Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  “Have you ever seen a doornail? Dead as it. He’d be a hundred by now. It’s not really a surprise.”

  “I suppose not,” I said automatically. I apologised again, thanked him, and rang off. I looked out the windscreen at the willow fronds stroking the glass.

  She’s not living with her father. She’s living with someone else.

  I considered a lover. That would be an obvious option, and one that could explain secrecy and embarrassment, depending on who it is. Gage would be pleased for her, at any rate.

  The wheelchair ramp could be leftover from when her father was alive; why tear it up when Ginny herself might need it in a few years?

  This isn’t important, I admonished myself. She never said she lived with her father. I said she lived with her father. She just agreed and hurried me along.

  In the time it took for me to form those thoughts, a large blue car pulled into the Russell driveway about a hundred metres ahead of me. Ginny got out of the passenger side. The boot popped open, and she started to pull out shopping bags.

  It was Thursday. Ginny’s friend takes her shopping on Thursdays.

  So Ginny hadn’t been in.

  I phoned Chloe.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. “I think I’ve got something from the dog—”

  “No, me first. When were you here?”

  “Where’s here?”

  “At Ginny Russell’s house.”

  “Oh. About an hour ago.”

  Her description of the imagined tea party that awaited me here lit up in my mind. Lace, florals … These “old woman” generics didn’t fit Ginny Russell at all. She wore jeans, a pullover, a down vest. Her just-shoulder-length hair was held back in a clip. What had Chloe said? “Metre-long hairs” in my cup?

  “What did Ginny Russell look like?” I asked her.

  “I’m pretty sure you know.”

  My voice was urgent, but not loud. I hunched down in my seat. I didn’t want to be noticed. “What was she wearing? Describe her hair.”

  “Flowered dress, long brown-grey hair, walker. Were you expecting something different?”

  I watched Ginny take two grocery bags in each hand, and even lift one to wave thanks to her friend, who pulled away with a cheerful tap of the car horn. Ginny—the person I had spoken to as Ginny—brought the bags inside the house.

  “One of us didn’t speak to Ginny Russell. Did she say to you that she’s Ginny Russell?” Possibilities: Ginny has a sister. Ginny has a housemate. Ginny has a female lover. Or, maybe neither of these is Ginny. Maybe two complete others have taken over the house.

  “She didn’t say much of anything,” Chloe said. “If you hadn’t told me before that she was cooperative, I would have wondered if she was even capable.”

  “Capable? How limited are you describing here?”

  “She could just be shy of strangers. It’s really not something I can judge from here.”

  “If you weren’t being politically correct …”

  “I would say mentally limited. She seemed childlike.”

  All right, Ginny is looking after someone who needs looking after. Or is the one being looked after. Admirable. Nothing the police need to be involved with… .

  The front door slammed open. Ginny, the strong Ginny, secured the door open with a hook on the wall. She went back inside and pushed out a wheelchair containing the other Ginny, the flowery, childlike one, according to Chloe. In her lap was a hard suitcase, an old-fashioned one, not one of those ubiquitous wheeled cases that fits in the overhead bin.

  Strong Ginny got the wheelchair down the ramp then scampered back to the front door to close and lock it. Childlike Ginny didn’t object, but neither did she seem to participate. She allowed herself to be pushed. They were heading for the large, garage-like shed on the opposite side of the house from the outhouse and lawnmower storage.

  “Tell Spencer to come,” I told Chloe. “You come too.”

  “I’m on my way to see Clemmy. Morris, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. It feels wrong.” I rang off. I opened my car door as silently as I could. Unexpected sounds, even soft ones, can carry.

  That worked in my favour. As I skulked around the trees at the edge of the property, I heard the padlock on the shed rattle as Strong Ginny unlocked it, and the doors slide shudderingly. They sounded like they hadn’t been opened in a long time, and she had to push first one with all of her strength, then the other.

  Then I heard Childlike Ginny scream.

  The sound was horrible, garbled and half-swallowed, as if, like the doors, her voice hadn’t been exercised in years.

