Daniel smiled at him, a quick, unexpected flash of a grin. He tipped the leather pouch upside down and a faded cardboard packet of cartridges fell out, onto the floor.
“Oh, beautiful,” Rafe said, picking up the box and giving it a shake. I could tell from the rattle that it was almost full; there had to be nine or ten cartridges in there. “We’ll have this up and running in no time. I’ll buy the solvent.”
“Don’t mess around with that thing unless you know what you’re doing,” said Abby. She was the only one who hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.
Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was seven. I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland—”
“Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”
“But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”
Again with that we. “Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.
Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me—”
“I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”
His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.
That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.
I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.
“I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection—”
“You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”
“Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”
Straight in with the diversion. “I did too have a collection,” I said. “I had all four sisters out of Little Women. You could get the mother, too, but she was such a horrible sanctimonious cow that I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I didn’t even want the others, but I had this aunt—”
“Why don’t you get Little Women dolls?” Justin asked Abby, plaintively. “And get rid of that awful poppet?”
“If you keep bitching about her, I swear, one of these mornings you’re going to wake up and find her on your pillow, staring at you.”
Rafe was watching me, hooded golden eyes across his solitaire game. “I kept trying to tell her I didn’t even like dolls,” I said, over Justin’s horrified noises, “but she never got the hint. She—”
Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.
There was a long, not-quite-comfortable silence. The fire spat sparks up the chimney. Abby had gone back to trying bits of fabric against her doll’s dress. Rafe was still watching me; I had my head down over my book (Rip Corelli, She Liked Them Married ), but I could feel his eyes.
For some reason, the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won’t answer questions beginning with “Where.”
And another thing: Rafe had to know that. He had been nudging at the boundary on purpose. I wasn’t sure whose buttons he had been trying to push, exactly, or why—maybe everyone’s, maybe he was just in that kind of mood— but it was a tiny crack, in that perfect surface.
Frank’s FBI buddy got back to him on Wednesday. I knew the second Frank picked up the phone that something had happened, something big.
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“Some lane, I don’t know. Why?”
An owl hooted, close behind me; I whipped round in time to see it drifting into the trees only a few feet away, wings spread, light as ash. “What was that?” Frank asked sharply.
“Just an owl. Breathe, Frank.”
“Got your gun?”