by French, Tana
There it was: why she hadn’t been frightened of Conway and Costello, why she hadn’t been frightened of us. All the long way from that night until this evening—and this evening something had changed—she had known she was safe, because she had known she was right.
I said, “Even when you saw it was Chris? You were still positive?”
“Specially then. That’s when I got it. Up until then, I had it backwards. All those stupid slimebags, James Gillen and Marcus Wiley, it could never have been them. They’re nothing; they’re totally worthless. You can’t have a sacrifice that’s worthless. It has to be something good.”
Even in that light I saw the flicker of Julia’s eyelids, hooding. The sad, sad smile on Selena.
“Like Chris,” I said.
“Yeah. He wasn’t worthless—I don’t care what you guys say”—into the dark of Julia and Selena—“he wasn’t. He was something special. So when I saw him, that was when I actually properly understood: I was getting it right.”
Those voices again, down the bottom of the slope. Building.
I said, fast and a notch louder, “It didn’t bother you? Some slimebag who deserved it, that’s one thing. But a guy you liked, a good guy? That didn’t upset you?”
Rebecca said, “Yeah. If I’d had the choice, I’d’ve picked someone else. But I would’ve been wrong.”
Setting up for an insanity defense, I’d have thought, if she’d been older or savvier. If we’d been indoors, I’d’ve thought there was no setup about it, just plain insanity. But here, in the glowing spin and slipslide of her world, in the air thick with scents and stars: for a second I almost saw what she meant. Caught the edge of understanding, swung by my fingertips, before I lost hold and it soared up and away again.
Rebecca said, “That’s why I left him the flowers.”
“Flowers,” I said. Nice and neutral. Like the air hadn’t leapt into a hum around me.
“Those.” Her arm rose, thin as a dark brushstroke. Pointed at the hyacinths. “I picked some of those. Four; one for each of us. I put them on his chest. Not to say sorry, or anything; it wasn’t like that. Just to say good-bye. To say we knew he wasn’t worthless.”
Only the killer had known about those flowers. I felt, more than heard, a long sigh come out of Conway and spread across the clearing.
“Rebecca,” I said gently. “You know we have to arrest you. Right?”
Rebecca stared, huge-eyed. She said, “I don’t know how.”
“That’s OK. We’ll walk you through everything. We’ll find someone to look after you till your parents can get here.”
“I didn’t think this would happen.”
“I know. Right now, all you need to do is come over here and we’ll go indoors.”
“I can’t.”
Selena said, “Give us a minute first. Just a minute.”
I heard Conway breathe in for the No. I said, “We can do that. But it’ll only be a minute.”
“Becs,” Selena said, so softly. “Come here.”
Rebecca turned towards her voice, hands reaching, and her head bent back into that dark shape. Their arms folded around each other’s shoulders like wings, drawing tighter, like they were trying to meld themselves into one thing that could never be prized apart. I couldn’t tell which one of them sobbed.
Footsteps behind me, running, and this time I could turn. Holly, hair spraying out of its ponytail, leaping up the slope in great desperate bounds.
Behind her, and making himself take his time, was Mackey. He had seen her coming, gone down to the path to keep her there as long as he could. He had left me and Conway up here, to do whatever we were going to do. In the end, for his own reasons, he had decided I was worth trusting.
Holly came past Conway like she was nothing, hit the edge of the clearing, and saw the other three. She pulled up like she’d smacked into a stone wall. Said, voice cracking wild, “What’s happened?”
Conway kept her mouth shut. This was mine.
I said quietly, “Rebecca’s confessed to killing Chris Harper.”
Holly’s head moved, a blind flinch. “Anyone can confess to anything. She said it because she was scared you were going to arrest me.”
I said, “You already knew it was her.”
Holly didn’t deny it. She didn’t ask what would happen to Rebecca next; didn’t need to. She didn’t throw herself on the others, didn’t rush into Daddy’s arms—he managed not to go to her. She just stood there, watching her mates motionless on the grass, with one hand braced against a tree like it was holding her up.
