The other thing hitting me over and over, with a horrible sick lurch every time: this could have been why she had come looking for me, this could have been what she had wanted all along. Someone to change places with her. Someone longing for the chance to toss away her own battered life, let it evaporate like morning mist over grass; someone who would gladly fade to a scent of bluebells and a green shoot, while this girl strengthened and bloomed and turned solid again, and lived.
I think it was only in that moment I believed she was dead, this girl I had never seen alive. I’ll never be free of her. I wear her face; as I get older it’ll stay her changing mirror, the one glimpse of all the ages she never had. I lived her life, for a few strange bright weeks; her blood went into making me what I am, the same way it went to make the bluebells and the hawthorn tree. But when I had the chance to take that final step over the border, lie down with Daniel among the ivy leaves and the sound of water, let go of my own life with all its scars and all its wreckage and start new, I turned it down.
The air was so still. Any minute now, I would have to go back to Whitethorn House and do my best to wreck it.
Out of nowhere I wanted to talk to Sam so badly it was like being hit in the stomach. It felt like the most urgent thing in the world, to tell him, before it was too late, that I was coming home; that, in the ways that mattered most, I was already back; that I was scared, terrified as a kid in the dark, and that I needed to hear his voice.
His phone was off. All I got was the voice-mail woman telling me, archly, to leave a message. Sam was working: taking his turn surveilling Naylor’s house, going through statement sheets for the dozenth time in case he had missed something. If I’d been the crying type, I would have cried then.
Before I understood that I was doing it, I set my phone number to Private and dialed Rob’s mobile. I pressed my free hand flat over the mike and felt my heart going slow and hard under my palm. I knew this was very possibly the stupidest thing I’d done in my life, but I didn’t know how not to do it.
“Ryan,” he said on the second ring, wide awake; Rob always had trouble sleeping. When I couldn’t answer, he said, with a sudden new alertness in his voice, “Hello?”
I hung up. In the second before my thumb hit the button I thought I heard him say, fast and urgent, “Cassie?” but my hand was already moving and it was too late for me to pull it back even if I had wanted to. I slid down the side of the tree and sat there, with my arms wrapped tight around myself, for a long time.
There was this night, during our last case. At three in the morning I got on my Vespa and went down to the crime scene to pick Rob up. On the way back the roads were all ours, that late, and I was going fast; Rob leaned into the turns with me and the bike barely seemed to feel the extra weight. Two high beams came at us around a bend, brilliant and growing till they filled the whole road: a lorry, half over the center line and coming straight for us, but the bike swayed out of the way light as a stalk of grass and the lorry was past in a great whack of wind and dazzle. Rob’s hands on my waist shook every now and then, a quick violent tremor, and I was thinking of home and warmth and whether I had anything in the fridge.
Neither of us knew it, but we were speeding through the last few hours we had. I leaned on that friendship loose and unthinking as if it were a wall six foot thick, but less than a day later it started to crumble and avalanche and there was nothing in the world I could do to hold it together. In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.
21
I
t only took Daniel a couple of hours to come up with his next move. I was sitting up in bed, staring at the Brothers Grimm and reading the same sentence over and over without taking in a word of it, when there was a quick, discreet rap on my door.
"Come in,” I called.
Daniel put his head in the door. He was still dressed, spotless in his white shirt and shining shoes. “Do you have a minute?” he inquired politely.
“Of course,” I said, just as politely, putting down the book. There was no way this was a surrender or even a truce, but I couldn’t think of anything either of us could try, not without the others there for weapons.
“I just wanted,” Daniel said, turning to close the door behind him, “a quick word with you. In private.”
My body thought faster than my mind. In that second when his back was to me, before I knew why I was doing it, I grabbed the mike wire through my pajama top, gave it a hard upwards yank and felt the pop as the jack came free. By the time he looked around again, my hands were lying innocently on the book. “About what?” I asked.
“There are a few things,” Daniel said, smoothing the bottom of the duvet and sitting down, “that have been bothering me.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Almost since you . . . well, let’s say arrived. Small inconsistencies, growing more troubling as time went on. By the time you asked for more onions, the other evening, I had serious questions.”
