Chapter II
II
Alice is in the kitchen when she hears the crash.
El’s at the shop getting streamers and she’s working on Catty’s birthday cake, wee Finn sitting on the counter as she measures, mixes, pours, and Alice loves this part—cooking is too wild, too much left to chance, but baking is like maths and chemistry, which are her best subjects this year in school—and she’s just letting Finn add the milk when the sound rings through the house, and Alice has the sense to put her little brother safely on the floor before she rushes toward the sitting room.
And finds Catty.
Catty, who’s moved on from Derrick to a guy named Malcolm, who’s nineteen and not from Hoxburn, just passing through, because he has the kind of job that takes him places.
Catty, who’s barely passing sixth year, and seems hell-bent on mystifying the counselor assigned to help her find a path because they don’t get that all she wants is to be discovered, to be seen.
Catty, who found one of Mum’s photos in a box instead of on the shelf, and took a bat to the wedding portrait on the mantel.
(All that practice in the gravel lot behind the pub.)
And that’s bad enough, but there’s glass on the floor and wee Finn toddles in before Alice can get it swept up and cuts his heel. Nothing a couple plasters don’t fix, but feet bleed just as much as heads and hands, and then El returns, and tells Catty to grow up or get out.
The next day, Catty blows out the candles on her seventeenth birthday cake.
And the next day, she is gone.
She doesn’t leave a note, doesn’t turn on her phone, and she’s too old to be considered a runaway, so there’s nothing to do but wait and hope.
El blames herself (even though Dad says that Catty’s been gathering sticks for years, armfuls of kindling, waiting for an excuse to strike the match), and Dad’s face is lined with worry, and Finn is too young to understand, so he goes around peering behind doors and under tables as if Catty’s just playing some drawn-out game of hide-and-seek, and for the first time in her life Alice fails a test because she can’t sleep, lies awake every night listening for the sound of her sister sneaking back in.
For a week, the walls of the house feel too thick, the air too tight, like the world is holding its breath.
And then, Catty calls.
“Hey, Bones,” she says like it’s any other day.
Alice is home alone, and she wants to scream, to sob, to throw her arms around her sister but she can’t because she isn’t there, so she just says, “Where the hell are you, Catty?”
And her sister laughs.
She laughs like nothing’s wrong.
“Right now? York.”
It knocks the wind out of Alice. So far away, so soon.
Catty told her once that there was a rope running between them—“Heart to heart,” she said, poking Alice right between the ribs—and every time one moved, the other would know, so Alice tried, told Catty to run and hide, and said she would use the rope to find her.
But it didn’t work.
Alice couldn’t feel it, couldn’t find her, and finally Catty showed up on her own, and shrugged, like the world hadn’t just caved in, and said, “I guess it’s easier for big sisters.”
“York?” Alice asks again, pulling up a map. The number of miles, the route the train would take, the path like a red cord stretching south.
“Yep. And guess what? It’s just as haunted as Mum said it was. All those little alleys full of ghosts and—”
“Please come home,” says Alice, but she can practically hear Catty shaking her head.
“Why would I do that?” she asks, a tight laugh catching in her voice.
Because I’m here, Alice wants to say. Because you promised me we’d go together.
“Look, one day you’ll understand,” says Catty. “The world is big and full of chances. Hoxburn isn’t.”
Alice’s eyes begin to burn. Tears spill down her cheeks. “You should have waited for me.”
(“Slow down.”)
(“Catch up.”)
“I couldn’t.”
Catty doesn’t say she’s sorry (never has), but Alice can hear the pang of sadness in her voice before it picks back up.
“But you finish school, get those good grades, and go to one of those big fancy universities, and I’ll be there.
By then, I’ll be all set, have enough saved up. And it will just be the two of us.”
“What about Malcolm?” mutters Alice.
“Oh, he’s gone. He was just a ride. A way out.”
Alice’s stomach twists, relief giving way to worry. “You’re alone?”
Only she’s not, because now Alice can hear another voice somewhere behind her, and then Catty’s saying, “Hey, I gotta go. Hang in there, Alice.”
“Catty, wait,” she says.
“Catty, please,” she says.
“Catty, just tell me—” she says.
But it’s too late. Her sister’s gone.
“Daft girl,” says Dad when he finds out, and he sounds furious, but that night he tries to call the number back a hundred times.
