“How did you know he was balding?”
Maeve bit her tongue. “Isn’t that what happens to all old men?”
Ellie folded her arms like a disappointed schoolmarm. “Is it really so hard to tell the truth?”
“When has either of us ever told the truth?”
In that moment, Maeve found herself back at Caldwell Street arguing in the front room, instinctively avoiding Callum’s gaze. Even though Callum wasn’t here, the old anxiety crept up her throat like a spider in its web. When she saw Ellie tugging at the cuffs of her shirt, biting her upper lip, she could tell she felt it, too.
“Fine,” Maeve said. “I saw it on Facebook. Happy?”
“But we’re not friends on Facebook.”
“I looked you up. Can we leave it now?”
Ellie, now with the upper hand, stopped chewing on her lip. “I guess Jilly was right about my privacy settings. Jilly’s my daughter, but I suppose you know that, too.”
Maeve chose not to reply. If only she could pull her quotations from her pocket. Read her reassurances. But that would have embarrassed her further, so she fiddled with the nearest doorknob instead.
“I’m sorry I ignored your friend request,” Ellie said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Wait. You sent that a few years ago, didn’t you? But David didn’t start going bald until last summer.”
Maeve walked to the door that marked the end of the hall, trying to put distance between them. Perhaps from farther away, Ellie would see her less clearly.
“I look you up sometimes. And Lorna. And Hollis. Oliver now and then. It’s not a crime.”
“I suppose not, but I certainly don’t see the point.”
“Because I have nothing better to do! There. Happy now, princess?”
“Don’t call me that.” Ellie furrowed her brow.
“Why not? That’s what we always called you. And it’s what you are. Isn’t it? Princess Ellie with her perfect life? You sell your soaps and lotions and live in a massive house that’s a registered historic landmark. Then there’s Lorna who gets to work at the University of Edinburgh, where I could never have got accepted even if I tried, and Hollis is an actual police detective, and Oliver was on Dragons’ Den, even though he didn’t get an investor, and do you know what I am? Nothing. Unemployed. On the dole. You have a mansion in Richmond? I live in my brother’s spare room. To make me feel better, he pays me to watch his kids like a live-in nanny. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted for me, isn’t it?”
A long silence stretched between them. Somewhere downstairs, Lorna and Oliver searched similar rooms, perhaps sharing similar arguments, but Maeve could not hear them. Last night, she had sworn she would be different around them. Stronger. A few pithy comments from Ellie, and already she was crumbling. She had to hold it together.
“I didn’t mean to upset you. I’d always hoped you’d do well.”
But she couldn’t.
“Don’t lie, Ellie. You never thought of me at all.” Maeve rattled the handle of the door to the attic. “I’ll go downstairs and find the key.”
“Shouldn’t I go with you?”
“I’d really rather you didn’t.”
Tears blurred her vision as she hurried away from Ellie, and she hated herself for it. She hugged her arms to herself and tried to squeeze the anxiety out. Why did she always cry when she was stressed? Why couldn’t she get angry or haughty? Why did it have to be sadness? This was all Callum’s fault. If he hadn’t died, she could be living a normal life. Maybe even a successful one. But she knew this was stupid even as she thought it. It wasn’t Callum’s fault she was here, just like it wasn’t his fault when she failed her maths exam or broke the teakettle or didn’t budget properly and ran out of grocery money. How many times had he paid for her lunch or got her dinner at the pub? She’d lost count, but she knew how many times she’d returned the favor. Zero was an easy number to remember. But this weekend, it was a chance to fix that, wasn’t it?
Lost in thought, she didn’t see the rope until she bumped into it. She’d wandered past the main staircase over to the wing of the house closed for renovation. The thin rope blocking off the closed wing swung limply back and forth from her touch. She grabbed it to steady it, but then smacked it in frustration. Why had she told Ellie about looking her up on Facebook? Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? She hit the rope again. No. No more tears. There was no reason to cry. She smacked the rope once more, and the weak catch that secured it to the wall broke. One end of the rope dropped to the floor.