  Strong Ginny put a hand over her mouth, which pushed Childlike Ginny’s head back, over the top of the chair. I ran forward, not skulking any longer.

  In the time it took me to get close, Childlike Ginny had raised her arms against Strong Ginny, pushing at her chest. Strong Ginny let go of Childlike Ginny’s face to swat down her hands, then swung the chair around to face away from the shed. Childlike Ginny stopped her keening, perhaps from exhaustion, or from fear, or spinning her round had done the trick.

  Strong Ginny dragged the suitcase towards the open doors. Now out in the open, but not yet noticed, I could see the inside of the shed, which contained a large car. It was goldish brown. No, once-white, and rusting. It listed to one side. On the corner of it that I could see, the tyre had deflated. Or rotted.

  Childlike Ginny saw me first. She started screaming again, but not the howl as before; this one was more of a gibber. Strong Ginny looked up from within the shed. She had wrenched a car door open and was wrestling the suitcase into the backseat.

  I held out my hands, surrender-like. I wasn’t going to physically fight her. I needed her to trust me.

  She was fast. She slammed the back car door and clambered into the front.

  The car didn’t move. It couldn’t. But still I pushed Childlike Ginny’s chair out of its path, in case it rolled, or lurched. I entered the shed at the driver’s side.

  The outside of the car was coated evenly with dust, and spotted with rust. The front, I saw, had been in an accident. The driver’s-side headlamp had been smashed, and that corner was dented in. In the dim light of the shed, streaks of rust on the hood looked like purple stripes.

  A green growth coated all the glass. I rubbed the window with my hand to see inside. Strong Ginny had stabbed the key in and stomped the clutch, and was beating the dashboard with the palm of her hand, asking why it wasn’t working.

  “Ginny,” I said. “Ginny.” And in the moments that it took for her to turn her head and shout “no!” at me, and lock the door and pound at her side of the window to warn me off, I thought of Cathy, and Annalise, and their fight on Annalise’s last day. Cathy hadn’t wanted to share the journey home with Annalise, so she’d waited it out behind the library. But Annalise wouldn’t have known that. What if Annalise had had the same thought to avoid Cathy, but instead of waiting, she’d taken a different route?

  There’s only one route, I remembered knowing, from my highlighted map. It’s a straight line. But if you’re determined to avoid that straight line, you can exit Lilling Road before it becomes Bishop’s Road. You can take the long and winding way round. You can end up out here.

  Childlike Ginny was screaming again. When I’d moved her I’d turned the chair, and she was facing us. She extended one arm, pointing at us. At me? Did I frighten her? More likely Strong Ginny did.

  Or the car.

  I lifted my phone out of my pocket with my good hand. I turned on the torch app and shone it at the hood. It hadn’t been a trick of the light, turning orange rust dark; the streaks there were purple.

  Purple bicycle paint? I wondered.

  Then the streaks seemed to move away from me, and I felt the answers slipping from my grasp. I wondered in a flash if I’d imagined them, if I’d wished them into being and fooled myself, and now they were receding, out of my reach… .

  No; reality overcame metap
hor. The car was rolling backwards, inching out the mouth of the shed. There was no surge of power from the engine, no purring vibration; nor could there be, with the car in its decrepit condition. Ginny must have released the hand brake. The car slid out and, with one back tyre in worse shape than the other, it tilted in an unexpected direction. Its skewed path listed towards the wheelchair.

  I scrambled around to get in front of its back. I had to choose between lurching at the wheelchair, to cast Childlike Ginny out of the car’s way, or trying to make the slow but heavy car stop. I chose the wheelchair.

  Childlike Ginny windmilled her arms against me as I tried to grab hold of the armrests, battering my face. The brake was on, and I couldn’t get my left hand close enough to the lever to pull it up. I tried shoving the chair but it held firm, threatening to topple but not to slide. So I whipped around and chose the car, which had become frighteningly close.

  I spread my feet and braced myself against its slow surge. I pressed my hands flat against the boot, and resisted. Even without power, even at its ponderous pace, it had an almost animate strength, and it had gained momentum. The wheelchair and its terrified occupant were just a few steps behind me.

