Chapter 37
A little after six, the doorbell starts ringing and doesn’t stop.
Suzie stares at Teddy across the dining table, her fork in her hand. “Are you expecting anyone?”
Teddy shakes his head. He’s been different ever since she closed the pharmacy early, she thinks.
Normally he is voluble and affectionate, easy to please.
These last few days, though, he’s become withdrawn.
She knows he’s worried about her, because he’d said as much when they were getting into bed last night.
I don’t know what you’ve got yourself mixed up in, but you need to be careful, Suzie.
“You’d better answer it, hon,” he tells her, sitting back in his chair. “It’s probably important.”
“Teddy—”
“Just go and see what she wants, Suzie. Please.”
Suzie composes herself before opening the door. Deep breath, she tells herself. Teddy’s right, she’s been so wrapped up in all this craziness that she’s forgotten herself. No more, she thinks now, unlatching the door. I’ve done as much as I can. You’re on your own now, Cathy Ma—
“I know where she is.”
Cathy is standing beneath the bright scrutiny of the security light, shivering in a thin jacket and trainers. She has her phone in one hand, holding it outward. Suzie is too stunned to speak. The two women stand that way for a beat, snow hard and glittering around them.
“Cathy, listen—”
“Take a look. Just look at it, Suzie. Tell me I’m not going mad.”
“I can’t. I can’t do this anymore. It’s affecting my work, my marriage.”
Cathy opens her mouth and Suzie knows her heart is going to break just by looking at the despair etched onto her face.
But then a hand falls on Suzie’s shoulder, and Teddy’s voice, soft and gentle, is saying, “You must be Cathy. Why don’t you come on in, out of the cold? We were just finishing our dinner.”
Teddy stands aside so she can walk in. He doesn’t insist that Cathy take her shoes off, as he would any other guest. He doesn’t offer to take her coat or mention how unusual it is to have an unplanned visit.
He simply smiles and pulls out a chair so that Cathy can sit down.
“I can make some tea,” he tells her, “or maybe you’d like something a little stronger?
You look like you could do with warming up.
” He lifts the bottle of whisky down from the shelf and catches Suzie’s eye, giving her a small, supportive smile.
Sometimes, she thinks, watching him pour a measure for Cathy and then one for herself, his steadfastness still has the capacity to surprise her. The thought gives her a warm, soothing feeling, like a balm.
“What were you saying, Suzie? Outside?” Cathy looks up at her.
Her eyes are sheened as if she has been recently crying.
She knows what I was going to say, Suzie thinks, she just wants to hear me say it out loud.
But then there’s that prickle of curiosity again, the one which got her into so much trouble when she was younger, crouched behind the car on Beeker Street. Sometimes she just can’t help herself.
“You first.”
“I got a message.” Cathy sniffs and wraps her hands around the glass. “A pin drop, Danny called it. He said Hazel sent it to me to mark her location.”
“Danny?”
“He’s my eldest.” Cathy turns in her seat to face Teddy, who is leaning against the counter behind her. “I’m not very good with tech stuff, but he saw the message come up on my phone. Here, see?”
She hands her phone to Teddy, who removes his reading glasses from his top pocket. Suzie stares into her glass.
“How do you know it’s from Hazel?”
Cathy blinks at Suzie. “Her name came up on the screen.”
“No, honey. What I mean is, how do you know she was the one who sent it? It could have been anyone.”
Cathy’s face blanches. She looks from Suzie to Teddy and back again. Now her voice is halting, hesitant. “But it came from her phone.”
“All right, let’s assume it was Hazel.” Teddy passes the phone back to Cathy, but it’s Suzie he’s looking at. “That pin drop is in the middle of nowhere. There’s no landmarks, no road, nothing. I don’t know where you’d even start.”
“Ah, now. I’ve got good news about that. You remember we looked at that footage of the truck this morning, Suzie? Well, look at what Danny found out in the woods this autumn.”
Cathy shows them both the video Danny had sent her, pausing the footage when he discovers the truck half-buried under branches and leaves.
Suzie gasps when she sees it, clapping her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, that’s it! The same truck! It’s got that tarp over the back, look!”