“Of course,” she muttered and bent down to retrieve it, thinking she could somehow re-secure it.
As she lifted the end, she heard a sneeze.
She looked down into the darkened wing.
“Hello?”
Silence.
She looked behind her, but there was no one there. She didn’t expect there to be. The sound had come from the closed wing. No one was supposed to be down there.
“Hello?”
No answer. She let the rope fall. She couldn’t see far down the hall. The doors to all the rooms were shut and there were no windows to let the daylight in.
She listened. More silence.
And then, a faint creak, like a door being shut very softly. She’d heard that creak before. Last night.
Maeve hurried back to the main staircase and ran all the way down to the lobby. Lorna’s and Oliver’s voices carried up from the cellar as she turned at the bottom of the stairs and followed the narrow hallway that led to the back of the house. The windows back here looked out onto the distant hills, the bitter gray sky dampening the day.
If she followed this hall to the right, she would be walking underneath the closed wing above, wouldn’t she?
A scream echoed through the house.
Maeve froze.
“Ellie,” she whispered.
Ellie screamed again. Maeve rushed back to the lobby, running into Oliver and Lorna, who were coming out of the dining room.
“Where is she?” Ollie asked.
“I don’t know. Upstairs?”
Oliver ran for the stairs. Maeve followed alongside.
“You two were supposed to stay together!” he yelled back at her.
“I thought I saw someone!”
Lorna grabbed her arm. “Who did you see?”
“No one. I mean, I thought I heard someone.”
“Hollis?” Oliver asked as they reached the second-floor landing.
“I don’t know.”
“But you heard them downstairs? Why did you leave Ellie?”
“I didn’t! I mean I did but—”
Ellie screamed again and this time didn’t stop.
They reached the top floor, and the narrower hall condensed the sound. Oliver tracked it to a closed door on their right.
“Ellie? What’s happening? What’s wrong? Ellie!”
The knob rattled. The door held firm.
“Ellie, let me in!”
Oliver landed a kick to the door.
“Ow! Fucking hell.”
The door didn’t move, but Oliver limped back. “Who installed these fucking doors? What did they do? Cement the fucking hinges? Ellie!”
“Hush,” said Lorna. “Listen.”
Maeve noticed, too. The screaming had stopped. In the quiet, she heard the lock unbolt. Then Ellie stood before them, holding her left arm as if wounded but otherwise apparently unharmed. She forced her way through them and staggered down the hall.
“Ellie, love,” Oliver said, going after her. “Calm down. It’s all right. I’m here. Calm down. Tell us what happened.”
He tried to take her arm, tried to hold her, but Ellie kept turning away, passively resisting as she stopped and started down the hall, Oliver trailing after her. She paused at a wall sconce and held her arm under the light, examining a wound—red marks that looked like scratches. What could have done that to her? Maeve thought. Who could have done that, when Lorna and Oliver had been down
stairs?
Ellie crumpled to the floor, her face shining from tears.
“What happened?” Lorna asked Maeve.
“I don’t know. I told you I thought I heard someone. I mean, I went to find a key for the attic, and that’s when I thought I heard someone, so I went downstairs and that’s where I was when I heard her scream.”
“You heard someone up here, so you went downstairs?” Oliver snapped. “What the fuck sense does that make? You were running away, was that it?”
“I wasn’t—I got my words jumbled. I went downstairs to find a key for the attic, and then I thought I heard someone, and then—”
“Stop. Look.” Ellie’s whisper silenced them. She shook her head back and forth, like she was having a seizure, and pointed at the room. “Just look!”
“Okay. Okay.” Oliver rubbed Ellie’s shoulder, then went to look into the room.
His face went gray and he staggered back, stricken by the same shock as Ellie. Maeve exchanged a glance with Lorna. Then they viewed the room together.
The walls were the same pale shade of yellow as those of Caldwell Street and were specked with hardened Blu Tack. A large wooden wardrobe, angled to the right from a missing leg, leaned against one wall, and empty Chicken Cottage boxes littered the floor. A Bon Jovi poster was taped above a box-spring bed.