  Inside the car, Strong Ginny was leaning on the horn, as if I were the enemy and she were signalling for help. Behind me, another car’s horn blared.

  “Move back!” called Spencer over the din.

  I fell out of the way, coughing from stirred-up dust. Spencer’s car slid forward, tapping against a corner of the white car and stopping its roll. The aged car shuddered. Its boot sprang open.

  Spencer pushed out, leaving his door hanging wide; I stumbled forward. We converged where the two cars met. Sunlight fell into the open boot.

  Inside, the remains of a twisted bicycle frame sparkled. It was almost entirely flame-coloured rust now, but I could make out bits of the original purple, that glittery kind of paint job that young girls sometimes get.

  Strong Ginny within the car had stopped sounding the horn, and was bouncing her head on the steering wheel. “The police. The police. The police,” she said. “We’ve got to get away before they come back.”

  Spencer called for medics. This situation was beyond questioning or arrest.

  I fell into a sitting position on the ground. Childlike Ginny, safe and upright in her chair, was still making noises, though weaker ones than before. Every muscle in my body throbbed. I’d just used every bit of my physical self, the whole damn thing. It became suddenly obvious how much of me there was besides the defective fingers on my right hand. There was a whole world of me. There was a universe of me. I think this is what they call endorphins. I think this is what they call shock.

  I closed my eyes. More cars, bustle, voices. Spencer telling people what to do. Good lad. I supposed his swooping in to stop the car that was perhaps about to take me down counted as much as would an apology I was never going to get.

  Chloe’s car arrived with emergency services. I waved paramedics towards the Ginnies (as I’d come to think of them, though I now had a suspicion of another name) and got up.

  Chloe, talking animatedly, had a promising lead about the body by the tracks, thanks to Clemmy the dog walker; I had an idea for how we were going to identify the handyman from the boarding house, even without the list of names from Ginny, Strong Ginny, who I didn’t think was going to be much good to us now. But both of those were distant obligations compared to the dirty white car, which loomed like an elephant. I waved Chloe towards the marks on the dented hood; I nudged her to look in the open boot.

  She gaped at the bicycle inside. “An accident?” she said.

  “I think Annalise took an out-of-the-way route to avoid Cathy that afternoon. She got hit by a car. This car,” I said.

  “And what? Buried here, or … No. Surely not.”

  We both turned towards Childlike Ginny, who was acquiescing to a cursory examination by paramedics. She was in her fifties. Her hair had once been dark.

  I said, “I think Ginny might have looked after her.”

  “But a hospital … Even if Ginny didn’t want to get in trouble for hitting a cyclist, surely her father wouldn’t have put up with a sudden, permanent, medically needy guest!”

  I looked in the front of the car. The driver’s seat had been pushed far back. Judging by the dust, it had been that way since the time it was garaged. “Unless he’s the one who had been driving.” Even if the engine had survived, Ginny wouldn’t have been able to get far in that position; she wouldn’t have reached the pedals.

  Strong Ginny—the only Ginny, it turned out—was going to go to a psychiatric ward for evaluation. When she’d come home from shopping and been told by Childlike—no, she has a name, Morris—that a second police detective had come by, that must have prompted a panicked nervous breakdown in Ginny. She’d tried to get them away from here, to … where? And how? I’d bet that car hadn’t been touched or even looked at since 1976. But it was all she knew. Her improvised best had been good enough for forty years.

  I walked over towards the ambulance. The woman I’d first thought of as Childlike Ginny was still in the wheelchair, waiting. They had finished examining her as much as she would allow at the moment. She was quiet now, her hands clutching each other. I thought, I do that. It’s comforting, as if one hand can take care of the other, and vice versa. As if you can take care of yourself.

  I knelt next to her chair. She might have suffered brain damage in the accident. No helmets in those days.

  “Annalise?” I whispered.

  She turned her head to face me. Her mouth hung open. I think she smiled.

  Chapter 19

  Anna Williams, Mental Health Treatment Requirement client, transcribed by Dr. Arthur Dean, National Offender Management Service

  Thank you, Dr. Dean. I really appreciate you being here.

