misery.
You didn’t see Rafe when we first started college: this skinny prickly creature, so defensive that if you teased him the tiniest bit he would absolutely take your head off. I wasn’t even sure I liked him, at first. I just hung around with him because I liked Abby and Daniel, and they obviously thought he was all right.”
“He’s still skinny,” I said. “And he’s still prickly, too. He’s a little bollocks when he feels like it.”
Justin shook his head. “He’s a million times better than he was. And it’s because he doesn’t have to think about those awful parents of his any more, at least not often. And Daniel . . . Have you ever, once, heard him mention his childhood?”
I shook my head.
“Neither have I. I know his parents are dead, but I don’t know when or how, or what happened to him afterwards—where he lived, with who, nothing. Abby and I got awfully drunk together one night and started being silly about that, making up childhoods for Daniel: he was one of those feral children raised by hamsters, he grew up in a brothel in Istanbul, his parents were CIA sleepers who got taken out by the KGB and he escaped by hiding in the washing machine . . . It was funny at the time, but the fact is, his childhood can’t have been too pleasant, can it, for him to be so secretive about it? You’re bad enough . . .” Justin shot me a quick glance. “But at least I know you had chicken pox, and you learned to ride horses. I don’t know anything like that about Daniel. Not a thing.”
I hoped to God we wouldn’t run into a situation where I needed to show off my equestrian skills. “And then there’s Abby,” Justin said. “Has Abby ever talked to you about her mother?”
“Bits,” I said. “I got the idea.”
“It’s worse than she makes it sound. I actually met the woman—you weren’t here yet, it was back in about third year. We were all over at Abby’s flat one evening, and her mother showed up, banging on the door. She was . . . God. The way she was dressed—I don’t know if she’s actually a prostitute, or just . . . well. She was obviously out of it; she kept shouting at Abby, but I barely understood a word she said. Abby shoved something into her hand—money, I’m sure, and you know how broke Abby’s always been—and practically
hauled
her out of the door. She was white as a ghost, Abby was; I thought she was going to faint.” Justin looked up at me anxiously, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Don’t tell her I told you that.”
“I won’t.”
“She’s never mentioned it since; I doubt she wants to talk about it now. Which is sort of my point. I’m sure you’ve got reasons, too, why you thought the no-pasts thing was a good idea. Maybe what happened changed all that, I don’t know, but . . . just remember you’re still fragile, right now. Just give it a little while before you do anything irrevocable. And if you do decide to get in touch with your parents, maybe the best thing would be not to tell the others. It would . . . Well. It would hurt them.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “You think?”
“Well, of course. We’re . . .” He was still messing with the cling-film; there was a faint pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “We love you, you know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re your family now. All of one another’s family—I mean, that’s not right, but you know what I mean . . .”
I leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Course I do,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Justin’s phone beeped. “That’ll be Rafe,” he said, fishing it out of his pocket. “Yes: wanting to know where we are.”
He started texting Rafe back, peering nearsightedly at the phone, and reached over to squeeze my shoulder with his free hand. “Just have a think about it,” he said. “And eat your lunch.”
* * *
“I see you’ve been playing Who’s the Daddy,” Frank said, that night. He was eating something—a burger, maybe, I could hear paper rustling. “And Justin’s out, in more ways than one. Place your bets: Danny Boy or Pretty Boy?”
“Or neither,” I said. I was on my way to my lurk spot—I was ringing Frank almost as soon as I got out the back gate, these days, rather than wait even a few extra minutes to hear if he had anything new on Lexie. “Our killer knew her, remember; no way to be sure just how well. That’s not what I was after, anyway. I was chasing down the no-pasts thing, trying to work out what these four aren’t sharing.”
“And all you got was a nice collection of sob stories. I grant you the no-pasts thing is fucked up, but we already knew they were a bunch of weirdos. No news there.”
“Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that afternoon had been useless, even if I didn’t know how it fit in yet. “I’ll keep poking around.”
“It’s been one of those days all round,” Frank said, through a mouthful. “I’ve been chasing our girl and getting zip. You’ve probably noticed: we’ve got a gap a year and a half long in her story. She ditches the May-Ruth ID in late 2000, but she doesn’t show up as Lexie until early 2002. I’m trying to track down where and who she was in between. I doubt she went home, wherever that is, but it’s always a possibility; and even if she didn’t, she might have left us a clue or two along the way.”