This was Hollis’s old bedroom, a near-exact replica. The only difference was the position of the opened window, the curtain wet and blowing from the rain. But this wasn’t what had Oliver dry-retching or Ellie muttering to herself. It was what lay on the bed.
They didn’t need to check if he was alive. Half his skull was caved in. Blood drenched the entire left side of his face down to the collar of his yellow jacket.
“Hollis,” Maeve whispered. His clouded right eye stared at her, and Maeve couldn’t look anymore.
Lorna stepped closer.
“What are you doing?” Oliver asked from the hallway.
But Maeve didn’t need to ask. By Hollis’s head was a card in one of Callum’s blue envelopes. Lorna plucked it from the mattress, then pulled Maeve out into the hall and shut the door behind them. Both of them sank to the floor, where Oliver and Ellie had already found themselves. When Oliver saw what Lorna had, he started shaking his head.
“Don’t,” Oliver said. “Don’t open it. Lorna.”
But she did anyway.
You try to leave when it’s too soon,
you’ll die like Hollis in your room.
Someone murdered Callum dear.
Till they confess, you’re all stuck here.
Pp. 35–45
but they had to go and make things harder than they needed to be. Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, this is how they’ve always been. I just had to keep telling myself it wasn’t my fault. Because it’s not. They’re here because of their choices, even if they didn’t see it that way. They’ve never been able to see things for what they were. That was never more obvious than in December 1994, and what happened after.
The pale blue envelope lay flat on the dark green carpet in front of the closed door. From Maeve’s position—sprawled belly-down on the bed, the side of her face pressed into the scratchy pillowcase—it looked like someone had taken a penknife and cut a perfect square from the carpet.
Maeve didn’t need a note to remind her of last night. Every time she closed her eyes, the memories played back as clearly as watching a rerun on TV. Her empty stomach protested her inaction, but moving remained impossible. The rooms around her were as quiet as her own. An apocalypse morning, she called it, when long moments passed without the sound of another human being and she could imagine she was the only person left alive. The last had occurred over the summer, when Max had been at a sleepover and her parents visiting friends in Leeds. Maeve used to love the peace and quiet of apocalypse mornings, but having one at a house like Caldwell Street was unnatural.
Brisk footsteps sounded up the stairs and disappeared behind the click of a door—Ellie’s or Hollis’s. Though quiet, they were enough to break the morning’s spell. Or afternoon’s, rather, for when she looked at her clock, the hour hand pointed almost to the one. She shot out of bed. She never slept this late, and it made her feel even more lazy and useless than usual. But Caldwell Street did that. They all knew it. It drew you into this world where every fault was amplified and every feeling—good or bad—became thrice what it would be elsewhere.
Maeve slid out of the low bed, one foot warm in its sock, the other bare and cold. She ignored the envelope as she threw on an old hoodie and hunted for a fresh pair of socks, but the envelope would not let her be. She wanted to step on it as she walked to the door, even hovered her foot over it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, she opened the flap.
I had a great time. You looked really fine. (That’s a bad rhyme.) But I had a lot of fun. What do you say to another one?
Maeve read it a few times, then slid the card back into the envelope, sick from her memories of last night. There had been drinks, laughing, his thumb sweeping over the back of her hand as they huddled together in the booth at the club. She tucked the envelope into the front pouch of her hoodie. She needed breakfast. Or lunch. Once she had some food in her, she’d be able to think about this more clearly. But when she reached the first landing, she collided with Callum as he was leaving his room.
“Maeve! Sorry!”
“Hi.” She cringed when she saw they were dressed alike: plaid pajama bottoms and red hoodies.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“Oh yeah. No problem. You?” She bit her lower lip at how awkward the question sounded.
“Sort of? Actually, I had this really weird dream that I was doing an internship for some botanical gardens or something out in the country? And we had no power and I kept having to fill in these holes with cement?”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah. Do you think it means anything?”
