At the edge of the Wilderness, I’m about to turn back, investigate the kitchen garden, when I hear the distinct sound of splashing from behind the yew hedge. Not quite believing my ears, I peer around the gate, hiding in a cloud of clematis.
A green dress, thrown over a deck chair with un-Sybil-like abandon. A beige elastic girdle. A bra, like something Grandma wore. Brown sandals kicked off in different directions. Then, rising from the water in a sinuous curve, a rainbow of fine droplets, the unbelievable sight of Sybil herself, flipping her hair off her face, her shoulders, revealing the white shock of bare breasts, stubby red nipples. I hold my breath, not daring to move, and watch, transfixed, as my aunt rests her head back against the pool’s edge and closes her eyes, face dappled by the sun reflecting off the water. The decision makes itself then. Retreating slowly, silently, I leave my aunt in her fragile newfound peace.
“Miss Wilde?” As I cross the terrace, Billy approaches, rubbing his hands clean on dirty trousers. He pulls something out of the leather tool pocket slung around his waist and smiles, his teeth very white in his tanned face. “I found this. I think it might belong to you.”
My whole body jolts. There is no blood on the paperweight now—washed away by the rain, or buffed by Billy’s leather pocket—yet it seems to me like a crystal ball, something that anyone might peer into and, in the right light, at the right angle, see exactly what happened, four sisters dragging a body across the grass, tipping it into the pool.
“It’s pretty,” he says, and something about the simple way he says it, the way he is looking at my mouth as he speaks, makes me feel very strange. “Here.”
I take it, the cold hard heart of the night before. “Dot’s lost her specs, too, if you happen to see them.” I sound almost normal.
“I’ll look, Miss Wilde.”
There is an honesty and sweetness about Billy that is like a balm this morning. I hover. For some reason, I don’t want to leave his side.
We stand there in silence, smiling shyly at each other, and I wonder if Billy understands far more than he’s letting on. Something, a feeling, a word I don’t have, flows between us. But it’s shattered by a motorcar roaring down the lane, screeching into the drive behind the wall, the slam of a door.
I don’t so much panic as drain of blood, rooted to the spot, my reactions too slow, too late, to be of any use at all. There are no moves left in me, no strategies. All I know for certain is that it is the police, coming to take us away, that I have failed to protect my little sister, and, yes, there was a black spot, like a hole, waiting in the corner of the summer sky, and we are all about to fall into it.
“You quite all right, Miss Wilde?” Billy puts a hand on my arm. It seems to me to be my last anchor to the earth. I take hold of it tightly. “Miss Wilde?”
I can barely breathe, every cell of my body braced for the sound of a heavy boot on the gravel, a heavy-knuckled knock. Billy moves protectively closer, picking up on my sense of threat, my apprehension now his. We listen together. But suddenly the sounds don’t quite make sense, the light sharp footsteps, less a boot than a heel picking its way through gravel. The brisk rat-a-tat-tat at the door. A woman’s voice, a yearned-for, long-lost voice. “Peregrine, you old rascal, where have you hidden my darling girls?”
15
Shadows move inside the tent—lit up like a lantern in the trees—as the police complete their grim work. Jessie shivers, thinking of all the times she and Romy have innocently rambled past the small stone well the tent now hides, never realizing they were brushing up against a tomb, that the rising water table was pulling something terrible to the surface.
Jessie didn’t look down into that hole for long. But she knows she’ll see it forever, the greenish bone sticking up from the lens of ice. She’s glad of the barrier of the police tape now, the way it makes everything more unreal, like a TV show, all those serious figures in white paper suits, plainclothes police taking photographs, mumbling into radios, churning the pristine snow into slush with their heavy feet.
It is a bitterly cold Monday afternoon when the first reporters start to ring the doorbell. On Will’s advice Jessie politely says nothing, tells them to talk to the police directly. She confides in her mother and Lou, then makes the mistake of letting it slip to a garrulous London friend. Soon her cell is flashing with incoming messages, people they haven’t heard from in months digging for gossip, marveling quietly at the irony of moving out of the crime-ridden capital for the safety of the sticks.
Will doesn’t head for London, refusing to leave Jessie marooned. Romy waves to the police, tries to pet sniffer dogs, the subdued mood that followed her fall into the pool replaced by a confused excitement. But Bella merely grows quieter and quieter, harder to reach, absorbed in thoughts that she refuses to share. Will and Jessie worry at this self-containment. They worry about everything. With the lack of information, everything feels suspended. Not even the snow will melt.
When Bella returns from school, batting her way through the reporters with dismissive aplomb, Jessie makes the girls creamy hot chocolate, pillowy with marshmallows, trying to provide comfort in the sugar and warm milk. Bella eyes the treat suspiciously. Will and Jessie hover around her, feeling out of their depth. Does the discovery make her feel threatened? they ask. Bella shakes her head. Scared? Of course not. Would she like to board in the dorms at school this week? No, thanks. No, really. After that Bella avoids both of them, the adult questions that come loaded with instructions for how she should feel and react, and retreats—regresses—into building a Lego farm with Romy. Outside the window, the snow still falls.
At any other time, such a sight—the sisters playing! snow falling at the window!—would have made Jessie giddy with happiness. Instead, she feels a crush of guilt that the girls have been brought together by a near drowning, and now this. Mandy would be justifiably horrified, she decides, after all Bella’s been through already, all she’s lost. Jessie remembers their first viewing, standing in the orangery on that January afternoon, imagining she could force her family to ripen with happiness like a fruit. She was naive then. She is not now. She knows what they must do.
When Will returns from talking to the inspector in the garden, conveying the lack of further enlightenment with a shrug, she pulls him to the side of the kitchen sideboard and whispers that they must put Applecote on the market. To her surprise, he doesn’t immediately agree with her. Let us see, he says, holding her face in his cold hands, snow melting off his boots onto the kitchen floor.
Jessie knows he’s clinging to the hope that the bones will turn out to belong to some kind of animal, not human at all. Or if not, then some unfortunate farmhand who lived hundreds of years ago, picked clean of meaning by time, something archaeological.