31. Starling
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
STARLING
It is far easier to get away with murder if there is no body.
How can you prove a murder occurred without one? If there is no body, that person may still be alive and well. Living another life. Hiding from someone. All the clues may hint that they are no longer with us, but without absolute proof, it can be tricky.
Not impossible, but tricky.
Of course, we did not murder Goldie.
Everyone else thinks she is missing, and now she really is.
There is dirt under my fingernails, which I scrape away with my thumbs.
The night is quite cold, really, but I am sweating underneath my coat.
It’s not like I exercise. I am embarrassingly breathless, childhood asthma making itself known again, but at least I can use it as an excuse not to talk.
If it were me meant to be in the ground, and Goldie were still here, she’d take control now.
Start rationalizing the situation, bringing everyone together, calming things down.
There would be a hushed, tense discussion, all while I rotted somewhere else.
If there was anything left of me to rot.
Seven years, it would probably be just bones.
“She can’t be gone,” Crow says, determined not to believe it.
She says this even though we all know this is where we buried her.
Between these two trees, the one with the hollow and the other, which is thinner than the rest. Two distinct trees, easy to pick out of the rest in these grounds.
The slight opening between them, enough space for a body, somewhere to dig where roots wouldn’t disturb us.
And what’s more, when we finished that horrible deed seven years ago, Cuckoo carved a small bird within the hollow of that first tree, and I know it’s what she is checking now as she clambers to her feet and rushes over to it.
She peers in, using her torch, and then staggers backward, nodding, confirming to us that we aren’t mad, this did really happen, and she was really here.
And now she’s gone.
“How can this have happened?” Wren asks.
“An animal, maybe,” I say. “It’s not like Goldie was in a . . . coffin. Maybe they smelled her and . . .”
“Oh my God.” Wren clutches a hand to her mouth.
Crow shakes her head. “What, and carefully laid the earth back as if undisturbed afterward? An animal wouldn’t do that.”
“It might have happened years ago. Things could have . . . I don’t know, naturally rearranged in the ground.”
“A trench in the ground would magically become flat again?”
“I don’t know!” I snap. “I’m just trying to come up with possibilities here.”
“It’s not an animal,” Cuckoo says. “Crow is right that the ground wouldn’t be so clean. But also everything is too clean. There’s nothing left of—of Goldie. This is deliberate.”
“Someone has moved her?” Wren whispers. “Who? One of you?”
“Not one of us,” I say. “Why would we come here if we knew she was already gone?”
“But we’re the only ones who know.”
I imagine this as the end scene to a true crime documentary episode: The four girls sat in the mud, their dead friend vanished, and they realized there was more to this case.
It would cut to an empty chair, someone walking toward it, sitting down with a sigh, their microphone being adjusted.
Their name would flash up on the screen, and it would blow this whole case apart.
Audiences would jump out of their seats in shock.
They’d message all their friends. It’d be the biggest show in years.
“This is a good thing,” I say cautiously, “isn’t it?”
The others turn to me, and each of them is confused.
“What are you talking about?” Crow says. “How is this a good thing?”
“We came here to move Goldie’s body. It’s been moved.”
“By someone we have no idea about!”
“But they have done us a favor. Technically. And it’s not as if they’re out to get us, or they would have approached us by now or gone to the police.”
Cuckoo glances over her shoulder, back at Bishop’s House. “What if she’s been moved to somewhere else on the property?”
This didn’t occur to me, but I explain it away. “What would be the point? Going to the effort of moving her from here just to put her somewhere else in basically the same place. It doesn’t make sense.”
“None of this makes sense,” Crow says. “You’re acting as if we should be happy about this. ‘Oh, thanks for doing us a favor, random stranger. We’ll just move on with our lives.’”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“We don’t even know how long she’s been gone,” Cuckoo says.
“We should have been honest back then,” Crow says. “We made a huge mistake.”
She gets to her feet, rubs her eyes even though her hands are caked in mud, and something about the way flecks of earth stay on her face makes me notice the other shadows there too.
She has deep bags under her eyes and patches of dried skin, even though she always had such clear skin before.
Her hair is greasy too. She mainly seems exhausted, as if she hasn’t slept since the last time we were on this patch of land.