“If you’d known this morning,” I said, “you’d never have brought me that card. Who did you think it was?”
Holly said, and she sounded way too tired and hollow for sixteen, “I always thought it was Joanne. Probably not actually her—I thought she made someone else do it, maybe Orla; she makes Orla do all her dirty work. But I thought it was her idea. Because Chris had dumped her.”
“And then you figured Alison or Gemma found out, couldn’t take the pressure, put up the card.”
“I guess. Yeah. Whatever. Gemma wouldn’t, but yeah, it’s exactly the kind of hello-are-you-actually-that-thick thing Alison would do.”
Conway asked, “Why didn’t you just say all this to Detective Moran, straight up? Why make us dick around jumping through hoops all day?”
Holly looked at Conway like just the thought of all that stupid made her want to sleep for a year. She let her back slump against the tree trunk and closed her eyes.
I said, “You didn’t want to be a rat.”
Rustle behind her, sharp and then gone, as Mackey moved.
“Again,” Holly said. Her eyes stayed closed. “I didn’t want to be a rat again.”
“If you’d told me everything you knew, you would’ve probably ended up testifying in court, and the rest of the school would’ve found out you’d squelt. But you still wanted the killer caught. That card was the perfect chance. You didn’t have to tell me anything; just point me in the right direction, and keep your fingers crossed.”
Holly said, “You weren’t stupid, last time. And you didn’t act like anyone under twenty had to be stupid. I thought if I could just get you in here . . .”
Conway said, “And you were right.”
“Yeah,” Holly said. The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart. I couldn’t look at Mackey. “Go me.”
I asked, “How did you figure out it wasn’t Joanne after all? When we came to take you to the art room, you knew. What happened?”
Holly’s chest lifted and fell. “When that light bulb blew up,” she said. “I knew then.”
“Yeah? How?”
She didn’t answer. She was done.
“Chickadee,” Mackey said. His voice was a kind of gentle I’d never thought could come out of him. “It’s been a long, long day. Time to go home.”
Holly’s eyes opened. She said to him, like no one else existed, “You thought it was me. You thought I killed Chris.”
Mackey’s face closed over. He said, “We’ll talk about it in the car.”
“What did I ever do to make you think I would kill someone? Like ever, in my whole life?”
“The car, chickadee. Now.”
Holly said, “You just figured if anyone annoyed me I’d bash them over the head, because I’m your daughter and it’s in our blood. I’m not just your daughter. I’m an actual person. Of my own.”
“I know that.”
“And you kept me down there so they could make Becca confess. Because you knew if I got up here, I’d shut her up. You made me leave her here till she . . .” Her throat closed.
Mackey said, “I’m asking you, as a favor to me: let’s go home. Please.”
Holly said, “I’m not going anywhere with you.” She straightened, joint by jo
int, moved out from under the cypresses. Mackey took a fast breath to call after her, then bit it down. Conway and I both had better sense than to look at him.
In the center of the clearing, Holly dropped to her knees in the grass. For a second I thought the others were going to tighten their backs against her. Then they opened like a puzzle, arms unfurling, reached out to draw her in and closed around her.
A night bird ghosted across the top of the glade, calling high, trailing a dark spiderweb of shadow over our heads. Somewhere a bell grated for lights-out; none of the girls moved. We left them there as long as we could.
We waited in McKenna’s office for the social worker to come take Rebecca away. For a different crime, we could have released her into McKenna’s custody, let her have one last night at Kilda’s. Not for this. She would spend the night, at least, in a child detention school. Whispers crowding around the new girl, eyes probing for clues to where she fit in and what they could do with her: deep down, under the rough sheets and the raw smell of disinfectant, it wouldn’t be too different from what she was used to.
