by Lizzy Barber
Besides, what does it matter now? What does anything matter?
‘Anna, are we doing this? Are you sure?’ William murmurs, even as I feel his warm hands against my flesh, moving along the length of my body. I can feel the strength of him on top of me, powered by an animalistic urge that, now unleashed, doesn’t seem to want to stop.
We dive into each other, all hands, and lips, and limbs. We are fumbling and awkward, neither quite knowing whether to lead or be led, but we somehow stumble our way into a rhythm that eventually makes us both cry out.
Afterwards, when we are still and quiet, our bodies cooling in the moonlight and William’s arms wrapped around me as I lie against his torso, I am the first to break the silence. ‘You’re right, Will. I have to let Mamma go. But not tonight. Please. Let me go home to her. Let me pretend everything is all right. I just need a little time.’ I stare into the distance at the oaks and trails surrounding us.
‘OK.’ He pulls me closer. ‘I will.’
In the car home, I don’t need to tell him: he stops at the top of the road. I kiss him deeply on the mouth, part of me not wanting to let go.
‘I need you to swear to me you won’t do anything until I tell you.’ I hold his face up to me, boring the promise into him. ‘If we’re going to do this, I have to know I can trust you.’
He rests his left hand over mine, traces the lines of my fingers in the dark. ‘You can trust me.’
From the top of our long driveway, the house looks quiet. It’s a quarter to eleven. Mamma will be in bed, listening for the door. She’ll be worried about falling asleep and missing me, so I picture her propping herself up, her ears pricked up for the sound of my footsteps on the stairs. Once she knows I’m back, I imagine her settling into her pillows, and falling into a comforted sleep.
I open the front door into total blackness, edge out of my shoes and then creep up the stairs so I don’t wake Mamma unduly. I open my bedroom door with a creak, and turn to switch on the overhead light.
When I turn around, I seize in shock. Mamma is sitting on my bed. Wide awake. Waiting for me.
‘Mamma!’ I clasp my hand to my chest, nearly jumping with fright.
And then I look properly at the bed, and at the objects beside her. A cell phone. A ticket. A bracelet. The pendant. The card.
A magpie’s trove, unearthed.
‘It was the strangest thing,’ she begins as my eyes slowly turn to meet hers. ‘I heard this incessant buzzing sound, coming from your room. And I thought to myself, there must be a bee, trapped in there somewhere. I was scared, in case it stung you in the night. So I looked all around, and there it was again. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Coming from your chest of drawers. And I thought, aha, the bee must be trapped in there. So, I opened it up, and guess what?’ I shake my head, tears stinging my eyes. ‘Well, there was no bee, was there, Anna? No bee at all.’
‘Mamma, I can explain.’ I come towards her, thinking frantically what I can say or do to rectify the situation.
Something hard and heavy flies through the air from Mamma’s hands, and lands square on the side of my head. The last thing I see, before my world becomes blackness, are the strangled stems of wildflowers, and the flash of a vase beside them.
ROSIE
18
It’s not like I’ve spent much time considering what MikeD’s house might look like, but as soon as we enter, something about it rings true. It’s very clean with lemon-fresh polished wooden floors and stark white walls hung with framed posters from art exhibitions and theatre productions. Off the hallway there’s a living room, with one of those leather corner sofas and a bookshelf that lines the entire length of a wall, crammed with books.
‘We’re both big readers,’ Michael says, seeing me staring. I give him an awkward half smile, happy to have his small talk as the backdrop to my gently calming mood.
‘Tea?’ he asks when we’re seated in the country-style kitchen. The wall is covered with a child’s drawings stuck on with Blu Tack. I hear the flick of the kettle switch. He opens and closes cupboard doors, taking out mugs and spoons and tea boxes. ‘I don’t think we have anything more imaginative than regular breakfast or Earl Grey, but I think there may be some peppermint somewhere if you like?’
‘Breakfast is good for us.’
