A small, tense shift through the room. None of them were looking at each other. I searched for some tiny difference between their faces, anything that would hint that this conversation was hitting one of them harder than the others, that someone was protecting, being protected, guilty, defensive: nothing.
“Then,” Abby said, on a big breath. “Lex, I don’t know if you’d thought about what it would mean, if you sold your share to Ned. You don’t always . . . I don’t know. Think things through.”
A vicious snort from Rafe. “That’s putting it mildly. My God, Lexie, what the hell did you think would happen? You’d sell up, buy yourself a nice little apartment somewhere, and everything would be just ducky? What did you expect to get when you walked into college every morning? Hugs and kisses and your sandwich all ready for you? We would never have spoken to you again. We would have hated your guts.”
“Ned would have been at the rest of us,” Abby said, “all the time, every day, to sell out to some developer and turn this house into apartments or a golf club or whatever the hell it was that he wanted. He could have moved in here, lived with us, and there would’ve been nothing we could do about it. Sooner or later, we would have given up. We would have lost the house. This house.”
Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a creak of floorboards upstairs, a draft spinning down the stairwell.
“We all started shouting,” Justin said, low. “Screaming, everyone at once— I don’t even know what I was saying. You got away from Daniel, and Rafe grabbed you, and you hit him—hard, Lexie, you punched him in the stomach—”
“It was a fight,” Rafe said. “We can call it whatever we want, but the fact is we were fighting like a bunch of scumbags on a street corner. Another thirty seconds and we would all have been rolling around on the kitchen floor beating the living shit out of each other. Except that before we got that far—”
“Except,” Abby said, her voice slicing his off clean as a slammed door, “we never got that far.”
She met Rafe’s eyes calmly, unblinking. After a second he shrugged and slumped back on the sofa, one foot jiggling restlessly.
“It could have been any of us,” Abby said, to me or to Rafe, I couldn’t tell. There was a depth of passion in her voice that startled me. “We were all raging—I’ve never been that angry in my life. The rest was just chance; just the way things happened. Every one of us was ready to kill you, Lexie, and you can’t blame us.”
That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of my hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys. “I don’t,” I said. I wondered— I should have known a whole lot better, I must have read too many cheesy ghost stories as a kid—if this was all Lexie had wanted from me: to let them know it was OK. “You had every right to be mad. Even afterwards, you would’ve had every right to throw me out.”
“We talked about it,” Abby said. Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Me and Daniel. Whether we could all still live together, after . . . But it would have been complicated, and anyway, it was you. No matter what, it was still you.”
“The next thing I remember,” Justin said, very quietly, “is the back door slamming and this knife lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. With blood on it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.”
“And you just let me go?” I said, to my hands. “You didn’t even bother to find out if—”
“No,” said Abby, leaning forwards, trying to catch my eye. “No, Lex. Of course we bothered. It took us all a minute to catch up with what had happened, but the second we did . . . It was Daniel, mostly; the rest of us were basically paralyzed. By the time I could move again, he was already getting the torch out. He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready—”
“Which would have come in useful,” Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, “if we’d been delivering a baby in Gone With the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby’s embroidery needle?”
“—and he and Justin went looking for you. Straight away.”
It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan that kept them both busy, all within seconds. The guy was wasted on academia.
“I’m not sure we were really as quick off the mark as we think,” Justin said. “We could have been standing there in a daze for a good five or ten minutes, for all I know. I can barely remember that part; my mind’s wiped it out. The first thing I’m clear on is that, by the time Daniel and I got to the back gate, you were gone. We didn’t know if you’d headed for the village to get help, or collapsed somewhere, or—”
“I just ran,” I said quietly. “I just remember running. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding for ages.” Justin flinched.
“I don’t think you were, at first,” Abby said gently. “There wasn’t any blood on the kitchen floor, or on the patio.”
They had checked. I wondered when, and whether that had been Daniel’s idea or Abby’s. “That was the other thing,” Justin said. “We didn’t know . . . well, how bad it was. You were gone so fast, we hadn’t had a chance to . . . We thought—I mean, I thought, anyway—since you had got out of sight so quickly, it couldn’t be all that serious, could it? It might have been just a nick, for all we knew.”
“Ha,” said Rafe, reaching for an ashtray.
“We didn’t know. It might have been. I said so to Daniel, but he just gave me a look that could have meant anything. So we . . . God. We started looking for you. Daniel said the most urgent thing was to find out if you’d gone to the village, but it was all locked up and dark, just the odd light on in bedrooms; there was obviously nothing going on. So we started working our way back towards the house, going back and forth in these big arcs, hoping we’d cross paths with you somewhere along the way.”
