There was nothing dodgy in any of the bedrooms, as far as I could see, but something about all three of them kept catching at me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I was kneeling on Justin’s floor, checking under his bed like a burglar (nothing, not even dust bunnies), when it hit me: they felt permanent. I had never lived in a place where I could mess with the wallpaper or glue things down—my aunt and uncle wouldn’t have objected, exactly, but their house had a tiptoe atmosphere that prevented anything along those lines from even occurring to me, and all my landlords apparently had this idea that they were renting me Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest; it had taken me months to convince my current guy that property values would not plummet if I painted the walls white instead of banana-barf yellow and stuck the LSD-based carpet in the garden shed. None of this had bothered me at the time, but all of a sudden, surrounded by this houseful of happy, cavalier possessiveness—I would have loved a mural; Sam can draw—it seemed like a very strange way to live, on some stranger’s sufferance, asking permission like a little kid before I left any mark.
The top floor: my room, Daniel’s, two more spares. The one beside Daniel was full of old furniture, tumbled in splayed heaps as if an earthquake had hit: those grayish undersized chairs that never actually get used, a display cabinet that looked like the Rococo movement had thrown up on it, and just about everything in between. Bits and pieces had obviously been taken out—drag marks, bare patches—presumably to furnish the rooms when the five of them moved in. What was left was inches deep in trailing, sticky dust. The room next to mine had more wild debris (a cracked stone hot-water bottle, mud-crusted green wellies, a mouse-shredded tapestry cushion involving deer and flowers) and teetering stacks of cardboard boxes and old leather suitcases. Someone had made a start on going through this stuff, not too long ago: layers of bright finger marks on some of the suitcase lids, one even wiped semiclean, mysterious outlines in corners and on boxes where things had been taken away. There were tangles of faint shoe prints on the dusty floorboards.
If you were going to hide something—a murder weapon, or some kind of evidence, or some small priceless antique—this wouldn’t be a bad place. I went through all the cases that had been opened, staying well clear of the finger marks, just in case, but they were stuffed to the lids with pages and pages of crabby fountain-pen scribble. As far as I could tell, someone, presumably Great-uncle Simon, had been writing a history of the March family through the ages. The Marches had been around for a while—the dates went back to 1734, when the house had been built—but had apparently never done anything more interesting than getting married, buying the odd horse and gradually losing most of their estate.
Daniel’s room was locked. The life skills I learned from Frank do include lock picking, and this one looked pretty simple, but I was already antsy from the diary, and that door wound me a notch tighter. I had no way of knowing whether Daniel always locked his room or whether this was specially for me. I was suddenly positive that he had left some trap—a hair across the frame, a glass of water just inside the door—that would give me away if I went in there.
I finished off with Lexie’s room—it had been searched already, but I wanted to do it myself. Unlike Uncle Simon, Lexie had kept sweet fuck-all. The room wasn’t tidy, exactly—the books were tossed onto the shelves rather than lined up, the clothes were mostly in piles on the wardrobe floor; under the bed were three empty smoke packets, half a Caramilk and a crumpled page of notes on
Villette
—but it was too sparse to be messy. No knickknacks, no old ticket stubs or birthday cards or dried flowers, no photographs; the only mementos she had wanted were the phone videos. I thumbed through every book and turned every pocket inside out, but the room gave me nothing.
It had that same taste of permanence, though. She had been trying out paint colors on the wall beside her bed, in broad fast sweeps: ochre, old rose, china blue. That flick of envy went through me again.
Screw you,
I told Lexie inside my head;
you may have lived here for longer, but I’m getting paid for it.
I sat down on the floor, dug my mobile out of my bag and rang Frank. “Hey, babe,” he said, on the second ring. “Burned already, yeah?”
He was in a good mood. “Yep,” I said. “Sorry about that. Come get me.”
Frank laughed. “How’s it going?”
I stuck him on speakerphone, put the phone on the floor beside me and stuffed my gloves and notebook back into the bag. “OK, I guess. I don’t think any of them suspect anything’s up.”
“Why would they? Nobody in their right mind would think of something this unlikely. Got anything good for me?”
“They’re all at college, so I had a quick look around the house. No bloody knife, no bloody clothes, no Renoirs, no signed confessions. Not even a stash of spliff or a porn mag. They’re awfully pure, for students.” My bandages were in carefully numbered packets, so that the stains would get lighter as the wound supposedly healed, just in case someone with a very weird mind was checking the bin—in this job, you leave room for a fair amount of weirdness. I found the bandage marked “2” and peeled off the wrapper. Whoever had done the staining lived life with enthusiasm.
