“Did she?” Karo blinks at her. “Anna was a filmmaker, not a spiritualist. She was interested in capturing those dreams, in using them herself—as images.” She rolls her eyes. “Spiritualism.” The change in tone suits her; she switches feet, working the cramp out of the other arch. “You’d have to believe that dreams find us, everything happens for a reason, blah-blah . . . do you really believe all that?” She looks down at her own hand, trembling there against her sock foot, then back to Maeve. “No. Dreams are only fragments. Physical fragments in the brain. That’s their value. We use them to work out what’s past—and practice for the future. Practice! Not predictions. We say: Trust your instinct,” she says. “Instinct is what shows up when you’ve learned something over and over, from experience. You know more than you think, Maeve.” There’s a silence, and then that slightly hawkish look again. “In dreams, you always know what to do. Don’t you?”
The question comes out low and serious, and they stare at each other for a long moment. Then the fire dims, and Maeve adds a little more kindling to it, shoring it up.
She doesn’t answer.
There’s a new brightness outside, the clouds thinning for long enough to let moonlight hit all that white, acres and acres of snow. They don’t talk about whether to sleep or try waiting up in the hope that a dig-out crew might arrive in the night. They just watch as the light moves, the moon rising far above them, until the silence is too much to bear.
Karo slips a sleeping pill under her tongue and tucks in at one end of the couch, eyes closed, but Maeve eventually makes up a bed for herself on the floor, cushions from all the armchairs in a fat row and the duvet she rescued earlier in the day over the top. She can’t sleep and lies there breathing. Listening to Karo breathe. There’s no way to know what time it is. Midnight? Earlier? Later? By now the others will have reached the village, Maeve thinks. If the village is still there. If there is something or someone to reach. Above her on the couch, Karo twitches and murmurs, sinks further into her blankets, falls into sleep-breath. The fire keeps burning away and Maeve gets up and goes to the back door for more wood, then just stays there, staring out into the night.
It’s snowing again, but only lightly. Fat, full flakes. Wind skims the trees, the promise of a new squall approaching. The moon hidden for the moment by clouds.
Standing in a dark window always gives Maeve the feeling she’s being watched—even here, in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around, no one maybe for miles. Another leftover anxiety. She resents it.
Iain. Always Iain: in the grocery parking lot, or standing by the school’s chain-link fence, or under the maple in Maeve’s backyard. Iain at the window. On her porch. At her door.
Her neighbor, an old lady, telling her how charming he was: he’d left Maeve a bouquet, two dozen roses. Maeve broke down and filed a report. The police told her they’d speak to him.
But the problem, the cop said, calling back the next day, is he’s just not over you yet. He’s still in love, he says. Before hanging up, he reminds her: It’s hard for a man. You’ve taken his children.
He waited outside her house the night before he died—the night before he got on a plane that put him in the wrong city at the wrong time. Maeve in the rocking chair at her kitchen window, keeping watch; Iain in a black rental car, parked at the curb.
July. High summer, a heat warning, and all of Maeve’s windows and doors locked tight. She didn’t dare to let the cat out. She didn’t dare to open the door even for that. She’d signed for a registered letter early in the day, then opened it to find a court file number, a date.
He’d never get custody, her lawyer assured her. Almost certainly not.
So then why go to court?
Because fighting him would cost Maeve everything.
The children whining in their sleep, faces pink and slick with sweat. She’d given them ice packs to cool their pillows, a wet facecloth chilled in the freezer and laid across each hot belly. The cat yowled by the back door and woke them. Still she kept it locked.
He’s just not over you.
Maeve in the rocking chair with a cushion in her lap. Under the cushion, a kitchen knife. She knew this was useless. Worse than useless: the scar on her hand a constant reminder of how easily a weapon could be turned against you.
He wouldn’t get it out of her hand this time.
