43. Cuckoo
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CUCKOO
Cassandra and Hugo can reunite in hell.
It is not the middle of the night, though it feels like it atop this hill.
Ahead of us, Bishop’s House lurks, silent and brooding.
It doesn’t feel so welcome tonight. Gone are the safety barriers around the perimeter, the old iron one and the crumbling stone wall allowed to exist on their own again.
The front gate no longer has a stiff padlock but pushes open with a whine, and instead of climbing over, for the first time ever, the four of us simply walk through the entrance, and when the gate closes behind us, it lets out a small scream.
Cassandra’s mark is obvious beyond this too.
The overgrown path has had its weeds pushed to the side, a gathering of brambles that flank our way to the house.
I risk a glance at the trees beyond but allow myself no more and keep my gaze firmly on the path ahead.
Starling leads the way, her head swiveling this way and that as if Cassandra might jump out on us at any second.
Maybe she imagines this like a horror film: Cassandra will appear complete with chainsaw and hockey mask, and all of this will end in a cascade of blood and guts and gore.
As Bishop’s House emerges fully into view, I can see that only the windows at the very top of the building are still boarded up.
Those on the ground floor are exposed to match the front door.
The obvious thing to do would be to try the front door, see if it opens for us as easily as the front gate, but Starling’s feet automatically take her around to the side of the house, and the rest of us follow her.
There is no other conceivable way of entering this place.
If we want Bishop’s House to be on our side, we have to treat it with the deference we always have done, and do things as normal.
The broken glass has been swept away now, from all those years ago when we created this entrance, but the window glass itself has not been replaced, nor even covered, as if daring us to come inside.
This time I take the lead, ducking under and sliding through the gap.
The basement is freezing, and the air is damp as I breathe it in.
It’s completely dark, and as Starling slides through, she passes me one of the torches she has brought, flicking on her own.
There’s something immediately different about this place, even since we returned to move Goldie’s body.
Gone is the warm, friendly space we sat in a circle within and laughed and drank and ate food.
We had my birthday here; we had everything here.
We were comfortable here before we ever explored the rest of the house.
It is this place, more than any, that I think of Goldie and want to cry.
Cassandra has ruined it; I imagine her standing here during her visits to the house, appraising how she is going to tear it all down, wrinkling her nose like there is a bad smell.
This thought breaks the spell because actually maybe there is a smell after all.
Musky, damp as the air. Rotten. Everything that didn’t matter comes into focus, from the dust to the cobwebs to the leftover furniture to the shards of glass near the window.
“Do you think she’s here yet?” Wren whispers. She and Crow are dusting themselves off after jumping down.
“There’s only one way to find out.” Cassandra isn’t going to come down here; we are going to have to venture farther into the house again. I head up the stairs, the rest of them in tow, and we emerge into the hallway, entrance foyer, and front door ahead of us.
The birds I drew are still here, but one of them has been angrily crossed out.
Goldie has been forcibly removed.
Cassandra. She’s done this.
“Bitch,” I say, pointing to the damage. “Look what she’s done. Fucking bitch.”
“We’ll make her pay,” Starling says smoothly.
“What if she doesn’t come?” Crow says. “What if she’s already called the police and they’re on their way here and this is a trap?”
“Then it’s hello, prison,” Starling says.
Prison. Not such an abstract concept growing up; there were plenty of kids at school whose parents or siblings ended up there. Theft, normally, or assault. Short sentences, but plenty of them; they were in and out.
We would be so much worse. I imagine everyone in our school—Miss White, oh God—picking up a newspaper or reading online about us. They would be shocked. Horrified.
“She’s coming,” I say. “I feel it in my bones.”
But perhaps worse than that, after so many years, we’d be forgotten. Left behind again. Stuck in a permanent isolation until we don’t know any different and no one even cares anymore. A statistic is all we’d be, another notch in convincing an entire subset of people how little we matter.
“Remember when we saved that bird?” I say.
We were so good then.
“We’re unstoppable,” I tell them all. “This bitch isn’t going to take us down.”
At that second, we hear a key being inserted into the front door. Heavy, solid. Then the sound of it turning.
She’s here.
“Well!” she says. “I didn’t think you’d be here before me.”
She’s changed her clothes, a new outfit of black jogging bottoms and a long-sleeved gym shirt, the kind you’d wear out on a run. Preparing for physical activity. She certainly isn’t stupid. She’s prepared for anything tonight.
But she hasn’t brought anyone with her. No one else comes through the door. It is four against one, and even her arrogance surely still tells her those are bad odds.
