“It’s grand,” Frank said, through another yawn. “Better safe than sorry. Put a report on tape, with a full description-and if you see him again, let me know.” He was already about half asleep.
“Will do. Night.”
I stayed still in my tree for a few minutes, listening for out-of-place noises. Nothing; just the undergrowth below me tossing like ocean in the wind, and that prickle, faint and unignorable, scratching at the top of my spine. I told myself that if anything was going to send my imagination into overdrive, it would be the story Sam had told: the girl stripped of her lover, her family, her future, knotting a rope to one of these dark branches for everything she had left, herself and her baby. I phoned Sam back before I could think too hard about that.
He was still wide awake. “What was that all about? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that. I thought I heard someone coming. I was picturing Frank’s mystery stalker with a hockey mask and a chain saw, but no such luck.” This was also true, obviously, but twisting facts for Sam wasn’t like twisting them for Frank, and doing it made my stomach curl up.
A second of silence. “I worry about you,” Sam said quietly.
“I know, Sam,” I said. “I know you do. I’m grand. I’ll be home soon.”
I thought I heard him sigh, a small resigned breath, too soft for me to be sure. “Yeah,” he said. “We can talk about that holiday then.”
I walked back home thinking about Sam’s vandal, about that prickling feeling, and about Slow Eddie. All I knew about him was that he worked for an estate agent, he and Daniel didn’t get on, Frank didn’t think much of his brainpower, and he had wanted Whitethorn House badly enough to call his grandfather a lunatic. I bounced a few scenarios around in my head-Homicidal Maniac Eddie picking off the occupants of Whitethorn House one by one, Casanova Eddie having a dangerous liaison with Lexie and then flipping out when he found out about the baby-but all of them seemed pretty far-fetched, and anyway I liked to think that Lexie had had better taste than to boink some dumb yuppie in the back of an SUV.
If he’d wandered around the house once and not found what he was looking for, the chances were that he would come back-unless he’d just been taking a last look at the place he had loved and lost, and he didn’t strike me as the sentimental type. I filed him under Things to Worry About Some Other Time. Right then, he wasn’t at the top of my list.
The part I wasn’t telling Sam, the new dark thing unfurling and fluttering in a corner of my mind: someone was holding a high-octane grudge against Whitethorn House; someone had been meeting Lexie in these lanes, someone faceless who began with an N; and someone had helped her make that baby. If all three of those had been the same person… Sam’s vandal wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but he could well be smart enough-sober, anyway-to hide that; he could be gorgeous, charming, all kinds of good stuff, and we already knew that Lexie’s decision-making process had worked a little differently from most people’s. Maybe she had gone for the angst boys. I thought of a chance meeting somewhere in the lanes, long walks together under a high winter moon and branches filigreed with frost; of that smile slanting up under her lashes; of the ruined cottage, and shelter behind the curtain of brambles.
If the guy I was picturing had found himself with a chance at getting a Whitethorn House girl pregnant, it would have seemed to him like a God-given thing, a perfect, blinding symmetry: a golden ball dropped into his hands by angels, not to be refused. And he would have killed her.
The next morning someone spat on our car. We were on our way to college, Justin and Abby up front, me and Rafe in the back-Daniel had left early, no explanation, while the rest of us were halfway through breakfast. It was a cool gray morning, dawn hush left in the air and soft drizzle misting the windows; Abby was flipping through notes and humming along to Mahler on the CD player, switching octaves dramatically in midphrase, and Rafe was in his sock feet, trying to disentangle a massive knot in his shoelace. As we went through Glenskehy Justin braked, outside the newsagent’s, to let someone cross the road: an old guy, hunched and wiry, in a farmer’s tired tweed suit and flat cap. He raised his walking stick in a kind of salute as he shuffled past, and Justin waved back.
Then the man caught Justin’s eye. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared through the windscreen at us. For a split second his face contorted into a tight mask of pure fury and disgust; then he brought down his stick on the hood, with a flat clang that split the morning wide open. We all shot upright, but before any of us could do anything sensible the old man hawked, spat on the windscreen-straight at Justin’s face-and hobbled on across the road, at the same deliberate pace.
“What the-” Justin said, breathless. “What the hell? What was that?”
