gwendolyn, sitting behind the desk with her head in her hands; and a younger, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair, wearing a brown bomber jacket over a shirt and tie. I’d already caught a glimpse of him down at the Castle, before they herded us up to the Hall.
“Morning, Oliver.” He extended a hand, which I shook with clammy fingers, realizing that I must look vaguely ridiculous, what with a moth-eaten blanket hanging from my shoulders like some derelict sovereign’s cape.
“This is Detective Colborne,” Holinshed said. He peered at me over the rims of his glasses, expression unforgiving and severe. “He’s going to ask you some questions about Richard.”
Gwendolyn gave a small whimper and covered her mouth.
“Okay,” I said. My tongue felt like sandpaper.
“There’s no need to be nervous,” Colborne said, and that same hysterical laughter from two hours earlier echoed in my brain. “I just need you to tell me what happened, and if you don’t remember, it’s all right to tell me you don’t remember. No information is better than wrong information.”
“Okay.”