Chapter 23
I stand a minute on the porch, looking out at the steady drilling rain that was the backdrop to most of my childhood.
Just like Hawaii, the wind here sweeps in and leaves storm clouds hanging over the hills, then drops to nothing.
It’s going to be soaking wet for hours now.
I sprint to my car and roll down the drive, where the ground beneath the big trees is still dry.
I turn my head as I pass through the gates. It feels like ten years since I paused there and met Bunny. I thought life had been upended then, finding out about the scheme, the scam, the fraud my brother was mixed up in. But I hadn’t known a fraction of it.
Now that I’ve seen it once, I can’t help but notice the little fox skeleton as I go by, and I make a promise to myself.
I’m going to bury it in the garden before this whole rotten mess collapses and I’m out of Saint Helen’s for good.
It feels important in a way I can’t quite account for, to lay something properly to rest. I missed Peggy completely and even Kai’s funeral feels as if it’s been sullied.
Chloe was there with her arm round me and her soothing voice in my ear.
And then, for no reason at all and after Kai was beyond doing anything to harm her, she decided she didn’t even like him and despised me for loving him.
So I’ll bury the little fox and I’ll take what’s coming to me from the law.
I absolutely trust that Chloe’s faked-up videos can’t outweigh my sworn testimony.
And I absolutely trust that John is the least guilty out of the whole lot because all he did was move furniture and not report the rest of it.
I really hope I get the chance to talk to Shelley without him.
I need to recruit her, get her to help me persuade him to cut his losses and be the only survivor when this thing falls apart.
If the three of us go to the police together today and tell all about the rest of them, maybe John and Shelley can escape the worst of what’s coming.
I don’t care about them exactly—they’ve been faking their concern for me—but I care about Zak and Nicky. I care about their little lives.
Except, of course, that I’m lying. I’m so good at lying to myself. I do care about John, only . . . admitting that means facing why.
I care about John because he had the same childhood as me.
And I’m pretty sure that if I tell people all about it—all about all of it—he’ll get help, not jail.
He’ll get treatment. He needs it. He went white that first time I mentioned the caravan after I got back here.
And he had no clue why I said “Dad.” He needs a kindly, clever doctor to dig down under the caravan on the top, and the so-called game underneath that, and help him face the full truth about the life we lived here.
No one with a heart will question why he got manipulated by the other three.
We turned into such good little soldiers, John and me, both of us so easily led, so desperate to please.
I wish, though, that these thoughts didn’t feel so much as if I was trying to convince myself. I wish what I’m telling myself didn’t seem so rickety and there wasn’t that gnawing dread that something far worse is just out of view. I can still hear Chloe’s voice saying so close and see for yourself.
The climb up to BofA is nerve racking—I’m out of practice driving in weather like this—the windscreen wipers struggling and the tyres skiting over sheets of water as the gutters fill.
The main street is a nightmare of scurrying shoppers with their hoods up, peripheral vision abandoned, crisscrossing the road to get into shelter while the peering drivers hunch over their steering wheels, cursing.
The rain has emptied the park as I skirt round the top of Stirling too, battering the beds of flowers flat, bowing the shade umbrellas outside the hotel until every segment is a hammock full of water and the spokes are buckling.
The Hillfoots Road is flooding. I slow down to thirty-five and put my full-beam headlights on, flashing the oncomers that I’m straddling the line to keep from aquaplaning.
I give them plenty of warning that I’m turning off at Lord’s Yard, but I still see the car behind skid too close for comfort before it swerves around me and keeps going.
The gates are shut. Maybe John doesn’t want the ground churned, or maybe he reckons no one will be out in this and he’s taken the chance for a break. Or maybe they’re out.
“God, I hope they’re out,” I mutter to myself.
Then I catch my lip in my teeth. Why did I say that?
My mind is reeling and I pray that my brain hasn’t chosen this moment to start sending my speech off the rails as well as my hearing and my vision.
Only . . . was my hearing off the rails?
