by Teri Terry
But for some reason, I don’t want to leave anymore—at least, not right now. I sigh. Is keeping this bracelet from Piper part of the darkness inside me that Gran was always warning me to guard against?
Somehow, I don’t think so. This bracelet was meant to be around my wrist. Our dad gave it to me, as Isobel’s daughter. I am Isobel’s daughter.
As thin and as crazy as these justifications may be, I’m keeping it.
Late that night, I’m pulled from sleep. A whisper of a dream lingers on—of running, searching, drawn by a deep hunger for something, but I don’t know what. It’s somehow important to know what it is, but as I reach for the traces of the dream, they slip away.
This bed is too comfy, the blankets too soft, and I’m disoriented, confused. Then memory rushes back: Piper and Zak. I’m at Zak’s.
There’s a sound; and again. Is that what woke me? At my door—like something scratching. It must be the puppy, Ness. What else could it be?
My heart beats faster; I pull the covers up. Scratch-scratch again at the door. I’ll never sleep now, unless I open the door and see what is on the other side.
Somehow I prod myself to get up, to walk across the room to the door. Now there is a faint whining sound; she must hear my approach. It is definitely Ness.
Should I ignore her and go back to bed? But then I remember the sad eyes she gave me when I wouldn’t go near her.
I know how crazy I look to Zak and Piper, being afraid of a puppy. I know it doesn’t make any sense, that it’s some strange reaction I don’t understand. We never had a dog; I’ve never been around dogs, other than very occasional chance encounters where I got away as fast as I could. So where does this fear come from?
The Hounds of the Wild Hunt: an involuntary whisper inside. They hunt the moors for the unbaptized, the unwary—murder them and carry them to hell. To hear them is a sign of disaster and death; to see them is worse.
I shake my head. Those are just fables, stories, and nightmares. Nonsense.
That’s what I tell myself, but uneasy certainty inside says it isn’t nonsense—not to Gran, not to me. But even if it isn’t, I’m sure there is nothing supernatural or frightening about Ness.
And here is my chance to try to make friends—without witnesses.
She whines again.
She was really quite sweet, wasn’t she? What was it Zak said? The only thing she might do is lick your face. She’s not a full-grown dog; she’s a puppy—like a small child—and she doesn’t understand why I don’t love her. I sigh. I can relate to that one.
I can do this. I take a deep breath, and open the door.
Ness is lying down now, her head between her paws. Her tail thumps and she lifts her head. But as if she knows not to scare me, she doesn’t jump up.
I ease myself down onto the floor, not right next to her, but at a little distance. My heart is thudding like a wild thing; I’m breathing in, out, in, out.
She looks up at me with soft eyes, tail still thumping.
She’s a sweet little puppy, not a huge scary guard dog like the ones that killed Isobel.
Ness was there, though, when it happened—when Isobel was attacked. How did she get away? How could this puppy with short puppy legs possibly have got away from big, mean guard dogs? Unless they weren’t hunting for her, but only for Isobel. Goose bumps run up and down my back.
I reach out a hand. It’s shaking. I pet Ness lightly on the top of her head. Her fur is soft, softer than that huge mongrel cat that sometimes deigns to visit at Gran’s. Her tail thumps harder. She suddenly launches herself at me, and I almost cry out but manage to bite it back. She licks my face—an eager, warm, wet tongue and cold nose and soft fur against my cheek—and settles against me. My arms go around her; an automatic, natural thing.
Well. I guess that wasn’t so bad.
A door creaks open across the hall. Zak stands there in boxers and a T-shirt, eyes half open, dark hair mussed—gorgeous and unreal, like a wish summoned from a late night dream.
He smiles sleepily. “I thought I heard something, but it looks like things are good here. Good night, Quinn.”
Piper
I run and run. I’m alone, but I shouldn’t be. There are others who would join me.
But there is something I must find, something important. I don’t know what it is. I hunger, but I don’t know what I’m searching for.
I run through the night, past exhaustion, past will. Always running—toward something, and away from something else.
Something I don’t want to know . . .
I wake up in tangled, sweaty sheets, caught between fear and anger. Despite the hours of sleep, I feel awful, as if some part of me really has been running all night.
Downstairs, Dad takes one look at me and says nothing about school.
I shake off the dream and bide my time, until at last he’s gone.
There is this desperate hunger inside me, like in my dream. Something is missing from my life. I can’t move on until I find it, but I don’t know what it is.
Mum wouldn’t help me. I was hoping that Quinn would, but she is so touchy if I ever try to ask her anything. If she isn’t going to give up her secrets easily, I’ll try another way.
There has to be something, some clue, in this house. If I can find out where Mum came from, will that lead me to an answer?
I’d tried searching when Mum was alive. Her careful eyes watched me all the time. But she’s not here now.
The most likely place to start has to be her study and dressing room. She spent a lot of time in there on her own.
I stand in the doorway, caught by memory. There, on the chaise longue—Mum read to me.
She loved books, loved to read to me, the two of us cuddled together. Things were different then, when I was little—before I knew she had secrets.
I start on the bookshelves, and look inside every book, riffle through the pages, look under the dust jackets, then every shelf and drawer.