He left a polite pause, in case I wanted to contribute anything to the conversation. I stared at him. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this one coming.
“And then, of course,” he said, when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to answer, “we come to last night. As you may or may not know, on a few occasions you and I—or, at any rate, Lexie and I—have . . . Well, suffice it to say that a kiss can be as individual and unmistakable as a laugh. When we kissed, last night, it left me more or less positive that you’re not Lexie.”
He gazed at me blandly, across the bed. He was burning me all over again, every way he knew how: with my boss, with the boyfriend he’d guessed at, with the brass who would not approve of an undercover smooching a suspect. They were his brand-new remote-controlled weapons. If that mike had been plugged in, I would have been a few hours away from a grim trip home and a one-way ticket to a desk in Offaly.
“Absurd though this may sound,” Daniel said tranquilly, “I’d like to see this supposed stab wound. Simply to reassure myself that you’re actually who you’re claiming to be.”
“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “why not?” and saw the startled flicker in his eyes. I pulled up my pajama top and tugged the bandage free to show him the jack and the battery pack, separate.
“Nice shot,” I told him, “but no dice. And if you do get me pulled out, do you think I’ll go quietly? I’ll have nothing to lose. Even if all I’ve got is five minutes, I’ll use them to tell the others who I am and that you’ve known for weeks. How well do you think that’ll go down with, say, Rafe?”
Daniel leaned forwards to inspect the mike. “Ah,” he said. “Well, it was worth a try.”
“My time’s almost up on this case anyway,” I said. I was talking fast: Frank would have started getting suspicious the instant the mike feed died, I had maybe a minute before his head went up in smoke. “I’ve only got a few days left. But I want those few days. If you try to take them away from me, I’ll go down all guns blazing. If you don’t, you still have a good chance that I won’t get anything worthwhile, and we can work it so the others never have to know who I was.”
He watched me, expressionless, those big square hands tidily clasped in his lap. “My friends are my responsibility. I’m not going to stand back and let you sweep them off into corners for interrogation.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough. Try and stop me any way you can; you didn’t have any trouble tonight. Just don’t mess with my last few days. Deal?”
“How many days,” Daniel asked, “exactly?”
I shook my head. “Not in the deal. In about ten seconds I’m going to plug this in again, so it sounds like an accidental disconnect, and we’re going to have a harmless little chat about why I was in a mood at dinner. OK?”
He nodded absently, still examining the mike. “Great,” I said. “Here goes. I don’t feel like”—I plugged the wire back in halfway through the sentence, for an extra touch of realism—“talking about it. My head’s a mess, everything feels sucky, I just want everyone to leave me alone. OK?”
“You’re probably just hungover,” Daniel said, obligingly. “You’ve always had a hard time with red wine, haven’t you?”
Everything sounded like a trap. “Whatever,” I said, giving him an irritable teenager shrug and sticking my bandage back down. “Maybe it was the punch. Rafe probably put meths in it. He’s drinking a lot more these days, have you noticed?”
“Rafe is fine,” Daniel said coolly. “And so will you be, I hope, after a good night’s sleep.”
Quick footsteps downstairs, and a door opening. “Lexie?” Justin called anxiously, up the stairs. “Is everything OK?”
“Daniel’s annoying me,” I shouted back.
“Daniel? How are you annoying her?”
“I’m not.”
“He wants to know why I feel crap,” I called. “I feel crap because I just do, and I want him to leave me alone.”
“You feel crap because what?” Justin had come out of his room, to the bottom of the stairs; I could picture him, in his striped pyjamas, clutching the banister and peering short-sightedly upwards. Daniel was giving me an intent, thoughtful gaze that made me edgy as hell.
“Shut
up
!” yelled Abby, furious enough that we could hear her right through her door. “Some of us are trying to
sleep
here.”
“Lexie? You feel crap because what?”
A thud: Abby had thrown something. “Justin, I said shut
up
!
Jesus!
”
Faintly, from the ground floor, Rafe shouted something irritable that sounded like “What the hell is going
on
?”
