by Luca Veste
I willed myself to look back at the house, but I couldn’t.
Instead, I pulled out my phone, switched on the music, tried to blink some life into my eyes, and turned the ignition.
It wasn’t until I was a mile or more away that I glanced at my phone again. I saw a missed call and messages. I pulled over and took it from the cradle.
Missed calls from Chris.
A message from Chris. Not a voice mail.
Two words in a text message.
The world turns and spins on phone notifications.
Two words.
Nicola’s gone.
Thirty-Eight
I made it to Chris’s house by eleven thirty. I was pretty sure I’d have some speeding fines landing on my doormat within a few days. If I made it long enough to receive them of course. I had gone my whole life without a single point on my license and was probably not going to be around to finally receive one.
Ironic? Not sure. I’d have to check with Alanis.
He opened the door before I even had the chance to knock, swinging it back on the hinges, the bang against the inside wall echoing around the street. I followed him, closing the door behind me carefully and finding Chris in the living room.
“What happened?” I said, stopping short of moving any closer to him.
He was a ball of energy, hands clenched into fists and banging against his thighs.
“Chris, tell me…”
“I’ll tell you what’s happened,” Chris shouted, turning on me now, the distance between us closed in a split second. “This is your fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“All of this crap,” he said, his voice still bouncing off the walls around us. I tried to place a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off like an annoyance.
“Calm down, mate. We can fix this.”
He laughed at that. I didn’t blame him.
“There’s nothing to fix, mate,” he spat at me, then paced away from me. Fists still flexing and finding a home on the mantelpiece. A vase crashed to the laminated floor, landing with enough force to smash it into pieces. Chris crunched through them with his shoes. “This is your fault.”
“Tell me what’s happened, Chris,” I tried again, my own jaw clenching now. We had never fallen out, the two of us. Everything that happened couldn’t be my fault. I couldn’t take the blame for it all. “Where’s Nicola?”
“She’s gone. I don’t know where.”
“Gone how?”
“I haven’t the first idea,” Chris said, a sarcastic laugh preceding it. “We were all set to go to the damn hotel, and she has to go get something or other, I don’t know. Next thing I know, I get a text from her.”
His phone was on the coffee table, and he picked it up and threw it at me. I looked at the screen after swiping it to unlock it. No password or security. I had an urge to point that out to him, but it didn’t feel like the right time. When the screen came alive, the message was there.
I’ve got to go away. We can’t be together while this is going on. We’re too much of a target. I will call you. Love you x
I looked up, and Chris was standing a foot away.
He snatched the phone from my hand and threw it across the room.
I moved quickly, placing my hands on his shoulders as he screamed in frustration.
“It’s going to be okay…”
“Liar,” he said, pulling away from me. He was breathing heavily, facing me with a look of violence in his eyes. He wanted to inflict damage on someone, and I was starting to wonder if it was going to be me.
“She’s probably just gone to another hotel,” I said, keeping my voice low and steady. “That’s all it is. Maybe it’s better that way. She can handle herself, Nicola. We both know that. We’ve seen it enough times over the years.”
“I’m supposed to be by her side through everything. I don’t care if she could kick all our heads in if she wanted to; I’m still supposed to be the one there with her.”
“I know.”
“You know? How could you? You and Alex split as soon as you possibly could. You have no idea what it is we have. You couldn’t possibly comprehend what we share. We’re a team. It’s always been me and her. Now, we’re arguing and she’s disappeared. That hasn’t happened in twenty-odd years, Matt. And it all starts with Stuart throwing himself in front of a train, just because he can’t take a little bit of guilt.”
“You were onboard with what we talked about earlier,” I said, sensing I had lost an argument I hadn’t even been part of. One he’d had with himself before my arrival. “You agreed with me.”
“What the hell do I know? This isn’t right. We’ve all panicked because of what we did last year. What if there was no one in those woods? What if someone is out there, but is just messing with our heads, so we do something stupid? What if, what if, what if?”
By the final repetition, Chris was in my face screaming, spittle flying from his mouth and hitting me on the cheek. I could feel his breath on my skin, and I placed my foot back, waiting for the punch to land.
It didn’t come.
I would have let it.
He knew that as well. The thought seemed to land inside his head and began to crumple.
I’d never seen him cry in the twenty-five years we’d known each other. Not when his dad died a decade ago. Not on his wedding day, when I stood next to him at the altar as his best man. Not when he told me he and Nicola couldn’t have children, after years of trying.
He did now.
Chris dropped to the sofa in a heap, and I moved quickly to fall with him. I grabbed him and held tight, as his cries of anguish filled the room.
We were sitting like that for a minute or so before he finally began to calm. I let him go and shuffled to the side to give him room. He breathed in and out deeply a few times, then seemed to gain control again.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, putting my hand on his upper arm and squeezing once. “We can all get through this.”
