by R. H. Dixon
‘Where?’ Pollyanna scowled with what looked like mistrust but could easily be something else, including murder.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Callie said. The fact they had found the key to the tower buried in Thurston’s chest was neither here nor there as far as Pollyanna was concerned. ‘The main thing is, all four of us are going to sit down together till we’ve figured a way out of here.’
When Smiler and Thurston made it to the bottom of the stairs in a sweaty jumble that comprised arms and legs and blood-rusted skin, Callie offered her shoulder to support Thurston over to the couch, where slowly and carefully she helped him to lie down. She sat by his feet and Smiler collapsed in the armchair opposite. Pollyanna went to her usual spot by the window and looked out, even though there was nothing to see but fog clawing at the glass.
Callie thrummed her fingers on the journal’s cover. She dreaded asking, but needed to know, ‘Pollyanna, how old were you when you first came to the cabin?’
Apparently it was acceptable to ask the question, because Pollyanna replied civilly, ‘Thirteen.’
‘What about Sarah Jane?’
‘Fourteen. She’s two months older than me.’
‘That was in 2009 right?’
‘Yes.’
Callie shifted in her seat and felt Thurston’s foot dig into the small of her back; a deliberate move, but one that showed support or deterrence for this line of conversation she wasn’t sure. She avoided looking at him and asked Pollyanna, ‘And do you know what year it is now?’
Pollyanna shrugged and shook her hair forward to conceal her face. ‘I was never able to keep track of time. Late 2010?’
This time Thurston’s foot in Callie’s back was definitely a sign of dissuasion. She coughed into her hand and tried to think of something to say, anything that might derail them from the path of trauma they were currently headed down, but couldn’t think of anything better than, ‘Anyway, shall we continue?’ while drawing attention to the journal that rested in her lap.
Pollyanna looked at everyone in turn then, her eyes unyieldingly scornful. ‘You mean you already started reading it? Without me?’
Shit. ‘So far we’ve flicked through as far as February 2010,’ Callie said, feeling insensitive for the way she’d handled things, but not knowing how else she might have done it.
‘Parts of the diary were written in 2010? But that’s not possible,’ Pollyanna said, her mind stumbling with the knowledge and making her look vacant. ‘Uncle Dean brought us here in October 2009.’
‘Yes, the trip was mentioned.’
‘But how did the diary end up in the tower? I’d have noticed if Sarah Jane had come back. I’ve been here all this time!’
For the first time since they’d met, Callie thought Pollyanna might cry. Her eyes glassed over and her mouth twisted with hurt frustration. To think that she’d been waiting all of this time for someone to come. But no one ever would. Not now. Not after seven years had passed. Jesus. ‘That’s what we need to find out,’ Callie said, making her voice as soft as she could. She opened the book’s cover and skimmed her finger over the words to find where she’d left off.
‘I have to warn you,’ Pollyanna said, with some prickle in her tone. ‘You should take everything Sarah Jane says with a pinch of salt. She’s a massive fantasist. A bloody big liar, in fact, and not a very nice person at all.’ Callie was surprised by the admission and didn’t quite know what to say before Pollyanna asked, ‘Has she mentioned me at all?’
Callie looked at Smiler. He frowned. Then she flashed a sideways glance at Thurston who shrugged some despondency on the matter.
‘Tell me,’ Pollyanna urged. ‘I want to know if she had anything to say about me.’
Callie took a deep breath. ‘Okay. She said you made her angry.’
‘Is that all?’
‘For now,’ Callie lied.
‘What did she have to say about this place and what happened and why they all left me?’
‘We’re not entirely sure what happened. It’s not yet clear. Her folks split up and her mother got with Dean. Uncle Dean. Like you said, it’s pretty obvious Sarah Jane was besotted with him.’
Pollyanna seemed to recede into herself, the stress of too much information. When it was clear she had nothing further to say, Callie started to read aloud from the diary.
No one interrupted. Everyone listened, including the cabin.