“I’ll come down and explain, Justin,” Daniel called. “Everyone go back to bed.” To me: “Good night.” He stood up and smoothed the duvet again. “Sleep well. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Don’t count on it.”
The steady rhythm of his footsteps going downstairs, then hushed voices below me: at first a lot of Justin and an occasional brief interjection from Daniel, shifting gradually till it was the other way round. I got out of bed, carefully, and put my ear to the floor, but they were talking barely above whispers and I couldn’t make out the words.
It was twenty minutes before Daniel came back upstairs, softly, pausing for a long few seconds on the landing. I didn’t start shaking until his bedroom door closed behind him.
I stayed awake for hours that night, flipping pages and pretending to read, rustling the covers and doing deep breaths and pretending to be asleep, unplugging the mike for a few seconds or a few minutes every now and then. I think I created a pretty good impression of a jack come loose, disconnecting and reconnecting itself as I moved, but it didn’t reassure me. Frank is very far from stupid, and he was in no humor to give me the benefit of any doubts.
Frank to the left of me, Daniel to the right, and here I was, stuck in the middle with Lexie. I passed the time, while I played my mike-jack game, by trying to work out how it was logistically possible for me to have ended up on the opposite side from absolutely everyone else involved in this case, including people who were on opposite sides from each other. Before I finally went to sleep I took the chair from Lexie’s dressing table, for the first time in weeks, and braced it against my door.
* * *
Saturday went fast, in a helpless nightmare daze. Daniel had decided—partly because working on the house always settled them all down, presumably, and partly to keep everyone in one room and under his eye—that we needed to spend the day sanding floors: “We’ve been neglecting the dining room,” he told us, at breakfast. “It’s starting to look terribly shabby, next to the sitting room. I think today we should start bringing it up to scratch. What do you think?”
“Good idea,” said Abby, sliding eggs onto his plate and giving him a tired, determinedly positive smile. Justin shrugged and went back to picking at toast; I said, “Whatever,” into the frying pan; Rafe took his coffee and left without a word. “Good,” Daniel said serenely, going back to his book. “That’s a plan, then.”
The rest of the day was just about as excruciating as I’d expected. The Happy Place magic was apparently on its day off. Rafe was in a silent, fuming rage with the whole world; he kept banging the sander into the walls, making everyone jump, till Daniel took it out of his hands without a word and passed him a sheet of sandpaper instead. I turned up my sulk as loud as I could and hoped it would have some effect on someone, and that sooner or later—not too much later—I would find a way to use it.
Outside the windows it was raining, thin petulant rain. We didn’t talk. Once or twice I saw Abby wipe her face, but she always had her back to the rest of us and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was just the sawdust. It got everywhere: drifting up our noses, down our necks, working its way into the skin of our hands. Justin wheezed ostentatiously and had great dramatic coughing fits into a handkerchief until finally Daniel put down the sander, stalked out, and came back with an ancient, hideous gas mask, which he held out to Justin in silence. No one laughed.
“They’ve got asbestos in them,” Rafe said, scrubbing viciously at an awkward corner of floor. “Are you actually trying to kill him, or do you just want to give that impression?”
Justin gave the mask a horrified look. “I don’t want to breathe asbestos.”
“If you’d prefer to tie your handkerchief around your mouth,” said Daniel, “then do that instead. Just stop moaning.” He shoved the mask into Justin’s hands, went back to the sander and fired it up again.
The gas mask that had sent me and Rafe into a giddy fit, that night on the patio.
Daniel can wear it into college, we’ll get Abby to embroider it . . .
Justin dumped it gingerly in a bare corner, where it sat for the rest of the day, staring at us all with huge, empty, desolate eyes.
* * *
“And what’s been going on with your mike?” Frank inquired, that night. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Ah, fuck,” I said. “What, it’s doing it again? I thought I’d fixed it.”
A skeptical pause. “Doing what again?”
“This morning when I went to change my bandage, the jack was out. I think I put the bandage on wrong, after my shower last night, and the jack pulled out when I moved. How much did you miss? Is it working now?” I stuck a hand down my top and tapped the mike. “Can you hear that?”