The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’m packing when I hear Carrie at the front door, but I immediately stop and head down the stairs to greet her. She shakes off her raincoat and pulls me wordlessly into a hug. My face fits into her neck.

  “Are you okay?” she asks into my hair.

  “It’s been a pretty strange day.” Pulling back, I press the heels of my hands to my temples. “Carrie—I don’t think we should stay here.”

  “What? I thought you said the alarm was sorted.”

  “But I still don’t think it’s safe. We should get a room in the Quaich for the night or something. You should stay in Edinburgh for the rest of your play.”

  She looks me over searchingly. “You’re scared.”

  “Yes. I thought . . . I thought it would be okay, I wanted it to be okay here, but it’s not. It’s not safe.”

  “You really think we could be in danger?”

  I nod silently.

  “Okay.” She’s thinking, but whatever she’s considering doesn’t show on her face. “Okay. I’m sure we can stay with Fi. I’m seeing her tonight anyway—”

  “Not Fiona. Anywhere but there.” Why do Carrie’s thoughts always jump to Fiona?

  She looks at me, her exasperation more than clear. “What is your problem? You’ve just been staying there.”

  “Well, that was before all the things I heard tonight.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m sure you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Why are you always so down on her?”

  “What?” I’m missing something. I know I’m missing something. “Why are you always defending her?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Yes, you are. You haven’t even heard what she said yet, and you’re already defending her. It’s like she can do no wrong in your eyes.”

  “And it’s like she can do no right in yours,” she shoots back. But she won’t meet my eye. “You’re wrong about her. I know that you’re wrong about her.”

  Perhaps it’s the way she says know. Perhaps it’s a million little things connecting that I hadn’t connected before. Whatever the reason, I suddenly understand what’s been going on. “Oh my God.” It’s out before I can stop myself. “Are you in love with Fiona?”

  “What?” she blusters. But the flush across her cheeks and the way in which her eyes leap to me, as if caught with her hand in the cookie jar, tell me I’m right.

  “Jesus. You and Fiona?”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me who I can be with?” There’s no volume in her words, but somehow they crack like a whip.

  “Why aren’t you answering the question?”

  “Yes!” she explodes. “I am with Fiona! And it’s absolutely none of your business.”

  “Indeed.” I’m still shocked to hear it confirmed. Carrie and Fiona? “You made that abundantly clear when you lied to me.” Fiona was driving Jamie’s jeep. I assumed the wrong McCue.

  “I didn’t—”

  “I saw you. At the village shop, when you were supposed to be in Edinburgh. When you told me you were in Edinburgh.” She drops her eyes, her righteousness slightly dented, red spots of embarrassment in her cheeks. Ben knew, I realize. Did everyone know except me? “So yes, you lied to me.”

  “You’re right: I lied,” she rallies. “Of course I lied. I didn’t know how you’d react. Turns out I was right to lie to you. I thought it might take you time to adjust to the idea, but I never thought you’d have this level of homophobia.”

  “Homo—” It never occurred to me that she would think my aversion was because of homophobia. “You’ve got to be kidding. I couldn’t give a monkey’s if you sleep with men, women or sheep; you can fuck the entire animal kingdom in alphabetical order if you want. I just don’t want you anywhere near Fiona.”

  “What—”

  “That woman just finished telling me she knows my father is dead, despite having no evidence, which is twisted and fucked-up beyond belief, on top of being just plain nasty, and her favorite game growing up was playing dolls with an actual skeleton. An actual skeleton! Which, incidentally, may or may not have been my father, and which she utterly failed to tell the police about. And that’s not even mentioning her obsession with this place.” I fling an arm out as if to sweep the Manse into the ring. “Did you know she even thinks my father was her father?” There are hot tears spilling down my cheeks. Carrie is frozen, staring at me with wide eyes. “So excuse me if I feel slightly ill at the idea of her in bed with my sister. But hey, you don’t even think enough of me to tell me the truth, so I guess it’s not my place to care.” A sudden thought occurs to me. “Wait, was she sleeping in your room that night? When I found the skull?” I can see from Carrie’s flush that I’m right. I looked in, I saw Carrie; how come I only saw Carrie? But I already know the answer: because Carrie was naked and that made me feel like I was invading her privacy, and I had no reason to look past her. Fiona could easily have been beyond her in the dark.

