“You’re a good person,” she whispered. “You’re a good person. You’re a good person. You’re a good person.”
The footsteps retreated from the cellar door. Maeve emerged from the stack of crates she’d used for cover, slicing her hand on an open pair of shears.
“Shit! Ow!”
She covered her mouth with her good hand and stared at the ceiling. The footsteps didn’t return. Quietly, she found the stack of old towels and wrapped one around the cut. Whoever was up there was not someone she wanted to meet. She turned back to the dark passage. Not wanting to be followed, she concealed the door behind her, then started down.
The stone floor and walls, illuminated by the old torch she’d found hanging on the wall, were supported by wooden beams that reminded her of the uni-sponsored trip to the Parisian catacombs, when she got separated from the group and was later found, crying of course, by a tour guide as her coach was about to leave. The memory didn’t help. Nor did the memory of Callum sitting next to her on the ride back to the hostel, giving her a warm croissant he’d bought for her while the group had waited for her to be found. In the catacombs, her only company had been the skulls lining the walls and the whispering she swore that she’d heard and confessed only to Callum.
The passage was short and ended in a set of stairs that led up to a door similar to the one in the cellar. A terrifying thought formed in her mind—what if she was still in the cellar after all? What if the door and passageway had been an illusion brought on by stress? Her panic worsened when she found the door locked. It was true. She’d lost it. A full-blown hallucination. Even her newfound strength was only an illusion. Then she remembered the key in her pocket, the one that had been in the door on the cellar’s end. She stopped hyperventilating and stuck the torch under her armpit. Then, with her uninjured hand, she fumbled the key into the lock. The door opened.
The room was an empty shell of a once grand ballroom. A row of boarded-up windows spotted the wall to her right while drop cloths lay on the floor, giving the impression the dancers’ bodies had disappeared, leaving piles of clothes behind. Her footsteps echoed to the high ceiling as she crossed the floor. She found another door to her left, but when she tried it, it was locked. Further down, she tugged at the boards covering one of the windows, but they were nailed tight. She reached the end and turned around, which was when her light caught a flash of white. When she’d first entered, she hadn’t looked behind her. Now she couldn’t look away.
From this distance, it was difficult to make out what she was seeing—something covering the back wall, like peeling wallpaper. As she stepped closer, she noticed images. They were pictures. Pictures tacked to the wall. At first she didn’t recognize what they were of. Another few steps, and they came into focus.
It was them. Pictures taken over twenty years ago: Hollis, Ellie, Oliver, Lorna, her. Some contained Callum. Others did not. And then she noticed other pictures. Ones from not so long ago. Pictures she recognized from her Facebook page and Ellie’s. Pictures of Hollis in his police uniform. And pictures that were not from online. Pictures that could only have been taken by someone on the street. Ellie walking out of Top Shop. Oliver smoking against the side of a pub. Hollis leaving a football pitch with a young woman who shared his stocky frame. Maeve kneeling in the park, talking to strangers’ dogs.
“Holy shit.”
On the floor below, what she had mistaken for another drop cloth was a sleeping bag. Alongside it, empty tins of food. A broken bottle of Drakkar Noir. That’s what she’d smelled from the cellar. Plus dirty clothes. And notebooks. Notebooks of all shapes and sizes scattered around the floor. She picked one up. A journalist-style Moleskine, mostly filled in small, blocky handwriting. Some of the words were in a shorthand she didn’t recognize and there were names, too—Landry, Catherine Marcus—that meant nothing to her. She dropped the notebook back onto the pile and chose another, spiral bound with lined paper. This was filled with a completely different but also unfamiliar handwriting, a slanted feminine script. The font was so narrow, she could only make out a word here and there. But two that leapt out at her began with big, looping C’s that appeared over and over.
Caldwell.
Callum.
Lorna
A bubble of blood escaped Caskie’s lips.
“Don’t . . . don’t do it. Juh-juh . . . en—”
His body slumped forward. Blood dripped onto his jeans. Lorna waited for his head to bounce upward. For one final gasp of life. For his breath to pierce the air. But it was over. He had choked on his final words.
Ellie stared at the corkscrew in her bloodstained fist. With her clean hand, she brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek, then placed the corkscrew on the bar. Exchanged it for a wineglass.
“Mind if I have a drink?”
Her hand shook, the red wine slopping up the sides of the glass. The rim trembled as she pressed it to her lower lip.
Lorna pictured herself flying at Ellie, knocking her to the ground, the glass shattering against the floor. But her brain had disconnected from her body. It shouted commands, but she remained as still as Caskie.
Ellie tipped the glass back as she finished the last of the wine. With a cocktail napkin, she dabbed the corners of her lips, ignoring the blood drying on her right hand.
“What. The. Fuck,” Oliver said.
Ellie twisted the napkin in her fingers.
