by Ruth Ware
The fall might have killed her, she thought, were it not for the fact that she had fallen against something soft and yielding.
It was only when she put her hand down to try to stand, and felt soft hair beneath her palm, that she realized what it was, and when she did she had to stifle the whimper that tried to escape her bruised throat.
It was Mrs. Warren. And, as Hal’s fingers traced across her face, her glasses, her open mouth, Hal could tell—she was dead and completely cold.
But she had no time to find out more. Above her, she could hear Ezra moving with lumbering ferocity like a wounded animal, crashing into furniture as he staggered towards the open door. He would be down here in a moment, and then she would be dead—wounded or not, he was far, far stronger than her, and his blinded eye was not much disadvantage in this inky black.
She must be in some kind of cellar beneath the house. The only question was, was there another exit?
Hal put her hands out in front of her, and began to stumble cautiously through the penetrating darkness, feeling the shift and slither of things beneath her feet—the clank of bottles, the sharp pain where she hit her shin against some kind of box.
Back there in the darkness was Mrs. Warren’s body, and as a shaft of gray moonlight pierced the blackness, and she heard a hoarse panting, she knew that Ezra too had found his way to the door, and was stumbling down the stone steps.
“Hal,” he called, his voice echoing in a way that made her think this cellar must be large, much larger than she had at first thought. “Hal, don’t run from me. I can explain.”
Her throat was too hoarse and bruised to have answered, even if she wanted to—but there was no way she was going to give away her location down here. She stopped, pressing herself back against the wall, listening for his harsh breathing. It sounded as if he was facing the wrong way, and she edged quietly along the wall, holding her breath.
In the disorienting darkness she had completely lost all sense of direction, but the cellar seemed to stretch out in two directions, in front of Hal, and to her left. Mrs. Warren’s body, and the steps upwards, lay to the right. Ezra seemed to be in front of her, venturing deeper beneath the house, so Hal continued her slow, painful edging along the wall, feeling the wetness of damp bricks at her back. There was hot blood on her hands, and she thought she must have cut herself when she hit Ezra with the photograph frame, though she had no memory of having done so.
“Hal!” His voice boomed, echoing back and forth beneath the vaults. Then there was a scratching rasp, and far away to her right Hal saw a flame ignite in the darkness, and the yellow glow of a lighter as Ezra held it above his head, surveying the darkness.
Two things happened in the instant before he extinguished the flame.
The first was that he saw her, she knew it from the way his face turned towards her, a hideous Pierrot mask that slashed his face into one half of white skin and another half painted in dark blood, black in the shadowy darkness.
But the other thing was that Hal saw the layout of the cellar—the clear path between the rows of dusty bottles and vaulted columns leading to the garden door at the far end.
For a moment she froze, each of them looking at the other, caught in the lighter’s glow.
And then Ezra’s face split into a terrifying grin, and he dropped the lighter, and ran.
Hal ran too.
She ran without seeing, barely knowing where she was going.
She ran, tripping over discarded bottles and mousetraps, hearing the crunch of small skeletons beneath her feet, and the splash of water. She fell, and she picked herself up, all the time hearing behind her Ezra’s triumphant panting breath, for he knew this cellar, this was his house, his domain, and she remembered him saying how he and Maud had played hide-and-seek down here as small children.
This was his home.
But he was half-blind, and Hal was not, and she had a head start, and now she could see the faint glimmer of moonlight coming through the crack of the garden door ahead of her, and she put on a burst of speed and prayed—prayed to gods she did not believe in, and to the powers she had decried all her life, prayed for deliverance.
And then the cold metal knob of the door was beneath her hand and she was trying to turn it, with fingers that slipped with blood, and she could hear his pounding feet and his panting breath coming closer, and closer . . .
And then the door gave, and she was out in the moonlight, running, and running, and running in the blessed light of the waxing moon, almost as clear as day.
Her feet were taking her downhill, and she was halfway there before she realized, with a terrified lurch, where she was heading. She glanced behind her, but it was too late, he was out, he had seen her. If she doubled back to the house he would catch her. There was nowhere else to go, and maybe . . . maybe, a little still voice inside of her said, maybe it had always been meant to lead back here. Back to where it had started, and ended. Back to the boathouse.