  Unless she was elsewhere in the house. Placing a skull on a bed, perhaps.

  Carrie’s phone has started to ring, faceup on the table in front of us. Both of us look at it involuntarily as the caller ID lights up the screen. Fi M. Of course it would be fucking Fiona. Carrie looks at me, then at the phone again, then back at me. It’s still ringing. “Take it.” The words are crimson and savage; they seek to rip and tear. “Ask her about it. Ask her about it all.”

  “Ailsa—”

  “Take it.”

  And she does, like I knew she would, like I told her to, but it still feels like she’s made her choice as she reaches out for the phone. I leave the room.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometime later I hear the door slam. The instant she’s gone, the Manse abandons all pretense of silence. The wind has picked up outside, and I can hear it throwing rain at the windows, rattling the glass in its lead casing and whistling through the eaves. Closed doors strain at their frames. The bathroom door bangs.

  As I pack, with very little method and all amounts of haste, tears run down my face unheeded to drop from my chin. I don’t understand where the urgency has come from, but it’s rising inside me, an inexplicable drumbeat that’s picking up in pace, exhorting me to leave, leave now, leave while I still can. At least Carrie has gone; she is safe—but it doesn’t seem like she will be someone I will have to worry about again. Perhaps it was a fool’s errand all along, to think we might salvage a relationship after all these years. Other people might have managed it, but not me. I haven’t had the training. I was stupid to even try.

  The bathroom door bangs. Again and again it bangs. I have to go, I have to go. The Manse is telling me to go. I don’t know where the threat is coming from—Jamie, Ben, Ali, Fiona . . . or someone or something else entirely—but the Manse is telling me as plainly as it can. I have to go.

  I won’t return to London, to my job—that life is over for me. Perhaps it was over for some time; perhaps it took my mother’s death for me to recognize it. For a little while, I thought that meant I could have a different life, but now I see that I’ve completely unhooked myself. I could slip my skin and disappear, like my father did before me, except in my case, nobody would care.

  I have to go. I must go. I must go, I must go, I must go.

  Toiletries—I need to clear out my stuff from the bathroom. It’s colder in there, but it often is. Possibly the pilot flame on the boiler has gone out again. I don’t bother checking; there’s no point when the house will be empty. I stand at the bathroom door and run my eye over it for a last check. I can’t see that I’ve missed anything. Though the bathroom window is open and there’s a pool of rainwater collecting on the sill. I don’t remember opening it, but it doesn’t matter now. I turn to the landing.

  Jamie is standing in the middle of it.

  I manage to cut off my half scream. “Jesus, Jamie, what are
you doing here?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he’s saying. He’s holding his palms out placatingly. “I wanted to—”

  “How did you get in?”

  “The usual way,” he says impatiently. “But look, I wanted—”

  “Jamie, it’s not a good time. You can’t just come into people’s houses uninvited—”

  “Have you been crying?” He drops the tote bag that was over his shoulder and takes a step toward me, pushing back the hood of his dark raincoat. The shoulders are soaked through.

  “I’m fine, it’s just . . . it’s not a good time.” I push past him and head down the stairs. How did he come in? Most of the houses round here don’t even have automatic deadlocks on their front doors, but the locksmith installed that when he came.

  Jamie hitches his bag onto his shoulder and follows me down the stairs. “I just wanted to apologize,” he says behind me. “For what Fiona said.” I stop in the hallway of the ground floor. “It was horribly insensitive of her. I just . . .” He descends the last step and stands in front of me, then puffs out a breath. “Sorry.”