  Yes, I understand. I’m here because the court ordered it as a condition of my probation. I’m to undergo regular therapy to help me gain a better insight into the choices I made.

  Ha! Yes! I’m quoting the judge. I’m impressed that you recognised the wording. I’m going to have to keep on my toes around you. [Laughs.]

  You already know why I’m here. I really don’t feel like rehashing what we both know. But there is something new I’ve found out, since the trial. I found out what was in the photo that Hannah-Claire took from me to show Mum. The one the police found in Nigel’s rubbish.

  I already knew what it was a photo of, obviously. It was Mum and two friends, as young teenagers. There’s a copy in Mum’s yearbook, in the back pages of candid shots. And in it you can see a long, thin scar on her chest. It just peeps out the top of her shirt. She got it when she was swimming in the river. You can hardly see it now, and she doesn’t really show her chest now anyway, but back then it was pretty clear, if you knew where to look.

  Well, the police got hold of Hannah-Claire’s belongings in storage in Canada, and there with her old baby clothes was her baby photo, her only one. There’s a gap in the hospital gown Mum was wearing and you can see the scar.

  Hannah-Claire meant to show the teenage photo to Mum, to make her admit the real truth. But Nigel met her instead. I don’t know what they said to each other, but one of them smashed the photo in its frame. Nigel swept it all up the best he could, took the frame and the picture itself, and destroyed it all at the office. Not destroyed it enough, as you know, but he refused to admit anything, which is exactly what you would expect from him.

  Look, I hate this part. I hate it. They weren’t able to convict. Convict him for what? That his step-niece-maybe-stepdaughter fell in the river while he was nearby? While they were having an argument? That he took a picture away from her? So what? Unless they could prove he pushed her, it didn’t mean anything. None of it.

  Which is why what I did is so important. I’m pretty sure the goal of this therapy is to get me to see the error of my ways, but without me, he’d be a free man. That wouldn’t be right. That wouldn’t be right.


  The police finished analysing the stuff under my fingernails and it turned out that Nigel had been the one to beat me after the funeral. He even has scratches on his arms to match. He saw Henry and me together and, knowing what people already suspected Henry had done to Hannah-Claire, he saw his chance. After Henry walked away he … I don’t really want to talk about it. I was as bad as Hannah-Claire to him. He’d already done it to her, and I was a variation on the same problem: a child he didn’t want and couldn’t control.

  Is he having to have therapy too? Because I think that would be a really good idea.

  All right, sorry. This is about me. I understand that.

  But don’t you get it, that if it weren’t for what he did to me, he wouldn’t be in jail? And he is now, for five years. Five years. For what he did to me. He didn’t get anything for Hannah-Claire, but he got five years for me. That sounds short but I bet it feels like forever to him. What I did was important. What I did was worth it. I got him.

  Actually, no, I don’t feel badly about Henry. Hannah-Claire put up with him because she was lonely but he wasn’t generous. He wasn’t kind. He should feel guilty for how he treated her. The way people looked at him when he was accused, that’s how he deserves to feel, because the point is that people were able to imagine he’d done it. How do you get to be the kind of person that people think, Huh. Maybe he did kill his wife. Right? If you’re that kind of person, you need to own that. You need to face it. Maybe his brief stint in jail did that for him. Maybe that was a kind of therapy, right? Therapy for everyone! [Laughs.]

  I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think Hannah-Claire deserved what happened at all.

  What do you mean? My part? I wasn’t at the river. I was trying to protect her. Mum had already made her decision to not tell her, to not tell any of us, and Hannah-Claire just didn’t respect that. That’s what put all of this in motion. Not me lying; it was her not being satisfied with the lie. I gave her a lie I would have loved to have myself. I gave it to her. That’s a kind of love. And she just wouldn’t be satisfied.

  [Exasperated breathing.] Well, for the same reason that kids all over the world imagine that their “real” parents are royalty or pirates or dinosaur archaeologists. Annalise is the closest thing to a princess where I was growing up. Of course I would have loved to be hers.