30
Wednesday 10th March 2010
Devoted Dorian,
Apologies yet again for the lateness of my thoughts. Almost another month has passed and everything is highly frustrating.
First things first, I finally asked Uncle Dean where the cabin at Whispering Woods is, but I’m still no further forward! He started telling me stories about the holidays he’s taken there since he was a boy, but didn’t answer the actual question. Then The Deserter insisted I go to my room to do my homework, so I STILL don’t know where it is. Argh! I’ve asked numerous times since, but it’s almost as though they don’t want me to know. The most I ever got out of Uncle Dean was that it’s somewhere ‘way up north’ and The Deserter keeps telling me to mind my own business. Once she even shouted at me, saying ‘I should never have bloody took you that day!’
I still plan to go there. Some day. I’ll find out where it is and take the ravens back and make it a place where The Deserter can’t go. Hopefully she might be buried in the ground by then anyway, so when Uncle Dean goes to the cabin for holidays, there’ll be just me and him. Him in his bedroom, with the stag’s head and the burgundy throw, and me in the tower. I’ll be right above him and he won’t know. Eventually he will though. He’ll sense me and call out for me. And that’s when I’ll go to him.
But till that day I’ll bide my time. Like Rapunzel.
In other news the wedding has been set. June next year. A summer wedding. How awful. The print will bearly barely be dry on the divorce certificates or whatever it is you get when you get divorced.
Dad is sickeningly sad and The Deserter is infuriatingly happy. I hate her more than ever. But at least I get to see more of Uncle Dean.
To rub salt in the wound, The Deserter has asked me to be bridesmaid. It’s the part of her that likes keeping up appearances that made her ask, otherwise she’d have run off into the sunset by now and never looked back. I’ve ruined her preferred colour scheme, so that’s something at least! She wanted all bridesmaids in ‘salmon pink’ and Uncle Dean to have a matching silk tie. But then she realised it would clash with my hair, so she’s decided to go with a sort of gold colour instead. I’m pleased I’m causing trouble for her. She doesn’t deserve to be this happy.
Nothing good ever lasts though. I have to hold onto that thought.
Monday 22nd March 2010
Delightfully Deadly Dorian,
Had a massive argument with Dad today. I told him I’m going to take Uncle Dean’s surname when him and The Deserter get married. Dad was really upset. I don’t know why. It’s not like he cares that much about what I do anyway. I only told him out of decency. I haven’t discussed this with Uncle Dean yet. But I don’t see why he wouldn’t let me take his name. Not sure The Deserter will be happy, mind you. But I need a new start too, not just her. She’s totally ruined my life with her selfishness, it’s the least she can agree to.
In fact, Dorian, I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve decided that as of next year I’m going to be someone else. Sarah Jane Miller is just too…ugh, I dunno, I just don’t like being her anymore. Even if it can’t be done legally, to have Uncle Dean’s surname, like if Dad won’t consent or whatever, I’ll just do it anyway. Because Sarah Jane Miller’s life isn’t exciting and she needs a new name and image. A new persona.
Besides, Uncle Dean has come up with this cool new nickname for me. He calls The Deserter Roxie all the time, which makes her sound cool, even though she isn’t. And he calls me Essie. The Deserter hates it, she says it’s the height of lazi
ness. But I love it! It’s something shared between just me and him, and I think she hates it because it’s mine and not hers and it’s something he gave me that she can’t have.
So next year I’m going to dye my hair blonde (a day or two before the wedding just to piss The Deserter off, because she could have had a ‘salmon pink’ colour scheme after all), and I’m going take Uncle Dean’s surname and make the transition from Sarah Jane Miller to Essie Bennett.
31
Smiler made a strange noise. Everyone looked at him. The sound came from the back of his throat as though he’d swallowed something the wrong way. His eyes were wide.
‘Are you okay?’ Callie asked.
His eyes stayed unblinking and he shook his head, but he did so with such slowness and an uncharacteristic vacuity that seemed to suggest he wasn’t answering her directly. Rather, he was engaged in some disturbing internal monologue.
