Chapter 13
After dinner we watch a movie: an old rom-com about a woman obsessed with weddings and improbably unlucky in love.
It’s the only one of the DVDs everyone can (more or less) agree on, and it’s charming in bits—and the bits when it’s not provide welcome white noise for me to think.
Dylan disappears to his room before the two romantic leads have even met each other, so I curl up next to Dad, pretending it’s only to get access to the family block of chocolate being passed around.
Friday night was movie night when Mum and Dad were still together, but nobody got that in the divorce and I miss the feeling.
When the movie’s over and the two good-looking people on-screen have decided to be good-looking together permanently, I grab a book from the bookshelf—my cover story—and head to Dylan’s room.
Room is an oversell: It’s more like a walk-in closet off Aunty Bec and Shippy’s room, with a sliding door Grandad installed because there isn’t enough room for a normal door.
Harry Potter would really feel like he’d come home.
Dylan takes a long time to answer the door.
A really long time considering the room is only just big enough for a bed.
There’s no space for a wardrobe or a chest of drawers—just a couple of shelves bracketed on the wall to hold a reading light and a stack of old Women’s Weekly magazines.
Dylan looks rumpled and suspicious when he finally slides the door open.
I hold up the book, momentarily forgetting it’s only my cover story, and he frowns.
“What’s that for?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
“Of course. Come in, Detective.”
“If you’re going to be like that about it—”
“Come in.” Dylan stands back from the doorway and I sit, cross-legged, at the end of his bed because there’s really nowhere else unless you have the upper-body strength to hang from the light fixture like a bat, which I don’t. “So? What have you got?”
“The box.”
“The box?”
“The one I told you about.”
“You found it?”
“No. But I’m going to go look for it in GG’s room.”
“Now?”
“That’s the idea.”
Dylan looks less enthused than I’d hoped. It’s not that I thought he’d whip out a flashlight and magnifying glass, but I expected slightly more than a slow blink.
“And in your mind our parents are doing what, exactly, while we’re ransacking Gertie’s room?”
“I never said we?”
Dylan blushes (ha). Just a little. Unfortunately, he recovers quickly. “Like I’m not coming with you.”
“We’ll wait until they go to bed.”
“Okay.” He nods. “I can’t exactly sneak out of this room once Mum and Shippy are in for the night. But if I turn off the light and close the door, Mum probably won’t even come to check on me.”
“One request,” I say quickly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we please do the thing where you put clothes under the covers so it looks like a person?”
“Seriously?”
“They always do it in the movies. It looks fun.”
“Have I told you you’re my favorite weirdo?”
“Not today.”
We stuff a few clothes under the duvet to create a Dylan-like shape, just in case, then turn off the lights so it’s pitch black in the room.
“You sleep like this?”
He shrugs. “It’s okay.”
It feels the way I imagine sleeping in a coffin would, but I don’t say that and just scoot on out with Dylan.
The real challenge is getting Dylan upstairs without running into the adults, but even this isn’t as hard as you’d think: They’re all still in the living room, arguing as the movie credits roll about whether the wedding industry is inherently patriarchal.
(I’m not making this up—that’s almost a direct quote from Aunty Vinka.) I get away with a “good night!” shouted through the door before I trot upstairs with Dylan.
“Do I hide under the bed or something?” he asks, crouching down to look underneath it. “Is that mouse poo?”
“I think you can just hide behind the door when Dad comes in.” I point. “If he thinks I’m asleep he’ll just stick his head in and go.”
“Okay.” Dylan flops onto my bed. “Tell me about the box while we wait. Then at least I’ll know what I’m looking for.”
“It’s cardboard.”
“A cardboard box, you say? I was assuming steel, but there you go.”
I ignore him. “It’s like one of those storage boxes IKEA sells.
” I make a motion with my arms that is supposed to be me turning a flat-pack bunch of cardboard into a convenient storage box, but Dylan looks at me like I’m having a seizure.
“About this big.” I move my hands apart.
“And it had ‘for M’ or maybe ‘to M’ or something like that written in marker on one side of the box.”
“What’s in it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Washing-machine receipts, maybe.”
“Or, what about this: money. Or maybe not cash but, I don’t know, gold bars? Jewelry?”
“Gold bars?”
“I’m not saying GG was a pirate—”
“It sounds a bit like you are.”
“—but if she was taking out half-a-million-dollar life-insurance policies, maybe she had money we never knew about. Where did all that money go?”
“Paying the premiums. Life insurance is a scam.”
“Dylan, has anyone ever told you you’re really unhelpful?”
“Constantly. But you make me really believe it. Where do you want to look, anyway? We’ve already searched the wardrobe. What else is there? Dressing table? Under the bed? I don’t suppose there’s a convenient hatch to a hidden attic?”
“Not that I know of.” The idea briefly excites me before I consider how unlikely it is that my grandad, who basically built this house, had the skill or enthusiasm to include a secret attic room and, even less plausibly, the self-restraint not to brag about it.
Dad’s step on the stairs sends Dylan to his hiding spot and I click off the bedside light and pull the blanket over me, wishing I’d thought to take off my shoes first. I lie still as the door opens and don’t breathe until it’s closed again.
The hand on my shoulder nearly forces out a scream until I see Dylan’s face.
