by Alex North
I thought about that.
“She was conscious after the fall?”
“She wasn’t when I arrived, but obviously, she must have been. All I can tell you, Mr. Adams, is that I was on the premises within half an hour. It would have been sooner, but it was late in the evening.”
She must have been.
Unless for some reason she had pressed it before the fall. Maybe because something or someone in the house had frightened her.
“Mr. Adams? Is there anything else?”
“Yes, sorry.” I shook my head. “There is just one more thing, actually. Was the door unlocked when you arrived?”
Silence for a moment.
“I have a set of keys. Well—you have them now.”
“Yes. But did you use them that night?”
More silence as she tried to remember.
“Now that you say it, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think I did. I knocked, and when there was no response I went straight inside. But I don’t think I had to use the key.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“But what—”
I ended the call. Which was intolerably rude, of course, but given the circumstances I figured the universe would forgive me even if Sally didn’t.
I stared out of the window at the street and the shops opposite the hotel, the people going about their business, and tried to balance what I knew already with what I’d just learned.
On the night of my mother’s fall, she had sent an alert signaling she needed help, and the door had been unlocked when Sally arrived. There was an obvious, innocent narrative you could construct from that, which was clearly what people had done.
Except that my mother was disoriented and scared of something. She claimed to have seen Charlie in the woods. And if it had been my doll that was mailed to me, then someone else must have been in the house at some point. I wondered now if there might have been more to my mother’s fall than everyone thought. That maybe she hadn’t been alone that night.
That perhaps she hadn’t fallen at all.
And as I sat there in the hotel room, feeling lost and frightened, the thought kept returning to me.
The game isn’t finished with you yet.
* * *
And so I made a decision.
That did not, however, mean that my determination would survive an encounter with reality, and I began to feel foolish before I’d even arrived at the police station. The sensation was compounded when I walked inside. The reception had barely changed over the years, and for a moment I remembered walking in here beside my mother, lost and numb, and with her arm around me, guiding me behind the two officers who had led us there.
But I wasn’t a teenager anymore.
At the desk, I asked for Amanda first, but after some initial confusion it turned out she wasn’t on the premises. So then I asked for Officer Owen Holder, the man who had seen the blood left on my mother’s door, and then I waited in the reception for a while.
“Mr. Adams?” When he arrived, Holder looked distinctly nonplussed to see me but did his best to hide it. “Follow me.”
He led me through to a small room on one side of reception. It was more of a storeroom than an office, but it had a computer, and he sat down on the far side of the desk and tapped at the keyboard. I sat across from him and waited. From the changing expressions on his face, I thought he was worried he hadn’t logged the door-pounding incident as I’d asked him to, and then he seemed suddenly relieved to discover he had.
“Has there been more … damage to your property?”
“It’s not my property,” I said. “It’s my mother’s house.”
“Yes, of course.”
“My mother had an accident—a fall down the stairs. Except I’m not sure that’s what really happened.”
“Oh?”
“I think that someone else might have been in the house.”
Holder had been peering at the computer, but he looked up at me now. On the way here, I’d been imagining that might sound ridiculous spoken out loud, and perhaps it did, but it also felt right. Holder leaned back from the screen and stared at me thoughtfully.
“Go on.”
I told him everything that had happened. To begin with he simply nodded along, but then he leaned forward again, searched out a pen and paper on the desk, and began making notes. He seemed skeptical about the man I’d seen in the woods.
But then I put the doll of Red Hands on the desk.
Holder looked up from his writing and froze.
“What in God’s name is that?” he said.
“It’s a doll,” I said. “Someone put it through my mother’s mail slot. Charlie Crabtree made it a long time ago. Charlie was—”
“I know who Charlie Crabtree was.”
Holder picked up the doll tentatively and examined it. He was too young to recall the case itself, but perhaps I’d underestimated the memory that places can have: the way stories are retold over the years. And Gritten, in particular, had always been like that. It held close to its people and tales, even if nobody wanted to talk about them outright.
“It’s … disgusting,” Holder said finally.
“Yes. It is.”
He put it down, then moved his hands below the desk. I wondered if, without even realizing it, he was rubbing his fingers against his trousers, trying to remove the invisible stain he felt the doll carried with it.
“And you say someone pushed this through your mail slot?”
“My mother’s door,” I said. “But yes.”
Holder’s gaze remained fixed on the doll. It was as though he were seeing something in real life that before now he’d only ever read about in history books. I could tell he was troubled by what I’d told him, but that he was also struggling to work out what to do about it.
But at least he was listening to me.
“You know who Charlie Crabtree was,” I said.
“Of course. Everybody around here does.”
“So you know what happened. You know what this is.”
“Yes. And I know who you are. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Adams. That’s the only reason I took the marks on your door—your mother’s door, I mean—as seriously as I did. And…”
He looked off to one side, suddenly awkward.
