“The engagement ring,” I said, keeping my voice easy. This was setting ideas exploding in my head like popcorn, but I didn’t want Frank to know that. “Did she take it with her when she split?”
“No. The cops asked Chad at the time. She left it on her bedside table, but that was normal. She always left it there when she went to work, in case it got lost or fell in the hash browns or whatever. It wasn’t a big fancy rock or anything. Chad’s the bassist in a grunge band called Man From Nantucket, and they have yet to get their big break, so he makes a living as a carpenter. He’s skint.”
My notes were scrawly and went at a funny angle, on account of the light and the tree, but I could just about read them. “Then what?”
'On the twelfth of September she and Chad bought a PlayStation on their joint credit, which I suppose is as good a statement of commitment as any, these days. On the eighteenth, she sold her car, an ’86 Ford, for six hundred bucks-she told Chad she wanted to get something a little less beat-up, now that she had the extra money from the raise. On the twenty-seventh, she went to her doctor with an ear infection, probably contracted from swimming; he gave her antibiotics and it cleared up. And on the tenth of October, she’s gone. Is that what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of stuff I had in mind. Thanks, Frank. You’re a gem.”
“I’m thinking,” he said, “something happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth of September. Up through the twelfth, everything says she’s planning on staying put: she’s getting engaged, she’s meeting the parents, she and Chad are buying stuff as a couple. But on the eighteenth she sells her car, which tells me she’s getting together the money to split. That the way you’re thinking?”
“Makes sense,” I said, but I knew Frank was wrong. That shifting pattern had slid into focus with a soft, final click, and I knew why Lexie had taken off running from North Carolina; knew it as clear as if she were sitting weightless on a branch beside me, swinging her legs in the moonlight and whispering in my ear. And I knew why she had been about to take off running from Whitethorn House. Someone had tried to hold her.
“I’ll try and find out more about that week, maybe get someone to re-interview poor old Chad. If we can figure out what changed her plans, we should be able to put our finger on the mystery man.”
“Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. Let me know how you get on.”
“Don’t do anyone I wouldn’t do,” he said, and hung up.
I angled the screen of my mobile towards the page, so I could read over my notes. The PlayStation meant nothing; it’s easy to buy on credit with no plans to pay it off, no plans to be anywhere within reach. The last solid thing that said she intended to stay put was the phone-provider switch, back in August. You don’t care about cheaper minutes unless you’re going to be around to use them. On August 16, she had been tucked snugly into her May-Ruth life and going nowhere.
And then, less than two weeks later, poor grunge Chad had proposed. After that, not one thing said Lexie was staying. She had said yes, smiled and bided her time till she got the money together, and then run as far and as fast as she could and never once looked behind. It hadn’t been Frank’s mystery stalker after all, it hadn’t been some masked menace slinking out of the shadows with a glinting blade. It had been as simple as a cheap ring.
And this time, there had been the baby: a lifelong tie to some man, somewhere. She could have got rid of it, just like she could have turned Chad down, but that had been beside the point. Just the thought of that tie had sent her slamming off the walls, frantic as a trapped bird.
The missed period and the flight prices; and, somewhere in there, N. N was either the trap trying to hold her here or, in some way I needed to find, her way out.
The others were sprawled on the sitting-room floor in front of the fire, like kids, rummaging through a wrecked traveling case that Justin had found somewhere. Rafe had his legs flung companionably across Abby’s- they had apparently made up their fight from that morning. The rug was strewn with mugs and a plate of ginger biscuits and a medley of small battered things: pockmarked marbles, tin soldiers, half of a clay pipe. “Cool,” I said, dropping my jacket on the sofa and flopping down between Daniel and Justin. “What’ve we got?”
“Odd oddments,” Rafe said. “Here. For you.” He wound up a moth-eaten clockwork mouse and sent it ticking along the floor towards me. It ground to a halt halfway, with a depressed scraping sound.
“Have one of these instead,” Justin said, stretching to pull the biscuits across to us. “Tastier.”
I got a biscuit in one hand, dipped the other into the traveling case and found something hard and heavy. I came up holding what looked like a beaten-up wooden box; the lid had said “EM” once upon a time, in mother-of- pearl inlay, but there were only a few bits left. “Ah, excellent,” I said, opening the lid. “This is like the world’s best lucky dip.”
It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.
“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas…”
“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”
“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”
“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”
“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid-a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”
“Knock it off,” Abby said, kicking his ankle-no pasts-but she didn’t sound seriously upset. For some reason, maybe just the mysterious alchemy you get among friends, all the tension of the last few days seemed to have vanished; we were happy together again, shoulders touching, Justin tugging down Abby’s sweater where it had slid up her back. “Sooner or later, though, we could find something valuable, in all this mess.”
“What would you do with the money?” Rafe asked, reaching for the biscuits. “A few grand, say.” In that second I heard Sam’s voice, close against my ear: That house is full of old bits and bobs, if there was something valuable in there…
“Get an Aga stove,” Abby said promptly. “The ones that heat the whole house. Warmth and a cooker that doesn’t crumble into lumps of rust if you look at it funny. Two birds, one stone.”
“You wild woman,” Justin said. “What about designer dresses and weekends in Monte Carlo?”
“I’d settle for no more frozen toes.”
Maybe she was supposed to give him something, I had said, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind… I realized I had my hand pressed down on the music box as if someone was trying to take it away. “I’d get the roof redone, I think,” Daniel said. “It shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years, but it would be nice not to wait that long.”
“You?” Rafe asked, giving him a sideways grin and winding the clockwork mouse again. “I’d have thought you’d never sell the thing, whatever it was; just frame it and hang it on the wall. Family history over filthy lucre.”
Daniel shook his head and held out a hand to me for his coffee mug-I had been dipping my biscuit in it. “What matters is the house,” he said, taking a sip and passing the mug back to me. “All the other things are just icing, really; I’m fond of them, but I’d sell them all in a heartbeat if we needed the money for roofing bills or something like that. The house carries enough history all by itself; and after all, we’re making our own, every day.”
“What would you do with it, Lex?” Abby asked.
That right there was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that was banging at the inside of my head like a tiny vicious hammer. Sam and Frank hadn’t followed up on the antique-deal-gone-wrong idea because, basically, nothing pointed that way. Death duties had cleared the good stuff out of the house, Lexie hadn’t been linked to any antique dealers or fences, and nothing had said she needed money; until now.
She had had eighty-eight quid in her bank account-barely enough to get her out of Ireland, never mind get her started anywhere else-and only a couple of months before the baby started showing, the father started noticing and it was too late. Last time she had sold her car; this time, she had had nothing to sell.
It’s amazing how cheaply you can ditch your life and get a new one, if you don’t ask for much and you’re