“Any sign of that diary?” Frank asked. “The famous diary that Daniel saw fit to mention to you, but not to us.”
I leaned back against the bookshelf, hiked up my top and pulled off the old bandage. “If it’s in the house,” I said, “someone’s done a good job of hiding it.”
A noncommittal noise from Frank. “Or else you were right and the killer took it off her body. Either way, though, it’s interesting that Daniel and company felt the need to lie about it. Anyone acting dodgy?”
“No. They were a little awkward around me to start with, but they would be. Basically, the main thing I’m getting is they’re glad to have Lexie back.”
“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”
There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”
“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”
“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”
“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”
“I put a chair in front of it.”
“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.
“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”
“Last time you weren’t living with suspects. These four may not be top of our list, but we haven’t eliminated them yet. Unless you’re in the shower, that mike stays on your body. You want to talk about last time? If your mike had been
in your bag
where we couldn’t hear you, you’d be dead. You’d have bled out before we could get to you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Point taken.”
“Got it? On your body at all times. No fucking about.”
“Got it.”
“OK, then,” Frank said, settling down. “I’ve got a little pressie for you.” There was the edge of a grin in there: he’d saved up something good for after the lecture. "I’ve been tracking down all your KAs from our first Lexie Madison Extravaganza. Remember a girl called Victoria Harding?”
I bit off a piece of surgical tape. “Should I?”
"Tallish, slim, long blond hair? Talks a hundred an hour? Doesn’t blink?”
“Oh God,” I said, taping the bandage down. “Sticky Vicky. There’s a blast from the past.” Sticky Vicky was in UCD with me, studying something nonspecific. She had glassy blue eyes, a lot of matching accessories and a frantic, limitless ability to octopus herself onto anyone who might be useful, mainly rich boys and party girls. For some reason she had decided I was cool enough to be worth it, or maybe she was just hoping for free drugs.
“The very one. When did you last talk to her?”
I locked my bag and shoved it under the bed, trying to think back; Vicky wasn’t the type that leaves a lasting impression. “Maybe a few days before I got pulled out? I’ve seen her around town once or twice since, but I always dodged.”
“That’s funny,” Frank said, with that wolfish grin spreading through his voice, “because she’s talked to you a lot more recently than that. In fact, you and she had a nice long chat in early January of 2002—she knows the date because she’d just been to the winter sales and bought some kind of fancy designer coat, which she showed to you. Apparently it involved, and I quote, ‘the absolute ultimate taupe suede,’ whatever class of animal a taupe may be. Ringing any bells?”
“No,” I said. My heart was going slow and hard; I could feel it right down to the soles of my feet. “That wasn’t me.”
“I figured it might not be. Vicky remembers the conversation vividly, though, almost word for word—the girl’s got a memory like a steel trap, she’ll make a dream witness if it ever comes to that. Want to hear what you talked about?”
Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched. It was one of the main reasons I’d spent any time with her. “Refresh my memory,” I said.
“You ran into each other on Grafton Street. According to her, you were ‘totally spacey,’ didn’t remember her at first, weren’t sure when you’d last seen each other. You claimed to have a foul hangover, but she put it down to that awful nervous breakdown she’d heard about.” Frank was enjoying this: his voice had a fast, focused, predator-on-the-move rhythm. I was having a lot less fun than he was. I had known all this already, only the specifics had been missing, and being right wasn’t as satisfying as you might think. “Once you managed to place her, though, you were very friendly. You even suggested going for a coffee, to catch up. Whoever our girl was, she had some nerve.”
“Yeah,” I said. I realized I was crouched like a sprinter, ready to leap. Lexie’s bedroom felt mocking and tricky around me, humming with secret drawers and fake floorboards and spring traps. “She had that, all right.”
“You went to the café in Brown Thomas, she showed you her fashion finds and you both played Do You Remember for a while. You, amazingly enough, were pretty quiet. But get this: at one point Vicky asked you whether you were in Trinity these days. Apparently, not long before you had your nervous breakdown, you’d told her you were sick of UCD. You were thinking of transferring somewhere else, maybe Trinity, maybe abroad. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah,” I said. I sat down, carefully, on Lexie’s bed. “Yeah, it does.”
It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.
My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity—this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off—had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.
Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where—Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”
“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.
“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”
Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”
“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”
Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.
The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”
In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”
* * *
I needed to get outdoors—partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich—this gang believed in good mustard—and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.