  “Well. Yes. But thank you.” Even apart from the fact that I want him gone, so I can be gone myself, there’s an awkwardness now between us. I can still see a younger him in the cave tea party, though Ben is no longer in the circle. Just Fiona, Jamie and a grinning skeleton that’s now wearing a smart blue suit and has a toy tea cup in one hand with its pinkie crooked sardonically. I feel sick.

  Present-day Jamie smiles a little ruefully, then gestures at the alarm panel in the hallway. “All going okay? I spotted the nice security tech outside.”

  “I haven’t quite got it linked up yet. The Internet keeps dropping out.” I move toward the front door, not so subtly trying to herd him out. Ordinarily he’s very good at picking up nuances. Not so much today.

  “Well. Keep trying. You cannae put a price on safety.” We’re by the front door now. “Listen,” he says, with his hand on the deadlock. “I know you’ve probably had enough of, well, everything today, but there’s something I wanted to tell you. Two things, actually.”

  “Jamie, please, it’s really not a—”

  “It’ll just take a minute,” he wheedles. “And I think you’ll really want to hear it. Please?”

  “Now?” I have a headache, I’m exhausted, I’m starting to feel sick and I really, really have to leave this house.

  “Better now than when you’ve packed up and left Scotland for good. That’s what you’re doing, aye?”

  He holds my gaze, and I can’t dissemble. I cave. “Come through to the kitchen.”

  Once in the kitchen, my gaze falls on the paint swatches on the table. That’s one job I don’t have to think about anymore. Jamie pulls out a chair, and I’m reminded of the first time I ever met him, here in this kitchen, what feels like ages ago but could only have been six weeks or so. Only this time he’s sitting where I was and I’m the one boxed in.

  How did he get in? “Did Carrie leave the front door open?”

  “Aye, she must have. She ought to be more careful.”

  “So what did you want to tell me?” I’m desperately eager to get him out of here. I haven’t even offered him a drink. There’s an air about him that’s extraordinarily discordant with how I’m currently feeling. Like a low thrum of electricity is running through him.

  “I know who’s been terrorizing you.”

  “You do?” He certainly has my undivided attention now. “How? Who?”

  He pauses for a beat, enjoying the buildup of suspense. “Morag.”

  “What? But . . . why?” Morag. Now I know, surely, it can be over. Can it really be over?

  “I dinnae ken, exactly.” He shrugs. “I think maybe she’s nuts.”

  “I thought she couldn’t drive.” I’m trying it take it in. Is it over? It doesn’t feel over.

  He snorts. “She cannae. Still does, though—she’s a bloody liability. She was doing near seventy the other day on the back road.” The Land Rover. “Anyroad, you can stay now,” he says earnestly. “And that’s important for the second thing—”

  But I’m still trying to make sense of this. “How do you know it was Morag?”

  “I saw her leave the fox.”

  What? “That was days ago. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  He shifts in his seat. “Well, I wanted to speak to Ali first. It is his mother, after all.” He sees my expression and moves on hurriedly. “But you’re missing the point. You can stay now, and I wanted to show you—”

  “How did she get in?” How did she get access to move the bin bags, to place the skull? How did he get in for that matter?

  “Never mind that. Something—”

  “Seriously, Jamie, how did she get in?”

  “Who cares?” he explodes. My mouth is agape in shock. He makes a show of exhaling slowly, like an adult deliberately moving past frustration with a toddler. “I told you I wanted to show you something,” he says in a more reasonable tone, reaching inside the pocket of his rain-sodden jacket. Designer, obviously. Like all of Jamie’s clothes. “Dinnae worry, it’s a good thing.” He draws out a folded sheet of paper. The hood of the raincoat is stiff; it sits half upright, flared out behind his head. Something about it is nagging at me. “Ailsa? Ailsa, are you listening?”

  “Ah . . . yes.” I don’t know what’s going on here. None of this is making sense.