Over the top of the gym shirt is Goldie’s bracelet.
She sees me looking. “Yes, I thought I’d wear this tonight. Seeing as you were all so emotional about it. Being her friends and all.”
“Tell us what you’ve done with Goldie’s body,” I say.
“Body?” Cassandra echoes, appalled. She places a hand on her chest as if this information is too great to bear and she might topple over any minute.
“I am so sorry if you think your friend has passed away, but I assure you I found this bracelet while cleaning out Bishop’s House for its demolition.
I promise you I had nothing to do with her disappearance.
Is that what you think? This is why I wanted to talk to you, to clear all this up. ”
It’s a perfect act. One that would be almost convincing, if we hadn’t buried Goldie in that bracelet ourselves.
She’s played this flawlessly. She knows all too well she prized that bracelet from Goldie’s dead wrist, but we can’t possibly know that. If we do, we’re admitting to being there when she died. And then Cassandra will think we killed her.
How can we get her to tell us where she’s buried Goldie without admitting we did it in the first place?
“You messaged us,” I blurt out instead. “Why send us that message pretending to be Goldie? It’s sick. We got our hopes up, but now we know it must be you.”
“Message?” Cassandra looks confused, but she’s so good an actress I don’t care how genuine she seems. “I didn’t send you any message. Why would I pretend to be your friend?”
“You killed her,” I say. I have to bluff, have to commit to this, have to scare her. “We’re going to the police, all of us, unless you tell us what you did with her. We just want to find her. Please.”
“I did nothing of the sort—”
“We can prove that was Goldie’s bracelet,” Starling says.
“We have photos of her wearing it. There are little engravings on the different charms that prove it’s hers.
And she never took it off. She was wearing—she would have been wearing it the night she disappeared.
And now you have it. They will be able to do all sorts of forensics on that. ”
But Cassandra doesn’t flinch. “I had nothing to do with your friend’s disappearance.”
“Come on,” Crow says. “This is a waste of time. She isn’t going to talk. We’re calling the police now.” She takes out her phone, which is switched off. All of ours are. Old habits die hard.
“I’m not lying,” Cassandra says. “I had nothing to do with your friend.”
There is something about the way she emphasizes this that makes me believe, for the first time, that there is something more going on here. But that doesn’t make any sense.
“Then who did?” I ask, because I have no idea where she is going with this.
“Come on,” she says. “I told you there was something I had to show you. It’s upstairs.”
The others glance at me uncertainly, reluctant to venture farther into Bishop’s House than we have to. But I nod. I want to know what she has. She could very well be taking us to Goldie herself. We have to find her.
“Lead the way then,” I say. “I promise not to stab you in the back.”
To this, she chuckles. She walks up the stairs, and we have taken them so much I can predict which ones will creak under her weight.
On the first-floor corridor, she turns sharply, heading down to the end of the hall.
And to my astonishment, I realize where she is taking us.
The locked room at the end of the corridor, the one we could never enter, which is no longer locked at all, the door wide open and waiting for us to pass through.
We always wanted to see what’s inside. I remember our conversations, our mad predictions: a treasure chest containing a million pounds, a lion, nothing at all.
My mind is darker now; it creates new predictions I wouldn’t have thought of before: a prisoner, a dungeon, a drug den.
Goldie’s corpse.
But when we enter, the room itself is startling in its simplicity.
None of the gaudy bathroom walls or toilet, none of the crazy wallpaper in the other bedrooms. It is a pale, tasteful blue; the carpet hasn’t been ripped up or damaged and is fuzzy and brown; the bed is a four-poster and dramatic but bare of quilts or pillows or sheets.
There is no other furniture. If it was open from the beginning, we would have walked right past it, uninterested.
If we had finally opened it back then, it would have been a disappointment.
“Why are we here?” Starling says. “Why this room?”
“It’s where it happened, I think,” Cassandra says. “Don’t you smell it, still, after all these years?”
The only smell is the staleness of a room long undisturbed. It almost reminds me of gasoline, wandering around a petrol station after a car has filled its tank and left.
“Where what happened? What smell?”
“The smell of blood,” she says. “The person who killed your friend? It was my husband, Hugo.”
What?
“What are you talking about?” I splutter. “Your husband?”
“Before he disappeared. I’m sure of it.”
What is happening?
“How—how can you possibly be sure of it?”
She sighs, fiddles with Goldie’s bracelet. I am itching to tear it from her.
“I know he did it,” she says calmly, “because he’s done it before.”