“And?” I prompted.
“And so I also understand that coming back here must be very difficult for you, especially after all this time.”
I waited.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that grief can do strange things to a person. And I’m genuinely not meaning that rudely. But what I’m wondering is if maybe you’ve built all this up in your head a bit. Enough for it to seem like more than it is. To make more of it, even.”
Again, I said nothing.
I’d been prepared to feel foolish coming here, or to be told there wasn’t enough evidence for the police to do anything, but I hadn’t expected to be accused of lying—even indirectly—about what had happened. For a moment, I felt embarrassed, but then Jenny’s words came back to me.
You used to be more decisive.
“I’m not making this up,” I said.
“I’m really not saying that.”
“Yes, you are.”
My voice sounded cold. Holder was right in at least one way: all the emotions of the past few days were bubbling up, and I was in danger of saying something I shouldn’t. Losing control of myself wasn’t going to help.
“Where is Detective Amanda Beck?” I said.
“Who?” He shook his head. “That’s the officer from Featherbank, right? I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone.”
“What about Billy Roberts? You know that he’s dead?”
“Of course I do.” Holder looked at me, his face almost plaintive now. He gestured at the doll. “But that has nothing to do with this. We already have individuals in custody, and—”
“Who? Who do you have?”
Holder took a second to gather himself.
“I’m really not at liberty to divulge that information right now, Mr. Adams.”
“You think I’m lying.” I stood up and picked up the doll. “Or that I’ve lost my mind.”
“No, I’m just—”
“Thank you for absolutely fucking nothing.”
“Mr. Adams—”
But I wasn’t prepared to listen to whatever else he had to say. And by the time I got back to the car, I was even more furious. I felt exactly as powerless and frustrated as I had as a teenager. I opened the trunk and threw the doll in so hard it almost bounced out, then slammed the lid down loudly enough to attract glances from passersby.
Which I ignored.
Then I stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. The police station was on a busy main road, lined mostly by shops, and there were dozens of people wandering along in the sunshine, bags in hand. I found myself searching their faces, looking for anyone familiar, or who seemed to be watching me.
Are you here somewhere?
Was it really Charlie I was looking out for?
As I stood there in the sun, surrounded by the mundane activity of ordinary life, it seemed absurd to be thinking such a thing. And yet I realized I really was doing just that. Scanning the people around me for the face of a boy I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. Dyed black hair swept to one side. Empty eyes. Grown up now, but not so far removed from what he had been that I wouldn’t recognize him.
A boy who nobody knew for sure was really gone.
The world carried on around me, apparently oblivious. Nobody appeared to be paying me even the slightest attention.
I started walking.
Partly it was because I didn’t know what else to do, but there was also the thought in the back of my mind that if someone really was following me, this might be the best way of spotting them. So I wandered along, doing my best to pretend to appear careless while keeping an eye on the people around me.
Nothing.
And then twenty minutes later, I realized what street I had found myself on. I looked around in wonder, hardly recognizing the bright new shops, the sidewalks that had been swept clear of trash. When I’d been a teenager, most of these units had been boarded up, and the ones that weren’t had been run-down. Now everything was taken and thriving. There were even trees planted neatly in little fenced-off plots along the road.
It can’t still be here.
I started walking a little more quickly now.
That first time I’d ever visited Jenny’s house, this was the street she’d brought me to, her carrying a bag full of books. She had taken me to a shop that—like so many here back then—had appeared derelict at first glance. The door had been old and flimsy, the windows had wire mesh across the outside, and the glass behind had been so misty with dust that it was difficult to see through.
It can’t still be here.…
And yet it was.
I stopped on the corner. The door was new, the wire mesh was gone, and the glass was clean. But in so many ways it felt like the place hadn’t changed at all. I looked up. The green sign had been repainted, but it still stretched the length of the shop, the name written in an elaborate cursive script, like something from another age.
Johnson & Ross.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the place. It was so familiar, and the world around me was suddenly so quiet, it was difficult to escape the sensation that I’d somehow traveled back in time.
I reached out and turned the handle slowly.
Pushed.
A bell tinkled within.
And then, feeling as nervous as I had twenty-five years ago on that first visit with Jenny, I stepped into the shop, out of the present and into the past.
TWENTY-SEVEN
BEFORE
I fell in love with Johnson & Ross the second I followed Jenny inside that first day.
The door led into a cramped main room. I was immediately assailed by a cacophony of sensation; the whole store was alive with texture. Books were packed in shelves along every wall, filling cabinets and covering the surface of tables, and there was a comforting, musty aroma to the air, as though all the leather and paper surrounding me had saturated it over the years. I remember exactly what it was like. Not only was I seeing the books, I was feeling them on my skin and breathing them deep inside me as well.
