hadn’t sat down on the floor to have a look, and she didn’t sound all that pleased with this whole idea. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, either. The Webley was a sweetheart and I would have loved a chance to try it out, but an undercover job grows a whole new level when there’s a gun bouncing around. Sam wasn’t going to like this one little bit.
Rafe rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I don’t? My father took me shooting every single year, starting when I was seven. I can hit a pheasant in midair, three shots out of five. One year we went up to Scotland-”
“Is that thing even legal?” Abby wanted to know. “Don’t we need a license, or something?”
“But it’s a family heirloom,” said Justin. “We didn’t buy it, we inherited it.”
Again with that we. “Licenses aren’t for buying a gun, silly,” I said. “They’re for owning it.” I had already decided to let Frank explain to Sam why, even though the gun had probably never been licensed in its existence, we weren’t about to confiscate it.
Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to hear this? I’m telling you a tender tale of father-son bonding, and all you can talk about is red tape. Once my father found out I could shoot, he used to pull me out of school for a whole week, every time the season came around. Those are the only times in my life when he’s treated me like something other than a living ad for contraception. For my sixteenth birthday he got me-”
“I’m fairly sure we do need a license, officially,” Daniel said, “but I think we should leave it, at least for now. I’ve had enough of the police for a while. When do you think you could get the solvent, Rafe?”
His eyes were on Rafe, ice gray and steady and unblinking. For a second Rafe stared back, but then he shrugged and took the gun out of Daniel’s hands. “Sometime this week, probably. Whenever I find a place that carries it.” He broke the gun open, a lot more expertly than Daniel had, and started peering into the barrel.
That was when I remembered the cherries, me chattering, Abby cutting in. It was the note in Daniel’s voice that reminded me: that same calm, inflexible firmness, like a door closing. It took me a second to remember what I had been talking about, before the others had deftly, expertly diverted the conversation. Something about having laryngitis, being stuck in bed, when I was a kid.
I tested my new theory later that evening, when Daniel had put the revolver away and we had hung the curtains and were curled up in the sitting room. Abby had finished her doll’s petticoat and was starting on a dress; her lap was covered with the scraps of material I’d been sorting on Sunday.
“I used to have dolls, when I was little,” I said. If my theory was right, then this wasn’t risky; the others wouldn’t have heard all that much about Lexie’s childhood. “I had a collection-”
“You?” Justin said, giving me a quirk of a smile. “The only thing you collect is chocolate.”
“Actually,” Abby asked me, “have you got any? Something with nuts?”
Straight in with the diversion. “I did too have a collection,” I said. “I had all four sisters out of Little Women. You could get the mother, too, but she was such a horrible sanctimonious cow that I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I didn’t even want the others, but I had this aunt-”
“Why don’t you get Little Women dolls?” Justin asked Abby, plaintively. “And get rid of that awful poppet?”
“If you keep bitching about her, I swear, one of these mornings you’re going to wake up and find her on your pillow, staring at you.”
Rafe was watching me, hooded golden eyes across his solitaire game. “I kept trying to tell her I didn’t even like dolls,” I said, over Justin’s horrified noises, “but she never got the hint. She-”
Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.
There was a long, not-quite-comfortable silence. The fire spat sparks up the chimney. Abby had gone back to trying bits of fabric against her doll’s dress. Rafe was still watching me; I had my head down over my book (Rip Corelli, She Liked Them Married), but I could feel his eyes.
For some reason, the past-any of our pasts-was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won’t answer questions beginning with “Where.”
And another thing: Rafe had to know that. He had been nudging at the boundary on purpose. I wasn’t sure whose buttons he had been trying to push, exactly, or why-maybe everyone’s, maybe he was just in that kind of mood-but it was a tiny crack, in that perfect surface.
Frank’s FBI buddy got back to him on Wednesday. I knew the second Frank picked up the phone that something had happened, something big.
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“Some lane, I don’t know. Why?”
An owl hooted, close behind me; I whipped round in time to see it drifting into the trees only a few feet away, wings spread, light as ash. “What was that?” Frank asked sharply.
“Just an owl. Breathe, Frank.”
“Got your gun?”
I hadn’t. I’d been so wrapped up in Lexie and the Fantastic Four; I’d completely forgotten that what I was supposed to be after was outside Whitethorn House, not inside, and was very likely also after me. That slip, even more than the note in Frank’s voice, sent a sharp warning twist through my stomach: Stay focused.
Frank caught the second I hesitated, and pounced. “Go home. Now.”
“I’ve only been out for ten minutes. The others will wonder-”
“Let ’em wonder all they like. You don’t go wandering around unarmed.”
I turned around and headed back up the lane, under the owl swaying on a branch, silhouetted sharp-eared against the sky. I cut round towards the front of the house-the lanes that way were wider, less cover for an ambush. “What’s happened?”
“You heading home?”
“Yeah. What’s happened?”
Frank blew out a breath. “Brace yourself for this one, babe. My mate in the U.S. tracked down May-Ruth Thibodeaux’s parents-they live somewhere in the mountains in Arsefuck, North Carolina, don’t even have a phone. He sent a guy out there to break the news and see what else he could pick up. And guess what he found out.”
In the instant before I told him to quit playing games and get to the point, I knew. “It’s not her.”
“Bingo. May-Ruth Thibodeaux died of meningitis when she was four. Your man showed the parents the ID shot; they’d never seen our girl before.”
It hit me like a huge breath of pure wild oxygen; I wanted to laugh so badly I was almost dizzy with it, like a teenager in love. She had fooled the hell out of me-pickup trucks and soda fountains, my arse-and all I could think was Fair play to you, girl. Here I had thought I lived light; all of a sudden that felt like an adolescent game, like some rich kid playing at poor while the trust fund piled up, because this girl had been the real thing. She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.
“Holy shit,” I said. “How many times did she do this?”
“What I want to know is why. This is all backing up my theory: someone was after her, and he wasn’t giving up. She picks up the May-Ruth ID from somewhere-a graveyard, maybe, or an obituary in an old newspaper-and starts over. He tracks her down and she takes off again, out of the country this time. You don’t do that unless you’re running scared. But he got to her in the end.”
I reached the front gates, got my back against one of the gateposts and took a deep breath. In the moonlight the drive looked very strange, cherry blossom and shadow scattering black and white so thick that the ground blended into the trees without a seam, one great patterned tunnel. “Yeah,” I said. “He got to her in the end.”
“And I don’t want him getting to you.” Frank sighed. “I hate to admit it, but our Sammy may have been right about this one, Cass. If you want out of there, you can start playing sick tonight and I’ll have you out tomorrow morning.”
It was a still night, not even a breeze in the cherry trees. A thread of sound came drifting down the drive, very
