“Yeah,” Rafe said, but the anger had drained out of his voice and he just sounded very, very tired. “Well.”
“What did Daniel think?” I asked, after a moment.
“Don’t ask me,” Rafe said. He threw back most of his drink with a neat flick of his wrist. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re mostly better off not knowing.”
“No, you said Daniel told Justin to chill out, but he wasn’t much help because he thought something. What did he think?”
Rafe jiggled his glass and watched the ice cubes clink off the sides. He obviously wasn’t planning to answer, but silence is the oldest cop-trick in the book, and I’m even better at it than most. I leaned my chin on my arms, watched him and waited. In the sitting-room window behind his head, Abby pointed to something in the book and both she and Daniel burst out laughing, faint and clear through the glass.
“One night,” Rafe said at last. He still wasn’t looking at me. The moonlight silvered his profile and lay along his cheekbone, turned him into something off a worn coin. “A couple of days after… It might have been Saturday, I’m not sure. I came out here and sat on the swing seat and listened to the rain. I thought that might help me sleep, for some reason, but it didn’t. I heard an owl kill something-a mouse, probably. It was horrible; it screamed. You could hear the second when it died.”
He went silent. I wondered if this was somehow the end of the story. “Owls have to eat too,” I offered.
Rafe shot me a quick, oblique glance. “Then,” he said. “I don’t know what time, it was just starting to get light. I heard your voice, under the rain. It sounded like you were right there, leaning out.”
He turned and pointed up, at my dark window above us. “You said, ‘Rafe, I’m on my way home. Wait up for me.’ You didn’t sound eerie or anything, just matter-of-fact; in a hurry, sort of. Like that time you rang me because you’d forgotten your keys. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” A light cool breeze drifted across my hair and I shivered, a fast, uncontrollable jerk. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but this story was something different, pressing like a cold knife blade against my skin. It was way too late, more than a week too late, to worry about whatever damage I was doing to these four.
“ ‘I’m on my way home,’ ” Rafe said. “ ‘Wait up for me.’ ” He stared into the bottom of his glass. I realized that he was probably fairly drunk.
“What did you do?” I asked.
He shook his head. “ ‘Echo, I will not talk with thee,’ ” he said, with a faint wry smile, “ ‘for thou art a dead thing.’ ”
The breeze had moved off down the garden, sifting the leaves and fingering delicately through the ivy. In the moonlight the grass looked soft and white as mist, like you could put your hand right through it. That shiver went over me again.
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t that tell you I was going to be OK?”
“No,” Rafe said. “Actually, no, it didn’t. I was sure you had just died, that second. Laugh if you want, but I’ve told you what kind of state we were all in. I spent the whole next day waiting for Mackey to appear at the door being grave and sympathetic and tell us the doctors had done everything they could but blah blah blah. When he turned up on Monday, all smiley, and told us you’d regained consciousness, at first I didn’t believe him.”
“That’s what Daniel thought, isn’t it?” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “He thought I was dead.”
After a moment Rafe sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did. Right from the start. He thought you’d never made it to hospital.”
Watch your step around that one, Frank had said. Either Daniel was a lot smarter than I wanted to tangle with-that little exchange, before I went out, was starting to worry me again-or he had had reasons of his own for thinking Lexie wasn’t coming back. “Why?” I demanded, doing offended. “I’m not a wimp. It’d take more than one little cut to get rid of me.”
I felt Rafe flinch, a tiny half-hidden twitch. “God only knows,” he said. “He had some bizarro convoluted theory about the cops claiming you were alive to mess with people’s heads-I can’t remember the details, I didn’t want to hear it and he was being cryptic about it anyway.” He shrugged. “Daniel.”
For several reasons, I figured it was time to change the tone of this conversation. “Mmm… conspiracy theories,” I said. “Let’s make him a tinfoil hat, in case the cops start trying to scramble his brain waves.”
I had caught Rafe off guard: before he could help it, he gave a startled snort of laughter. “He does get paranoid, doesn’t he,” he said. “Remember when we found the gas mask? Him giving it that thoughtful look and saying, ‘I wonder if this would be effective against the avian flu?’ ”
I had started giggling as well. “It’ll look gorgeous with the tinfoil hat. He can wear them both into college-”
“We’ll get him a biohazard suit-”
“Abby can needlepoint pretty patterns on it-”