Ezra was almost halfway across the lawn, his footsteps great slithering gashes in the white snow, when Hal broke into the cover of the little copse and began the slow fight through the brambles, tearing at her hands. She had no thought in her head apart from putting as much distance as possible between herself and Ezra—but perhaps, if she could somehow circumnavigate the lake and get to the other side, she could make it to the road, flag down a passing car. . . .
She crashed out of the brambles, her legs torn and bleeding, and found herself in a patch of moonlight at the shore of the lake. Behind her she could hear Ezra beginning to forge his own path through the undergrowth, and he was making better time of it than she was. She had already pushed aside the worst of it—all he had to do was follow in her path.
“Hal,” he panted. “Hal, please.”
And there was something so desperate in his voice that a part of her almost wanted to say, It’s okay. I’ll stop. I give in. Oh God, she was so tired. . . .
In front of her the lake was a black slick, dotted here and there with patches of white. And as Ezra came plunging out of the undergrowth, Hal knew she had nowhere else to go.
“Hal,” he gasped. He looked half-destroyed, his face dark with drying blood, the wound above his eye still wet and raw. His clothes had been slashed by the brambles, his arms and legs streaked with cuts, and looking down at herself Hal might almost have laughed, had she not been so terrified and exhausted.
“Stop,” he said. He held out his arms. “Stop running. Please . . . please, just stop.”
She wanted to answer him. She wanted to scream at him, to berate him for what he had done to Maud, to Maggie, to Mrs. Warren. She wanted to cry for the hopes she had had for her father, and for what she had found.
But her throat was too raw. As he came towards her, step after slow, careful step, his arms held out like the promise of a grim embrace, she could only shake her head, the tears running silently from her eyes, down her cheeks, and hold herself, as she would never let him hold her.
“Hal, please,” he said again, and she stepped backwards, onto the frozen surface of the lake.
It cracked, but held, and she stepped again, seeing his face change in an instant, from cautious pleading to a kind of impotent, terrified rage.
“Please, don’t,” he managed. “It’s not safe.”
You are the danger, she wanted to say. I’d be safer out here, beneath the ice, with my mother, than ever I would be with you.
But she could only shake her head, and step backwards, and backwards, expecting each time she did to hear the snap of breaking ice, and feel the frigid waters of the lake envelop her.
Each time she did, the ice creaked and groaned, but it didn’t break.
“Hal, come back,” he cried. And then, almost laughing, “What are you going to do, for Christ’s sake? Stay out there all night? You’ll have to come back.”
And again she stepped back. She was almost to the island now. And from there it was just another short crossing to the far shore, and the
boundary of the property.
“Hal!” he bellowed, and above her she saw the flurry of wings as the startled magpies woke and took flight, cawing and wheeling in alarm, sending little patters of snow falling all around them in the quiet of the woods. “Hal, get over here now.”
But she only shook her head for the third and final time—and then he stepped onto the ice.
It held. And Hal felt a wash of hot horror flood over her, and then a great coldness as he looked down at his feet, and then up at her, grinning at the realization of what this meant.
“Oh, you,” he said as he began to walk towards her. “Oh, you little—”
But he never finished.
There was a tearing, rending crack, and the surface of the lake gave way. And Ezra plunged through, cracking his head on the ice at the edge of the hole as he went, and slid beneath the black surface.
“Ezra,” Hal screamed, or tried to, but her torn throat would make only the smallest of sounds, a whimper, barely even recognizable as a name. “Ezra.”
There was a languid flowering of bubbles on the surface of the water for a moment . . . and then no more. The lake was still and silent, and nothing moved. Ezra was gone.
CHAPTER 50
* * *
“Ooh, aren’t we lucky,” the nurse said, whipping aside Hal’s curtains.
“Lucky?” Hal croaked. Her head ached and her throat was still almost too painful to talk.
“Visitors. And a lovely bunch of flowers. Do you want a hand putting on your dressing gown?”
