Chapter 16
Cathy can’t concentrate. She has already burned the pizzas, setting off all the smoke alarms just as she’d got the boys round the dining table, and now she can’t find her glasses.
She is sure she had them earlier because she can’t read without them, but they’re not in their usual place on the arm of the sofa or by the sink.
She has just begun emptying her handbag onto the counter when Danny walks into the kitchen, heading straight for the fridge.
He watches his mother with some bemusement as she scrabbles through loose change and tissues and various tubes of lipstick.
“They’re on your head.” He pulls out the milk, swigging it straight from the carton. “You put them there ’cause they get steamed up when you’re cooking.”
“Wow. I must be losing it.” She laughs, but it doesn’t feel funny, not at all.
Danny gives her a sarcastic smile. “Going senile, more like. Must be your age.”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even reproach him for drinking out of the carton like she normally would, saying, Danny Maddon, were you born in a barn? She just sighs and picks up her phone.
“What’s up, Mum?”
“Huh?” She looks at him over the top of her glasses. “Oh, I’m just worried about your aunt Hazel, that’s all. I still haven’t heard from her. Her phone’s off and she’s not at your grandparents’, where she should be. I don’t know what to do.”
Danny shrugs. “Who cares? It’s not like you even saw each other these last five years.”
Cathy reaches for her glass of wine. She’s not normally a daytime drinker, not with a toddler to look after all on her own, but she thinks she could happily finish this bottle and tuck herself into bed. Her brain is buzzing, restless.
“It’s different now. We’re older. She wants to make up. Besides, she’s had a lot of problems recently.”
“You mean her divorce?”
Cathy frowns. She doesn’t know how to explain it all to Danny and she’s too tired to try. He’s only fifteen anyway, how can she expect him to understand? So she settles for a nod, a quick downward turn of the mouth. Sure, why not.
“Did you watch the video I sent you?”
“Honestly, Danny, I’ve barely had time to think, let alone watch a—” Cathy stops mid-sentence, her eyes widening behind the lenses of her glasses. “Fuck,” she whispers, then reaches for her bag. “Hey. Can you look after Scout for me? I just need to head out.”
“Sure.”
“He’ll probably wake up from his nap in the next half an hour, so I’ll try to hurry.”
“Mum?” He looks at her, his face serious. Cathy wonders if he might reach out to try to stop her leaving, as though some ill omen has passed behind his dark brown eyes.
She forces herself to smile. “Yes, hon?”
“Be careful, okay?”
Be careful. Danny’s words follow her all the way down Knox Row like the tail of a comet.
The way he’d looked at her, as if trying to read what was underneath the surface.
Cathy had always promised herself to be honest with her kids.
It wasn’t that her own parents hadn’t been—they’d been distant and hard to reach, but never dishonest—after all, it was her mother who’d told her frankly about the growth on Hazel’s spine when Cathy had been just eight years old, still sleeping with her cuddly lamb tucked under her arm.
“Your sister’s got to have an operation to remove it.” Her mother had been reading a letter over breakfast, her face pink and shiny from the shower. “It’s a tumor, but they don’t think it’s dangerous. They’ll have to put her under.”
“What does that mean?” Cathy asked.
Her mother glanced at her, almost irritated. “It means they’ll put her to sleep.”
Cathy dropped the spoon into her bowl. Milk sprayed everywhere, flakes of soggy cereal. Her eyes filled with tears. “Like Gandalf?”
Gandalf was their old cat, the very first Persian their mother had bought. With his long gray hair and keen amber eyes, he had looked like a wizard, but his full name—his pedigree name—was Gandalf Lomond Baudelaire, which Cathy had thought was just about the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.
“Don’t be silly, Cathy,” her mother snapped, but she hadn’t said no, so for the weeks leading up to Hazel’s operation, Cathy had been extra kind to her, just in case she didn’t wake up after her operation. Like Gandalf.
Cathy picks up her pace. It’s raining, a thin drizzle that sweeps over the pines and down the hillside, gusted fitfully by the wind.
In her hurry to leave the house, she hadn’t brought a coat, and so she wraps her cardigan more tightly around her.
Maybe Danny’s right, she thinks, head down, walking across the playing fields that serve as a shortcut, maybe I am overreacting.
After all, Hazel’s only been missing a day or two.
She might have decided to take off for a few days.
It’s still autumn, right? She might be digging somewhere for mushrooms, up to her wrists in dirt.
But still, that feeling persists. An ache, like the stirrings of a migraine behind her eyes. That unopened divorce letter, the mess in Hazel’s bedroom. Those poor cats, stuffed into a suitcase. Hazel wouldn’t have done that, would she?
She might. You know she might.
Even so, Cathy reminds herself, if that was the case, then who was the man Mr. Jenner saw going into the house with a key?
Cathy reaches the gate on the far side of the field, near where the play equipment sits empty and dripping with rain.
The swings creak in the wind. It’s an eerie, melancholy sound, like whale song.
She used to bring Danny to this playground.
She still brings Scout sometimes, but the equipment is old and rusting now, the sandpit turned a slurry gray like concrete.
The council say there isn’t the budget to replace it, so it all gets left to softly fall apart under the children’s hands.