She shrugged. “You’re not meant to be a gardener?”
He laughed, and her face got hot because it was a sweet laugh. An honest one. And then she was laughing with him, and some of the weight from that morning lifted away.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I was going to grab a quick shower then get something to eat? That café by the train station has surprisingly good fry-ups, and they don’t charge for refills on coffee. Want to give it a go?” He fiddled with the cuff of his sleeve, his pale skin turning a shade of pink, which became darker when his eye caught the corner of the blue envelope peeking out from Maeve’s pocket. Maeve’s doubt crept up inside her, but she swallowed it back down.
“Yeah, sure. You’re going to shower first? I’ll have time to get changed.”
“Or we could go like this?” He laughed, then stopped. “That’s a joke. It was a joke. I really do need to shower. I stink from last night.” He blushed. “You don’t. Just me. You’re fine. You look fine.” He glanced at the envelope and winced.
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said.
“Great!”
“Great.”
They nodded like two strangers who’d been discussing the weather and had run out of things to say.
“Right. Shower.” Callum hurried to the bathroom.
“See you.”
The bathroom door closed, and Maeve winced again at how stupid she sounded before retreating back upstairs to her bedroom.
Maeve’s heavy footsteps might have been what woke Oliver. Or perhaps it was Callum turning on the shower. Either way, one moment he’d been in a dream. The next, he was lying on his mattress, staring up at the water-damaged ceiling. The waking had been so abrupt, he couldn’t recall anything about the dream other than an impending sense of dread, and he knew then why he’d woken.
She was going to call.
He listened to the shower running in the bathroom next door, the groan of the pipes the loudest in his room, and told himself this time it would be differ
ent. This time when she called, he’d stick to his word. He wouldn’t come running.
The phone rang. He fumbled down the stairs and picked up the receiver on the fifth ring.
“Yeah?”
He heard her voice, the baby crying in the background.
“Mum, I can’t . . . Mum, I have a final exam . . . Then get your husband to—”
Her answer did not surprise him. He rubbed his thigh, pain springing from his knee and traveling the familiar route to his hip.
“I’ll see what I can do . . . Yeah, you too.”
The phone’s shrill ring stirred the rest of the house. Once he hung up, a steady cacophony of footsteps, random thumps, drawers opening and closing echoed between the walls like an orchestra warming up. When Oliver returned upstairs, the shower had stopped. He ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his itching eyes, and knocked on Callum’s door. No one answered, and he tried again. The third time, the bathroom door swung open, and Callum appeared in only a towel.
“Callum! Exactly who I wanted to see.”
“Oh! Oliver. Um . . . Let me get dressed and I can—”
“Don’t worry about it, mate. Come on. Let’s go to your room. I have a quick question for you. You work in the records office, yeah?”
Lorna remembered this day as the first—and, she pledged, the last—she ever experienced a hangover. Her head pounded, her mouth was dry, and her stomach couldn’t decide if it wanted to intake food or expel it. Little comfort could be taken from the knowledge that she hadn’t done or said anything ridiculous, but she was an idiot for not sticking to her own golden rules: three drinks max, a glass of water before bed, no befriending strangers at Oliver’s parties. But the stress of her courses, particularly her incompetent media prof who detested anyone who detested Ayn Rand, had made her let her guard down.
She stumbled down into the front room, kicked over a stack of empty Carling cans, and woke a red-eyed stranger crashing on the sofa. The boy muttered something about his mum as Lorna got him to his feet and shoved him out the door. As she started collecting the cans, she remembered the girl she’d been flirting with. God, had she been flirting? She’d put a hand on the girl’s knee and leaned into her side. The girl hadn’t even been that pretty and all she talked about was Oasis. Lorna dumped the cans in the metal bin out back where they clattered like a broken wind chime. She wanted to pour a big glass of juice and sneak back up to her room to work on one of the three papers she had due on Thursday, but by the time she filled her cup, she only had strength enough to sit.
They Did Bad Things Page 10