‘Seriously, Smiler, what’s up?’
His jaw and lips began to move ever so slightly, as though he was chewing on the beginnings of a response, but it seemed his tongue was having problems turning his thoughts to actual words. Or maybe his thoughts failed to unjumble themselves into any sort of sense.
‘Smiler!’ Pollyanna tried to impose a look of impatience. It had been a while since anyone had seen her with a cigarette in her hand and it was this as well as her countenance that betrayed her concern. She was all stiff and angular, her small bony body fraught with apprehension. The reproving tone she managed to exude did the trick, however. Smiler snapped out of his trance, running a hand over his face. He looked at Callie and said, ‘That’s the girl I told you about.’
‘What girl? When?’
‘Essie Bennett. Yesterday.’
‘Your ex-girlfriend?’
Smiler’s complexion was waxen, too pale. He nodded.
‘Shit!’ The word hardly held enough weight to convey Callie’s shock, but it was the first that came to her head.
A loud, sharp rap against the window made them all look. There was a raven on the wooden boards of the veranda outside. Watching them, intently. Its beak was poised, ready to hit the glass again, and its feathers were nightmare black against a backdrop of greedy fog, which had eaten the lake and the Bentley and anything else that had been out there.
Callie’s heart began to thump.
Were the birds planning another attack? And was it because they were closing in on the truth?
‘What happened with Essie Bennett?’ Callie asked Smiler. ‘Was it an amicable break up? Or did things get messy?’
‘As I said, she got overly paranoid. Said I was sleeping with anyone and everyone I spoke to. She was the one who called it off when I said I wouldn’t put my career on hold for her.’ His face darkened then. ‘But that’s not to say it ended there. She went on to cause no end of trouble for me.’
Callie’s eyes widened. ‘Was that the trouble you mentioned before? Whatever it was you were acquitted of?’ Her attention was split between Smiler and the raven. The raven’s eyes gleamed with something: if not gloating then something perilously close to, like it knew more than she did on the matter.
‘Yes. Essie orchestrated the whole thing.’ Smiler rubbed at his chin with blood-rusted knuckles. His eyes were despondent as he began to process what all of this might mean, the fact the malicious teen who’d been so besotted with her mother’s partner Dean, to the point of wild obsession, had been his own girlfriend at some point. Smiler was incredulous that he had been in a relationship with Pollyanna’s cousin and was only realising now. Poor Pollyanna, the girl who should now be twenty-one, but looked and thought she was fourteen. ‘I imagine after a whole lot of bribing and bullying tactics,’ he said, ‘Essie managed to persuade a group of schoolgirls to say that I’d exposed myself to them.’
Callie made a noise of disgust. ‘That’s sick.’
‘Twisted,’ Thurston agreed.
‘Essie Bennett is twisted,’ Smiler said. ‘Thankfully the jury found me not guilty, but the media had already by that point damaged my reputation beyond what I could cope with. I mean, there’s a certain stigma attached to stuff like that that never really disappears. No matter what. Even after an innocent verdict, there are people out there who still cast their eyes at you like you’re some filthy fucking nonce. So yeah, Essie Bennett pretty much killed my career with her game of jealousy-induced revenge. And caused me to have a nervous breakdown at the same time.’
Cah-cah-cah. The raven laughed. It was an ugly sound, which the cabin readily welcomed into its wooden viscera. Callie refused to give the bird the attention it craved and kept her eyes on Smiler. ‘How do you know for definite that it was Essie Bennett who set you up?’
‘One of the girls cracked under the pressure of the case. Katie Pomfrey. She confessed to having lied about the whole thing. Then one by one most of the others did as well. They implied that someone older had coerced them into fabricating lewd stories about me, but none of them would give any names. About two months after the acquittal, I found a red rose taped to my apartment door. There was a note with it that said: Next time, Miles. It was quite obviously a threat. And it was quite obvious that it came from Essie. I could tell because of the way she put an ‘x’ above the ‘i’ in my name. She always did that.’