  “Aye. Well. As I was saying, the full report is, like, fifty pages or something. But the gist of it is here.” He passes the paper across to me. It’s a letter, on headed notepaper: Genetica Biolabs. A sudden noise from upstairs whips my head away. “Ailsa, look.” His frustration is boiling up again. I’ve never seen Jamie like this.

  “Sorry, I . . . I thought I heard something.” The Manse breathes in its own way. And if anything, the wind and the rain outside are increasing in intensity. I turn back to the letter. Underneath the logo, in smaller font, is written:

  MEDICAL DNA TESTING AND LEGAL BIOMEDICAL TESTING

  “What is this?” Once again I have the feeling that I’m missing something, something I should have seen.

  “Read it.” I’m trying to scan it, but I’m only getting snatched phrases. Close relationship DNA testing. Combined Relationship Index. “It says what I always thought. Read it,” he says, grinning, but he doesn’t give me any time to do that; he can’t help himself. “It says we’re siblings.”

  “What?” He’s grinning and nodding. I look back at the letter.

  Tested relationship: half sibling. Conclusion: The DNA from the samples labeled as James Calder and Ailsa Calder support the biological relationship. This means that the individuals from whom the samples were obtained are highly likely to have the relationship which was tested.

  “How did you get my DNA?” I ask him shakily. James Calder and Ailsa Calder. Since when was Jamie a Calder?

  “Hair.” He’s still grinning. “From your hairbrush.”

  “You took my . . .” He took my DNA without my permission. Expressly against my wishes, in fact. “But Jamie . . .” When he asked, he said he was asking for Fiona. But now I think he was twisting the truth, asking for himself. What else was he twisting? “But . . . but this can’t be right.” My voice is not my own. It can’t find a definite pitch. “How could this be right?” What has he done? Who is he?

  “I always felt it,” he says, an odd mixture of earnestness and something approaching intoxicated elation. “Surely you felt it too, when you met me? The connection between us? I always kent I couldnae be anything to do with Glen or that nutjob everybody thinks is my half sister.” He looks across at me, his eyes gleaming. He’s almost bouncing with the frenzy of it all. “Our father would be so happy, aye? You and me, together in the Manse? I used to think that it was so unfair, that this place would be yours. But I was missing the point. It can be ours. You and me together her
e. Can you just imagine it?”

  “Jamie . . . I . . .” I look at his eyes, and everything I thought I knew, every iota of trust that I thought we had between us drops away, and I am suddenly, paralyzingly, scared. He’s not the biggest of men, but he’s a lot bigger than me. I start to reach for my phone, which is on the table, but he reaches out and grabs it first.

  “I get it—it’s a lot to take in. But let’s not be jumping the gun.” He drops my phone casually into the inside pocket of his jacket. His jacket . . . I can see it now. The way the hood sits up, flared, I can just imagine the silhouette it would make in dim light. It wasn’t Fiona at all in the box room. It was Jamie. The bathroom door starts to thud like the Manse has something to say. “You should meet your father before you go spreading the good news.”

  “What are you talking about?” I whisper, but I know. The skeleton. Jamie has it. Not the skull, surely, but the crossbones, and all the rest of it bar a few fingers. We were pirates.

  “It wasn’t Morag,” I say shakily.

  “Oh, it was. Mostly.” He sounds unconcerned. “She did the newspaper, and the fox and that manky bird.” He’s been watching, I realize. He’s been watching all along. He shudders. “You couldnae pay me to touch that thing. Come on upstairs, to your bedroom. Come on. Up you come,” he says, as if encouraging a small child. “Ailsa,” he barks sharply when I don’t move. “I ken you’re my older sister, but you are going upstairs if I have to drag you by the hair to get you there. And believe me, I will.” He comes round the table as if to pull me up himself, and that’s enough to spring me into action. I can’t bear the thought of his hands touching me. There’s a rottenness within him that I can see, now; it’s his rottenness that I sensed in the Manse. I don’t know how I never saw it before. I don’t know what he means to do with me, but I can’t imagine that anything is out-of-bounds in his head.