Chapter 26
Have you ever woken up from a really good sleep with the feeling that your brain has been working on your problems overnight?
It doesn’t happen to me often (and never on the morning of a math exam, meaning I still don’t understand integration), but it does happen.
One day last year, just for example, I spent all day trying to come up with an embarrassment-free plan to figure out if Jade at school liked Libby or liked Libby, and I still had nothing by bedtime.
The next morning I woke up with the perfect solution in my head, as though someone had whispered it into my ear as I slept.
(Unfortunately for Libby, Jade turned out to be almost aggressively straight, but the plan was flawless.)
It happens that night when I wake up, just after midnight, suddenly sure I know where GG’s missing box is.
As with any satisfying mystery, the clues—three of them that I can count—have been in front of me, sometimes literally, but I haven’t seen them.
I get out of bed, as wide awake as if it’s nine a.m. I could wait for nine a.m. That’s definitely the sensible thing to do, since it doesn’t involve thundering around a dark house recently linked to at least one murder.
But if you think I can stay in bed without checking to see if I’m right, then I’ve completely failed to tell you anything about me at all.
The floorboards sag a little as I get out of bed, feeling for the slip-on woven flats I kicked under the bed last night.
This house was built at a time when building standards weren’t what they are now, and I wonder if anyone would even get in trouble if the floorboards collapsed beneath me and I plunged all the way down to the ground-floor bathroom to be impaled by the shower fittings.
Given that Grandad built most of it back in the day, and he’s dead, I’m guessing there’d be nobody left to sue.
The first flaw in my plan comes when I find my bedroom door locked.
I never asked Dad if it was him who locked me in last time, and apparently, oh joy, tonight too, but it’s got to be.
Nobody else would care this much. There’s a moment where I consider going out the window and shimmying down the drainpipe, except that seems like a not-so-fun way to break my legs.
Also, there are two doors to my bedroom.
The door to Dad’s room opens silently and I step through as quietly as I can, ready with a cover story about the toilet. I don’t need it (the cover story, that is): He’s asleep, face slack. There’s another bad moment when I realize his door is also locked, but (of course) the key is in the lock.
At the bottom of the stairs, I stop. This bit is going to be tricky.
It would be easier with Dylan here, for a couple of reasons, but I can’t get to his room without going through Bec and Shippy’s, and if there’s one room I definitely don’t fancy making a nocturnal appearance in, it’s theirs.
Shippy might use it as an opportunity to bludgeon me to death with his hiking boot first and blame it on thinking I was an intruder later.
The first thing I need to do, the hardest bit, is move the big standing lamp at the bottom of the stairs.
When I noticed days ago that it had been moved from its usual corner position, I didn’t think too hard about why anyone might move a lamp just a meter or so.
Nor did I consider the significance of it having moved only after GG died.
That should have been clue one. I drag the lamp back into place.
It’s not so heavy—the material covering all four sides of what’s basically just a big column, lit from within, must be IKEA’s lightweight best—but the metal feet it’s standing on scrape against the floorboards, letting out a horrendous wail, reminiscent of when Mike got hit in the balls during school soccer training.
I freeze, imagining a door opening, a light clicking on, a silhouette in the doorway.
But nothing happens and nobody arrives, so I drag it again, and this time the wail seems more restrained, like when Ali tried to kick her school locker closed and stubbed her toe on her laptop instead.
(Her parents don’t really believe in technology, and as a result, her computer looks like something that might have been used to put man on the moon.)
When the lamp is out of the way, I can better see the patch of dust that sparked Dad’s (thankfully barely developed and clearly insane) theory about dust working differently in the country.
This weirdly localized patch of dust, mostly (deliberately) concealed by the lamp, was clue number two, by the way, but it was wasted on me.
Under that dust is the outline of a square in the floorboards, the entrance to the same crawl space where Dad once got stuck while trying to fix a problem with the lights.
The square of wood comes away easily enough under my fingers, dislodging more dust as I set it down.
The last person who did this must have wanted to hide the telltale dust that showed someone had been under the floorboards recently but didn’t have time to go for a dustpan and broom and just yanked the lamp over a foot or two to cover it instead.
Beneath the floorboards is a snake’s nest of wires.
If you’re wondering about clue three, we’re there now: the flickering light in my bedroom, which, like the mysterious moving lamp, only appeared after GG died.
Something happened that night to disturb the wiring in my bedroom, but I never slowed down long enough to ask myself the obvious question: What?
Or maybe: How? Hell, even why would work, now that I think about it.
It doesn’t take much rummaging to find the box, which has clearly just been dropped into the hole, and drag it out to confirm I got it right: the for M is written in marker on one side.
That’s when I hear footsteps and look up to see a familiar face illuminated in the moonlight.