‘Did this Duke person ever give PCP to Tim, or maybe some marijuana that was laced with it?’
‘How the hell should I know? And why do you care?’ He puckered his mouth as if biting into a lemon. ‘Come on, fess up. You and Timbo are at it.’
An eyeroll would have provided welcome relief, but she refrained. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of my own memories.’
‘Good luck with that.’ He grinned. ‘Do you even have any left? Didn’t they zap your brain like a zillion times at that nuthouse? Probably nothing in there but a big ol’ pile of scrambled eggs. Give it up, sis, and move on.’
She’d been wondering how long it would be before he brought up Danfield. Vivien and Graham, thick as thieves, colluding with that quack doctor to convince him she was mad. Poor little Mimi, totally bonkers. Vivien even going so far as to say she was afraid of her, a child of thirteen.
‘That night, I remember waking up around two in the morning,’ Erin said. ‘It was pouring rain. I thought I’d heard someone come home. I don’t think it was you.’
He made a noise in his throat. ‘If you’re wondering about nocturnal shenanigans, you’d better ask Her Majesty.’ He reached for the remote and switched on the television. ‘She calls herself Vivien Donnelly now. Married some schmuck about ten years back. But he died a few years ago. So now she’s a widow twice over, and milking it for all it’s worth. Calls me all the time, saying she needs me to fix something in the house. Same old Viv. Hates to be alone.’
The room had grown dark. A blackbird, mistaking the glass for open air, smacked into the window. Erin jumped. She crossed to the room to see if the bird was okay, but it was lying on the flagstones, its neck broken.
The locked room, the dark basement. Bloated and pathetic though Graham might be, buried in there somewhere was the savage boy everyone called the Viking. The one who’d pinned her wrists to the floor and laughed when the doctor came to cart her off to Danfield. For the first time since she arrived in the flat, fear sliced through her chest. If he went for her, that steak knife she brought wouldn’t make a scratch.
She picked up her bag and edged backward to the door, afraid that any quick moves might cause him to lunge forward and grab her by the arm. Without turning her back, she opened the door and stepped in the hall.
He tore off another slice of pizza and took a bite. ‘Leaving so soon?’ He smirked. ‘And we were having such a good time.’
41
Standing under the metal awning outside Graham’s flat, Erin inhaled great gulps of the rain-washed air. Her clothes smelled of dirty socks and pizza grease. If she were smart, she’d get in her car and drive straight back to Lansford. Wash off the stink of the afternoon under a hot shower and treat herself to dinner at a fancy restaurant. But she’d come this far and survived.
Like an arrow shot from a bow, there was no turning back. Concord was little more than a thirty-minute drive away. If anyone had the answers she was looking for, it was Vivien. Time to face the dragon.
But as the miles ticked past, her courage wavered, and the familiar fear snaked through her gut.
This time, she reminded herself, there was no reason to be afraid. No doctor was waiting to knock her out with a hypodermic and bundle her away. She was no longer a child, and Vivien was old. So who had the power now?
In no time, she had reached the outskirts of town. How predictable of Graham to live a stone’s throw from his old haunts. Not to mention the woman he professed to loathe, but to whom he was tethered like a balloon to a fence post. Stuffed with pizza and bloated with beer, perhaps even now, he was planning his comeback. Sliding behind the wheel of a sporty new car. Wavy blond hair magically resurrected, Adonis body gleaming with health. The Viking’s triumphant return.
She laughed out loud.
But as she pulled off the main road and drove through the centre of town, the tension returned, and she gripped the wheel. Clapboard houses, bordered by strip malls, dozed in the summer haze. As the clouds dispersed, steam rose off the pavement in the heat of the sun.
On the northern edge of town, where the houses thinned out and the forest began, she turned left onto a narrow street lined with single-storey homes set back in a dense wood of hickory and pine. No children played outdoors. No barking dogs or lawnmowers disturbed the still air. She idled the car in front of the last house on the right.
At night, locked in her room with the lights off, she would peer at the dark woods, sensing rather than seeing the nocturnal creatures lurking amongst the trees. Staring at her with their red eyes and sharp fangs. Smelling fear. On some nights, she used to pray that a kindly wood sprite would emerge from the pines and spirit her to safety.
In the hot car, a trapped bluebottle butted against the windscreen. She opened the window to release it and stepped onto a ratty patch of lawn. No dog bounded across the grass to greet her. No pets had ever lived in the house. Nothing warm-blooded to speak of.
Her sandals flapped on the slate flagstones that led to the front door. Erin’s pulse quickened, and her throat felt tight. She glanced round for possible escape routes, gauging how long it would take to run to the nearest neighbour, barely visible amongst the trees. Ridiculous to be afraid. What could possibly happen in broad