He stared down at the glass in his hands. “At least, that’s what I assume we were doing. I was just following Daniel on and on and on through this pitch-black labyrinth of lanes; I had no idea where we were, my sense of direction was completely gone. We were afraid to switch on the torch and afraid to call you—I’m not even sure why, it just seemed too dangerous: in case someone in a farmhouse noticed or in case you hid from us, I suppose, I don’t know which. So Daniel just flicked on the torch for a second every few minutes, cupped his hand around it and did a quick sweep, then switched it off again. The rest of the time we felt our way by the hedges. It was freezing, like winter—we hadn’t even thought of coats. It didn’t seem to bother Daniel, you know what he’s like, but I couldn’t feel my toes; I was sure I was getting frost-bite. We wandered around for hours—”
“You didn’t,” Rafe said. “Trust me. We were stuck here with a bottle of disinfectant and a bloody knife and nothing to do but stare at the clock and go out of our minds. You were only gone about forty-five minutes.”
Justin shrugged, a tense twitch. “Well, it felt like hours. Finally Daniel stopped dead—I bumped straight into the back of him, like something out of Laurel and Hardy—and he said, ‘This is absurd. We’ll never find her like this.’ I asked him what else he suggested we should do, but he ignored me. He just stood there, staring up at the sky like he was waiting for divine inspiration; it was starting to cloud over, but the moon had come up, I could see his profile against it. After a moment he said—perfectly normally, as if we were in the middle of some dinner-table discussion—‘Well, let’s assume she’s headed for a specific place, rather than simply wandering around in the dark. She must have been meeting Ned somewhere. Somewhere sheltered, surely; the weather’s so unpredictable. Is there anywhere nearby that she—’ And then he took off. He was running, flat out, and fast, I didn’t know he could run like that—I don’t think I’d ever seen Daniel run before, have you?”
“He ran the other night,” Rafe said, grinding out his cigarette. “After the torch-bearing villager. He’s fast, all right, when he needs to be.”
“I didn’t have a clue where he was going; all I could think about was trying to keep up. For some reason the idea of being out there by myself sent me into a complete panic—I mean, I know we were only a few hundred yards from home, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt . . .” Justin shivered. “It felt dangerous, ” he said. “Like something was happening, all round us, and we couldn’t see it, but if I was on my own . . .”
“That was shock, hon,” Abby said gently. “It’s normal.”
Justin shook his head, still staring down at his glass. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.” He took a quick, hard swig of his drink and grimaced. “Then Daniel switched the torch on and swung it around—it was like a lighthouse beam, I was sure everyone for miles around would come running—and he stopped on that cottage. I only saw it for a second, just a corner of broken-down wall. Then the torch went out again, and Daniel threw himself over the wall into the field. There was all this long wet grass tangling round my ankles, it was like trying to run through porridge . . .” He blinked at his glass and pushed it away from him on the bookshelf; a little of his drink splashed out, staining someone’s notes with sickly orange splotches. “Can I have a cigarette?”
“You don’t smoke,” Rafe said. “You’re the good one.”
“If I have to tell this story,” said Justin, “I want a fucking cigarette.”
There was a high, precarious wobble in his voice. “Knock it off, Rafe,” Abby said. She stretched over to pass Justin her smoke packet; as he took it, she caught his hand and squeezed.
Justin lit the cigarette clumsily, holding it high up between stiff fingers, inhaled too hard and choked. No one said anything while he coughed, caught his breath, wiped his eyes with a knuckle under his glasses.
“Lexie,” Abby said. “Can’t we just . . . You’ve got the important part. Can’t we leave it?”
“I want to hear,” I said. I could hardly breathe.
“So do I,” said Rafe. “I’ve never heard this part either, and I’ve got a feeling it might be interesting. Aren’t you curious, Abby? Or do you already know this story?”
Abby shrugged. “All right,” said Justin. His eyes were pressed shut and his jaw was so tense he could barely get the cigarette between his lips. “I’m . . . Just give me a second. God.”
He took another drag, retched a little, managed to hold it. “OK,” he said. He had his voice under control again. “So we got to the cottage. There was just enough moonlight that I could see outlines—the walls, the doorway. Daniel switched on the torch, with his other hand partway over it, and . . .”