Hal shook her head, wondering who the visitors might possibly be. It was probably the police again, although she felt as if she had run through the events at Trepassen more times than she could count, certainly more times than her aching throat had been able to take. Though would the police really be carrying flowers?
The nurse had gone, bustling away up the corridor to another patient, so Hal sat up in bed, pulled her T-shirt straight, raked her fingers through her hair, and tried to prepare herself for whoever might come through the curtains of her cubical.
Even so, she was not prepared for the two people who came nervously down the hallway. Abel and Mitzi, Abel carrying a bunch of flowers almost bigger than himself, and Mitzi bearing what looked like a homemade cake.
“Hello, Harriet,” Abel said, rather tentatively, and Hal saw his throat move as he swallowed awkwardly. “I hope—I hope this is okay, I could understand . . .”
He trailed off, and Mitzi stepped forwards, her pink face even pinker than usual.
“Frankly, Harriet, we can both quite understand if you don’t feel up to seeing anyone from Trepassen, so please don’t hesitate to say if you’d rather we went away. This is pure selfishness on my part—I was so anxious when I heard the news. Harding is at home with the children, and Abel kindly agreed to give me a lift—oh, no, Harriet, please don’t get up.”
Hal was struggling out of bed, putting her shaky legs to the floor, and then she was in Mitzi’s arms, enveloped in a hug so hard and close she felt breathless with the force of it.
“Oh, my darling,” Mitzi was saying over and over. “Oh, my darling, what an ordeal, I can’t tell you—that vile, horrible man—I can’t even—”
She broke off and sat back, wiping fiercely at her eyes with a corner of her Hermès scarf, and Abel stepped forwards.
He did not embrace her, or not exactly; he simply put a hand on either side of her shoulders, holding her gently, almost as if he feared she would break, looking at her with such sadness in his gray eyes that Hal felt a lump rise in her own throat.
“Oh, Harriet,” he said. “Can you forgive us?”
“Forgive you?” Hal tried to say, but the hoarseness in her throat broke up the words, and she had to swallow and try again before they understood her. “What should I forgive?”
“Everything,” Abel said heavily. He sat opposite the head of Hal’s bed on the hard little chair, and Mitzi perched on the foot of the bed. “For letting you sleepwalk into this. For turning a blind eye for twenty years. I knew in my heart of hearts that something was wrong, we all did. But he was so charming, so funny when he wanted to be.”
“None of you knew the truth, though?” Hal managed. It was a question, not a statement, and Abel shook his head.
“Mother knew. And . . . and I think so did Mrs. Warren, almost certainly.”
“Mrs. Warren?” Mitzi’s face was horrified. “She knew, and she said nothing?”
“She loved him,” Abel said simply. “And so did Mother, I think, in her own way. I suppose they felt . . .” He spread his hands. “What was done was done, after all. They couldn’t bring Maggie back. And they thought, perhaps—forgive me, Hal.” He took a breath. “I think perhaps they thought he had been . . . provoked. Beyond bearing. A crime of passion, in some way.”
“Mrs. Warren knew,” Hal said. Her throat hurt and she took a sip of the water beside her bed. “It’s why he killed her. She tried to warn me. But I didn’t understand. I thought it was a threat. I thought she tried to trip me up down the stairs and frighten me away, but it was—”
She stopped. What to say? It was Ezra? It was my father who did that, who set an opportunistic trap to stop me digging up my own past?
“And now she’s gone,” she finished. She felt numb with the futility of it. Maud, Maggie, even herself, she could understand. She could not forgive Ezra for what he had done, but she could understand it. He had killed out of rage and a kind of twisted love, and later to protect himself, to stop the truth from coming out. But Mrs. Warren . . . She thought of all the questions she still had—questions only Mrs. Warren could have answered—and she wanted to cry. Mrs. Warren’s face, that first day, came back to her—the image she had had of a child watching a cat stalk towards a group of unsuspecting pigeons, watching with a kind of horrified glee for the carnage that was to come. At the time she had thought the cat was Hal herself. Now she understood—the cat was Ezra. And Mrs. Warren had perhaps not expected what was to come—if she had, surely even she would have said something. But she saw the danger, and did nothing to stop it. The only person she had tried to warn was Hal herself.
