I needed to talk to Ned, fast. Lexie had neglected to leave me instructions on how the hell they got in touch with each other. Not by mobile: Sam had pulled her phone records first thing, no unidentified numbers in or out. Carrier pigeon? Notes in the hollow tree? Smoke signals?
I didn’t have much time. Frank had no idea that Lexie had ever met Ned and no idea that she had been getting ready to blow town-I knew there would turn out to be a good reason why I didn’t want to tell him about that diary; just like he always says, your instincts work faster than your mind. But he wasn’t about to let go of this. He would worry away at it like a pit bull, and sooner or later he was going to hit on this same possibility. I didn’t know all that much about Ned, but enough to be pretty sure that, if he ended up in an interview room with Frank going at him full throttle, he would spill his guts inside five minutes. It never once occurred to me, not for a second, to sit back and let that happen. Whatever had been going on here, I needed to put my finger on it before Frank did.
If I wanted to make an appointment to meet Ned, without any chance of the others finding out, how would I do it?
No phones. Mobiles keep a call register and they get itemized bills, she wouldn’t have left anything like that lying around, and Whitethorn House didn’t have a landline. There was no pay phone within walking distance, and the ones in college were risky: the Arts block phones were the only ones close enough to use on a fake bathroom break, and if one of the others had happened to walk by at the wrong moment, she would have been fucked-and this was too important for gambles. No calling in to see him, either. Frank had said Ned lived in Bray and worked in Killiney, there was no way she could have got there and back without the others missing her. And no letters or e-mails; she would never, not in a million years, have left a trail.
“How the hell, girl?” I said softly, into the air. I felt her like a shimmer over my shadow on the lane, the tilt of her chin and the mocking sideways flash of her eyes: Not telling.
Somewhere along the way I had stopped noticing just how seamlessly conjoined their five lives were. Into college together, all day in the library together, smoke break at noon with Abby and at four with Rafe, lunch together at one, home together for dinner: the routine of it was choreographed as precisely and tightly as a gavotte, never a minute left unaccounted for and never a minute to myself, except-
Except now. For one hour a night, like some spellbound girl in a fairy tale, I unwound my life from the others’ and it was all my own again. If I were Lexie and I wanted to contact someone I should never have been contacting, I would use my late-night walk.
Not would: had. For weeks now I had been using it to phone Frank, phone Sam, keep my secrets safe. A fox skittered across the lane in front of me and vanished into the hedge, all bones and luminous eyes, and a shiver went down my back. Here I had thought this was my very own bright idea, I was making my own way step by step and alert through the dark. It was only now, when I turned around and looked back down the road, that I realized I had been blithely, blindly putting my feet smack in Lexie’s footprints, all the way.
“So?” I said aloud, like a challenge. “So what?” This was what Frank had sent me in for, to get close to the victim, get into her life, and-duh-I was doing it. A certain amount of creepy was not only beside the point but also pretty much par for the course on a murder investigation; they’re not supposed to be one long round of laughs. I was getting spoiled, all these cozy candlelight dinners and handicrafts, turning jumpy when reality kicked back in.
One hour to get hold of Ned. How?
Notes in the hollow tree… I almost laughed out loud. Professional deformation: you’ve got the most esoteric possibilities all worked out, it’s the simple ones that take forever to hit you. The higher the stakes, Frank once told me, the lower the technology. If you want to meet your mate for coffee, you can afford to arrange it by text message or e-mail; if you think the cops or the Mob or the Illuminati are closing in, you signal your contact with a blue towel on the washing line. For Lexie, days ticking away and morning sickness starting to kick in, the stakes must have felt like life and death.
Ned lived in Bray; only a fifteen-minute drive away, outside rush hour. Probably she had taken the risk of phoning him from college, the first time. After that, all she had needed was a safe drop spot, somewhere in these lanes, that both of them could check every couple of days. I must have walked straight past it a dozen times.
That shimmer again, in the corner of my eye: tip of a grin, there and tricky and then gone.
