30. Crow
CHAPTER THIRTY
CROW
“It’s not the same gnome,” I say. “How can it be? It’s been seven years. You said the following morning you scooped up the pieces and put them all in the bin. It was never here.”
“It’s him,” Wren cries. “I know it. He has the same smile.”
“What is going on?” Cuckoo shouts from downstairs. “Have you found more?”
“We’ve found . . . something,” I call back.
“It could have always been here,” Starling says. “The gnome. It could be a coincidence.”
“After finding your cigarettes?” Wren says. “After finding an old newspaper about Cuckoo’s mother’s death? And the vodka at the start—Goldie’s vodka? That’s something for all of us. It’s not a coincidence.”
“We could have left the cigarettes and vodka behind,” I say.
“Christ, Crow. And the newspaper? How do you explain that?”
“We don’t have time for this.” Cuckoo takes control in a way reminiscent of Goldie.
“Whatever we’ve seen here . . . or haven’t seen .
. . or whatever we think, it doesn’t matter.
We’ve checked the place; we’ll take this stuff out so we don’t have to worry about it.
But there’s something else we need to do, and we can’t delay it much longer. ”
She is right. Wren knows it, and her shoulders sag with defeat. She refuses to touch the gnome, which Starling takes instead, and we know the last place to look is the attic.
The balcony, the roof, where Goldie died.
The attic is warmer than the rest of the house.
Heat rises, I think automatically, but I’m not sure what source has allowed that to happen here.
It is the only place that looks the same as before, I suppose because this, more than anywhere, has been burned into our minds.
The floorboards creak more, and the balcony double doors are stiffer.
For a moment I want to take their hint and leave, but Cuckoo shoves them hard with her shoulder, and they finally open, winter chill making itself known.
“I can’t go out there,” Wren says.
“I’ll look. I’ll have a quick check—and then that’s it,” Cuckoo says.
“I’ll look too,” I say, surprising myself. But maybe I need to go out there for my own sanity. See the balcony and the roof for what they are, rather than what they’ve become.
The first time out here my brain worked overdrive to remind me of the dangers: Is the structure safe?
Is the roof safe? Is this really sensible when there is alcohol in your system?
But we were so high on everything by then; we had Hugo’s body in the river and all to play for.
Now, it works to remind me of what came next.
The glass doors whine open, and Cuckoo and I step out to the cold night, cramped even with just the two of us.
The balcony itself is small, and its low wall does little to comfort someone afraid of heights.
One glance down and I will think of her crumpled body, so I keep my gaze steady, focused on examining the stone and the tiles and searching for anything out of place.
My fingers are numb; I should have worn gloves. I stare at the pinkie finger of my left hand, the one used to seal away so many secrets, then cover my entire fist with the end of my jacket.
“Nothing here,” Cuckoo says. She is cheerful, calm, but her jaw is clenched, betraying whatever is on the inside.
Don’t look down.
“Crow?”
I tear myself away, return to the attic. There is nothing left now but what we really came here to do.
But as we leave, as we head downstairs and are in the hallway again, I spot the drawing Cuckoo made all those years ago. The five of us, as birds, one after the other.
Someone has carved angry slash marks over one of the birds, removing her from our lineup for good.
I open my mouth, ready to gasp or scream or simply tell the others, but something freezes me. They haven’t seen it; they are heading to the basement.
“Crow?” Cuckoo calls. “What is it?”
I can’t tell them.
I close my mouth and silently join them.
Out in the grounds once more, we are now armed with the same spades we buried her in.
Mine is freezing in my grip, handle rusty and determined to make me lose all sensation in my fingertips, and heavy to lug along.
I didn’t do this, not to begin with. I was too distraught.
I only helped later, when I understood we had no other choice.
Is that right? Was this the only choice?
Is this the only choice we have now?
The trees are waiting, steady guardians, the earth bumpy and covered in weeds. There are patches of ground barren of anything but grass and mud, and in the patch farthest west we set down our spades and take deep breaths.
“Are we ready?” Starling asks. “Once we do this, we have to make sure we’ve gathered everything. It’s been seven years. She won’t be . . .”
Her words hang in the air like icicles on a branch.
“She won’t be as she was before,” Wren finishes for her.
“Are we prepared for that?” Starling says. “It’s not going to be nice. She won’t be Goldie.”
Goldie. Where is she? I look around, but we are alone, a simultaneously comforting and terrible truth.
I suppose the reality of her bones beneath me is too strong for anything else.
“She is always Goldie,” Cuckoo says fiercely.
“Of course it won’t be nice,” I say. “We have to do it though, don’t we?”
“I thought she’d be here forever.” Wren is quiet.
“No backing out.” Starling doesn’t want to do this, I realize.
She is stalling, desperate for one of us to give her an exit ticket.
Miss White used to give them, a reward for doing good work, a chance to leave the lesson five minutes early before lunch and get to the front of the queue first. I never used them.
I kept the ticket, my reward, and stayed until the bell went, unwilling to miss even a second of her time.
Cuckoo takes one of the shovels. She uses the edge of it to mark the ground, lining a circle around the area we all know too well.
“We don’t have all night,” she whispers. Her pocket bulges slightly; the newspaper article is crumpled within.
And so we begin. Because we have to, and because like she says, we are on a time crunch. We don’t have time to process the pain. Perhaps that’s been a long-running problem.
I switch my brain off. I clasp the spade.
Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
Fifteen minutes is when we allow ourselves to worry.
“This is the right spot?” I say, and Starling frowns.
“Of course it’s the right spot. How can you not remember?”
“I remember,” I say. “I just hoped I was wrong.”
“Stop,” Cuckoo says. “I know what you’re . . . let’s just keep digging.”
But we know something is wrong. We were not expert gravediggers seven years ago. I would be impressed if we managed to bury her more than three or four feet. And yet we are six feet down now, we are exhausted, and Goldie is nowhere to be seen.
Starling wipes her brow; she is sweating more than the rest of us. She rests her spade against the earth. “What is going on?”
Cuckoo whispers, “I don’t know.”
I am the only one who refuses to be done. Because if I don’t keep digging, we can give up. And I refuse.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening. I continue to dig, and I throw the spade away and use the tiny trowel in an attempt to get closer to the earth.
“Stop it!” Wren shouts, no longer caring about keeping quiet. She is in tears, her words are choked. “Stop it, Crow! There’s no point!”
The soil is tougher, but it churns away, and I am so far into it now I think of childish things like a water fountain sprouting from the trench, like digging to Australia and seeing a kangaroo.
The trowel produces no results either, so soon I chuck that to the side too, and I dig into the mud with my bare hands, scratching and clawing like a feral animal, until Cuckoo and Starling finally pull me off and I collapse in a heap with my breath in gasps.
My fingers are numb, stiff and reluctant to move, frozen.
The others are flushed, terrified, no doubt reflections of my own expression and trembling bottom lip.
“She’s disappeared,” Starling says. “She’s fucking vanished.”
“That’s impossible,” I insist. “She’s here—we’re looking in the wrong place.”
“We haven’t forgotten where we buried our friend, Crow,” she snaps. “I told you that already. We buried her right here.”
“Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we are remembering wrong—”
“You don’t forget a thing like that and you know it.”
“How has this happened?” Cuckoo asks helplessly.
The ground, the trench we have dug, remains empty. There is nothing.
I have to accept it, this reality I cannot grasp.
Goldie’s body is gone.