Chapter 26
Suzie and Cathy stop just once on the way to Belle Vue. Progress is slow, traffic building up as people leave their offices early to get ahead of the weather. Overhead, the dusky white sky is deepening into something gray and spectral.
“Pull over,” Cathy tells Suzie, leaning into the back to grab her leather jacket. “I need to go and get something.”
Suzie indicates and pulls up to the curb, watching as Cathy disappears into the newsagent opposite. When she returns, she is carrying something in a white paper bag. She gives Suzie a wink as she climbs back into the car.
“I never went to visit Hazel, but my parents did,” she tells her.
“They said the receptionist there was partial to sherbet lemons, the old-fashioned kind. My dad said sometimes it meant the difference between getting a cup of tea with my sister or having to wait until the next day. Here.” She puts the bag of sherbet lemons on the dashboard.
Suzie frowns. “I’m really not comfortable with this.”
“It’s fine, Suzie. We’re not planning a heist, we just want information. Find out if Hazel’s there, and why she wrote Belle Vue on this note. There must be a reason.”
Suzie sighs. “It just feels—wrong. I hate lying.”
Cathy slides her gaze over to Suzie but wisely keeps her mouth shut. Suzie is already doing Cathy a huge favor, she knows that. She doesn’t want to jeopardize it by pointing out what a Goody Two-shoes Suzie normally is. She takes a sherbet lemon from the bag and twists off the wrapper.
“There was something in the house with her,” Cathy hears herself say instead. Her voice is quiet, not her usual, strident tone. Danny would be amazed if he heard it, she thinks.
“You mean Laurence Mitchell? The man Mr. Jenner saw?”
“No, not him. It was something else.”
Suzie grips the steering wheel a little tighter. She glances over at Cathy, who is staring straight ahead, still talking.
“I remembered Hazel saying that Mum had installed a nanny cam, so I watched the playback. Something crawled after her down the hallway.”
“One of the cats.” It isn’t a question. Suzie’s voice is level despite the chill that steals over her. She wants to be rational. “Or a spider on the lens. We get that sometimes with our door cam.”
Cathy crunches the sweet between her teeth.
“I still have a scar,” Cathy continues in that same muted tone.
It sounds to Suzie almost as if she is talking to herself.
“From when I came off my bike. I needed stitches. The doctor said I was lucky I didn’t break my neck.
When I asked Hazel about it later, you know what she said? ”
Suzie shakes her head. Her jaw is clenched so tightly it feels like her whole head is vibrating.
“She said, ‘I’m scared of her too.’”
“I don’t know what any of this is about, Cathy.” Suzie’s chest burns with the lie. Beneath her smart leather gloves, her hands are on fire, skin crawling with an itch she can never quite scratch.
“You do. I know you do. But no one ever wants to talk about it. Not my parents, not Hazel—not even Joe, who got hurt so badly he put her into a private hospital and hired a lawyer to start divorce proceedings.”
“What? What happened to Joe?” Suzie switches lanes and edges the car a little faster. Her mouth is so dry her throat feels like sandpaper.
“I heard it all secondhand, you understand. Hazel and I still weren’t talking, and Joe hated my guts after what happened at their wedding, so everything got channeled through my mum. It was her who told me that Hazel destroyed the hives.”
Suzie’s mind is completely blank. Hives?
“The bees.” Cathy unwraps another sweet. At this rate, Suzie thinks, the receptionist is going to be gifted a bagful of empty wrappers. “Joe had a dozen hives. He was an apiarist; it was his life’s work.”
“What did Hazel do to them?”
“She burned them down.”
Suzie feels that dreadful itch spreading from the beds of her fingernails to the first crease of her wrist. It’s agony, like dipping her hands into a hill of fire ants. She thinks of Abigail in the prom photo, sitting in her wheelchair with a shawl draped over her lap. That haunted smile.
“All twelve hives were destroyed. He’d only been gone an hour and when he came home, they were smoking, burned-out ruins.
Hazel was covered in stings from her hands to her elbows.
Dozens of them. Joe said it must have hurt like hell, but she just went right on standing there in the field, grinning as the hives burned. ”
Up ahead, a sign for Belle Vue appears, small and discreet, giving nothing away. Suzie indicates to take the turning.
“Either way, it was the end for them, but from what I’d heard, it had been heading that way regardless. Joe had started finding glass in his food.”
The car swerves. Just a little, but they both feel it.
