It wasn’t the kind of lead detectives dream of, but it was about the best I’d got, so I was spending a lot of my walk lurking in the general area of the cottage and hoping N would help me out by showing up some night. I had found myself a convenient stretch of lane: it had a clear enough view that I could keep an eye on the cottage while I talked to Frank or Sam, enough trees to hide me if I needed it, and enough isolation that no farmer was likely to hear me on the phone and come after me with his trusty shotgun. “I’m alert,” I said. “And I’ve got something to ask you. Remind me: Daniel’s great-uncle died in September?”
I heard Frank moving stuff around, flipping pages; either he had brought the file home with him, or he was still at work. “February third. Daniel got the keys to the house on September tenth. Probate must’ve taken a while. Why?”
“Can you find out how the great-uncle died, and where these five were that day? Also, why probate took so long? When my granny left me a grand, I got it six weeks later.”
Frank whistled. “You’re thinking they bumped off Great-uncle Simon for the house? And then Lexie lost her nerve?”
I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, trying to work out how to explain. “Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But they’re weird about that house, Frank. All four of them. They all talk about it like they own it, not just Daniel—‘We should get double-glazing, we need to decide about the herb garden, we . . .’ And they all act like this is a permanent arrangement, like they can spend years doing it up because they’re all going to live here forever.”
“Ah, they’re just young,” Frank said tolerantly. “At that age, everyone thinks college mates and house shares are forever. Give them a few years and it’ll be all semi-ds in the suburbs and Sunday afternoons buying decking at the home-and-garden shop.”
“They’re not that young. And you’ve heard them: they’re way too wrapped up in this house and each other. There’s nothing else in their lives. I don’t really think they knocked off the great-uncle, but I’m shooting in the dark here. We’ve always thought they were hiding something. Anything weird is worth checking out.”
“True,” Frank said. “Will do. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve been doing with my day?”
That undercurrent of excitement in his voice: very few things get Frank that worked up. “Damn straight,” I said.
The undercurrent broke through into a grin so wide I could hear it. “FBI got a hit on our girl’s prints.”
“Shit! Already?” The FBI guys are good about helping us when we need it, but they always have a spectacular backlog.
“I’ve got friends in low places.”
“OK,” I said. “Who is she?” For some reason my knees felt shaky. I got my back up against a tree.
“May-Ruth Thibodeaux, born in North Carolina in 1975, reported missing in October 2000 and wanted for car theft. Prints and photo both match.”
My breath went out with a little rush. “Cassie?” Frank said, after a moment. I heard him draw on a cigarette. “You still there?”
“Yeah. May-Ruth Thibodeaux.” Saying it made my back prickle. “What do we know about her?”
“Not a lot. No info till 1997, when she moved to Raleigh from someplace in the arsehole of nowhere, rented a fleabag apartment in a crap neighborhood and got a job waiting tables in an all-night diner. She had an education somewhere along the way if she was able to jump straight into a postgrad at Trinity, but it’s looking like self-taught or homeschooled; she doesn’t show up on the register at any local college or high school. No criminal record.”
Frank blew out smoke. “On the evening of October tenth 2000, she borrowed her fiancé’s car to get to work, but she never showed up. He filed a missing-person report a couple of days later. The cops didn’t take it too seriously; they figured she’d just taken off. They gave the fiancé a little hassle, just in case he’d killed her and dumped her somewhere, but his alibi was good. The car turned up in New York in December 2000, at long-term parking at Kennedy Airport.”
He was very pleased with himself. “Nice one, Frank,” I said automatically. “Fair play to you.”
“We aim to please,” Frank said, trying to sound modest.
She was only a year younger than me, after all. I was playing marbles in soft rain in a Wicklow garden and she was running wild in some hot small town, barefoot at the soda fountain and jolting down dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck, till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.
“Cassie?”
“Yeah.”
“My contact’s going to do some more digging, see if she made any serious enemies along the way—anyone who might’ve tracked her here.”
“Sounds good,” I said, trying to pull my head together. “That sounds like the kind of thing I might want to know. What was the fiancé’s name?”
“Brad, Chad, Chet, one of those American yokes . . .” Papers rustling. “My boy made a couple of phone calls, and the guy hasn’t missed a day of work in months. No way he hopped across the pond to kill off the ex. Chad Andrew Mitchell. Why?”
No N. “I just wondered.”
Frank waited, but I’m good at that game. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “I’ll keep you posted. The ID might take us nowhere, but still, it’s nice to have some kind of handle on this girl. Makes it easier to get your head round the idea of her, no?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
It wasn’t true. After Frank hung up I spent a long time leaning against that tree, watching the broken outline of the cottage slowly fade and reappear as clouds moved across the moon, thinking about May-Ruth Thibodeaux. Somehow, giving her back her own name, her own hometown, her own story, brought it home to me: she had been real, not just a shadow cast by my mind and Frank’s; she had been alive. There had been thirty years in which we could have come face to face.
It seemed to me suddenly that I should have known; an ocean away, but it seemed like I should have felt her there all along, like every now and then I should have looked up from my marbles or my textbook or my case report as if someone had called my name. She came all those thousands of miles, close enough to slip on my old name like a sister’s hand-me-down coat, she came pulled like a compass needle and she almost made it. She was only an hour’s drive away. and I should have known; I should have known, in time, to take that last step and find her.
