Jessie takes a larger sip of wine. “Amazing.”
Bella angles her spoon so that the candlelight flickers off its handle and ripples on the ceiling. “That’s not all.” Bella’s face is more animated than Jessie’s seen it in months. “Audrey disappeared. She disappeared from Applecote Manor.”
“What, like an alien abduction?”
“She went down to the river one day,” Bella says, irritated that Jessie’s making light of it. “Never seen again.”
Something in Jessie seizes tight. She thinks of the river that snakes through the meadow, its smooth verdigris surface, the surprising kick of its current. “She drowned?” Her voice drops to a hush. Romy glances at her mother for reassurance, rotating a cindered roast potato in her fingers.
“A man was arrested.”
A man. A bad man. Jessie doesn’t want to hear this. She doesn’t want a girl to have come to harm in this house. Applecote Manor is their safe place. It’s where they are going to become a happy family and Bella will heal. It is not allowed to have a malign, murky history. She stands up and starts stacking plates.
“Audrey’s father was arrested.”
Jessie turns. The air fills unpleasantly with the smell of greasy chicken. “How terrible. And they . . . they found her?”
“Not yet.”
There’s something about the yet. It means she could still be here, the girl, that they could pull up a floorboard . . . No, she’s being as silly as Bella. This is the kind of story schoolgirls fabricate to whip themselves into a hormonal frenzy. Still, she could have done without it, today of all days. She reaches for the pendant on her necklace and feels her heart pumping along the gold.
Without being asked, Bella starts clearing plates. “The Squirrels girls say that some of them have seen her, this Audrey. Seriously. I’m not joking. That she’s old now, because she would be, but she comes back to roam around Applecote Manor. A girl in the upper sixth, Tania with the shocking acne, she passed this house on a driving lesson, not even six months ago, when it was meant to be empty, and saw a face in the window, pressed up to the glass. A woman looking out! She nearly crashed the car.”
“Uh-oh,” says Romy.
“Well, they’ve certainly got lush imaginations,” says Jessie in a clipped voice.
Bella watches Jessie’s evident discomfort with interest, and Jessie wonders if the whole thing is a ruse to unsettle her. “You remember I felt a bad thing had happened here, the first day we saw the house?” The candles, stirred by an imperceptible draft, start to elongate into long red tongues, throwing shadows against the walls. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I? I knew.”
Jessie turns on the stiff brass tap, seeking the distraction of water sputtering into the sink. First the letters, now this story about the girl. Summer is over. Will has gone. And Bella is determined to fill the house with ghosts. “Okay, dessert.”
“I reckon there are certain places, houses, where bad things just happen, and keep happening,” Bella says determinedly.
There’s a blast of heat as Jessie opens the oven, burns her fingers on the earthenware dish.
“I wonder what the next bad thing will be. When it will happen.”
“Bella, I think I’m done with legends of disappearing girls. And since I roasted the chicken into oblivion and back, I suggest we all fill up on apple crumble,” Jessie says, trying to bury the conversation beneath steaming dollops of dessert, feeling a sudden unexpected rush of dread, less about the girl disappearing than the niggling sense that something about the story speaks directly to Bella and that Bella wants to recast it.
8
Sybil tugs the hairbrush through my hair like my mother used to, alternately brisk and tender, pausing to pull apart the worst bathing pool tangles with her fingers. I sit passively on the floral upholstered stool at Audrey’s dressing table, enjoying the relinquish of control, my mind idly wandering from Harry’s thighs to the itch on my leg to my discovery of another posy in the meadow crater and my new theory that it is not a local’s pagan offering but something left by Perry, a mark of guilt or a secret. I play over my mother’s explanation of what happened to Audrey, not the words, but the gaps between them, the sense I had afterward of not being told everything, a wrinkle in the air after she mentioned Perry’s name. Or am I imagining it, that wrinkle?
Sybil clinks the hairbrush down on the silver dish and my thoughts slip beneath the surface once more. I see my reflection sit straighter in the dressing table mirror, the stiff pleats of Sybil’s gray-blue blouse splaying slightly over the neat mound of her bust. I know what’s coming next. I particularly like this bit, the lift of thick, hot hair off my neck, the splitting into three sections, the gentle tugging as she weaves back time with her fingers, the rhythm filling the room with a strange music all of its own.
When the braid is done, our eyes meet with a spark in the mirror. And I know that Sybil is not seeing me but Audrey and that this is wrong and queer. And yet.
I thought it would just be the once. After finding me in this room last week, making me try on the dress, Sybil kept asking if she could braid my hair. Secretly, she said. We wouldn’t tell anyone. I could take the braid out afterward. Her fingers were twitching at the sight of so much unruly hair, so in need of a brush, she said. After a while my refusal seemed mean-hearted—I was so grateful not to be in enormous trouble at being caught in Audrey’s room. Also, there was this bit of me that couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit at Audrey’s dressing table, Audrey’s mother’s fingers in my hair. I thought of Ma’s actor friends who live their characters’ quirks offstage and decided the more I submerged myself in Audrey, the better the chances of discovering her state of mind the day she disappeared.
It was awful at first, the braiding. I sat rigid, flinching every time Sybil’s fingers brushed my scalp, appalled at the sound of her loud fast breathing, but after a while I forced myself to surrender and the encounter became almost bearable, then comforting, all that being cared for, fussed over like a little girl. Afterward, I went into my room, not understanding why I suddenly felt tearful, and found a gift of the wooden box of dominos on my bed, the one from the storeroom, complete but for the one I’d taken. And I wiped my eyes and smiled.