“How?”
“Well, if you’re going to ask questions I can’t answer, then I don’t know how I’m supposed to get you through this without crying myself.”
He chuckled a little at that and wiped his face with a sleeve. “It’s always been me and her, you know? We came as a pair. I don’t know how I’d have fared without her. She makes me a complete person.”
I nodded in response, thinking of Alexandra and the way we had been until a year ago. She had always been independent, freethinking, and self-sufficient. I had been the same. Yet once we were together, that was it. We were entangled. Our separate lives had become a whole. Now, I felt like there was always something missing.
“Before all of this, we were okay,” Chris said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Sure, we still carried some guilt, but we got through it. Since Stuart died, I’ve felt her slipping away. She’s been colder. The other day, some guy cut us off at a roundabout, and I swear if she’d had a gun or whatever, that bloke would have been dead. She’s always had a short temper, but I don’t know…lately, she’s been different.”
“It’s the stress of the situation—”
Chris shook his head in disagreement and spoke before I had a chance to finish the thought. “It’s more than that. I’m worried about her state of mind. All of this, it’s breaking us apart. Not just me and her, but the rest of us too. Those of us who are left, anyway.”
“We can fix this. He’s not going to beat us.”
He seemed to nod in agreement, but I didn’t feel confident that he believed me. I wasn’t sure I believed me either. I looked around the room and felt my stomach fall a few floors. “Chris, where’s the candle?”
He looked up as if he were seeing the room for the first time, then got to his feet quickly. He banged into the coffee table, leaving the room in a rush. I
followed him as he went into the kitchen-dining room and began moving things around the room.
“Did you throw it out?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my voice. “When you got back or something?”
“No,” Chris replied, now ransacking the room, pulling things from cupboards and then running out.
I could hear feet pounding on the stairs, so had a look around myself. I didn’t find anything.
He returned quickly and jogged through the kitchen, tearing open the back door and going outside.
I could see him through the window, opening up each wheelie bin and checking through its contents. I closed my eyes and felt the sense of sadness wash over me.
“Maybe she took it with her,” Chris said, coming back into the kitchen and looking at me with pleading eyes. He took one look at me and began to shake.
“Yeah, maybe,” I replied, but even I could hear the doubt in my voice. I cleared my throat and tried again. “She probably wanted to make sure she had it, for evidence or whatever.”
He looked at me again, then moved to the side and gripped hold of the kitchen counter. “No, she wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t even want to look at it. I’ve got to find her.”
I was almost pushed off my feet as he moved past me, not even grabbing a jacket as he picked up his keys and pulled the front door open. I chased after him, finding him getting into his car.
“Wait,” I shouted, wondering just how much his neighbors would be listening in now. If they hadn’t already had a glass to the wall as he’d first screamed at me in the living room, then smashed up his dining room looking for the candle, they would be getting a front row seat now. “Chris, let me come with you.”
He wasn’t listening to me anymore, slamming the car door shut and turning the engine on. The car was moving up the road before I’d even had the chance to shut his front door behind me and get to my own vehicle.
By the time I was driving, he was long gone.
I slept that night.
I’m not sure what it was that made my body shut down without a problem, but maybe it had just had enough. Chris’s phone would ring and ring as I tried to contact him. Alexandra was doing the same for Nicola’s. We spoke a little after midnight, but she ended the call when she realized I was beginning to make little sense. Told me to go to bed and try again in the morning.
To lock up my doors and make sure I was safe. I told her the same.
I remembered turning on classical music on my phone—a ten-hour collection I found on YouTube—and not hearing more than a few minutes before the world turned black.
A dreamless sleep.
I was so out of it—so deeply asleep—that when the banging started, it seemed to only exist in a void of darkness. A black space with just a rhythmic sound. A song started playing. One I recognized. It stopped after a few seconds, letting the silence grow again, before starting up again.
Silence.
Banging.
I woke up confused and bewildered. I could hear knocks and banging, so I pulled myself out of bed in a daze. Still half-asleep.
A crash against wood made me jump, and I was suddenly alert again.
I pulled on lounge pants draped over the end of the bed and grabbed the baseball bat that had been lying under the duvet as I slept. Crept downstairs and realized the knocking was coming from the front door.
There was someone there.
It was still pitch-black outside. I rubbed my eyes and moved slowly to the door.
“Who’s there?” I said, but it only came out as a whisper, fear cutting off my voice box. I coughed and cleared my throat before repeating myself. “Who’s there?”
A muffled voice that was instantly familiar to me answered. I didn’t hear what was said, but it made me cross the final few feet between me and the door in one long stride. I unlocked the door and swung it open.
The first thing I saw was Alexandra. She was red-faced and shaking in the cold.
The second thing I saw was what she was holding in her hands.
A red candle.
In a storm lantern.
Still lit. Still burning.