No, of course it wasn’t. Nice save makes perfect sense for Sarah McAllan to tell her husband when I turned up at the nursing home.
And I can work out what I overheard John saying now too, when I thought I heard North Wind and the Sun.
It’s not difficult once you know what they were discussing: how to get away with it, how to make sure David bears the brunt, how the best plan of all is to make sure that there’s more pinned on the son.
Only . . . what aspect of John’s bit could be pinned on the doctor instead?
I wish I could be sure I’d never work that out, but I’ve got a deep-down—bone-deep—feeling that something is more wrong than I’ve admitted yet and that some bit of me knows what it is, even though the rest of me can’t bear to.
Poor little fox, I think. I look at myself in the driving mirror and from nowhere, my voice says, “Seven dead.”
I step out of the car. Coatless, my hair and shoulders soaked through before I even reach it, I go for the little pedestrian gate cut into the big one but, try as I might, I can’t get it to open.
The latch looks the same as it always did but, from the way the lock bows and clanks, I think it’s bolted on the inside.
I stand there a moment, so wet I can’t get any wetter, letting the rain stream down my face and feeling the water saturate my clothes.
In the front of my mind, I’m still coming to tell Shelley and John to confess and get themselves some benefit, so what I should be doing is getting into my car, into the dry, and phoning them.
In the back of my mind, though—not even that, in the pit of my belly—there’s a truth growing too big to be denied. And so maybe it’s for the best that this gate is locked. Maybe, just maybe, I can get in under my own steam and face what I already know to be true.
But is there any chance one of our secret routes is still there?
He’s definitely been working on the side fence.
It’s now as sturdy as any wall and six feet high from the level ground, rising to eight because of the drainage ditch at the field edge.
So it’s not going to be easy, but I can use the depth of the ditch and the fence shadow as cover while I make my way to the end, where the land starts to rise, the hills looking down like a judge from his bench, like God from his throne.
The ditch is filling and my Converse are sodden and squelching on my feet, blisters already rising on my heels as my wet socks start to work their way down. But not for one minute do I consider giving up.
I get to the back corner and the fence is as stout as ever.
My heart starts to sink. How likely is it that any of the old tricks are still there to be played?
I’m drenched to the skin now, glad I’ve left my phone in the car and that I don’t wear a watch.
My eyes are smarting as my day cream streams into them and I can smell the conditioner in my hair as it washes out and pours down my neck.
I’m shivering. Still, I stand a moment with my eyes squeezed shut, remembering and hoping.
I even cross my fingers and try, inside my cold socks, to cross my toes.
I knew the tree with the overhanging branch was still there—I could see it from Zak’s bedroom—but when I splash and clamber my way over to it, it’s as I thought: The nails are gone, nothing left but scars in the bark to show where they were.
On to the next one. I thought I remembered where the leaning sheet of corrugated iron was, but after I’ve squelched and skidded back and forth for what feels like half an hour, I’m forced to admit that either I’ve forgotten or—more likely—it’s gone too.
The third route was always my best shot anyway, because no one else knew about it.
Chloe didn’t know because we never told anyone anything, John and me.
And John didn’t know because, by then, he had turned crude and tough and scornful, forgetting where the library was and what time Blue Peter was on, and only caring about the price of Strongbow and whose big sister might buy it for him because she thought he was a ride.
That’s why I kept this secret entrance—the best one, the Narnia wardrobe—to myself.
I turn to scan along the length of the back boundary, but it’s so dark—in the shadow of the hill, the clouds as black as a new bruise, the rain a veil of grey—that I accept I’ll have to go by memory. That and hope. Maybe a stroke of luck too.
I get to the spot, hauling myself up a steep bank by digging my fingernails round the tree roots and jabbing my feet into the mud to make toeholds.
I’m almost sure that this fence panel I’m touching right now is no such thing.
It’s too narrow and too tall, and I’m sure my fingers can feel swirls of walnut wood, rough now without a shred of varnish left, raised into a topography by the seasons of rain and sunshine.
I’m sure of it. This is my Welsh dresser, here as it’s always been.