“I’d focus on European countries,” I said. “After September 2001, airport security tightened up a lot; she wouldn’t have made it out of the U.S. and into Ireland on a fake passport. She had to be this side of the Atlantic before then.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what name to chase. There’s no record of May-Ruth Thibodeaux ever applying for a passport. I’m thinking she went back to her own identity or bought herself a new one in New York, flew out of JFK on that, switched identity again once she got wherever she was going—”
JFK—
Frank was still talking but I’d stopped dead in the middle of the lane, just forgotten to keep walking, because that mysterious page in Lexie’s date book had gone off in my head with a flash-bang like a firecracker.
CDG 59 . . .
I’d flown into Charles de Gaulle a dozen times, going to spend summers with my French cousins, and fifty-nine quid sounded just about right for a one-way. AMS: not Abigail Marie Stone; Amsterdam. LHR: London Heath-row. I couldn’t remember the others but I knew, sure as steel, that they would turn out to be airport codes. Lexie had been pricing flights.
If all she wanted was an abortion she would have headed to England, no need to mess about with Amsterdam and Paris. And those were one-way prices, not returns. She had been getting ready to run again, right off the edge of her life and out into the wide blue world.
Why?
Three things had changed, in her last few weeks. She had found out she was pregnant; N had materialized; and she had started making plans to take off. I don’t believe in coincidences. There was no way to be sure of the order in which those three things had happened, but by whatever roundabout path, one of them had led to the other two. There was a pattern there, somewhere: tantalizingly close, popping in and out of view like one of those pictures you have to cross your eyes to see, there and gone too quick to catch.
Up until that night, I hadn’t had much time for Frank’s mystery stalker. Very few people are willing to ditch their whole lives and spend years bouncing around the world after some girl who pissed them off. Frank has this tendency to go for the more interesting theory rather than the more likely one, and I’d filed this one somewhere between Outside Chance and Pure Hollywood Melodrama. But this made three times, at least, that something had smashed broadside into her life, left it totaled, irreclaimable. My heart twisted for her.
“Hello? Ground control to Cassie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Frank, can you do something for me? I want to know anything out of the ordinary that happened in her May-Ruth life in the month or so before she went missing—make it two months, to be on the safe side.”
Running away from N? Running away
with
N, to start a whole new life somewhere, him and her and their baby?
“You underestimate me, babe. Already done. No strange visitors or phone calls, no arguments with anyone, no odd behavior, nothing.”
“I didn’t mean stuff like that. I want anything that happened, anything at all: if she switched job, switched boyfriend, moved house, got sick, took a course in something. Not ominous stuff, just your basic life events.”
Frank thought about this for a while, chewing his burger or whatever. “Why?” he asked, in the end. “If I’m going to call in more favors from my friendly Fed, I need to give him a reason.”
“Make something up. I don’t have a good reason. Intuition, remember?”
“OK,” Frank said. He sounded disturbingly like he was picking bits out of his teeth. “I’ll do it. If you do something for me in exchange.”
I had started walking again, automatically, towards the cottage. “Hit me.”
“Don’t relax. You’ve started to sound way too much like you’re enjoying yourself in there.”
I sighed. “Me woman, Frank. Woman multitask. I can do my job
and
have a laugh or two, all at the same time.”
“Good for you. All I know is, undercover relax, undercover in big trouble. There’s a killer out there, probably within a mile or so of wherever you’re standing right now. You’re supposed to be tracking him down, not playing Happy Families with the Fantastic Four.”
Happy Families. I had been taking it for granted that she’d hidden the diary to make sure no one found out about her N appointments, whoever or whatever N was. But this: she had had a whole other secret to keep. If the others had found out that Lexie was about to slash herself straight out of their interlaced world, shed it like a dragonfly shrugging out of its skin and leaving behind nothing but the perfect shape of its absence, they would have been devastated. I was suddenly, almost dizzily glad I hadn’t told Frank about that diary.
“I’m on it, Frank,” I said.
“Good. Stay on it.” Paper crumpling—he had finished his burger—and the beep of him hanging up.