It was easy to imagine him coming to the door. He’d done it before, stood on the step, pounding. Rattled her windows to see if they were locked. Maeve could see the dead bolt from where she sat, could picture, not a turning of the lock, but a crowbar splinter, the frame coming loose from the wall around it. One fist and then an arm breaking through. A boot, kicking its way in.
She’d go for his face first, the knife cleaving down the length of his nose, splitting him in two. He wouldn’t expect that from her. He would expect something low down and lame, a few stabs to his soft parts. She didn’t want to aim for his heart or his guts or even his balls. She wanted him gone.
After a few hours, she stopped waiting for him to come to the door but imagined instead circling the house herself. Going out the back entrance, along the high hedge, through the neighbor’s yard, and down that way. Into the back seat behind him. Slicing his throat.
She’s small and light and she knows how to move fast.
This is what she thought about during the whole long night. He stayed there in his car till the sun came up again. He stayed till other people started other cars, until the smell of coffee and bacon and gasoline began to move through the heavy air. She thought he’d never leave her alone.
Until he did, she tells herself now. He did go. He got on a plane and the plane took him so far away that he couldn’t come back.
An accident. Kind of.
Sometimes she wonders if she willed it. The shooter. Can you do that? Can you wish someone dead so fiercely that your wish transmits? A child’s question.
She is not a child.
Dreams, Karo said, are a way of working out the past. Not the future. But Maeve is aware that she’s still the same woman she was that night, with as much to fight for—even if the children aren’t sleeping upstairs but waiting for her, far away, at home.
She closes her eyes now to expel the memory, to wash it clean.
When she opens them again, she blinks. Back in the trees, there’s something moving. For a second, her heart skips—as though it could be Iain himself.
She peers out, thinking first that the others must have returned after all. But it’s more defined than that. A shadow. Perhaps not all of them.
Perhaps just one.
Maeve shoves her feet into her boots and steps outside, holding the door safely open with one hand. But the shadow doesn’t move. The darkness of the forest grows, lying in wait. No one shouts to her.
She does hear something, though. A huff. Is it? A low grunt?
Maeve pulls in, holds her breath—
But the clouds shift: the shadow disappears, swallowed up by the night. She scans the snow from her doorway out to the trees. Whatever it was—real or imagined—she can’t see it now. The woods are silent. To each side, only the mountains loom in the dark.
She retreats back inside and locks the door.
The fire cracks and spits sparks, and Maeve shivers at the noise. She pads softly to her makeshift bed and lies down. Karo sleeping, and no one else in the whole place. She tries not to think of Anna lying on her shelf.
The building like an endless cavern around her. Maeve alone, exhausted and wired, all at once.
Sleep. She needs to sleep, that’s all.
Her eyes finally close but even as she drifts off, she’s unable to shake the sense that something is waiting, outside in the dark. Feeling it there.
The moonlight shifts again, then disappears. Dreaming now, Maeve slides her boots back on and steps outside into a storm. The snow is so thick she can’t see—is that the building behind her? Or is that the forest, and the center is ahead? The ridge to one side
and safety to the other, but which is which? Maeve gropes blindly for the door, the new snow stinging her face—but the door shuts, and now she’s spinning in circles, desperate.
She realizes she is not alone. Something is out here with her. It grows darker, closer, pressing in. A new cold cuts through her wrists, the back of her neck. She knows it’s there.
She cannot see it. She can’t see her hand in front of her face.
In the lobby, Maeve opens her eyes with a start. Awake.
She turns over on her cushions, her breath coming short and broken. There’s a creak back in the kitchen and she freezes—then again, somewhere else, lower down. She waits, counting the seconds between sounds the way you count in a storm between the flash and the crack of thunder. She can remember lying this same way, in the heat of that night, with Iain pacing on the sidewalk below. Willing herself to stay alert.
There’s nothing out there now. Just a dream. She saw that for herself.
She closes her eyes, counts to ten, breathes. Allows the repetition to draw her gently back to sleep.