Callie was rendered speechless for a moment and it seemed nobody else had anything to say either. Not even the raven. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see any of this in the papers or on the news,’ she said at last.
‘Me neither.’ Smiler shook his head. ‘Where were you, on the moon?’
‘Well I must have been up there with her,’ Thurston said, ‘because I don’t remember hearing about any of that either.’
‘Well, you have now.’
‘Didn’t it ever cross your mind that Essie might have been the one responsible for you being here?’ Callie said.
‘In the early days, maybe a little. Like maybe, I thought, she was trying to set me up. I mean, after everything, how bad does it look me being holed up with a minor?’ He looked at Pollyanna apologetically for having referred to her as such. ‘But I was never totally convinced. Essie’s certainly dangerous and vengeful, but the longer this dragged on the more it didn’t seem like her style. Essie is impatient. She wants everything done yesterday. She pretty much needs instant gratification otherwise she spits her dummy out. Whereas this, this is slow torture. Whoever set this up, I got to thinking, had to be in it for the long run. For the life of me I couldn’t make any connection between me being here and Pollyanna being here.’
‘Yet now,’ Callie said, ‘it’s safe to say you’re both here because of Sarah Jane Miller.’
Smiler’s face fell into a troubled frown, as though the much-anticipated revelation was both mind-blowing and anti-climactic.
‘What about me?’ Thurston said. ‘I don’t know Sarah Jane Miller or Essie Bennett. So why am I here?’ His head lolled against the couch’s backrest and his heavy eyes suggested an increasing lethargy, but still he managed to inject a startling amount of aggression into his tone when he looked between Pollyanna and Smiler and warned, ‘And the next person to accuse me of being Uncle Dean gets a punch in the face, just so you know.’
The raven laughed again. Everyone looked at it.
An idea had formed in Callie’s mind, one she’d rather not entertain, but one that seemed quite obvious. Too obvious to ignore. ‘I think I know what’s going on,’ she said. ‘Sarah Jane Miller became Essie Bennett, didn’t she? Therefore, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that Essie Bennett might have got bored with herself and taken on another persona at a later date. And if that is indeed what happened, I’m going to suggest we do know Sarah Jane Miller.’
Thurston raised his eyebrows, but she could tell he wasn’t about to oppose her idea because an unambiguous look of understanding was spreading over his face with as much presence as the fog outside; a murkiness that would become clear given time.
�
��Someone who links us together and fits into the correct age bracket,’ Callie said, hoping she was wrong, ‘makes me think that Sarah Jane Miller and Essie Bennett could be our Freya.’
Thurston closed his eyes to consider this within the confines of his own head. As he did, another raven flew at the window pane. It scrabbled about on the veranda, clawing, tapping and squawking.
‘Sarah Jane’s ravens,’ Smiler said, his voice an eerie whisper. ‘They know that we know her secrets. That Sarah Jane Miller is three different people.’
‘We can’t be sure,’ Thurston said, his back straightening, his mouth pulled tight. Defensive. ‘Not about Freya.’
‘But I think it’s highly bloody likely.’ Callie reached across and touched his forearm, her fingers gentle but firm. ‘Going off what you told me last night, you’re about to break up with her. How long have you been thinking about it?’
‘It’s been in the back of my mind for a while now. I just hadn’t done anything about it.’ His eyes were deep set in shadow. ‘But this is the thing, I haven’t broken up with her. As far as she’s aware everything’s fine. She has nothing to be angry or upset with me over.’
Smiler issued one snort of ironic laughter, like he knew differently, and Callie raised an eyebrow. ‘If something wasn’t right,’ she said, ‘chances are Freya knew. Woman’s intuition.’
‘Rubbish,’ Thurston scoffed.
‘I’m telling you, she’ll have got vibes from you that something isn’t right,’ Callie reaffirmed. She pointed at the congealed bloodiness of his chest then thought to say, ‘Don’t you think that’s highly symbolic?’
‘Of what? A sadist!’
‘Of Freya ripping your heart out and leaving the key to her secrets in its place.’