Where the Memories Lie
By: Sibel Hodge
I sat next to him, arm around his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’
I leaned my forehead against the side of his, feeling his heat through my hair.
He turned towards me, his face a mass of anguished wrinkles.
‘I don’t know how to deal with something like this.’
‘Together. We’ll deal with it together.’
Whoever was up one minute was down the next and vice versa.
Ethan was happier at dinner that night, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster. Lucas was quiet and withdrawn, and Nadia was almost manic in her liveliness. Anna was back to ask-ing a million questions, this time about the entomology of insects on buried human bodies. Not a very appetising conversation for the dinner table. Charlotte obviously agreed because she ran to the bathroom a few minutes later and vomited up Nadia’s roast beef.
How Nadia had the time or inclination to cook a full roast dinner in the midst of everything going on beat me, but it was Lucas’s 219
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favourite, and since he was only home for one night before jetting off again, she somehow found the time, as she always did. Maybe that’s what Ethan needed: a nice roast dinner to make everything OK again!
DI Spencer and DS Khan appeared an hour after we all finished eating. Nadia poured red wine into large, almost bowl-shaped glasses. I looked at it as she handed one to me and thought that definitely wasn’t going to be enough to blot out what was going on.
Lucas was on beer. Ethan hit the whisky. DI Spencer and DS Khan declined anything.
‘We just have a few more questions for you and Nadia, actually,’
DI Spencer said to Lucas. ‘You don’t all need to be here.’
‘Right.’ I stood up.
Ethan and I went into the lounge to wait, avoiding each other’s eyes. There was one of those awkward, fidgety silences that you get on a blind date when you find out you’ve got absolutely nothing in common with the other person. I chewed on my lip and stared out into the garden.
A little while later I heard Nadia talking in the hallway outside as she showed them out.
‘So, we’re no further forward, then?’ Nadia asked them.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ DI Spencer replied before they left.
Nadia poked her head round the door. ‘Come into the kitchen.
I need another drink.’
‘What did they ask?’ Ethan asked her as he sat at the sparklingly shiny glass dining room table.
Nadia set her glass on the worktop and uncorked another bottle of wine. ‘They wanted to know if I remembered where Dad was that Sunday when Katie left home, but I don’t know. It was a long time ago. Apparently Chris told them that Tom mentioned he had something urgent to do that day and couldn’t give him a lift to boxing, and they wanted to know if he’d mentioned what might’ve 220
Where the Memories Lie been so urgent.’ She poured some wine into her glass and topped up mine, then sat in between Lucas and Ethan.
Lucas sighed. ‘They wanted to know if Tom could’ve been working at the barn, but he couldn’t have been, could he? He never worked on Sundays. Ever.’
Nadia took a sip of wine, and when she set it back down, the base of the glass clipped the edge of the table and the glass tipped over. She leaped back as red wine splattered across the glass and dripped onto the laminate beech floor.
I shot up and grabbed the tea towel resting on the back of the oven door as Nadia reached for the kitchen roll, and between us we mopped up the spilled mess.
‘Sorry. Sorry about that!’ Nadia sat back down, face flushed, wiping her hair away from her forehead.
Ethan took Nadia’s glass and silently refilled it. Lucas stared at the floor, looking blank. Or bored. I wasn’t sure which. Probably wishing he was a million miles away, just like all of us.
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Chapter Twenty-Five