Another thump—the sounds are coming from the spa level. She’s sure of it now. But this time, it’s more like a slam. Heavy.
Maeve’s head swims. She struggles to rouse herself, but it’s too late, a new dream already taking over. She finds herself downstairs, in the lower hallway. She is dreaming again, isn’t she? Or is she sleepwalking, like Anna?
It’s dark, and she’s feeling her way along the wall. This is where she was the night she saw Sadie crouched in a doorway. It must be; it’s so much warmer here, the sudden change makes her shiver. On the other side of the wall she hears a groaning noise and another heavy thud, and she stops.
There’s a room down here. Down in the basement. Did she know that? She peers in, squinting. On the far wall, she can just make out another door. A door to the outside.
That same sharp cold, stinging at the back of her neck.
A loud pop from the fire and Maeve bolts upright, fully awake this time. She is in her bed in the lobby, Karo asleep on the couch. She hugs her knees to her chest, recovering. The last dream image still burning in her mind:
In the strange room, the door’s handle pumps up and down. The dead bolt grinds in its lock.
Day 7
IN THE MORNING Maeve wakes by the fire, which is dead.
It’s barely warm enough, even buried under the duvet, and the contrast where the air touches her skin is stark. The morning air is not just cool. It’s crisp—frosty even. Bad dreams and a new blizzard swept in overnight, each of them waking her over and over. She burrows down inside the covers, relieved for the daylight. At least now she can stop trying to sleep.
In the light of morning, she pulls her hand from under the covers and places it on her cheek, her ear, and the sudden heat against her skin gives her a shiver. She twists in her makeshift bed to look out the window, but there’s nothing new to see. It’s snowing. Up on the couch, Karo is still sleeping; only the trim of her wool hat and her eyes show at the edge of her blankets.
Maeve keeps the duvet wrapped around her like a giant shawl and crouches by the hearth to rebuild the fire. The embers are there, black and ashy, and she builds a teepee of kindling first and lets it flame up before adding the bigger split logs, one by one. When the fire takes, she leaves it burning and, glancing back at Karo one last time, slips into her office and shuts the door.
Inside, Maeve scans the surfaces first, but the desk is spare and clean, the cabinets closed. She rolls a few drawers open and shut slowly, unsure what her excuse would be if Karo were to walk in. I was just looking for an Advil, Maeve practices in her mind. I thought you might have some over-the-counter stuff in here. The cabinets are stacked with hanging files; in the desk drawers, only office supplies.
Maeve looks to the window. Karo’s day pack sits propped against an old painter’s stool. She takes one last quick glance over her shoulder and opens up the pack.
There you are, she thinks.
She tucks Justin’s camera bag under the wealth of duvet and opens the door.
Maeve passes through the lobby and goes up the stairs, duvet dragging, to her own room. The space is vacant and haunted now, bare sheets drawn up over the mattress, frost inside the windowpane. In the mirror, her reflection startles her. White-faced in white bedding, her own ghost. She needs to pee; in the bathroom, the water in the bowl with the first glassy sheen of ice forming along its surface. The porcelain burns cold against her thighs.
Safe in her privacy, she reaches into her pocket, pulls out the photo strip, and sobs, her thumb tracing the line of Talia’s brow, as though she could tuck her long hair behind one ear or stroke Rudy’s puffed-out cheeks. Maeve’s own cheeks in the photo, a little gaunt but lifted in real glee. She wants to cry it out here, far away from Karo. Alone with it.
All the things this time was supposed to be. A rest, a reset, a way for Maeve to regain her spirit and come back a better artist—better, in fact, at everything. More able to care for her children. More able to care for herself. And every last moment of it turned to disaster. A punishment for wanting more than the world wants to offer women.
The snow and the cold and Anna frozen in it. Punishment seems the only possible word.
She gives herself five minutes—five minutes to wallow, she thinks—then wipes her nose with her sleeve and leaves again.