“Sorry,” Suzie says quietly.
“He called Mum. I was there when she took the call. This was about a week before she set the fires. He was so worried. He said that Hazel had started talking about herself in the plural—we.”
Suzie nods. What was it Hazel had said in the pharmacy last week? We’re house-sitting for our parents. She’d even mentioned it to Cathy.
“That was just the start of it. He caught her eating weird stuff—insects and river mud by the handful, licking sap from trees. One afternoon they were out foraging, and he watched her scoop a minnow out of the river and bite it in half, still wriggling. Some mornings he’d wake up and there would be pine needles and leaf litter in the bed, like she’d been wandering the woods all night.
“When Joe started finding bits of glass and metal in his food, he started talking about sending Hazel away. He was afraid she was escalating, but Mum played it down. ‘Oh, Hazel’s always had an overactive imagination,’ that sort of thing.
She told Joe that Hazel just needed more rest. God!
Can you imagine? After she hung up the phone, I pointed at my scar and said to her, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ and do you know what she said back to me, Suzie? ”
Suzie shakes her head.
Cathy’s voice has taken on a tight, brittle quality, vibrating like a taut wire.
“‘It’s about time you stopped blaming your sister for the mistakes you made, Cathy.’ I was so shocked.
I just sat there open-mouthed. I remember thinking, She’s going to kill him.
Hazel is really going to kill him and you’re not doing anything to stop it.
Thank God Joe got her into this place before she really did him some harm. ”
She points toward the large, imposing house they are approaching along the tree-lined drive.
It is old, washed stone, with ornamental turrets at either end.
Looking at it hurts Suzie’s eyes. It is built new to look old, even down to the gabled roof and sweeping front steps that lead up to the double doors.
It is an impression of a history that doesn’t exist, like seeing someone in medieval armor walking through a supermarket. It doesn’t fit.
“Are you okay, Suzie?”
“Yes. Just thinking what an ugly building that is.”
“You’re still going in there, though, right?”
Suzie nods, although her heart is beating so hard she can feel it in her eyes and her wrists, the side of her jaw. She pulls into one of the dozens of parking spaces out front and turns off the engine. Cathy holds out the depleted paper bag of sherbet lemons to her.
“One minute, Cathy.”
Outside, a cold wind skitters dead leaves across the lawn.
The sky is low and gray and thick, curdled like cream.
So far there’s only been a light dusting of snow, but Suzie knows that is just the beginning.
She sits back, loosening her seat belt and thinking about the day Hazel came into the chemist. There had been something about her that set off an alarm in Suzie’s gut, hadn’t there?
Something that had unnerved Suzie so much at the time that she’d thought about her old school friend Hazel for the rest of the day.
She’d even talked about it to Teddy at dinner that night, taking the old photo down off the wall to show him.
A discomfort that had settled on her skin like heat rash, itchy and uncomfortable, crawling up her arms. Something about the way Hazel had smiled, too wide, like invisible fingers were stretching her lips.
It was that expression which Suzie was familiar with, because she remembers Hazel’s moods had a premonitory aspect, like the wash of heat before a storm.
Or the taste of metal on the wind before the snow blows in.
“Suzie?”
“She was with her the day I saw Hazel. The ‘other sister,’ I mean. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was there, even if she was just small, like an infected cut, or an ulcer. She was festering.” Suzie turns to look at Cathy, her eyes fervent. She closes her gloved hand over Cathy’s own.
“I wish I’d stopped her. I wish I’d been brave enough to say something.”
“You couldn’t have done, Suzie,” Cathy tells her calmly, surprised at the alacrity of Suzie’s reaction. “Don’t blame yourself.”
But Suzie is taking the bag of sweets and getting out of the car before Cathy has finished, her coat floating around her in the bitter wind. As she walks toward Belle Vue, Cathy turns in her seat to watch her go. She thinks she sees Suzie wiping away tears.
About a minute after Suzie has disappeared inside the opulent double doors—arched, with scrollwork cast-iron filigrees overlaid on the glass—Cathy gets out of the car for a cigarette.
Her legs feel stiff and sore, tendons strung tight across the backs of her knees.
She stretches, pulling a woolen hat from her pocket and over her head.
She thinks it is probably one of Danny’s—that boy has more beanie hats than he knows what to do with—but she’s pretty sure he won’t notice it missing.
In the other pocket, she finds a lighter and one of Scout’s pacifiers.