‘Right then.’ He doesn’t look back, keeps moving around the kitchen. Stalling, maybe?
‘Sorry it’s not much.’ He brings over three mugs and some biscuits, sits, says nothing. I glance at the clock on the far wall. It’s edging on four o’clock. If we want to be back in time for dinner, we have to get a train at five. I take a loud sip of tea, as if the act will urge him into speaking. He sucks his top lip, looks down at his mug. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really know where to start, Rosie. What do you want to know?’
I press my tea-warmed hands to the sides of my face. ‘Whatever it is you can tell me. Who is the woman in the navy dress? How did you find out about her? Why do you think she’s connected to Emily? We’ve travelled three hours to get here, Michael; please, just tell me anything that could help me find my sister?’
He bows his head. ‘OK. I’m sorry. I know you’re frustrated.’ He loops his hands tighter around his mug. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know, but you have to understand that the reason I’ve kept this to myself is because it’s not safe—’
‘I get it, Mike,’ I interject before he gets a chance to talk himself out of it. ‘But I have to know.’
He nods, understanding. ‘I guess it all began when I met my wife.’ He glances away from us, and his mouth curls into a guilty frown. ‘My first wife, Angela.’ He takes a long sip of tea, letting the sentence hang in the air. ‘When I first started out – gosh, more than twenty years ago now – I was an investigative journalist. Lengthy, painstakingly researched pieces about human life: an exposé on what it’s like to be a prison guard, MPs’ expenses, a profile piece about a celebrity chef I’d heard was terrorising his staff. I was doing pretty well.’ He shrugs. ‘I wrote for lots of the nationals. I wrote a couple of pieces for the New York Times; I even won an award for a piece I wrote about a drug cartel in Jalisco. I was spending a lot of time in the States, and that’s where I met my Angela.’
I start to build a picture of him, before whatever made him slink away into the shadows happened. He’s clearly sharp – it’s in his manner, the way he holds himself. Could it be that this man has unearthed the key to what happened to Emily, when so many others have failed?
‘Angela was American. Her parents lived in Georgia. About six months after we got married, her father got sick, and she wanted to move back home to be near him. They lived in a little place right at the border of Georgia and North Carolina. It’s very quiet there, proper small-town life: one bar, a diner, a mayor who knew most people by name. I was quite content, starting to cobble together ideas for a book. I began to find that so-called “Southern charm” quite irresistible.’
‘How does this relate to my sister?’ I urge him on, but he raises an eyebrow.
‘I said I’d tell you everything. This is everything.’ He continues, ‘Around the time Angela’s father got sick, her mother became involved with a new church. She started going quite regularly: Sundays at first, and then twice a week, later more. I think she found it comforting, with her husband sick like that.’ Michael gives a heavy sigh, and I can see him placing himself back in that time.
‘Almost overnight, something changed. As I understand it, they were never a particularly religious family. But suddenly it was “the Lord” this and “the Lord” that. Soon, she was fascinated with this idea of “good” and “evil”, and “purity” versus “sin”. She became obsessed with dirt. She fretted over Bill. They gave her the crazy notion that his illness was the result of some imperfection, some sin within him that was working its way out. The man had stage-three cancer,’ he spits, ‘and they were telling him to confess his sins.’ I see his knuckles tighten around the handle of his mug. ‘It was about that time that Angela got p
regnant.
‘Ruth began to ask Angela to come to church with her. It started out just as light nagging, but she wouldn’t let it rest. Eventually, Angela couldn’t take it any more, didn’t want to be the cause of arguments when her father was so unwell, and so finally she agreed to go. As soon as she saw it for herself, she felt that there was something off about it. She told me she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was just something wrong about the place.’
‘What?’ Keira asks; she’s trying to chivvy him along too. She’s hooked her finger on the handle of her empty mug and is drawing it round and round in a circle. The mug makes a dull scraping sound against the tabletop, and I give her a nudge with my knee.