In the back of one drawer is her smartphone. I turn it on and go through her calendar, for months and months back, but there is nothing out of the ordinary. But she’d hardly have an entry like Tuesday, 3 p.m., visit secret daughter, would she? I turn it off, put it back in the drawer, and continue to hunt. I even peer under the chaise longue and unzip its cushions to look inside. But I find nothing.
Then I go into her adjoining dressing room. I feel along every shelf, inside every hat and shoe, every pocket. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but there has to be some clue to where Mum came from.
Her dressing table next. I feel along under the drawers, in them—even go through her makeup box. Then her jewelry box: I pull out every little drawer, examine them all. Nothing. Though one drawer is empty—that’s odd. I frown and try to think what’s missing, then dismiss it. Focus on the task at hand, Piper.
Mum and Dad’s bedroom seems less likely, but I go there next, sticking to her stuff. Everything is still in place, as she left it. The aunts suggested to Dad that they could help go through everything to see what to keep, what to give to charity. I put them off so I could have a look through it all on my own first.
Once again, I come up empty. I sit on her side of the bed to think. What else?
Wait. A marriage certificate! If I can find their marriage certificate, won’t it say where the bride and groom are from? Someone in history class brought their grandparents’ one in when they were doing a family history exercise, and I remember laughing that it had her grandmother’s “condition” on it as spinster. I’m sure it had addresses on it for the bride and groom, too.
Where would it be? Dad’s study. He’s a lawyer through and through—the king of filing. He has everything in alphabetical order in massive filing cabinets.
I race to the wooden cabinets in his study. I pull open the M drawer, and rifle through—no marriage certificate. It’s not there. What else? C for certificate? W for wedding? Everything I try comes up
blank.
Where did they get married? Maybe it is filed under the name of the church or something. I frown. I can’t remember. Isn’t that something I should know about my parents? Isn’t that the kind of thing parents do—reminisce about their wedding?
Dad once started to tell me about when they met. I concentrate, trying to remember what he said. It was something about being on holiday, but I don’t know where. Mum gave him a look when he started talking about it, and he clammed up. I tried him later when she wasn’t listening, but he changed the subject: she must have warned him off.
How about her credit card bills? I find the file for her card and flick through the bills from the last year. No petrol or restaurant receipts from anywhere outside of Winchester. But there wouldn’t be, would there? Dad would have seen it on the bill and asked where she’d been. She was more careful than that.
I flop into Dad’s giant desk chair, defeated. These cabinets are huge. I could go through them from beginning to end, but it’d take me weeks. I’ve been at this so long now that Dad could be home soon; I need to clear out of here.
I start to idly flick through the in-tray on his desk. It’s mostly bills: phone bill, credit cards, funeral bills. Mum’s death certificate. And—
Wait. What does that say? I pull her death certificate out of the tray. Rub my eyes, and look again.
Excitement courses through me. Maybe I’ve been wasting time looking for a marriage certificate that changed my parents into Mr. and Mrs. Hughes.
The name on her death certificate isn’t Isobel Hughes. It is Isobel Blackwood.
Quinn
Beep-beep.
Zak takes his head out of the fridge, where he was assessing options for dinner, retrieves his phone from the counter, and checks the screen.
“Ah. Piper says she needs to spend some time with her dad, so she’s making him dinner. Poor man. She says I should keep an eye on you.” He laughs. “What should we do with ourselves?”
“I don’t know. But I haven’t seen much of Winchester. Are we allowed out of the house?” I raise an eyebrow in challenge.
He stares at his phone again, then assumes a fair imitation of Piper: “Under no circumstances are you to leave the house.” He looks up, and grins. “Just kidding! They’ll be at home, so no chance of us all bumping into each other. Let’s go out. We can have an early dinner at my work before my shift begins.” He hesitates. “Unless you want to put on a big hat and dark glasses, people will think you’re Piper. I can handle things if anyone gets too close. Are you up for it?”
“Sure, why not?” I managed to get away with being Piper with her dad, the one who surely knows her best. I’m ready to try it with the people of Winchester.
I go up to get ready, find a shirt of Piper’s with long sleeves, and shimmy the bracelet back down my arm to my wrist. It was uncomfortable up there, but I didn’t dare have it on my wrist when Piper could walk in at any moment. If Zak spots it, he may or may not recognize it; I don’t know how much time he spent around Isobel. But with him I’m prepared to take the risk.
When I come down, Zak is waiting in the kitchen. “We really should take Ness with us. Unless I dreamt the two of you making friends last night, that should be OK with you?”
“No problem.”
He whistles her in from the garden, clips a short lead onto her collar.
I pause at the door. Pretty as they are, I’ve had enough of Piper’s shoes. They pinch. I put my own boots back on, and we head out.
Zak has a long stride, but I’m used to walking, and walking fast. It was miles to anywhere from Gran’s house, over rough footpaths, hills, tors.
Here it is all even, smooth roads, pavements, lovely houses and gardens. How many people there must be to live in all these houses! It’s a completely different world, and my eyes drink it in.
