Chapter 38 #2
Annalise went to the viewing, primarily to search the faces of the house-hunters for signs that they could sense something awful had happened there.
To check if the walls were going to whisper their secrets.
When the house was abruptly and mysteriously withdrawn from the market, Annalise worried that they had.
Erin disappeared; she couldn’t get hold of her.
A woman moved in, on her own, with no furniture and no things.
Ellie. As a test – ill-judged, in hindsight – Annalise sent a welcome message that implied the house had an unhappy past, hoping the woman would enquire about it.
Because that’s what you’d do, isn’t it? If you didn’t already know?
But she didn’t, so Annalise hastily deleted it.
The guards appeared, twice in one week.
She started to panic – just as Erin finally made contact and told Annalise the truth: she was trying to get this woman, her husband’s mistress, out of the house.
But it was too late.
By then, Ellie – Hannah – had already started trying to uncover the house’s secrets herself.
The night of the Sips party, Annalise had spotted Steve in the crowd.
He didn’t seem to recognize her as his former neighbour, the woman who’d once lived two doors down.
But she knew exactly who he was – and she knew that, in recent years, Steve had often come back to visit Delaney Row.
She took him aside and told him who she really was, told him she knew who he was, too.
She asked him what he was doing there and it all came tumbling out.
He wanted to warn Hannah. He needed to warn her about the house.
It was cursed. Only bad things happened to anyone who lived in it.
She needed to get as far away from it as she could.
He knew she was Hannah Flynn, the mistress.
He’d seen her at the house ten years before, with Jason, the man who’d bought it.
He’d got it into his head that she was responsible for the stain on the bedroom floor, because she’d gone to some club he was part of that was obsessed with what he called ‘murder houses’, and told them lies, pretended to be someone else.
He thought she was fishing, testing them to see how much they knew.
She’d invited them into the house that very morning, to look at the stain.
Then the article appeared in the WhatsApp group, and Hannah fled.
Annalise stayed at the party long enough to make it look like she wasn’t following her, then went straight to 1 Delaney Row, intending to finish their conversation, to make Hannah understand what was at stake here.
Just as she rang the doorbell, Steve emerged from the shadows.
He’d heard noises, he said. Shouting earlier, but nothing for a while. Just some banging.
When Erin opened the door, it was immediately obvious something was terribly wrong. Her eyes were glassy, vacant; her movements slow.
And this time, the blood was fresh.
Annalise had helped Erin hide her husband because she was afraid to bring Gardaí to the house, terrified that the searches they’d undoubtedly do would uncover her crime too.
Now, she had to help hide this so they didn’t discover Jason, the second body – and second murder – she’d had a hand in covering up.
It was a risk. She wasn’t confident that Hannah would cooperate and she didn’t know if Erin could.
But she had no choice but to take the chance.
The most effective lies are the ones that are substantially true.
Erin’s husband had bought the house and put it in his mistress’s name without her knowing.
That mistress, recently released from prison for running him over with her car in front of the very same house, had just moved into it.
Erin was furious about that, and she had slammed a heavy object into the side of Hannah’s head.
They just changed a few details. The confrontation happened downstairs, in the hall.
Annalise, walking home from the party, had been passing when Hannah opened the front door and called for help.
Annalise had flagged down Steve, a passer-by.
The first guard Hannah told all this to, Murphy, didn’t seem to believe a word.
But then the case was kicked over to a detective, who mostly sat in front of them looking bored.
There was some talk of trying to locate Jason in Australia, but when that wasn’t immediately successful, it was assumed he didn’t want to be found.
After all, he’d committed his own crime: forging the house sale in Hannah’s name.
Erin was arrested and charged with assault, but after an evaluation, she was moved to a secure unit in a psychiatric hospital.
She had suffered something called an ‘acute stress event’, her doctors said, which was why she couldn’t remember anything from the night she’d attacked Hannah at 1 Delaney Row.
She was, last they heard, suffering from it still.
Annalise takes one last look around the kitchen and wonders who will live here next and what they’ll be like.
But this time, she isn’t worried.
Sophie bought a house in Milltown and moved Sips to a larger premises in Rathmines.
The brother has gone abroad. Sweden or Denmark, somewhere like that.
Annalise suspects he and Hannah had a thing for a few months before he left, although she was never able to get confirmation out of Hannah.
A new tenant is in number two now – a tidy, divorced man with a yappy dog.
Steve is still going to meetings with his morbid murder-men friends, but now it’s mostly to monitor what they know, which is still nothing tangible.
He’s more convinced than ever that number one is cursed, but Annalise has given up trying to dissuade him.
Jason is upstairs, in the wall of the now-finished office.
Billy, or whatever’s left of him, is under the new patio.
And Hannah knows everything now, about the secrets her house keeps and the women those secrets protect.
That’s why she decided, in the end, not to sell.
From now on, she’s going to keep them, too.
She’s found an apartment just down the road and a job in a women’s charity, where everyone knows her backstory. She’s made friends. She has plans.
She has a future again.
If these walls could talk, Annalise hopes they’d say, Good for her.