She opened her window a few inches, and the wind blew her hair sideways. "I don't know… The twin, Jessica-the bunny-in-headlights thing could just be stress from Katy being missing, but she's way too thin. Even through that big huge woolly thing you could tell she's half the size of Katy, and Katy was no heifer. And then the other sister…There's something off about her, too."
"Rosalind?" I said.
There must have been something funny in my tone. Cassie shot me an oblique glance. "You liked her."
"Yes, I suppose I did," I said, defensive and not sure why. "She seemed like a nice girl. She's very protective of Jessica. What, you didn't?"
"What's that got to do with it?" Cassie said coolly and, I felt, a little unfairly. "Regardless of who likes her, she dresses funny, she wears too much makeup-"
"She's well groomed, so there's something wrong with her?"
"Please, Ryan, do us both a favor and grow up; you know exactly what I mean. She smiles at inappropriate times, and, as you spotted, she wasn't wearing a bra." I had noticed that, but I hadn't realized that Cassie had as well, and the dig irritated me. "She may well be a very
I didn't say anything. Cassie threw the rest of her cigarette out the window and dug her hands into her pockets, slumped in her seat like a sulky teenager. I turned on dipped headlights and sped up. I was annoyed with her and I knew she was annoyed with me, too, and I wasn't sure quite how this had happened.
Cassie's mobile rang. "Oh, for God's sake," she said, looking at the screen. "Hello, sir… Hello?…Sir?…Bloody phones." She hung up.
"Reception?" I said coldly.
"The fucking reception is fine," she said. "He just wanted to know when we'd be back and what was taking us so long, and I didn't feel like talking to him."
I can usually hold a sulk for much longer than Cassie, but I couldn't help it, I laughed. After a moment Cassie did, too.
"Listen," she said, "I wasn't being bitchy about Rosalind. More like worried."
"Are you thinking sexual abuse?" I realized that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been wondering about the same thing, but I disliked the thought so much that I had been avoiding it. One sister oversexual, one badly underweight, and one, after various unexplained illnesses, murdered. I thought of Rosalind's head bent over Jessica's and felt a sudden, unaccustomed surge of protectiveness. "The father's abusing them. Katy's coping strategy is making herself sick, either out of self-hatred or to lessen the chances of abuse. When she gets into ballet school, she decides she needs to be healthy and the cycle has to stop; maybe she confronts the father, threatens to tell. So he kills her."
"It plays," said Cassie. She was watching the trees flash past on the roadside; I could only see the back of her head. "But so does, for example, the mother-if it turns out Cooper was wrong about the rape, obviously. Munchausen by proxy. She seemed way at home in the victim role, did you notice?"
I had. In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials (and this is, of course, the real and icy reason why we try to tell families about their losses ourselves, rather than leaving it to the uniforms: not to show how much we care, but to see how they react), and we had borne bad news often enough to know the usual variations. Most people are shocked senseless, struggling for their footing, with no idea how to do this; tragedy is new territory that comes with no guide, and they have to work out, step by dazed step, how to negotiate it. Margaret Devlin had been unsurprised, almost resigned, as though grief was her familiar default state.
"So basically the same pattern," I said. "She's making one or all of the girls sick, when Katy gets into ballet school she tries to put her foot down, and the mother kills her."
"It could explain why Rosalind dresses like a forty-year-old, too," Cassie said. "Trying to be a grown-up to get away from her mother."
My mobile rang. "Ah,
I did the bad-reception routine, and we spent the rest of the drive making a list of possible lines of inquiry. O'Kelly likes lists; a good one might distract him from the fact that we hadn't rung him back.