“Sorry,” he whispers, so quiet I have to lip-read. “How long do we wait?” He points at the wall separating Dad’s room from mine. I consider and hold up ten fingers. Dad’s probably already out—I once saw him fall asleep while he was still brushing his teeth.
So we give it ten minutes before creeping out and up the stairs, going so slowly we’re bordering on slo-mo. GG’s bedroom door opens without the ominous creak I’m braced for.
“Should we turn on the light?” Dylan whispers. The only light in the room is coming from a hole in the cardboard covering the window. I start to answer, but a noise makes us both go rigid. We’d look ridiculous if there was anyone up to see us. (Is there anyone up to see us?)
The noise is, as the horror movies so rarely say, not coming from inside the house. I’m not as quiet as I should be in my hurry to get to the window and put my eye to the hole in the flattened box taped where a sheet of glass should be.
The garden is dark but there’s a moon, and as my pupils do their thing, I can make out flower beds, the lemon tree, and…
something moving? The longer I watch, the more I’m sure that the something moving very slowly across the grass is actually a someone and that the shoo-shoo noise that turned us into statues is the sound of their feet on the grass.
I can’t make out more than a human-shaped blob.
“There’s someone there,” I whisper.
This is the moment I should fly down the stairs and investigate.
I want to. Mostly. There’s a big part of me (we’re talking head, torso, and three out of four of my limbs) that wants to do exactly that.
If I’m serious about figuring out what happened to GG, I need to get out there right now to see who’s taking an eleven p.m. stroll about the garden.
The problem is there’s a small part of me (my left arm, say) that is just straight-up scared of what—or, let’s be real, who—I might find.
“I can’t see anyone,” Dylan whispers, bumping me out of the way to take my place.
“They’re going around the house toward the front door,” I say.
“I’m going out there.” I consider grabbing the sewing scissors out of GG’s sewing basket, but realistically I’d probably trip down the stairs and impale myself on those tiny twin blades, and then everyone would think I was the Second Victim.
Plus, Dad told me once that, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to have a weapon used against you than have a chance to use it yourself.
It’s probably one of those made-up things parents say, like you’ll explode if you eat a sandwich before going swimming, but I’ve never quite managed to scrub it from my mental hard drive.
“I’ll come with you.”
We’re moving so fast on the stairs that I nearly go down the second flight headfirst when Dad’s bedroom door swings open and he stands there, rubbing at his face.
“Ruth? You’re up?”
“Uh, yeah.” There doesn’t seem much point in denying it.
Dylan collides with my back, knocking me down a stair and robbing me of any chance to pretend I’m going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water. I’m not entirely mad about it: How much easier to hand this problem to a grown-up?
“I saw someone outside in the garden,” I say quickly, getting to the point.
“Outside the house?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” I don’t mention that I saw them from GG’s window.
I’m braced for Dad’s skepticism, so I’m surprised when he takes me seriously.
“Okay. You two, go to Ruth’s room. I’m going to have a look.”
“I’ll come.”
“No, you won’t.”
Dad’s fast down the stairs, even in the dark. We keep up but only just.
“Stay inside,” he says to us once we’re downstairs in the kitchen, before closing the front door, very firmly, in our faces.
Dylan puts his hand on the door handle, but it’s a question.
I shake my head and we go into the living room instead, where a lump on the couch startles me before I remember it’s where our newest guest is sleeping.
Rob’s snoring doesn’t falter as Dylan and I lean against the window to follow the bob and weave of Dad’s cell-phone light around the side of the house.
This feels like a terrible idea, the moment in a scary movie when someone goes to investigate a weird sound in the basement or a strange light in the creepy-arse woods and it’s impossible to have sympathy for their imminent butchering because they’re too stupid to live.
Then the light disappears as Dad moves from the side of the house around toward the backyard where we saw the figure, and all I can do is stand with my cheek pressed flat against the glass.
I can’t see anything, which is bad, but I also can’t hear anything, which is good because at least it means nobody is getting murdered. Not noisily, anyway.
Then a cloud shifts and there’s enough light from the moon to see a figure walking close to the house, coming toward us. I should have woken someone else in the house. I should have woken everyone in the house. I shouldn’t have let Dad go outside. Mum is going to kill me.
Then the figure comes closer and I see that it’s Dad, walking quickly but not dripping blood or sporting any obvious head wounds.
I meet him at the door. “Did you find them?”
Dad shakes his head. “I didn’t see anyone. I walked all the way around and then back again.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t look disappointed, Ruth. This is a good thing.”
“But I saw someone. I really did.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m just saying I couldn’t find anyone.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s go back to bed. You too, Dylan. Do I even want to know why you two were prowling around the house at night?”
“I woke him up when I saw someone.” I lie quickly and probably too easily to make me a good person.
“Wake me up next time” is all Dad says.
I want to ask if he believes me, but just asking the question makes it sound like I’m not sure, and I don’t want Dad to think I got spooked by a shrub waving in the breeze.
Also, do I want to know the answer? Dad insists on escorting me back to my room, so there’s no chance to debrief with Dylan before he slopes off back to his.
Back in my bedroom I crawl under the blanket, my heart still beating too fast to make sleep possible.
My brain is asking my eyes if they’re absolutely sure they saw what they saw when I hear the sound of a key being inserted into the keyhole of my door and then the click of it locking me in for the night.
It’s both reassuring and scary to consider that Dad might have believed me more than I thought.