‘She found it hard to describe at first,’ Michael answers. ‘It just gave her the creeps. The church was about a fifteen-minute drive from us, set back from the road in a clearing next to a river.’ He pauses, looks up. ‘They called themselves The Lilies.’ From his place at the kitchen table, he lets his words hang in the air, searching our faces for any sign of recognition. We stare blankly back at him. ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters,’ he quotes, tickling a faint recognition in my brain.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘That’s from the Bible, isn’t it?’
He nods. ‘The lily is a symbol of purity in Christianity. Angela said they started off every meeting with this weird ritual: they’d dress in these long, white robes, and wade into the river to “wash” themselves of their sins whilst one of the leaders would quote Scripture at them. Angela said it was the most bizarre thing, these grown men and women standing about in nightdresses like some sort of adult baptism. There were other things too: a sort of “confession” session, where they’d take turns admitting something they were guilty about, and then everyone would chant, “Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!” at them whilst they scrubbed their hands in a bucket of diluted bleach until a leader pronounced them cleansed. They wanted Angela to do some sort of special purification ritual for the baby, but on that she absolutely put her foot down. And then there was the money.’
Michael leans back in his chair, drags his hands across his face and gives his head a slight shake from side to side, mentally readjusting himself. And then he continues. ‘Cancer treatment is expensive, especially in the US; the insurance, the lack of a nationalised health service. Bill and Ruth didn’t have much to cover the bills, and Angela and I were hardly in a position to help out. Bill’s doctor was suggesting a new drug trial … and that was how we found out that Ruth was giving money to the church. Small bits, in the beginning, at least. But it was her talk of the church leader, Father Paul, that made me really uneasy. Ruth’s eyes would get all kind of twinkly when she’d talk about him. Soon it was “Father Paul says this” and “Father Paul says that”. It was like, to her, he was God incarnate. And then she wanted Bill to stop having treatment. “Father Paul says he doesn’t need treatment,” she’d quote in this pious tone. “He just has to believe.”’
Michael sucks in his cheeks, breathing the air into himself before he next speaks. ‘And then Angela lost the baby.’
I’m not quite sure where to look. ‘I – I’m so sorry.’ Next to me, Keira murmurs the same. I awkwardly reach out a hand to him. Surprisingly he acquiesces, and pats mine gently in response.
‘It was a very sad time. She was about five months along. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the pregnancy. But with the stress of her mum, and Bill … it was just all too much. That was when things started to get really bleak. Bill was so weak. Ruth was becoming more obsessed by the day. When Angela lost the baby, Ruth told her Father Paul said it was because she was “impure”, and the Lord had seen fit to take it from her. He wanted to do some sort of cleansing ritual on her, to cast the evil out of her.’
I can see the anger building inside of Michael. His nostrils flare; his hands grip his mug so hard I think he might snap the handle off.
‘That was when I lost it. I got straight in the car and drove over to that vile place, and asked to speak to Father Paul. When he finally deigned to emerge from his office I already knew what I was going to say. “If you know what’s good for you,” I told him, “you’ll leave my wife and my family alone.” I accused him of brainwashing people, stealing their money. And he took it all in without saying a word. Just as I was about to drive off, he tapped ever so lightly on my window, and when I opened it he said, in an utterly calm, knowing voice, “You can take Ruth away from The Lilies, but know that no one ever truly leaves. The church will always have ways of finding you.”’
I can picture exactly the sort of man Father Paul is. Charismatic. Dangerous.
‘After that,’ Michael says, ‘I told Angela we couldn’t stay in town any longer. None of us could. We left for Atlanta the next day. I found us a place to rent – Angela, Ruth, Bill and me – with the last of my savings. We discovered quite soon after that someone had torched her parents’ house – it was razed to the ground. I couldn’t prove who did it, but when I went to look at the damage, there was a single lily planted in the rubble. I never told Angela, or her parents, and somehow they started to build their lives back. Ruth – it was like she was slowly waking up from a dream; the longer she was away from that place, the less she talked about the church. Then Bill passed away – it must have been two or three months later – and it was as if the effect of that completely overcame her, and she never mentioned the place again, to the best of my knowledge.’
