I went to bed early, around ten, partly as a character choice and partly because Frank had been right, I was wrecked. My brain felt like it had just done a triathlon. I shut Lexie’s bedroom door (smell of lily of the valley, a subtle little eddy swirling up my shoulder and round the neck of my T-shirt, curious and watchful) and leaned back against it. For a second I thought I wasn’t going to make it as far as the bed, I’d just slide down the door and be asleep before I hit the carpet. This was harder than I remembered, and I didn’t think it was because I was getting old or losing my touch or any of the other appealing possibilities O’Kelly would have suggested. Last time I had been the one calling the shots, deciding who I needed to hang out with, for how long, how close I needed to get. This time Lexie had called them all for me and I didn’t have a choice: I had to follow her rules to the letter, listen hard and nonstop like she was on a faint crackly earpiece and let her run me.
I had had this feeling before, on some of my least favorite investigations: Someone else is running this show. Most of them hadn’t ended well. But then it had always been the killer, a smug three steps ahead of us all the way. I had never had a case where that someone else was the victim.
One thing, though, felt easier. Last time, in UCD, every word out of my mouth had left a nasty taste behind, something tainted and wrong, like bread gone moldy. Like I said, I don’t like lying. This time, though, everything I’d said left nothing except the clean-cotton taste of true. The only possible reasons I could come up with were that I was fooling the living bejasus out of myself-rationalization is a major part of the undercover’s skill set-or that, in some tangled way that ran deeper and surer than cold hard fact, I wasn’t lying. As long as I did this right, almost everything I said was the truth, just Lexie’s rather than mine. I decided it would probably be a wise move to peel myself off the door and go to bed before I started thinking too hard about either of those possibilities.
Her room was on the top floor, at the back of the house, across from Daniel and above Justin. It was midsized, low-ceilinged, with plain white curtains and a rickety wrought-iron single bed that screeched like an ancient mangle when I sat down on it-if Lexie had managed to get pregnant in that thing, respect to her. The duvet cover was blue and freshly ironed; someone had changed my sheets. She didn’t have a lot of furniture: a bookshelf, a narrow wooden wardrobe with helpful strips of tin on the shelves to tell you what went where (HATS, STOCKINGS), a crap plastic lamp on a crap bedside table, and a wooden dressing table with dusty scrollwork and a three-way mirror, which reflected my face at confusing angles and gave me the creeps in all the predictable ways. I considered covering it up with a sheet or something, but that would have taken some explaining, and anyway I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection would keep doing its own thing behind there, just the same.
I unlocked my bag, keeping a sharp ear out for any noise on the stairs, and dug out my new gun and the roll of surgical tape for my bandages. Even at home, I don’t sleep without my gun handy-old habit, and not one I felt like breaking right at that moment. I taped the gun to the back of the bedside table, out of sight but in easy reach. No cobwebs, not even a film of dust on the back of the table: the Bureau had been there before me.
Before I put on Lexie’s blue pajamas, I peeled off the fake bandage, unclipped the mike and stashed the whole shebang at the bottom of my bag. Somewhere Frank was going into a full-blown conniption about this, but I didn’t care; I had reasons.
Going to sleep on your first night undercover is something you never forget. All day you’ve been pure concentrated control, watching yourself as sharply and ruthlessly as you watch everyone and everything around you; but come night, alone on a strange mattress in a room where the air smells different, you’ve got no choice but to open your hands and let go, fall into sleep and into someone else’s life like a pebble falling through cool green water. Even your first time, you know that in that second something irreversible will start happening, that in the morning you’ll wake up changed. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters’ children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.
I found a beautiful, illustrated, fragile old edition of the Brothers Grimm in the bookshelf and took it to bed with me. The others had given it to Lexie on her birthday, last year: the flyleaf said, in slanted, flowing fountain pen- Justin’s writing, I was almost sure-“3/1/04. Happy Birthday YOUNG girl (when are you going to grow up??). Love,” and their four names.
I sat in bed with the book on my knees, but I couldn’t read. Every now and then the quick muffled rhythms of conversation seeped up from the sitting room, and outside my window the garden was alive: wind in leaves, a fox barking and an owl on the hunt, rustles and calls and scuffles everywhere. I sat there and looked around Lexie Madison’s strange little room, and listened.
A little before midnight, the stairs creaked and there was a discreet tap on my door. I leaped halfway to the ceiling, grabbed at my bag to make sure it was zipped up all the way and called, “Come in.”
“It’s me,” said Daniel or Rafe or Justin, close behind the door, too soft for me to tell which one it was. “Just saying good night. We’re going to bed.”
My heart was pounding. “Night,” I called. “Sleep tight.”
Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets’ chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.
I sleep lightly and I have good ears. Sometime in the night I woke up, instantly and completely. Across the hall, in Daniel’s room, someone was whispering.
I held my breath, but the doors were thick and all I could make out was the flicker of sibilants in the dark; no words, no voices. I reached out my arm from under the covers, carefully, and found Lexie’s phone on the bedside table. 3:17 a.m.
I followed the faint double trail of whispers, weaving between the bat shrills and the rolls of wind, for a long time. It was two minutes to four when I heard the slow grate of a doorknob turning, and then the soft click as Daniel’s door closed. A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.
6
Footsteps woke me, thumping downstairs. I had been dreaming, something dark and messy, and it took me a wild second to disentangle my mind and figure out where I was. My gun wasn’t beside my bed and I was grabbing for it, starting to panic, when I remembered.
I sat up in bed. Apparently nothing had been poisoned, after all; I felt fine. The smell of a fry-up was creeping under the door, and I could hear the brisk morning rhythm of voices, somewhere far below. Shit: I had missed cooking breakfast. It had been so long since I’d managed to sleep past six, I hadn’t bothered to set Lexie’s alarm. I stuck the mike-bandage back on, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and a mammoth sweater that looked like it had belonged to one of the lads-the air was freezing-and went downstairs.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it had improved a lot since Lexie’s scary movie. They’d got rid of the mold and the cobwebs and the scummy linoleum; instead there was a flagstoned floor, a scrubbed wooden table, a pot of ragged geraniums on the windowsill behind the sink. Abby, in a red-flannel dressing gown with the hood pulled up, was flipping bacon and sausages. Daniel was at the table, fully dressed, reading a book pinned under the edge of his plate and eating fried eggs with methodical enjoyment. Justin was slicing his toast into triangles and complaining.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Last week only two of them had done the reading; the rest just sat there staring and chewing gum, like a pack of cows. Are you sure you don’t want to swap, just for today? Maybe you could get more out of them-”
“No,” Daniel said, without looking up.
“But yours are doing the sonnets. I know the sonnets. I’m good at the sonnets.”
“No.”
“Morning,” I said, in the doorway.
Daniel nodded at me gravely and went back to his book. Abby waved the spatula. “Morning, you.”