“Well, hold on a minute.” Teddy holds up his hand. “How do we know it’s the same truck? You got the reg plate? Any identifying marks? This is a town full of gardeners, landscapers, and arborists—there’s trucks like that one driving around all day.”
Suzie’s heart sinks, but Cathy is sat bolt upright in her seat, her fingernails tapping against the table in agitation.
“But it’s not just the truck. Look what else is on the video.
” She spools forward a few seconds until she reaches the frame with the weather vane.
“See that? The fish thing? That’s a weather vane!
There’s a fucking house out there, Suzie.
I bet you any money that’s where Hazel is.
He drove her up there and she’s in that house, I swear it. ”
Suzie stares at the image before passing it to Teddy.
He examines it carefully. “It’s a conger eel, not a fish. Horrible-looking thing.”
Suzie’s mind is racing but still she strives to be rational, pressing her palms together in front of her as if she is praying. “I see what you’re saying, Cathy, but we don’t know that Hazel’s in that house, do we? Let’s just take a breath, yes?”
“‘Take a breath’? Are you fucking kidding?”
Abruptly Cathy pushes her chair back and snatches the phone out of Teddy’s hand. Her color is high and hectic, chin lifted. “Why is everyone acting like this is something we can just wait on? She could be stranded out there in the snow right now and I’m wasting my time talking to you two! Jesus!”
“Cathy, just wait a minute. You need to be sensible. It’s already dark, and we’re talking about two hundred miles of woodland, most of it unmapped.
The police will want to send up a drone and they’ll need to wait for daylight to do it.
No search party will go out at night in the snow—you’d need to call a specialist rescue team, and that means going over to the next county. ”
“Well, what then, Suzie? Just sleep on it? See how things look in the morning? You know I was starting to think maybe you’d managed to get that stick out your arse, but I guess not. Thanks for the whisky, Teddy. I’ll see myself out.”
Suzie looks at Teddy in exasperation, expecting him to agree that yes, the idea is crazy. To her surprise he is smiling.
“Take my car.”
Suzie stares at her husband. He removes his glasses and polishes them on his shirt, his smile crooked and knowing.
“What?”
“I put the snow tires on it yesterday. I know you thought I was being overly cautious, but it’ll take you all the way up to where Hazel dropped the pin. Besides, Cathy’s right. You can’t wait until morning.”
Suzie is stunned. Her mouth drops open, but then part of her had already seen this coming.
The day she’d closed the pharmacy, she’d told Teddy all about Hazel going missing and how she’d been helping Cathy find out what had happened.
She’d even gone so far as to tell him about breaking into Cathy’s parents’ house on Polmen Avenue.
He’d pantomimed disapproval at that, but Suzie thinks he’d kissed her especially hard before they’d gone to bed that night, his hand roaming all over her body.
Cathy looks at Suzie expectantly. There is still that anger there, but Suzie sees desperation too. Worse than that, she thinks, she sees hope.
“Okay. On one condition. We’ll check out where Danny filmed this, and if we find the house, then we call the police. We absolutely do not go down there on our own. Agreed?”
Cathy nods, her jaw set. Suzie gets up, pushing the remainder of her whisky to one side. Stick up her arse or not, she doesn’t want to get pulled over on the way up to the Spit only to get Breathalyzed.
She tells Cathy and Teddy that she is going to get a coat, but while she’s in the little cubby that they use as a cloakroom, Suzie experiences a wave of dizziness strong enough to tilt the room around her.
She leans with her forehead against the wall, pulse throbbing, blood roaring in her ears.
Her hands sting as if she has run them through a nettle patch, and she wishes she could take a stiff wire brush to them to scrape off all the skin.
She closes her eyes. Her mind is circling, but it’s not Hazel she’s thinking of.
It’s Abigail, grinning as she picks the lock of the house on Beeker Street, teasing Suzie who is backing away onto the pavement.
Abigail, still having procedures on her legs almost ten years later.
Skin grafts and scar tissue, a lifetime of remembering.
And that long shadow pooling beside Hazel on the pavement, where a shadow should never have been.