Chapter 8
John’s still in the kitchen with Shelley when I get up the next morning, although the boys have gone to school already.
“Listen, Lindsay,” he says. “I’m serious now. You can’t let Chloe boss you about. You shouldn’t make any big decisions for at least a year, you know.”
“Viewing a house isn’t a big decision,” I say. “Letting my friend do a nice thing for me isn’t a big decision.”
“Friend,” says John. “Right, well I’m saying nothing.” He stands, puts his mug in the sink and bangs out of the door.
“Why’s he got it in for Chloe?” I say. It doesn’t seem likely that they’d have enough dealings to make it a possibility but the atmosphere between them is unmistakable.
“He hasn’t!” Shelley says. “Anything but.”
“Christ, you don’t mean—” I blurt out before I manage to stop myself.
Shelley laughs. She’s wearing wellies and a raincoat, spreading newspaper on the table ready to tip out a barrowload of wet beans to top and tail before she packs them.
“Now, that I would pay to watch,” she says.
“Nah, it’s just Chloe thinks she knows best about everything.
You ever notice that? Her business, our business, no doubt your business.
And John reckons she’s always got another angle beyond the one she tells you. Same as him. He’s jealous, I think.”
“So . . . they’ve locked horns professionally?” I say. House clearing and house cleaning in the same small town are not a million miles away from the same thing, I suppose.
“No way!” Shelley says. “No, I mean about you. John wants you here. Chloe’s desperate to show you houses and move you out.”
“What about you?” I ask her.
“Well,” Shelley says, “this place has been feeling tight recently, if I’m honest. And there’s only one of you. At the moment. What I think is maybe getting your family home back is just what you need right now.”
All I can do is stare at her. Is she saying what I think she’s saying? How can I tell her I don’t want a seventies chalet bungalow in my brother’s scrapyard, that I don’t want the place she’s been living for twenty years?
“I thought you were settled here,” I said. “Does John—”
“Don’t tell John I said any of that!” She’s mugging alarm and panic. At least, I hope she’s mugging. “Rain’s off,” she says, and I watch her trudge up through the yard towards her garden.
I sit with my eyes closed for a good five minutes, sipping coffee.
Is that what’s going on here? Shelley wants to move and thought I’d slot back in and ask to stay forever?
John thinks I’d make a good night watchman?
Peggy said it all—the way women on their own get shunted about and expected to go wherever and do whatever they’re told.
She said it with false bravado, pretending to a stranger she was staying put in her house, but she said it.
More than ever, I want to find her, and I think I know how.
Unless it’s a wild idea for here. I borrow a coat from the pegs beside the door and head up the yard.
“Shel?”
She’s doing something in her vegetable garden that looks like washing the bean plants. I can smell soap.
“Best way to get rid of aphids,” she says. “Greenfly,” she adds. My face must have told her I had no idea what aphids were. “That downpour’s given me a head start and I don’t want to waste it. What can I do for you? Have you thought about what I said? About living here if we move out?”
I can’t begin to find a polite way to say what I’m thinking.
Shelley pushes her lips out and nods. “Fair enough. Just don’t tell John.”
He might work it out when I buy a different house, I think, but I say nothing. Or rather, I change the subject. “You know how I made a fool of myself saying I would get a Lyft from the airport that time?”
“You didn’t make— It was funny. But yes, I remember.”
“What about private detectives? Are they like Lyft and Uber, or are they like nail bars and kombucha? Are they here yet?”
“Private detectives?” Shelley’s tone gives me my answer. “As a business? Instead of the audio work?”
“As a customer. Me employing a private detective to do a bit of work for me. To find someone I’ve lost touch with.
” I don’t really know why I’m being . . .
not quite dishonest . . . about Peggy March.
Maybe I feel stupid to be so fixated on someone I only met once.
Maybe I don’t want them to tell me it’s because of Kai—like I don’t know that.
Or tell me they’re “worried.” They’d get more worried when I started screaming until my eyes bled.