He clasps his hands above the table and strokes his thumbs together as a look of immense sadness drops over his face, pulling his features down. ‘Angela and I were broken, though. All of that turmoil, the miscarriage, then Bill dying … we just couldn’t get past it. We separated. I moved back to New York. And then we divorced.’ He shrugs, a lonely, almost childlike gesture. ‘The States lost all magic for me, as did my writing. And so I moved back home, to London. But it turns out I’m not really good at anything else, so I became a hack news reporter. And I would have had nothing to do with The Lilies again if I hadn’t seen the woman in the navy dress.’
All my senses sit up, alert. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is what the whole journey has been for. ‘And that’s how we come on to Emily?’
Michael slowly nods his head. ‘Yes. That’s how we come on to Emily.’
ANNA
19
A pounding pain in my temple throbs me into wakefulness. I try to reach out to place my palm against it and realise with a dawning alertness that my wrists are tied either side of me. Panicked, I open my eyes more fully. I am lying on a bed that’s not my own. And then I hear it, a whispered, trembling voice, chanting the same thing over and over: ‘Pure in mind, in word, thought and deed, I ask You, Lord, to pay me heed …’
I gradually take in my surroundings. Everything around me is white. The sloping walls; the sunlight streaming through a slanted window; the bed sheet that rests over my body, which, glancing down, I see has been draped in a white nightdress. It’s stifling, airless – the sweet, muddy scent of mothballs so thick I can taste them in the back of my throat.
The attic. I’m lying on my childhood bed, my arms tied to its wrought-iron frame.
‘Mamma?’ My voice is hoarse.
The pulsating in my skull clogs my thoughts, and I try to dilute them. The dance. The images drift across me: the dress, Jonah, the punch, William. William. Memories of the pond resurface – what we said, what we did there (I blush inwardly) – and then returning home and—
Sluggishly, I turn my head against the pillows to meet Mamma’s eyes.
She knows.
I don’t know what I expect: for her to lash out at me, to reveal the truth in all its glory and then … and then what? Instead, she rises tentatively, crosses the room from the wicker chair she’s been sitting in by the door. I recognise it now – the one from the bathroom. Mamma must have dragged it up here while I was out cold. ‘Anna,’ she bends over me, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Honest, I didn’t. I was
waiting for you all that time and I … I … I panicked.’
My tongue feels thick against the roof of my mouth, and as I try to swallow the dryness away, a taste of something lingers, sharp and vaguely chemical. William’s words come rushing back to me. If only I listened to him. Acted when he told me to. I said I needed time; well, look what time has brought me.
‘What have you given me?’ I try to sit up, but the ties around my wrists hold me down like an invisible extension of Mamma’s force.
‘I just needed a way to make you stay.’ I hear a tinkle of water; feel a coolness on my forehead as a rough flannel presses against it. ‘I knew you’d try to run. And I can’t lose you, Anna. You don’t know what I’ve done, to keep you here.’ She sits on the side of the bed, and I am gently rocked as it sags under her weight. ‘Please. Let me look after you like when you were a little girl. You loved me then, didn’t you? You didn’t want to go away from me.’
Panic sparks around, but I try to keep my voice calm; ignore the thickness in my head. ‘Mamma, I’m not going to go anywhere. But you can’t keep me like this. Why can’t you at least untie me, and I’ll prove it to you?’
‘Shhh …’ Mamma dabs zealously at my head. ‘There now. We’re safe here, you and me. Don’t worry, Anna. You can stay here with me and no one will hurt you. I’ll protect you – no one can get to us up here.’ There’s a breathless quality to her voice, unnaturally high and bright, as she turns her head to the attic door.
Slowly, I follow her gaze. The padlock. The only door in the house with one. In case of skunks, Mamma said.