“How can I not?”
“Well, don’t pick at it, that’s all.” She pauses, and déjà vu runs through the moment like silver metallic thread: a sticky summer evening, back in London, and I am trying to talk about Pa’s accident and Flora is saying, as she is now, “If we think about it too much, it’ll weigh us down, it’ll make life impossible.” As if we are four birds that must keep flying upward or we’ll drop out of the sky.
“Being at Applecote without Audrey feels like borrowing something without asking.” I lower my head to the mattress with a sigh. “It’s her life. It’s her house.”
“She’d happily lend her life to you of all people.”
Something inside me lights. I’d never thought of it like that before. I prop myself up on my elbows, resting my face in my hands, a sense of possibility fizzing. I imagine myself crawling into Audrey’s life, under it, like a blanket.
“Although it’s not the same, is it? It used to be so free and easy here.” Flora kicks up her legs, her soft feet brushing against mine midair. “Do you remember how Aunt Sybil would take us moonlight swimming in the river?”
The image of Sybil, her black-red wet curls flat on her head, her starlit bare shoulders emerging from the river water, swims toward us. “She doesn’t look like she would now.”
“No, she really doesn’t.” Flora studies the ends of her hair under the circle of lamplight, checking for split ends. She looks up and laughs. “Jump the well wall! My God. Remember that?”
“Now, that didn’t involve Aunt Sybil,” I laugh, enjoying having my big sister to myself for once. “She didn’t know about that one. Audrey swore me to secrecy.”
The key, Audrey said, was to imagine the narrow well as a shallow pond. Fear made you falter, nothing else. You can do anything if you’re not scared. (She took the same approach to scaling the towering beeches in the Wilderness.) It was the one thing I refused to do, the well. And I wouldn’t let Dot go anywhere near it at any time. It wasn’t just the blackness. Audrey said it was the entry point to the underworld, a labyrinth of tunnels that burrowed right down to the molten core of the earth. That was why if you threw a stone into it, you couldn’t hear the splash. It just kept falling, like a stone in space.
“And stars. All those stars,” Flora says wistfully.
We tug open her window. The night gusts in. We pull out the necklines of our nighties like nets to catch it, press the cool air against our skin, then settle, our chins on the sill. “Look.” Flora points, like we used to years ago from this same window. “The Bear . . . Can you see it?”
I nod, although I can see only Audrey’s heart-shaped face, stars for eyes, picked out like sequins.
“She must be dead, Margot,” Flora mutters softly, tuning in to my thoughts. “She drowned. Everyone thinks so.”
Audrey’s eyes sparkle before a dark cloud masks them again. “No body.”
Flora shakes her head, curls stippling my arm. “They say the river can sweep you all the way down to the London docks some days. All those horrible reed beds, too.”
“She could have run away,” I suggest, not really believing it.
“What would be the point of that?”
“Well, quite.”
Flora eyes me warily. “You got more details from Ma this morning, didn’t you? I heard you haranguing her. And I can tell by the expression on your face.”
I smile, superior with knowledge, and think of Ma earlier, wilted against the malachite-green parlor wall, surrounded by luggage trunks, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead in utter exasperation at my questions. She admitted defeat in the end and told me the little she knew, the gaps between facts.
“Go on, then.”
“Boat people,” I say cryptically.
“Boat people?” Flora wrinkles her nose.
“One theory. They stole her. Sooty-skinned river gypsies who wanted a pretty blond girl to bring up as their own.” I like this version, Audrey rocking on a narrow riverboat, one of those long barges, gold and green like something from the circus, full of skinny cats and grubby happy children, running along the vessel’s narrow flat roof with bare feet. Audrey is smiling and barefoot, too, her braids silted with river mud, wild and free as an otter.
“I think there might be rather worse things gypsies do to pretty blond girls, Margot,” Flora mutters darkly.
“Oh. Yes, of course,” I say, quickly trying to cover my own naivete. I feel a funny sort of heat imagining what might happen to a blond girl like Audrey, like me, in the hands of a piratical gypsy man. I squeeze my legs together and change the subject. “There were reports of a man in the area, too.” I pause, enjoying Flora’s impatience, the cool breeze playing around my neck. “A key suspect. Close to the bridge. In a hat.”
“Oo.” A bat curls toward the window, away again. Then more and more of them, like question marks.
“The police never found him.”
“Bah. Did they find anything?”
I shake my head. “Hopeless, Ma says. Swung a torch on a rope into the well. Checked the spades in the shed for blood. Oh yes, and searched the village houses belonging to the funny types—the men who had never married, the village idiot, at least the child-murdering sort. But it was too little, too late. A bit of a scandal afterward. One police officer lost his job.” I put on my grand, high Ma voice, imitating her, fluttering my lashes. “Darling, if you’re going to vanish and prefer to be found, I’d advise you to vanish in London under the beady eye of Scotland Yard.”
Flora’s laugh trails off into sadness. We sit in silence for a moment, our thoughts separating. Then Flora says, “But what about the obvious?” and the conversation plunges somewhere darker, gathering speed.
“Moll was the last person to see her, that’s true,” I acknowledge. “Sybil and Perry were at a dance that evening, but Sybil gave Audrey permission to fish before they left, Ma said, so that wasn’t Moll’s fault, or idea, Audrey being by the river alone. And Moll was the one who searched and searched for her, walking miles and miles through fields with a stick, who never deserted Sybil and Perry afterward, not like the rest of the staff. Anyway, don’t you remember how Moll adored Audrey?”
Flora drops her voice to a barely audible whisper. “I don’t mean Moll.”
“Oh.” Something unspoken seesaws between us. The hairs on my arms spike.
“The police, however dozy, must surely have considered it, Margot, even if he did have an alibi.”
I feel my heart quicken. I think of his bullish neck. His huge shoulders. The peculiar way Ma mentioned my uncle’s name, her lips closing around a cigarette, stopping more details getting out. “You know, Flora, thinking about it, I did get the sense Ma wasn’t telling me everything.”
To my surprise, Flora suddenly reaches up and pulls the window shut. “Let’s stop this. Audrey is long gone.”