His eyes opened, skated away from us to the window. “You were sitting in a corner, against the wall. I shouted something—called you, maybe, I don’t know—and I started to run over to you, but Daniel grabbed my arm, hard, he hurt me, and pulled me back. He put his mouth right up against my ear and hissed, ‘Shut up,’ and then, ‘Don’t move. You stay right here. You stay still.’ He shook my arm—I had bruises—and then he let go of me and went over to you. He put his fingers on your throat, like this, checking your pulse—he had the torch on you, and you looked . . .”
Justin’s eyes were still on the window. “You looked like a wee girl asleep,” he said, and the grief in his voice was soft and relentless as rain. “And then Daniel said, ‘She’s dead.’ That’s what we thought, Lexie. We thought you had died.”
“You must have already been in the coma,” Abby said gently. “The cops told us it would have slowed down your heartbeat, your breathing, stuff like that. If it hadn’t been so cold—”
“Daniel straightened up,” Justin said, “and wiped his hand on the front of his shirt—I’m not sure why, it wasn’t bloody or anything, but that was all I could see: him rubbing his hand down his chest, over and over, as if he didn’t even know he was doing it. I couldn’t—I couldn’t look at you. I went to hold myself up against the wall—I mean, I was hyperventilating, I thought I was going to faint—but he said, very sharply, ‘Don’t touch anything. Put your hands in your pockets. And hold your breath for a count of ten.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about, none of it made any sense, but I did it anyway.”
“We always do,” Rafe said, in an undertone. Abby gave him a quick glance.
“After a minute Daniel said, ‘If she had gone for her walk as usual, she would have her keys and wallet on her, and that torch she uses. One of us needs to go home and get them. The other one should stay here. It’s unlikely that anyone will pass by, at this hour, but we don’t know the full extent of her arrangements with Ned, and if someone does happen to pass, we need to know about it. Which would you prefer to do?’ ”
Justin made a tentative move to stretch out a hand to me, took it back and clasped it tightly around his other elbow. “I told him I couldn’t stay there. I’m sorry, Lexie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been . . . I mean, it was you; it was still you, even if you had been . . . But I couldn’t. I was—I was shaking all over, I think I must have been gibbering at him . . . Finally he said—and he didn’t even seem upset, not any more, just impatient—he said, ‘For heaven’s sake, shut up. I’ll stay. Get home as fast as you can. Put your gloves on and get Lexie’s keys, her wallet and her torch. Tell the others what’s happened. They’ll want to come back with you; don’t let them, whatever you do. The last thing we need is more people trampling all over the place, and anyway there’s no point in giving them more to forget. Come straight back here. Take the torch with you, but don’t use it unless you really need to, and try to be quiet. Can you remember all that?’ ”
He drew hard on the cigarette. “I said yes—I’d have said yes if he’d asked me whether I could fly home, as long as it meant getting out of there. He made me repeat it all back to him. Then he sat down on the ground, beside you— not too close, I suppose in case he got . . . you know. Blood on his trousers. And he looked up at me and said, ‘Well? Go on. Hurry.’
“So I went home. It was horrible. It took—well, if Rafe’s right, it can’t have actually taken that long. I don’t know. I got lost. There were places where I knew I should have been able to see the lights from the house, but I couldn’t; just black, for miles around. I knew for sure, like a fact, that the house wasn’t even there any more; there was nothing left but hedges and lanes, on and on, this huge maze and I would never get out of it, it would never be daylight again. That there were things watching me, up in the trees and hidden in the hedges—I don’t know what kind of things, but . . . watching me, and laughing. I was terrified. When I finally saw the house—just this faint gold glow, over the bushes—it was such a relief I almost screamed. The next thing I remember is pushing the back door open—”
“He looked like The Scream,” Rafe said, “only muddier. And he was making absolutely no sense; half what came out of his mouth was pure gibberish, like he was speaking in tongues. All we could make out was that he had to go back, and that Daniel said we should stay where we were. Personally, I thought fuck that, I wanted to go find out what the hell was going on, but when I started getting my coat, Justin and Abby both went into such hysterics that I gave up.”
“And a good thing too,” Abby said coolly. She had gone back to the doll; her hair fell across her face, hiding it, and even from across the room I could tell that her stitches were huge and sloppy and useless. “What possible use do you think you could have been?”
Rafe shrugged. “We’ll never know, will we? I know that cottage; if Justin had just told me where he was going, I could have gone instead, and he could have stayed here and pulled himself together. But apparently that’s not what Daniel had in mind.”
“Presumably he had reasons.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Rafe said. “I’m sure he did. So Justin flapped around for a bit, grabbing things and babbling at us, and then he dashed out again.”