“Goldie would know what to do,” Cuckoo says.
“Well, I’m not fucking Goldie.” My voice is raised, but I can’t help it. “Why am I suddenly the one who is meant to have all the answers?”
“The sun is rising,” Wren says.
“What?”
I look up at the sky, and sure enough, the darkness of before is turning milky blue. We are running out of time. Have run out of time.
In the broken-up pieces of ground, there is that fresh smell of morning.
It seems rude, even directly confrontational, that it doesn’t have any marker of Goldie once lying there.
Not even her charm bracelet, which we buried still on her wrist. As if she never existed.
I think of all the bodies the earth has consumed and understand that it simply doesn’t care.
She is nothing new, the same way I will finish one documentary, hold space for it in my head for that day, perhaps a week if it was edited particularly well, and then cast it aside for another one.
They pile up, and old ones are forgotten.
Not just that, the new ones become less interesting.
There are always the same endings, and they usually involve the husband. Goldie, at least, is unique in that.
“We have to go,” I say. “We can’t be seen here.”
“And what about this?” Crow says, gesturing to the ground.
“We fill it back in. And then we leave.”
“I don’t mean the hole. I mean what’s missing from it.”
This time, my voice is level. “I know you do. But let’s focus on what we can control right now, okay?”
“I can’t believe—”
“Crow,” Cuckoo snaps. “We don’t have time for this. Come on.”
She backs down, but she isn’t happy. Then again, it’s not like the rest of us are laughing and joking.
She seems to think she is the only one bothered by this when I can see Wren’s hands shaking as she gathers the earth back into its trench, and Cuckoo can’t look any of us in the eye, keeping her head down.
I am trying to be practical, cold as that may be.
It’s what Goldie would do. If they miss her so much, why can’t they appreciate that?
We are rushing, and when we finish, the ground doesn’t look quite right, not the same as before. But it is indistinguishable unless someone knows what to look for, and even then it’s not as if there is a body under there this time. Find this suspicious patch of ground, and it will reveal nothing.
I stumble as we head over the gate, cut my shin on one of the iron spikes. The sudden pain of it rushes warmth to the source, and I have to gasp. I’ve never done that before.
Only Crow sees, but she turns away from me, doesn’t acknowledge it.
“We need to figure this out,” she says to the others. “This isn’t over just because Goldie is gone.”
Something up ahead, across the road, seems to move. A shadow crossing the rising sun. I squint my eyes to try and see, but whatever it is has vanished.
“We’re too exposed,” I say, conscious that at any moment someone could come up the hill. A jogger, a dog walker, a shift worker.
“We’ll talk later,” Cuckoo promises Crow. “For now, let’s head home and try to get some sleep. I have a shift in five hours.”
“I have work in three hours,” Wren says. “I’m going to be exhausted.”
“Me too,” Crow says. “Starling at least can sleep it off.”
She says it evenly enough, but it still feels like a gibe. I choose to ignore her. As if I am going to be able to sleep after this. “Good night, everyone. Speak later.”
“Good morning, you mean,” Crow replies, but I am done with her today.
I am not going to be caught outside Bishop’s House. I am going home.
This is the same journey I did before. The déjà vu isn’t lost on me.
I even take the same shortcuts, tap my hand on the lamppost as I turn into my street.
There isn’t any sneaking around, which feels odd.
I am an adult, I can do what I want. But it feels wrong, somehow, to use my key to open the front door and not come in through the garden and into the window I always left cracked open.
Inside, I still creep along the hallway, up the stairs, and across the landing.
Mum and Dad will be awake soon, and in fact I might even hear them murmuring to each other from their room as I walk past. I should be grateful to them, I know, for letting me live at home and paying no rent.
But they are always worried about me. No doubt they’ll think I was out all night doing something fun or wild, and they are ever so keen for me to be out and about nowadays, and act as if my room should be used sparsely.
Dad said the other day he was worried I wasn’t enjoying myself enough, whatever that means.
So they can be happy and think I’ve done what they wanted, and I’ll slip into bed knowing I’ve done the opposite.
They wonder where it all went wrong, and I find myself, for the first time, inclined to agree.