“Well,” said Abby, “it wasn’t funny last week, no. But now that you’re back…” She turned to grin at me, over her shoulder. “Four-Boobs Brenda asked me-you know that horrible confidential whisper?-if it was ‘one of those games gone wrong.’ I just froze her out, but now I’m thinking I could have made her day.”
“What amazes me about her,” Daniel said, opening his door, “is that she’s so determined to believe we’re wildly interesting. If only she knew.”
When we got out of the car I got my first real look at what Frank had meant about these four, how they came across to outsiders. As we walked down the long avenue between the sports fields something happened, a change as subtle and definite as water turning to ice: they moved closer, shoulder to shoulder and in step, backs straightening, heads lifting, expressions falling away from their faces. By the time we reached the Arts block the façade was in place, a barricade so impenetrable you could almost see it, cool and glinting like diamond. All that week in college, every time someone started angling for a good stare at me-edging down the library shelves towards the corner where we had our carrels, rubbernecking round a newspaper in the tea queue-that barricade swung around like a Roman shield formation, confronting the intruder with four pairs of impassive, unblinking eyes, till he or she backed off. Collecting gossip was going to be a major problem; even Four-Boobs Brenda stopped midbreath, hovering over my desk, and then asked if she could borrow a pen.
Lexie’s thesis turned out to be a lot more fun than I’d thought. The bits Frank had given me were mainly stuff about the Brontës, Currer Bell as the madwoman in the attic bursting free from demure Charlotte, truth in alias; not exactly comfortable reading, in the circumstances, but more or less what you’d expect. What she’d been working on just before she died was a lot snazzier: Rip Corelli, of She Dressed to Kill fame, turned out to be Bernice Matlock, a librarian from Ohio who had led a blameless life and written lurid pulp masterpieces in her spare time. I was starting to like the way Lexie’s mind had worked.
I’d been worried that her supervisor would want me to come up with something that made academic sense-Lexie had been no idiot, her stuff was smart and original and well thought out, and I was years out of practice. I’d been worried about her supervisor all round, actually. Her tutorial students weren’t going to spot the difference-when you’re eighteen, most people over twenty-five are just generic adult white noise-but someone who’d spent one-on-one time with her was a whole different story. One meeting with him reassured me. He was a bony, gentle, disconnected guy who was so paralyzed by the whole “unfortunate incident” that he could barely look me in the eye, and he told me to take all the recovery time I needed and not to worry about dead-lines. I figured I could handle a few weeks curled up in the library reading about hard-boiled PIs and dames who were nothing but trouble.
And in the evenings there was the house. We put some work into it almost every day, maybe for an hour or two, maybe just for twenty minutes: sand down the stairs, sort through a box from Uncle Simon’s stash, take turns climbing the stepladder to change the ancient brittle fittings on the lightbulbs. The crappiest jobs-scrubbing stains off the toilets-got the same time and care as the interesting ones; the four of them treated the house like some marvelous musical instrument, a Stradivarius or a Bösendorfer, that they had found in a long-lost treasure trove and were restoring with patient, enchanted, absolute love. I think the most relaxed I ever saw Daniel was flat on his stomach on the kitchen floor, wearing battered old trousers and a plaid shirt, painting baseboards and laughing at some story Rafe was telling, while Abby leaned over him to dip her brush, her ponytail whisking paint across his cheek.