McKenna and Rebecca faced each other across the desk, Conway and I stood around in empty space. None of us talked. Conway and I couldn’t, in case something came across like questioning; McKenna and Rebecca didn’t, being careful or because they had nothing to say to us. Rebecca sat with her hands folded like a nun, gazing out the window, thinking so hard she sometimes stopped breathing. Once she shivered, all over.
McKenna didn’t know what face to wear, for any of us, so she looked down at her hands clasped on the desk. She had layered up her makeup, but she still looked ten years older than that morning. The office looked older too, or a different kind of old. The sunlight had given it a slow voluptuous glow, packed every scrape with a beckoning secret and turned every dust mote into a whispering memory. In the stingy light off the overhead bulb, the place just looked worn out.
The social worker—not the one from that morning; a different one, fat in floppy tiers like she was made of stacked pancakes—didn’t ask questions. You could tell from the fast sneaky glances that her job gave her more piss-sprayed blocks of flats than places like this, but she just said, “Well! Time we were getting some sleep. Off we go,” and held the door open for Rebecca.
“Don’t call me we,” Rebecca said. She got up and headed for the door, not a glance at the social worker, who was clicking her tongue and tucking in her chins.
At the door she turned. “It’s going to be all over the news,” she said, to Conway. “Isn’t it?”
“I haven’t heard you caution her,” the social worker said, pointing a waggy finger at Conway. “You can’t use anything she says.” To Rebecca: “We need to be very quiet right now. Like two little mice.”
“The media won’t use your name,” Conway said. “You’re a minor.”
Rebecca smiled like we were the kiddies. “The internet isn’t going to care how old I am,” she pointed out. “Joanne isn’t going to care, the exact second she gets online.”
McKenna said to all of us, one notch too loud, “Every student and staff member in this school will be under the strictest instructions not to make any of today’s events public knowledge. On or off the internet.”
We all left a second for that to fall into. When it was gone Rebecca said, “If anyone goes looking for my name, like in a hundred years, they’re going to find mine and Chris’s. Together.”
That shiver again, hard as a spasm.
Conway said, “It’ll be headlines for a few days now, a few days later on.” She didn’t say during the trial. “Then it’ll go off the radar. Online, it’ll drop even quicker. One celebrity caught shagging the wrong person, and this is yesterday’s news.”
That curled the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. “That doesn’t matter. I don’t care what people think.”
Conway said, “Then what?”
“Rebecca,” McKenna said. “You can speak to the detectives tomorrow. When your parents have arranged for appropriate legal counsel.”
Rebecca, thin in the slanted space of the doorframe, where one sideways turn would vanish her into the immeasurable dark of the corridor. She said, “I thought I was getting him off us. Getting him off Lenie, so she wouldn’t be stuck to him forever. And instead I am. When I saw him, there in the common room—”
“I’ve told her,” the social worker said, through a tight little mouth. “You all heard me tell her.”
Rebecca said, “So that has to mean I did the wrong thing. I don’t know how, because I was sure, I was so—”
“I can’t force her to be quiet,” the social worker told whoever. “I can’t gag her. That’s not my job.”
“But either I got it wrong, or else I got it right and that doesn’t make a difference: I’m supposed to be punished anyway.” The paleness of her face blurred its edges, bled her like watercolor. “Could it work like that? Do you think?”
Conway lifted her hands. “Way above my pay grade.”
If crouds of dangers should appeare, yet friendship can be unconcern’d. That afternoon I had read it the same way Becca had. Somewhere along the way, it had changed.
I said, “Yeah, it could.”
Rebecca’s face turned towards me. She looked like I had lit something in her: a deep, slow-burning relief. “You think?”
“Yeah. That poem you have on your wall, that doesn’t mean nothing bad can ever happen if you’ve got proper friends. It just means you can take whatever goes wrong, as long as you’ve got them. They matter more.”
Rebecca thought about that, didn’t even feel the social worker tugging at the leash. Nodded. She said, “I didn’t think of that last year. I guess I was just a little kid.”
I asked, “Would you do it again, if you knew?”