* * *
The only shadows over that week came from outside. We were playing poker, Friday evening—they played cards a lot, late into the nights; mostly Texas Hold-’em or 110, sometimes piquet if only two people felt like playing. The stakes were just tarnished ten-pence pieces from a huge jar someone had found in the attic, but they took it seriously all the same: everyone started with the same number of coins and when you were out you were out, no borrowing from the stash. Lexie, like me, had been a pretty decent card player; her calls hadn’t always made a lot of sense, but apparently she had learned to make the unpredictability work for her, especially on big hands. The winner got to choose the next day’s dinner menu.
That night we had Louis Armstrong on the record player and Daniel had bought a huge bag of Doritos, along with three different dips to keep everyone happy. We were maneuvering around the various chipped bowls and using the food to try and distract each other—it worked best on Justin, who lost his concentration completely if he thought you were about to get salsa on the mahogany. I had just wiped out Rafe head-to-head—on weak hands he messed around with the dips, if he had something good he shoveled Doritos straight into his mouth by the handful; never play poker with a detective—and I was busy gloating, when his phone rang. He tilted his chair backwards and grabbed the phone off one of the bookshelves.
“Hello,” he said, giving me the finger. Then his chair came down and his face changed; it froze over, into that haughty, unreadable mask he wore in college and around outsiders. “Dad,” he said.
Without an eyeblink, the others drew closer around him; you could feel it in the air, a tightening, a solidifying as they ranged themselves at his shoulders. I was next to him, and I got the full benefit of the bellow coming out of the phone: "... Job opened up . . . foot on the ladder ... changed your mind . . . ?”
Rafe’s nostrils twitched as if he had smelled something foul. “Not interested, ” he said.
The volume of the tirade made his eyes snap shut. I caught enough of it to gather that reading plays all day was for pansies and that someone called Brad-bury had a son who had just made his first million and that Rafe was generally a waste of oxygen. He held the phone between thumb and finger, inches from his ear.
“For God’s sake, hang up,” Justin whispered. His face was pulled into an unconscious, agonized grimace. “Just hang up on him.”
“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but . . . Someday.”
Abby shrugged. “Well, then . . .” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.
The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.
The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot—a seven and a nine, not even suited—but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”
He blinked. I cocked one eyebrow, gave him my best cheeky Lexie grin and whispered, “Unless you’re scared I’ll kick your ass again.”
The frozen look dissolved, just a little. He checked his cards; then he put the phone down on the bookshelf beside him, carefully, and tossed ten pence into the middle. “Because I’m happy where I am,” he told the phone. His voice sounded almost normal, but that angry red flush was still covering his face.
Abby gave him a tiny smile, fanned three cards deftly on the table and flipped them over. “Lexie’s drawing to a straight,” said Justin, narrowing his eyes at me. “I know that look.”
The phone had apparently spent a lot of money on Rafe and wasn’t planning to see it flushed down the bog. “She’s not,” Daniel said. “She may have something, but not the makings of a straight. I call.”
I was nowhere near a straight, but that wasn’t the point; none of us were folding, not till Rafe hung up. The phone made a big statement about a Real Job. “In other words, a job in an office,” Rafe informed us. The rigidity was starting to go out of his spine. “Maybe even, someday, if I’m a team player and I think outside the box and work smarter not harder, an office with a window. Or am I aiming a little high?” he asked the phone. “What do you think?” He mimed
See your one and raise you two,
at Justin.
The phone—it obviously knew it was being insulted, even if it wasn’t sure exactly how—said something belligerent about ambition and how it was about bloody time Rafe grew up and started living in the real world.
“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
“It’s all jealousy,” Justin said, considering his cards and flipping two more coins into the middle. “Sour grapes.”
“Nobody,” Rafe told the phone, flapping a hand at us to keep our voices down. “The television. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society’s downfall.”
The last card came up a nine, which at least gave me a pair. “Well, certainly in some cases jealousy is a factor,” Daniel said, “but Rafe’s father, if half what he says is true, could afford to live any life he wanted, including ours. What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I’ve always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself. Could you put it on speakerphone, Rafe? I’m interested to hear what he has to say.”
Rafe gave him a wide-eyed, are-you-insane stare and shook his head; Daniel looked vaguely puzzled. The rest of us were starting to get the giggles.
“Of course,” Daniel said politely, “if you’d prefer . . . What’s so funny, Lexie?”
“Lunatics,” Rafe told the ceiling in a fervent undertone, spreading his arms to take in the phone and Daniel and the rest of us, who by now had our hands over our mouths. “I’m surrounded by wall-to-wall lunatics. What have I done to deserve this? Did I pick on the afflicted in a previous life?”
The phone, which was obviously working up to a big finish, informed Rafe that he could have a Lifestyle. “Guzzling champagne in the City,” Rafe translated, for us, “and shagging my secretary.”
“What the fuck is wrong with that?”
the phone shouted, loud enough that Daniel, startled, reared back in his chair with a look of sheer astounded disapproval. Justin exploded with a noise somewhere between a snort and a yelp; Abby was hanging over the back of her chair with her knuckles stuffed in her mouth, and I was laughing so hard I had to stick my head under the table.
The phone, with a magnificent disregard for basic anatomy, called us all a bunch of limp-dicked hippies. By the time I pulled myself together and came up for air, Rafe had flipped over a pair of jacks and was scooping in the pot, pumping one fist in the air and grinning. I realized something. Rafe’s mobile had gone off about two feet from my ear, and I hadn’t even flinched.
* * *
“You know what it is?” Abby said out of nowhere, a few hands later. “It’s the contentment.”
“Who said which to the what now?” inquired Rafe, narrowing his eyes to examine Daniel’s stack. He had switched his phone off.
“The real-world thing.” She leaned sideways across me to pull the ashtray closer. Justin had put on Debussy, blending with the faint rush of rain on the grass outside. “Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re