Get out—if you know what’s good for you. While you still can . . .
“She was the only person left who knew the truth,” Hal said slowly. “And he knew . . . he knew that she was going to warn me. . . .”
She thought back through the years, counting the bodies, falling like dominoes from that first moment of anger in the boathouse. And the last domino, Hal herself. Except . . . she hadn’t fallen. He had.
“Abel . . . Mitzi . . .” She stopped, groping for what to say, and in the end the only phrase that came was the clichéd perennial response to the unbearable: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“And I for yours,” Mitzi said, and there was a kind of wisdom in her round, pink, horsey face that Hal would never have expected to find there, when they first met. An infinite compassion, beneath the self-satisfied façade. “He was your father.”
It was not Hal who flinched at the word, but Abel, putting his face in his hands as though he could not bear it, so that Hal wanted to reach out, and tell him that it was okay, that it would all be okay. Whoever, whatever her father was—had been—she’d had not one but two remarkable mothers, women who had fought for her and protected her, and she was lucky in that.
But she could not find the words.
“When you’re better”—Mitzi patted the sheet over her knees—“we’ll have to get Mr. Treswick to come and see you again, Harriet.”
“Mr. Treswick?”
“It seems . . . well, it seems as if Mrs. Westaway did know what she was doing when she drafted that will.”
“Mr. Treswick has looked into it,” Abel said. “In view of what we know now, the wording is quite clear and unambiguous. That legacy is meant for you, Hal. It always was. The house is yours.”
“What?”
The shock was so unexpected that the word slipped out, like an accusation,
and then Hal could not think of anything more to say.
Abel was nodding.
“Mother knew you were her granddaughter. I think that’s very clear. And with the will . . . well, I think she wanted all of us to ask questions, start digging into the past. It’s what she meant, I think, by that line to Harding in her letter.”
“Après moi, le déluge,” Hal said softly. And she finally understood what Mrs. Westaway had set in motion with her will. There had been malice, yes, but also cowardice. The truth had been a horror that she could not bear to face while she was alive. Instead her grandmother had waited until she herself was beyond pain—and unleashed this catastrophe on the living.
For a moment Hal imagined her lying there, bed-bound, waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Warren, and planning the cataclysm that was to come. Had she rubbed her hands as she signed that will, full of a bitter glee? Or had it been done with a weary resignation and pity for the living?
They would never know.
“What puzzles me,” Abel was saying slowly, “is why the hell Ezra wouldn’t agree to that deed of variation you suggested. It was the perfect get-out for him—an acceptance that you weren’t Mother’s granddaughter. I think Mother must have counted on you being as voracious and bloody-minded as the rest of us, and forcing the truth to come out in court. She never expected you to renounce your legacy without a fight. You were more noble than she could have imagined, Hal.”
“I wasn’t noble,” Hal said. Her throat was sore, as if trying to stop her from saying the words, but she swallowed hard and forced them out, huskily. “I—I knew, when I got Mr. Treswick’s letter, that there had been a mistake. I let you think that I was as confused as the rest of you, but the truth was, I wasn’t. I came down here—” She stopped. Could she bear to do this? “I came down here to deceive you all. You don’t know—you can’t understand what it’s like, any of you, to struggle so much, to never know where the next month’s rent is coming from. You were rich, to me, and it felt like . . .” She stopped again, twisting the bedsheets with her fingers. “I felt like this was fate’s way of righting the scales, and a few thousand here or there would mean nothing to you—and everything to me. I was on the run from a loan shark.” How small and unimportant it seemed now, Mr. Smith and his small threats, in comparison with what she had survived. “And I only needed a few hundred pounds to make it all okay. I hoped—I hoped I could walk away with a little bit of money, and start again. It was only when I met you I realized I was wrong, and when I found out the legacy wasn’t something small, but the whole estate, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. But I think I know why Ezra wouldn’t agree to the deed of variation.”