Rebecca laughed at me. Real laugh, so clear it made you shiver; a laugh that dissolved the exhausted walls, sent your mind unrolling into the vast sweet night. She wasn’t blurry any more; she was the solidest thing in the room. “Course,” she said. “Silly, course I would.”
“Right,” said the social worker. “That’s enough. We’re saying good night now.” She grabbed Rebecca by the bicep—nasty little pinch off those stubby fingers, but Rebecca didn’t flinch—and shoved her out the door. Their steps faded: the social worker’s pissed-off clatter, Rebecca’s runners almost too light to hear, gone.
Conway said, “We’re going to head as well. We’ll be back tomorrow.”
McKenna turned her head to look at us like her neck hurt. She said, “I’m sure you will.”
“If her parents get back to you, you’ve got our numbers. If Holly and Julia and Selena need anything else from their room, you’ve got the key. If anyone has anything to tell us, whatever time of night, you make sure they get the chance.”
McKenna said, “You have made yourselves abundantly clear. I think you can safely leave now.”
Conway was already moving. I was slower. McKenna had turned so ordinary; just one of my ma’s mates, worn down by a drunk husband or a kid in trouble, trying to find her way through the night.
I said, “You told us earlier: this school’s survived a lot.”
“Indeed,” McKenna said. She had one last punch left in her: that fisheye came up and hit me square on, showed me exactly how she smashed snotty teenagers into cringing kids. “And while I appreciate your belated concern, Detective, I am fairly sure that it can survive even such an impressive threat as yourselves.”
“Put you in your place,” Conway said, a safe distance down the corridor. “And serve you right for arse-licking.” The dark took her face, her voice. I couldn’t tell how much she was joking.
Us, leaving St. Kilda’s. The banister-rail arching warm under my hand. The entrance hall, slants of white spilling through the fanlight onto the checkered tiles. Our footsteps, the clear bell-jingle of Conway’s car keys hanging off her finger, the faint
slow toll of a great clock striking midnight somewhere, all spiraling up through still air to the invisible ceiling. For one last second, the place we’d come to that morning materialized out of the dark for me: beautiful; whorled and spired of mother-of-pearl and mist; unreachable.
The walk to the car lasted forever. The night was wide open, full to dripping with itself, it smelled of hungry tropical flowers and animal scat and running water. The grounds had gone rogue: every flash of moonlight off a leaf looked like bared white teeth, the tree over the car looked dense with shadow-things hanging ready to drop. Every sound had me leaping around, but there was never anything to see. The place was only mocking or warning, showing me who was boss.
By the time I slammed myself inside the car I was sweating. I thought Conway hadn’t noticed, till she said, “I’m only fucking delighted to get out of here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Same.”
We should’ve been high-fiving, high-stepping, high as kites. I didn’t know how to find that. All I could find was the look on Holly’s face and Julia’s, watching the last shadow of something craved and lost; the distant blue of Selena’s eyes, watching things I couldn’t see; Rebecca’s laugh, too clear to be human. The car was cold.
Conway turned the key, reversed out fast and hard. Pebbles flew up as she hit the drive. She said, “I’ll be starting the interview at nine. In Murder. I’d rather have you for backup than one of those dickheads off the squad.”
Roche and the rest of them, putting an extra spike in their jabs now that Conway had got her big solve after all. Ought to be backslaps and free pints, fair play to you and welcome to the club. It wouldn’t be. If I wanted to be part of the Murder guy-love someday, my best bet was to leg it back to Cold Cases as fast as my tiny toesies would carry me.
I said, “I’ll be there.”
“You’ve earned it. I guess.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“You managed a whole day without fucking up big-time. What do you want, a medal?”
“I said thanks. What do you want, flowers?”
The gates were closed. The night watchman had missed the long sweep of our headlights all the way down the drive; when Conway beeped, he did a double-take up from his laptop. “Useless bollix,” Conway and I said, in unison.