Thirty-Nine
I managed to get Alexandra inside before she poured out what had happened right there on my doorstep. I checked there was no one following her, then locked up behind her and moved her into the living room. Sat her down on the sofa, as her shaking continued, and tried to take the candle from her hands.
“No, don’t touch it,” Alexandra said, gripping it tighter and holding it to her body.
I broke away and took a step back. “You’re freezing. You need to warm up.”
I did the good British thing and flicked the kettle on. Raced upstairs, chucked a T-shirt on, and grabbed my phone.
A few minutes later, Alexandra had finally let go of the candle and its metallic housing. She was sitting huddled over it, both of her hands wrapped around a cup of tea.
“He couldn’t get into my house,” she said, her voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear it.
I was kneeling on the floor near her, so I moved closer and placed a hand on her knee for comfort.
“I heard him trying to break in, I think,” Alexandra continued, her shaking hands lifting the cup to her lips and seemingly risking a sip of the drink. She blew on it at the last moment instead. “I barricaded the doors before I went to bed and all my windows are well secured. You can’t even get into the place with a key, once I’m inside. He settled for ringing the doorbell for a few minutes instead to get my attention.”
“Did you see him?”
She shook her head in response. In the dim light from the lamp I’d switched on, she looked so different from a few hours earlier. Her eyes were flat and listless. Skin pale and taut with tension. I had to stop myself from embracing her and never letting go.
This was my fault.
“I didn’t even open the door until half an hour had gone by. I didn’t want to go out, but I had to be sure, you know? After all, I was the last one pretending this wasn’t going on, wasn’t I? Aren’t you going to tell me I told you so?”
“I think that’s below even me right now,” I said, grimacing and smiling in equal measure. I rubbed my thumb against her kneecap and looked her in the eyes. “What happened after that?”
“I checked about four thousand times, but I think he was gone by the time I opened the door. It was still on the chain, but I could already see it anyway. Feel it, almost.”
“Did you see anyone?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t stay in the house anymore. I got dressed, picked it up, and did the twenty-yard dash in about half a second to my car. Came here. I didn’t know where else to go.”
“You did the right thing,” I said, but didn’t believe it. It seemed everything was falling apart, and I included myself in that. There was a part of me that wasn’t even really sure that this was real or if it was some lucid nightmare.
My whole life felt like that though.
“What do you think we should do?” Alexandra said, her hands no longer shaking, her eyes becoming steelier by the second. “We have to work this out.”
“I think any way we dress this up, we’re still in the same boat.”
“One without a paddle, a million pin-size holes, and on a river of shit?”
“That’s the one,” I replied, smiling without humor. “What we’re dealing with here…I don’t think there’s an easy way out of it.”
“What do we know?”
We sat there for twenty minutes, as misty light began to enter the room from outside, going over everything we knew. The facts as we understood them, what they meant and how they fit into the whole picture. It wasn’t long before we came to the same inevitable conclusion.
It had to be the son.
It had to be revenge.
“Okay, but that
doesn’t help us figure out what we do next,” Alexandra said, a hand going to her forehead and massaging it in thought. “Do you think the police would believe any of this? We have no more evidence than the rest of the online community, and the police have managed to ignore them successfully enough.”
“We have a body.”
She looked at me for a second, then shook her head. “All that would show them was that there was a dead guy. It’s not like they would be able to figure out anything from that. If there were bodies out there of his victims, then maybe we have a shot in the long-term. For now though, we’d still have the same problem. I mean, unless you want to be arrested and denied bail?”
“Would that be a bad thing considering the alternative?”
“Yes, prison would be a bad thing,” Alexandra said, rolling her eyes at me and leaning forward to put her empty cup on the coffee table. “You wouldn’t last five seconds in there. Too clean-cut.”
“Oh, and you would?”
“I’d do a damn sight better than you.”
I let out a short bark of laughter, and Alexandra sniggered next to me. I sighed and leaned back into the sofa and turned my body to face her properly. “This is all my fault.”
“No it isn’t…”
“I killed him,” I said, saying it out loud for the first time. In an instant, I could feel the rock in my hand as I brought it down on his head. “If I had controlled myself better, Stuart and Michelle would still be here. I dealt the final blow, as they say.”
Alexandra sat forward on the sofa suddenly, perching on the edge and staring at me intently. “What are you talking about?”
“What happened,” I replied, letting my head fall into my chest, unable to keep her gaze any longer. “We were all fighting with him, but he would have survived if I hadn’t finished the job. Things would have worked out a lot better if I had been able to control myself.”
“That’s not what happened.”
I looked up at her, my forehead creasing in confusion. “I think I remember what I did.”
“Obviously not,” Alexandra said, shaking her head and moving closer to me. She laid a hand on my knee. “You weren’t the one who did that. I watched the whole thing. He was already gone by that point.”