Jenny led me down one of the overcrowded aisles. But in that moment I was distracted—looking around in wonder, almost shocked by my visceral reaction to the shop. Walking in here was like receiving an embrace from someone who had cared for me when I was too young to remember them properly. I had never been here before, and yet it felt like coming home.
The counter turned out to be little more than a cave among the shelves and cabinets. At first glance, I couldn’t work out how anyone got behind it, but a woman was sitting there with a newspaper open on the counter before her. She was in her forties, her long hair dyed so blond that it was practically white, and she was wearing small glasses. She peered curiously at me over the top of the frames as we approached.
Then she looked at Jenny and smiled warmly, clearly delighted to see her.
“Jenny! And what have you brought me today?”
Jenny held up the bag of books. “A few from last month.”
“I was not talking about the books, young lady.”
Jenny glanced back at me, and for the first time that I could remember she looked slightly nervous herself.
“I’m her … trainee,” I said.
“Ah!” The woman seemed even more pleased now. She closed the newspaper and gave Jenny a conspiratorial wink. “The one you told me all about, right?”
“This is Paul,” Jenny said. “Yes.”
From the look on her face, it was like she was no longer sure this was such a good idea. But then she turned to me.
“And this is my friend Marie.”
* * *
It turned out that Marie was the Johnson of the bookshop’s name. Ross had been the name of the man who’d owned it before, and whom she’d worked for until he retired several years earlier.
“But I kept his name on there as well,” Marie told me. “Tradition is important, isn’t it? You’ve got to have lineage. Places are like people. They have to know where they came from—and where they are now—or else they’ll never know where they’re going.”
I agreed that was true, but it was honestly difficult to do anything else. Marie was a force of nature. She spent the next twenty minutes bustling around, dragging me off to see different parts of the shop and bombarding me with questions the whole time. The latter were often accompanied by amused glances in Jenny’s direction, as though they were designed to tease her as much as probe me.
“So how did you two meet?”
“We go to the same school,” I said.
“That’s no answer at all. Jenny goes to school with lots of boys, and I don’t recall her ever bringing any of them to meet me before.”
Jenny raised an eyebrow.
“And you wonder why?” she said.
But I could tell that her nerves had settled a little now, and she seemed quietly pleased, as though meeting Marie were a kind of initiation that I was so far managing to pass. It was obvious she and Marie had known each other for a long time and that the woman’s opinion of me mattered. For my own part, it was nice to see Jenny relax a little. I admired how self-contained she always seemed, but it was also good to see her more relaxed, more at ease.
Seeing someone in their sauce, as my mother would say.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but looking back now I can see this whole encounter for what it was. Marie, older and more experienced than Jenny and me, was effectively grabbing our hands and pulling us together, forcing us closer toward the flirtation we were still both tentatively circling.
“We’re in the creative writing club together,” I said.
“Which I already told you,” Jenny added.
“Of course, yes.” Marie feigned forgetfulness. �
�Well, when you get to my age. The creative writing club—that reminds me. Did you send your story in to that competition?”
Jenny pulled a face. “Yeah. Not that anything will come of it.”
“Hush. You’re a very good writer. Have you read any of her stories, Paul?”
“Only the one in the club. Well—I mean, I listened to that. The one about the dog.”
Marie laughed.
“I liked that one. A bit close to home, maybe, but some of the best stories are.”
“Marie is a font of local knowledge,” Jenny told me.
“There are plenty of stories around these parts, believe me.”
“I know,” Jenny said. “I know.”
The idea of that pulled me up a little. For as long as I could recall, I’d thought of Gritten as a gray and dull place, and I’d dreamed of escaping from it and ending up somewhere better. It had never occurred to me before then that where I lived might be just as interesting in its own way as whatever place I imagined myself going.
“Paul sent a story in too.” Jenny looked at me. “I think?”
“Yeah.”
I had followed my mother’s instructions. I remembered the way my father had sneered at me when I asked him for two envelopes and stamps: one to send the story; the other for a self-addressed envelope if it got rejected and returned.
When it got rejected.
“But nothing’s going to come of mine either.” I turned to Jenny and added quickly: “Not that I mean nothing will come of yours. I’m sure it will. Yours will be way better than mine.”
“You haven’t read mine yet.”
“No. But I’d like to. I mean—if you want me to.”
“Yeah, of course. But only if you want to.”
Marie followed our exchange, her gaze moving back and forth between us, an incredulous expression on her face.
“Teenagers.”
“What was that?” Jenny said.
“Nothing, love. Anyway—let me see what you’ve got for me, bookwise.”
Jenny began unloading the bag, and the two of them went through the contents. The books were all secondhand, and I assumed they had been bought from here. As I watched Marie checking the penciled prices on the inside covers and making a list of figures on a sheet of paper, I guessed that, for at least some of her customers, this place effectively functioned as a library as much as a bookshop.