Of course, by then, the phone is off.
Alice lies there, pressing the pendant against her chest until she can feel her pulse beating through the metal, pretends it’s the other end of their shared rope, that it won’t break, no matter how far Catty goes.
Heart to heart, she whispers into the dark, as her pulse slows—
And slows—
And—
Alice wakes at dusk.
Not slowly but all at once, lurching back, one hand still clutching the necklace through her shirt.
For a moment, she doesn’t know where she is, or rather, she thinks she knows, back in her single bed in her shared room in her dorm suite, and she must have climbed beneath the blankets, taken a nap after class, and that’s what she’s always done when she’s sick.
But then she swallows, and tastes the dregs of copper in her throat. She isn’t sick, because sick is a problem that can be fixed, and when she rolls over she sees she’s not in her bed, but on a sofa, a blanket she doesn’t need draped over her shoulders.
And she remembers.
I really thought you would be safe.
Alice sits up, and sees blood staining the cushion under her cheek, feels a second’s lurching panic before she feels the crust of tears beneath her eyes. Her gaze drifts to the marble coffee table with its deep crack, a glaring reminder of a rage she tries to summon now, and can’t.
She checks her phone and sees a series of increasingly worried texts in the suite thread—asking where she is, if she’s okay, please, just let them know, say something, don’t make them call campus police.
Alice doesn’t know how to answer that so she lies and says Sorry, says Yes, says she’s Staying at a friend’s, even though they all know she doesn’t have anything close to friends outside the suite, barely knows anyone from class.
Alice pockets the phone and looks around.
No sign of Ezra, or Lottie.
The room is empty, the curtains drawn, twilight spilling through a narrow gap, and maybe it’s Lottie’s story, or maybe it’s the dream she had, the memory, but she finds herself hooking the gold chain with her fingers and drawing the pendant from beneath her hoodie.
The pendant, which isn’t a pendant but a locket, a vial.
Her little piece of home.
A bit of glaur, Catty called it—dirt, but not just any dirt.
Her mother’s, taken from the grave, a gift from Eloise on that blue-tinted wedding day.
She unscrews the hidden lid and tips the smallest bit into her palm, and the moment it touches her bare skin she is back in the cemetery plot, and all the strength is rushing out of her, the life leeching backward, her limbs shriveling and her heart drying up and—
Alice recoils, wrenching her hand back so fast the flecks of grave dirt rain down onto the splintered marble.
“No, no, no,” she whispers, dropping to her knees beside the table, trying to salvage the dirt, even though it’s little more than a capful, a coin, and every time it touches her skin that sickness surges up to meet it.
At last she gives up, and screws the tiny gold cap back onto the vial, and what’s left of the dirt inside, shoving the pendant back beneath her shirt.
She leans forward, fills her lungs, and blows, scattering the thin dusting on the marble, is about to retreat beneath the blanket, try to disappear again when she sees a bag that must be Lottie’s, tucked between the table’s feet.
Only, it’s not the bag that holds her gaze.
It’s the book that’s sticking out.
A battered paperback, but she’s read it twice, and she would know the cover anywhere. The marble face turned half-away on the black ground, the serifed type declaring it The Secret History.
Penny’s book.
Alice plucks it from the bag and opens it, flipping to the blank back pages where Lottie kept her litany of conquests, her list of names, no better than the tokens Sabine wore around her neck.
Alice doesn’t read them all, except to note how many there are, the names filling not one page, but two, before her eyes go straight to the most recent line.
Brief as a tombstone in damning purple ink.
Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief.
She reads it twice, three times, till the lines become words and the words become letters and the letters break apart and still she can’t understand how her entire life has been reduced to six words in this small and sloping script.
And ah—there it is, the anger Alice couldn’t find when she woke up.
There it is, striking up again, as quick as flint.
The page crumples beneath her hands, and she’s about to tear it, when the lock on the hotel door chirps and the door glides open, and Lottie comes in, dressed in fresh clothes and holding a store bag—the fancy kind with tissue sticking out the top—hooked on her elbow, as if she’s been shopping.
Lottie sees Alice, book clenched in her hands, and Alice wants her to lunge forward, to say No, to say Don’t. To try to pry her precious list away, so Alice can take something from her, too.