Ness pulls at the lead, dragging Zak along, wanting to go faster and faster, then stopping dead to sniff something, before bounding on again.
I pause to get a pebble out of my boot, and Ness runs back around me. I jump, the fear reaction automatic, but I quell it. She noses into my leg to make me keep going, and Zak laughs.
“Border collies are working dogs; they herd sheep. In the absence of sheep, they herd people.”
“Haven’t noticed any sheep around your place or Piper’s.”
“No. I did warn her that Ness would need a lot of exercise, but Piper had her heart set on Ness once she laid eyes on her—love at first sight.”
“Was it like that with you and Piper?”
“Kind of. Sounds lame, but the first time we met, she just looked at me—and she said that we knew each other. Even though I’m sure we’d never met before. And just like that, it was like something inside me recognized her. Like I was tuned in to her.”
“Yeah, pretty lame,” I say out loud, but inside, I wonder. Does it really work like that? She just spoke to him, and he knew? We look exactly the same. If he’d met me first, would the same thing have happened?
I shake my head. That is one question that will never be answered.
Piper
When I finally hear Dad’s car pull in, it’s late—much later than he said it would be.
The front door opens. There’s a pause, then footsteps head this way as Dad follows the lights to the dining room. He stands in the doorway, sees the table set and me sitting there, head in hands.
“Oh, Piper. Did you make dinner?”
I nod, and look down through my lashes. “I just thought we should try to, you know, do the family thing on our own, but . . .” I shrug my shoulders as my words trail away.
He puts his briefcase down, walks over, and pulls me from my chair, gathers me in for a hug, and kisses my cheek. “Sorry I’m late, Petal. First day back; things were a mess.”
“It’s OK.”
“No. It isn’t.” He starts telling me how he’ll make an effort to get out of work at a reasonable time, that I’m important, all the kind of stuff I’ve heard him say to Mum a million times, but then as if he hears the echo too, he stops and smiles wryly. “Well, I’ll do my best, anyhow.”
I smile back at him. “Fair enough. I’ll go and see if dinner has survived.”
He follows me into the kitchen. I lift the lid on the stir-fry pan—I’ve left it on low for way too long—and pull a face at the dried-out remains.
Dad looks over my shoulder. “We can still eat that. Looks yummy!” He grins.
“Cut the keep-calm-and-carry-on impression. No, we can’t. It’s tragic. Even Ness wouldn’t eat it if she were here.”
“Want to head out?” he asks, but I shake my head. “Or order pizza?”
I give him a real smile. “Yes, pizza! Let’s do that. Why don’t you go and change, and I’ll order it.” I hesitate. “Should I get the usual?”
He pauses. So many years of family-negotiated toppings—of avoiding anything one of us didn’t like. But one of us isn’t here anymore. He says finally, “You know, I don’t think I could eat a pizza with onions on it. It wouldn’t feel right.”
“Me neither. Usual it is.”
Once he’s up the stairs, I shut the door and dial the pizza place we use—the one where a friend from English class answers the phone after school, the one that is never speedy at the best of times. I place the order, then ask her to sit on it for an hour. This may take a while.
When he comes back downstairs, the red wine and photo albums are open. “Do you remember this one, Piper?” Dad points at a photo of me on the bicycle I got for my sixth birthday, beaming from ear to ear. “You’d just pedaled the whole length of the drive for the first time.”
“Of course I do. I think you took it just before I fell off and broke my arm.”
He turns the page, and there is me with a cast on my arm, and a quivery lower lip. Last page of the album. I close it, and pick up another.
“Your mother was so annoyed at me that I wasn’t running alongside to catch you.” He shakes his head. “O
ne minute you were laughing and flying down the drive, the next it was like something had tripped you and thrown you in the air. I couldn’t work out how it happened. I should have been nearer. I should have caught you.”
“But I wouldn’t let you help me, would I?”
“No. You were just as stubborn then as you are now.”
I pick up another album and scan through until I catch a shot of me in bed, as pale as the sheets around me. I shut the album quickly. I’d had the worst flu in history. It seemed to come from nowhere: one moment I was fine, and the next . . . well. I’m sure I nearly died. I missed weeks of school, back when I used to like going. And thinking of the hallucinations that came with the fever can still make me shiver, even now.
“Dad, is there another album of you and Mum from before I was around? There don’t seem to be any pictures of just you two from way back when.”
He starts stacking the albums together. “Enough photos for today. I’m starving—where is that pizza? I’ll go and call them again.” He starts to get up.
“No, leave it. You know they’re slow. Dad, where’s your wedding album? I’ve been through all of them. I can’t find it.”
“We don’t have one.”
“Why not? Doesn’t everybody want memories of the day they marry the love of their life?”
He shifts in his seat, pours more wine into his glass. “Well, yes, I suppose, but . . . er . . .”
“I’m starting to think you and Mum were never married.”
He looks back at me, and confirmation is there, in his eyes.
Despite my suspicions, I’m shocked. “You weren’t, were you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Isn’t that the sort of thing I have a right to know about my own parents? How could you keep that from me?”
“That was how Isobel wanted it. Your mother had her ideas. You know what she was like.”
