“Just … just before the Christmas holidays. Last Christmas. So, around fourteen months ago, I suppose.”
Ward looks irritated. He is writing everything down. “So, Maeve, are you saying that you have no relevant information about Lily from the last year? Did she have any … any chat rooms she visited? Any special friends?”
Griffin cocks an eyebrow at him. “I’m not sure if ‘chat rooms’ are quite the thing any more, Ward. And anyway, this is relevant. Tell me more about this tarot reading, Maeve. Is there anything else that happened?”
I bite my lip. “Yes. A card came up. One that didn’t belong to the rest of the pack.”
“Can you show me? Do you have your cards now?”
I dig them out of my school bag, sitting on the floor next to me. I flip them over so they’re face up.
“See, all these cards, they each have a place. They belong to a suit or a pattern. But this one card, it came up only for Lily. It was this scary-looking woman called the Housekeeper. She was all on her own.”
“What does the Housekeeper mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s why Lily got freaked out. She believes in this stuff. More than most people. More than me. When I told her I didn’t know the card, she got scared. I was scared, too, because I thought I had taken the Housekeeper out of the deck.”
“Can you show me the Housekeeper now?”
“That’s the thing,” I say, biting my lip. “I don’t know where it’s gone.”
There’s a quaver in my voice, as if I’m afraid the card is going to walk through the door.
“So you were frightened, and that made Lily frightened,” Griffin says. “Her brother mentioned that she was quite susceptible to that kind of thing.”
My heart jumps at the word “brother” again. Roe. I have been so upset at the thought of Lily in danger I had completely forgotten about Roe, and how he must feel about all of this.
“Yeah. I was always kind of … the leader, I suppose,” I say lamely. “Lily always feels what I feel.”
“So this is why you were so jumpy all weekend,” Jo says. “You were feeling bad about Lily.”
I nod.
“That’s why all those girls were chanting ‘witch’,” reasons Griffin.
Another nod.
“There’s something else,” I say, and I can feel the three adults physically lean towards me, wanting to catch my words as though I were spitting tickets like an arcade game. My eyes flicker to Jo, hoping that she will protect me when I tell the final piece of information, the thing that will reveal just what a cruel and terrible friend I really am.
“Me and Lily had sort of … an argument on Friday. She said some mean stuff to me, and then I said some stuff to her.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“She said … she said she didn’t know why we were ever friends, and I said I wished we never had been.”
A thick, porridge-y lump forms in my throat. “And then I said that I wished she would just disappear.”
Griffin, Ward and Joanne all look at each other, wide-eyed.
“And now she has disappeared,” I say, my eyes filling up again. “Lily’s missing and it’s all my fault.”
Jo puts her arm around me.
“Mae,” she says affectionately. “It sounds like you’ve freaked yourself out over some spooky nonsense. It’s OK. It’s not your fault. Whatever has happened with Lily, it’s not as if you were bullying her, or preying on her in some weird way. You were every bit as freaked out as she was. I remember a sleepover where they played with a Ouija board and Maeve rang Mum to bring her home.”
At this last bit she smiles at Griffin and Ward, in a sort of “girls will be girls” way.
“Listen to your sister, Maeve. There’s no point beating yourself up about this. The way to help Lily is to tell us everything you know about your best friend. Anything could be helpful.”
My best friend. Present tense. Who treats their best friend like this?
I talk, and they write. They ask endless questions about Lily, none of them specific. They sound like they’ve been taken from The Big Book of Teenage Problems.
“Did Lily ever have any problems with bullying? Catty behaviour among the other girls?” Griffin asks. “Was she concerned about body issues? Drink or drugs?”
Drink and drugs: that’s easy. No way. Once, we decided to drink a bottle of vodka, neat, while on her trampoline. Just to see what happened. We got about a third into the bottle before Lil vomited down the side and vowed never to drink again.
Body issues: maybe. It doesn’t feel likely, though. The summer we were twelve Lily shot up five inches. She went from being a kind of monkey-faced kid to a somewhat gawky teen, the tallest girl in our year by a good inch or two. It never seemed to bother her. She has that vaguely alien look you see on certain Russian fashion models, the ones that aren’t necessarily pretty but seem to be picked for photograph shoots that require disjointed positions wearing sack dresses.
Bullying: well, that’s a little more complex. The girls at St Bernadette’s could be bitches, sure, and even the kids at primary school were cruel. There were weird prying questions about her hearing aid on good days and outright insults on bad days. Here’s the thing about Lily, though – she genuinely doesn’t care. People say that all the time, but for her, it’s true. Whenever anyone was mean to us for being in the slow-learning class, she would just roll her eyes. “Don’t worry about that, Maeve. It’s just noise.”
Because, for her, it was. Lily is an expert lip-reader, entirely self-taught from birth, so no one caught on about her hearing issue until relatively late. She learned to listen for the right sounds by tuning the wrong sounds out, and it had a permanent effect on her personality. If someone’s saying something she