“Why not do what everyone else does and use Facebook?” Shelley has stopped washing the beans and stands with the spray bottle dangling from one hand while soapsuds drip off the plants and pop on the earth below them.
“I don’t think she’s on Faceb—” I say. “You know what? I didn’t actually check. She’s local so it seems like it would be easier to track her down by asking around.”
“Or getting Inspector Whatshisname up from Midsummer to investigate for you,” Shelley’s winding me up but still I get the sense that I’ve rattled her.
“Barnaby, but he’s a policeman,” I tell her. “It’s not a police matter. She’s not missing. She’s just gone.”
“Well, to answer your question, no. It’s not a normal thing in Clackmannanshire to hire a private detective to find an old friend. Or to hire a nanny for your dog or a therapist to listen to your troubles. Get a grip, Lindsay.”
“What’s not a police matter?” John has appeared from nowhere, or rather from behind the hedge—new since my last proper visit—that separates Shelley’s garden from the Barrens. It must have cost them a fortune to put in hedge plants this size.
“Lindsay thinks she can get a private investigator,” Shelley says. “Maybe in Alloa? Or were you thinking you’d have to go all the way to Stirling? Why not get a lawyer too, and sue somebody?”
“What’s not a police matter?” John says again.
“I’m trying to track someone down,” I tell him. “A local woman who’s gone missing.”
“You said she wasn’t missing,” John says. “What’s her name?”
“What difference does that make?” I don’t know why I’m being so awkward, except I’ve had enough of Shelley making fun of me and it’s easier to be rude to your brother than your sister-in-law.
He stares back at me for a while before answering. “I might know where she moved to,” he says. “If I took any of her stuff off her hands before she went.”
As he speaks, I remember the black biscuit tin I meant to show Peggy. It must have rolled under the passenger seat of my car while I was driving. Then it went out of my mind in the shock of finding her gone.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Like Shelley’s just pointed out, I haven’t even checked Facebook yet. But message received: No private investigators.”
“And don’t go running to police if you don’t have to,” John says.
“Well, don’t you be so weird for no reason then,” I shoot back. “Deal?”
Shelley laughs. “She’s got you there, pal.” She pumps up the air in her spray bottle again and goes back to firing jets of soapy water at the invisible pests on her precious beans.
“When was I weird?” says John. He’s not kidding. He turns to disappear back through the hedge but stops before he’s quite out of sight and adds, “Don’t bring the polis sniffing round, Lindsay. I mean it.”
I find my own route back through the yard. At the Portakabin, I see John sitting in his recliner, talking nineteen to the dozen on the phone and banging his hand on the top of the display case. I walk on by.
It’s not as if I ever thought my dad’s business was squeaky clean.
I knew there was often something stored at a friend’s house that he didn’t want to have lying around the yard, just in case.
He never said in case of what. But that was no more serious than a work crew taking the leftover materials at the end of a job or, at worst, an abandoned car getting stripped out before the tow company arrived.
Dad was never wary of the police. Not like John’s just been.
The one time we had a break-in, in the appliance shed, Dad was on the phone before the alarm had finished ringing.
Maybe. I think to myself, the less I know about how the yard’s being run these days, the better.
Which is so ironic, it’s almost funny in a hollow, unbearable kind of way.
It’s like, back then, the daylight business was an acceptable shade of very pale grey and we lived in an adventure playground, John and me.
Now, if I’ve understood John’s warning, the daylight business is a good bit murkier.
On the other hand, that murk is all I’ll find, no matter how hard I dig.
There are no depths here now. Which is great, obviously, but there are no heights these days either.
In fact, as I look around, it’s hard to believe this is the same place that made such a wonderland for John and me.
Maybe it’s just being taller, so I can see over everything and none of it looks like an enchanted grotto anymore.
I wonder if even my third and most secret entrance would still feel like magic, the way it used to because it was all mine and because it was so unlikely.