I was almost at my surveillance spot. Snippets of hedge and grass and earth sprang alive in the pale circle of the torch beam, vanished the next moment. I thought of her running hard down this same lane, this same faint circle of light ricocheting wild, the strong door to safety lost forever in the dark behind her and nothing up ahead but that cold cottage. Those streaks of paint on her bedroom wall: she had had a future planned here, in this house, with these people, right up until the moment the bomb dropped.
We’re your family,
Justin had said,
all of one another’s family,
and I had been in Whitethorn House long enough to start understanding how much he meant it and how much it meant.
What the hell,
I thought,
what the hell could have been strong enough to blow all that away?
* * *
Now that I was looking, the cracks kept coming. I couldn’t tell whether they had been there all along, or whether they were deepening under my eyes. That night I was reading in bed when I heard voices outside, below my window.
Rafe had gone to bed before I had, and I could hear Justin going through his nighttime ritual downstairs—humming, puttering, the odd mysterious thump. That left Daniel and Abby. I knelt up by the window, held my breath and listened, but they were three stories down and all I could hear through Justin’s cheerful obbligato was a low, fast-paced murmur.
“No,”
Abby said, louder and frustrated. “Daniel, that’s not the point . . .” Her voice dropped again. “Moooon
river,
” Justin sang to himself, hamming it up happily.
I did what nosy kids have done since the dawn of time: I decided I needed a very quiet drink of water. Justin didn’t even pause in his humming as I moved across the landing; on the ground floor, there was no light under Rafe’s door. I felt my way along the walls and slipped into the kitchen. The French window was open, just a thumb’s width. I went to the sink—slowly, not even a rustle from my pajamas—and held a glass under the tap, ready to turn the water on if anyone caught me.
They were on the swing seat. The patio was bright with moonlight; they would never see me, behind glass in the dark kitchen. Abby was sitting sideways, her back against the arm of the seat and her feet on Daniel’s lap; he had a glass in one hand and was covering her ankles casually with the other. The moonlight poured down Abby’s hair, whitened the curve of her cheek and pooled in the folds of Daniel’s shirt. Something fast and needle-fine darted through me, a shot of pure distilled pain. Rob and I used to sit like that on my sofa, through long late nights. The floor bit cold at my bare feet and the kitchen was so silent, it hurt my ears.
“For good,” Abby said. There was a high note of disbelief in her voice. “Just keep on going, like this, for good. Pretend nothing ever happened.”
“I don’t see,” Daniel said, “that we have any other option. Do you?”
“Jesus, Daniel!” Abby ran her hands through her hair, head going back, flash of white throat. “How is
this
an option? This is
insane.
Is this seriously what you want? You want to do this for the rest of our lives?”
Daniel turned to look at her; I could only see the back of his head. “In an ideal world,” he said gently, “no. I’d like things to be different; several things.”
“Oh, God,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyebrows as if she had a headache starting. “Let’s not even go there.”
“One can’t have everything, you know,” Daniel said. “We knew, when we first decided to live here, that there would be sacrifices involved. We expected that.”
“Sacrifices,” Abby said, “yes. This, no. This I did not see coming, Daniel, no. None of it.”
“Didn’t you?” Daniel asked, surprised. “I did.”
Abby’s head jerked up and she stared at him. “
This?
Come
on.
You saw
this
coming? Lexie, and—”
“Well, not Lexie,” Daniel said. “Hardly. Although perhaps . . .” He checked himself, sighed. “But the rest: yes, I thought it was a distinct possibility. Human nature being what it is. I assumed you’d considered it too.”
Nobody had told me there was a rest of this, never mind sacrifices. I realized I had been holding my breath for so long that my head was starting to spin; I let it out, carefully.
“Nope,” Abby said wearily, to the sky. “Call me stupid.”
“I would never do that,” Daniel said, smiling a little sadly out over the lawn. “Heaven knows, I’m the last person in the world who has any right to judge you for missing the obvious.” He took a sip of his drink—glitter of pale amber as the glass tilted—and in that moment, in the fall of his shoulders and the way his eyes closed as he swallowed, it hit me. I had seen these four as safe in their own enchanted fort, with everything they wanted within arm’s reach. I had liked that thought, a lot. But something had blindsided Abby, and for some reason Daniel was getting used to being terribly, constantly unhappy.