Cathy turns her back on the fields and heads through the gate. She has business to attend to.
She approaches the house on Polmen Avenue the back way to avoid the watchful eye of Mr. Jenner.
Before she’d left, Cathy had locked the French doors and slipped the key into her pocket, and now she uses it to open them, ears strained for any sound of life within.
In the darkened kitchen the cats are there to greet her, eyes like headlamps in the dark.
They are hungry, so she empties food into their bowls and makes a quick inspection of the kitchen.
After Suzie had walked out on her yesterday, Cathy had sat alone for a long time, smoking and drinking tea.
Then she’d washed up and swept and tipped the rancid milk down the sink.
Now, looking around, she can see that nothing has been touched.
The cups are still on the draining board, stools pushed beneath the counter.
In the last twenty-four hours, no one has been inside, and no one is feeding these cats.
That thought again, If that man wasn’t Laurence Mitchell, then who was he?
Cathy moves up the stairs, turning all the lights on as she goes.
Unease rises like a pale, swelling dough as she walks past the doorway to Hazel’s old bedroom.
Back when they were younger, both girls had shared that room.
There were bunk beds and a fish tank and a huge dolls’ house which opened at the front like double doors.
Then Hazel went into hospital, and when she came back out, Cathy hadn’t wanted to share a room with her anymore.
She’d told her parents it was because she was getting older and needed her own space, but it hadn’t been that—at least not entirely.
It hadn’t even been the way that Hazel insisted on sleeping with the window open, even though it made the room cold and sometimes insects got in.
It had been the other sister that Hazel had brought home with her. The one who lived under Hazel’s bed.
Cathy shakes herself. She doesn’t want to think about all that right now.
No good comes of digging up the past, she reminds herself, rushing past the open doorway so she doesn’t have to glance into the darkened room beyond and see the way the wardrobe door hangs open as if pushed by a skinless hand.
Head down, she tells herself, don’t look.
It doesn’t stop her heart pounding, and even when she has reached the door to her old room, she doesn’t dare risk looking back, just in case something is peering round the doorframe with round yellow eyes like Christmas baubles.
Cathy still thinks of this as her bedroom, even as she pushes open the door, but of course her old room is barely recognizable anymore.
Where Cathy’s bed had been is a chaise longue upholstered in purple velvet.
The old wardrobe and matching dressing table have been replaced by scratching posts and cat baskets lined with cashmere and wool.
Framed photographs dominate the walls; there’s her mother grinning at various award shows, and there’s the Persians, looking down the lens with that particular feline contempt.
There are quirky photographs of the cats dressed up at Christmas and Halloween, all cardboard pumpkins and funny little elf hats.
Cathy turns away. She knows what she is looking for and it isn’t cute pictures.
She finds the camera quickly, tucked up on the shelf between two trophies.
I think she’s set up a nanny cam, Hazel had joked, but it hadn’t been a joke at all, because here it is, small and plastic and futuristic looking in Cathy’s hands.
After investigating it for a minute or so, she pulls her phone from her pocket and calls Danny, tapping her foot impatiently as the phone rings and rings.
Finally, he picks up, his voice a slow, familiar drawl. “What’s up, Mum?”
“Danny, how do I get a video off a camera?”
He laughs. It is a good sound. It rinses some of that dread away.
“What kind of camera?”
Cathy frowns. She has happily watched technology accelerate away from her since she hit her twenties, content to use an ancient mobile and a creaky old laptop.
She tells Danny it’s because she doesn’t care about keeping up with the tech, but that’s only half right.
Truth is, it costs a lot, and Cathy has priorities—none of which include herself.
“God, I don’t know, Danny. It’s white and looks like it came from outer space. Your grandmother rigged it to spy on the cats when she’s away.”
Another laugh. In the background she can hear Scout cooing.
“Aw, you should have said! I set that up for Grandma. It’s called a Motion Monitor. It records when it captures movement. I set it up to send the notifications to her phone and laptop. If you go to her laptop, you can see what it’s picked up.”
“Okay. You know what her password is?”
“Guess.”
Cathy looks around at all the framed pictures and certificates, the folds of soft gray cashmere in the baskets. She rolls her eyes.
“Yeah. I got it. Thanks, Danny.”
Her mother’s laptop is in the study. Cathy takes a seat at the desk there, clearing a space in all the paperwork, and opens it up in front of her.
She types in the password—Conquest just an impression of eerily long limbs snaking out beneath a tangled mat of dark hair.
When her phone rings, Cathy screams. She looks down at the screen. It’s Danny.
“What’s going on?” She knows she sounds hectic and afraid. Out of breath, as if she’s been running. “Is Scout okay?”
“You haven’t forgotten I’m going to Zac’s this afternoon, have you?”
Cathy curses and looks at her watch. Even with the shortcut, she’s been out longer than she intended. She looks at the frozen screen in front of her, that blurred black shape.
“Mum? Did you hear me?” He sounds alarmed. “What’s wrong? Have you found something?”
No, Danny, she thinks, running her tongue over her dry teeth, but something found her. Something found your aunt Hazel and I’m frightened for her, more than you could know.