The common room at the end of the hall has the widest view of the grounds and a door with a manual lock. She stands at the window. She’s so much higher here, the vantage so much better. She goes to crank the window open, thinking that it will shove the high-piled snow off the sill, but it’s frozen shut. She has to push up onto her toes to see out. The open field to one side, and the new snow, always new snow, moving in.
Nothing else. No person, no vehicle, no rescue on the horizon.
There’s a sudden flurry of movement by the forest border, and she pivots to catch it, but it’s only a few elk. Separated from the herd? Charging out of the woods.
She freezes there, watching them, then turns back to look at the trees, expecting something else to appear behind them: wolves, or a bear, or even a moose. Something chasing them down. But there’s nothing to explain it and Maeve watches them until they disappear from view. Spooked, and cutting through the snow.
When they’re gone, she turns away from the window and unpacks Justin’s bag, putting everything on the counter of the kitchenette: camera, hard drive, SDs. She goes to turn the camera on, but it’s dead. Of course it’s dead: she rummages through the bag’s zipper compartments for an extra battery.
If nothing else, she knows Anna had the camera trained on her the night before she died, Maeve’s last dance in the lobby. The footage is worth a look. But there’s also whatever Sadie was doing with it. Secretly, with or without Sim. If Karo thought the thing was causing trouble, she must have had good reason. And that reason is likely on film.
There are two extra battery packs in the side pocket, one drained, one showing a 40 percent charge. Maeve slips the juiced battery into the camera and hits Play on the first card.
There’s a blast of sound and she almost jumps out of her skin—the volume is way up. She hits Stop, looks all around, then takes a breath. Turns the sound down. Starts again.
The dance footage is the first thing she sees. It’s the last thing that was recorded. The normalcy of watching herself dance on the little screen feels, at first, like a reprieve. But there’s a strangeness to the way it’s filmed—it goes in and out of focus, as though Anna were distracted, as though she were holding the camera but really watching something else. There’s some ambient noise and Maeve nudges the volume up a little. She can see herself and also a shadow reflection in the window. There, it’s not only Maeve in the frame but Sim too—his image growing larger in the glass until she sees the real Sim enter the shot, skirting the edge of Maeve’s space. He disappears where the mezzanine stairs begin, and a moment later, Maeve watches herself fall.
T
he screen goes black.
Maeve removes the card and pockets it, like a souvenir she can take home. She plugs another one in. There are a million little files, all numbered, no names, and she sets them up to play through. The first few groups show a different High Water: full sun, leaves on the trees, people she doesn’t know. A lecture, maybe, or a tour, outdoors in summer. The season changes. She’s waiting to see the clip of Dan out in the snow, the one where he loses his temper and takes the camera from Justin’s hands—but it’s missing. Justin must have deleted that one, scrubbed it clean. She scrolls and tries again, scrolls and stops cold.
More and more, what she sees is Anna. It’s like he tried to capture her in her worst moments, Maeve thinks. The ugliest angles, bad light, her face red with cold.
“Girl, he sure hated you,” she murmurs aloud. She can almost feel Justin’s resentment in the clips. Once, he accidentally captures Dan walking into the moment, reaching out to prod teasingly at Anna’s shoulder, to bug her, then suddenly taking her hand. He must have thought they were alone. The clip cuts off.
When she pulls out the card this time, a row of thumbnails pops up. Maeve realizes there are files temporarily saved to the camera itself. Scrolling back, she sees Anna again and hits Play.
Time-stamped only a few days ago: Anna, viewed through the slim crack of a doorway, left just barely ajar. She is in some kind of storeroom, Maeve thinks. The camera pans to the floor and up again, struggles to focus. A low murmur, a man’s voice: she wasn’t alone, someone was with her. Dan.
Maeve suddenly recognizes the basement hall.
It’s not Justin behind the camera. These are Sadie’s files.
The Retreat Page 19