A Dark and Secret Place

truth—it was an old Polaroid photograph, very much like the two she had found in the abandoned caravan. The photo showed a typical scene between two lovers—a man and a woman on a beach, the sea a burnished strip of blue behind them, the man with his arm draped possessively around the woman’s narrow shoulders. They were both wearing coats and hats, their cheeks pink with the cold. The woman’s face was coyly turned inward, nuzzling a little at the man’s broad chest, and her left hand was tucked snugly between the man’s knees. She was grinning, her eyes shining. She looked very young. There was no question that these two people were a couple, and it was almost charming in its simplicity—a couple on a beach, enjoying themselves, very much in love.

Except that the man was a notorious serial killer, and the woman was her mum.

Heather snatched the photo off the pillow. Her breathing sounded too loud, whistling in and out like a kettle boiling. She shook the photo and pressed her fingers to the shiny surface in the strange and slightly desperate hope that it would prove to be a fake—something crafted in photoshop and printed on fancy paper. But she’d handled enough photos in the newspaper’s archive to know what it was. It was real. A real photograph of Michael Reave and Colleen Evans, cozied up with their arms around each other. Her mother even had on the same thick winter coat she had been wearing in Pamela’s photo.

She turned it over. On the back were two scraps of writing, each written in a different hand with a different color pen. The first one, written in black ballpoint pen, said:

Fresh air!! March 27th, 1983

The second, in red ink and a familiar, blocky font, read:

I know what you are, and I think you do too.

For long, elastic minutes, Heather couldn’t do anything at all. She stood with the Polaroid clutched between her fingers. She couldn’t stop looking at the date.

March the 27^th, in 1983. Heather’s birthday was in October of that year.

No.

If the date was correct, then her mother was already pregnant in this picture. Had been pregnant for maybe six or seven weeks.

No.

Reluctantly, she turned the photo over and looked again at her mother, this girl-child image that she had never seen before. There was no way of telling, with the big coat covering her lap, but then some women didn’t show until fairly late in their pregnancy, especially when it was their first child. And hadn’t her mum and dad gotten married when she was a toddler? Why had she never questioned that? They had always told her they had known each other since school, that they had started dating when Colleen was nineteen, but that had to have been a lie. An image of her dad floated into her mind, his round, easily flushed face, the strawberry blond hair that edged into straight-up ginger near his ears, or when he grew a beard.

I look nothing like him. I never did.

“No.”

She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until she heard Nikki call out from the living room.

“Hev? Are you ever getting that bottle or what?”

Reluctantly, her eyes were drawn back to the picture of Michael Reave. He was young here, even handsome, his face as yet free of the lines that would be etched there by his time in prison. She couldn’t help noticing his dark hair, the particular shape of his cheekbones, the line of his nose.

“Hev?”

Nikki’s voice was closer, as though she was standing in the little hall that led to the bedroom.

“Coming, sorry, just got distracted!”

She looked around the room, but nothing else seemed out of place. The window was shut and locked, as she’d left it, and the little dressing table was littered with the usual junk she took out of her pockets every night—receipts, loose change, sweet wrappers. Everything was normal, except …

She turned back to the bed, a cold hand walking down her back. The bed was made, the covers pulled up neatly to the pillow, which was itself straight and freshly plumped up. The only time Heather ever made the bed was just before she got into it herself, and then it was really only a case of tucking in the under sheet again, or retrieving a pillow. Whoever had left the photo had also made her bed.

For a horrible, suffocating second she thought she was going to laugh. And then she heard Nikki’s footsteps going back to the kitchen and the compulsion passed. Instead, she slipped the photo into her pocket, snatched up the bottle of wine, and closed the door firmly behind her.

 CHAPTER39

BEFORE

HE REMEMBERED WHERE each of them was so clearly that often he felt like he could almost see them. Women sitting on the edge of the stream with their feet in the water, or women up in the trees, their souls taken up in the roots and spreading through the leaves. He could almost hear them sighing as he walked through the woods, and the gentle thrum of their hearts was ever present. Their bodies were far away, arranged with precision and care in distant green places, but they were here really, with him, in Fiddler’s Wood. They all wore red coats.

It was raining on the day he lost Colleen, and although it was only around six in the evening the woods were rushing eagerly toward darkness. Michael moved through the shadows contentedly, listening to the graves and the patter of raindrops against leaves and mud, when he heard a sudden, piercing scream. He stopped and held himself very still, the hair raising on the backs of his arms. Screaming held no terrors for him—how could it?—And he was by now used to the noise generated by the commune, but this was a noise out of place, a noise that shouldn’t have been there. A few seconds passed, and there was another scream, somehow more desperate and then abruptly cut off.

He left the woods, stepping into