tops of trees. Nicholas was angry with himself. It could have gone so much better with Pritam. Suzette was right. And now he’d alienated a person who felt like a man who could be trusted. Nicholas couldn’t blame the reverend. Spoken aloud, his theory on the murders was a fabulist’s: the stuff of nineteenth-century fairy tales where endings weren’t happy and evil was as powerful as good.
How had everything gone so wrong so fast? Four months ago, he and Cate had had a life to be envied. Was that the problem? That they’d had the gall to be truly happy? Had they offended the gods by flaunting their pleasure with their simple plans and simple love? One motorcycle trip. One ladder. One phone call. Halloween child. Samhain child.
Church. Green Man. Walpole Park. A face wreathed in leaves.
One fall down cement stairs and a day world becomes a night world. The dead walk unmollified, doomed to mark time while some cosmic starter gun fires, reloads, and fires again and again.
They saw him, the dead. And they knew he could see them; they watched him. As some respite from their own morbid television rerun performances, perhaps they looked to Nicholas for help. But he couldn’t help them. Nor could they teach him.
Why hadn’t he died in the bike crash?
Why had Cate died instead?
Why hadn’t Gavin shot him?
Nicholas stopped. He was at the corner of Lambeth Street. If he turned up it, in two minutes he’d be with his mother and Suzette. But he could feel no answers waiting there.
He walked on.
Another block and he reached the corner of Airlie Crescent. Without thinking, he let his feet change direction-just as he used to let his hands turn the wheel of his van when he trundled through narrowlaned English villages hunting for knickknacks. He strode up a shadowy footpath he hadn’t walked in two decades, in and out of tiny pools of streetlight, to stop outside number seven.
The Boyes’ house.
It lay watching from within a nest of tall laurel trees, which hissed disapproval at his arrival. Though the house was, to his adult eyes, smaller than he remembered, it was still huge-a looming colonial with deep verandas draped with filigreed ironwork that had grayed with neglect and hung between posts like cobwebs. The hedges had rambled and shrubs were creeping out to reclaim the yard. Dim lights shone within; a brooding Halloween pumpkin.
Nicholas entered the yard and mounted the wide wooden steps to stand outside the lattice doors. He rang the doorbell.
Here was the landing that he and Tristram had dared each other to jump off, commandoes from a C-47. And Nicholas, to his credit, had jumped, albeit pale and terrified. Tristram had jumped whooping. Tristram had been the brave one.
Across the shadowed veranda, the dark, glossy front door opened a crack and Mrs Boye squinted at him through the gap. Her white hair spilled like a judge’s wig around her dressing-gowned shoulders-she could have stepped from a scene of Shakespearean mania. Her eyes narrowed.
“Yes?”
“It’s Nicholas, Mrs. Boye. Nicholas Close.”
Mrs. Boye set her lips. “Oh, Nicholas. I’ll tell Tristram you’re here. But I don’t want you two yelling about the yard! Mr. Boye has had a very full week.”
Nicholas thought better of arguing with her.
“Thanks, Mrs. Boye.”
“Tristram!” she called. “Tristram Hamilton Boye? Gavin, where is that brother of yours?”
The old woman walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her. Again, Nicholas was alone on the steps. Why am I here? Avoiding my own mother. Avoiding my sister. Avoiding sleep. A minute passed, and no one returned to the door. Nicholas gave up, and was halfway down the stairs when he heard the front door open again.
“Hello?” A younger woman’s voice. He turned.
Laine Boye’s hair was dripping wet and she held a bathrobe closed with one hand.
“It’s Nicholas Close, Mrs. Boye.”
“I can see that,” said Laine. Her face was in shadow. “Can I help you?”
He walked slowly back up the stairs. “Yes. Well, I just was walking, and happened to be…”
He watched her watching him. She was barefoot, drenched, even thinner than when he saw her last. She held her chin up and out, her head cocked.
“I’m sorry to come unannounced, Mrs. Boye, but…”
He felt his hand close around something in his pocket. He pulled it out. Something silver and small rested on his palm.
“I found Gavin’s cigarette lighter. At home. I thought…”
He held out the Zippo.
Laine took a half-step back, as if the sight of the lighter offended her. Again, Nicholas noticed the color of her eyes. A seashell gray; an equivocal color that could be contented or angry, serene or melancholy.
“I thought maybe we could talk a little,” he said. “About Gavin.”
She watched him a moment, frowning at some argument in her head. Then she nodded and unlatched the lattice door.
“Come inside.”
Nicholas followed her in.
The sensation of being drawn back through time made him wish he’d walked up Lambeth Street instead. Some rooms had been refurbished, and a few of the furnishings had changed. But the tall paneled walls, the polished cherrywood dining suite, the fireplace over which were mounted painted portraits of Tristram and Gavin as boys, were all exactly as when he’d seen them last, twenty-five years ago.
Laine stopped in the dining room. She seemed shorter in bare feet. Square-shouldered. In the softer light, her features were finer, less angular. Her skin had an olive hue.
“Give me a minute. I have to dry my hair.”
She frowned at Nicholas, then stepped into the room that had been Gavin’s and shut the door. On the floor outside it, Nicholas saw a small collection of packing boxes. Some were taped shut, and over the tape the boxes’ contents had been neatly printed in permanent marker: Shoes, Shirts amp; Trousers, T-shirts. Their ordinariness-as if Gavin were simply moving house, not dead and being filed away for good-was prosaic and mournful. One box remained open, only half-filled. He stepped closer to peer inside.
Some VHS tapes with documentary titles handwritten on the spines. A pair of worn hiking boots. A curled bunch of shooting magazines… and something else. Nicholas bent closer to see-
“Who are you?”
He whirled at the shout, startled.
Mrs. Boye stood behind him, brandishing a fireplace poker.
“Nicholas. Nicholas Close,” he replied, hiding the tremor in his voice. A woman who could spit on Christ from twenty paces would be a wildcat with a poker. “How are you, Mrs. Boye?”
“Ah, Nicholas,” said Mrs. Boye, lowering the weapon. “You want to see Trissy. Tristram!” She wagged a bony finger at Nicholas. “I don’t want you two making a racket.” She gestured for him to follow.
She led him through the house to Tristram’s bedroom door. The sight of it made Nicholas feel suddenly cold. She rapped sharply.
“Tristram? Your friend is here.”
She looked at Nicholas with an expression that said: boys, how intolerable. “Go in, but I need you going home by five. We’re dining early.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Boye.”
She walked away, stiffly whistling a tune that should have been tripping and joyful, but from her sounded broken and lost.
The large house became eerily quiet.
Nicholas twisted the low-set knob and opened the door.