“He knew my name.” She pinched her eyes shut, adding lines to her forehead that hadn’t existed twenty years prior.
“My maiden name. He knew the nickname ‘Hunt the—’ You know. And he knew the Caldwell Street address.”
“He didn’t say that. I don’t believe you.” The words floated from Lorna’s lips before she had the chance to stop them. Her body was rebooting, but not all the processes were working.
“He said he was trying to help. That he knew what happened at 215 Caldwell Street. About what happened to Callum. He mentioned Callum by name and said that was why he’d come. He’d been lying to us all along.”
“You killed him,” Lorna said.
“He was planning on killing us! Look. Look at his hand. He’d got one free, see? I turned my back to him when I couldn’t bear to listen to him anymore, and when I turned back around the ropes were coming undone and he was going to run at me, so I . . . I . . .” She waved her hand, then resumed tearing the cocktail napkin to pieces. “It was self-defense.”
“You can’t prove any of that!” Lorna said. “So his hand got loose? So what? There’s no sign that he was about to attack. Just your word for it. Fuck. Do you ever think at all? Someone’s been trying to prove we’re murderers, so what do you do? You murder someone!”
Lorna wrapped her arms tight around her chest, afraid she might fall apart. She needed to think, but she couldn’t. She needed to run away, but she couldn’t. She needed to cry, but she couldn’t. All she could do was stand there and try not to lose it until she could figure out what to do next, which she couldn’t do until she could think.
Oliver leaned on the bar, staring at the corkscrew. “Lorna’s right. Forget going to the police.”
“But it was self-defense.” The whine in Ellie’s voice made Lorna want to scream. Oliver did it for her.
“Shut up, Ellie! You stupid—Even if Lorna and I lied and said we saw everything you just described, and I mean everything, it’s too suspicious. And even if we untied him now and said he got completely free, they’d do all this forensic shit to prove he was tied up when he died. The long and the short of it is we tied a man to a chair and you stabbed him to death. And—here’s another even if—even if we could sell it, which is a fucking big if, they’d want to know more about what he was doing to us. Why we were so desperate to silence him. Too many questions I don’t want to answer. This isn’t like Callum. We can’t cover this one up.” Oliver paused and drummed his fingers on the bar. “I suppose, though, that there is an upside to all of this.”
“Please,” said Lorna.
“Share with the class.”
“Ellie got info. Caskie really was our mystery benefactor. No more Caskie means no more someone trying to kill us. We can take our time figuring out what to—”
Maeve burst through the study door.
“Someone’s been living in the closed wing!” She saw Caskie’s body. “Shit!”
“You’re alive?” Oliver asked. Lorna couldn’t tell if he was pleased or disappointed. She felt nothing. She hadn’t expected Maeve to be dead, so to her, Maeve’s return felt expected. They were all together again, the way it should be, but Lorna felt nothing.
“Of course I’m—Who the fuck is that?”
“What do you mean, someone’s been living in the closed wing?” Lorna asked. The words tasted like cardboard against her tongue. “Where have you been?”
Maeve couldn’t draw her eyes away from the body. “There’s a passage down there, in the cellar. To the other wing. The door opens onto a ballroom, or what looks like one. There’s not much furniture, but the walls are covered in pictures. Of us. And a sleeping bag. Old clothes. Tins of food. It’s pretty creepy to be honest. Is that . . . is that Mr. Caskie? Is he dead?”
Oliver rubbed his hands together. “That’s it then. Further proof, if you needed it, Lorna. Caskie hid in the other wing, waiting for the right moment to pop out and surprise us. I bet there are other passages like the one Maeve found. Servant’s entrances. Old houses are full of shit like that.”
“If it was him living there, he wasn’t alone,” Maeve said.
“Give us a break, love! I thought even you could put two and two together and get four. Let us have a win.”
“Yeah, well, here’s some math for you, Oliver. If Mr. Caskie was the one living in that ballroom, then tell me what he needed a bra and a box of tampons for.”
Normally Lorna loved seeing Oliver taken down a few pegs, his confidence draining away, the slouch in his shoulders showing he was beaten. But she couldn’t muster any schadenfreude as her own world tilted beneath her feet. She gripped the bar counter to keep herself steady.
“You’re lying,” said Oliver.
“Go see for yourself.”
“Why would she lie?” Lorna asked.
Ellie laughed, and the others stared. It was high and nervous, like someone embarrassed at being scared. “How stupid are we?”
Lorna couldn’t tell if she was somehow referring to Maeve or to something else, but Ellie wasn’t looking at Maeve as she lowered herself to a barstool, holding a freshly filled glass with both hands.
“I can’t remember her name. What was her name?”
“Ellie?” Oliver asked.
“The pregnancy test wasn’t mine.”
Lorna didn’t understand what she was talking about, and neither, it appeared, did Oliver. But Maeve grimaced.
“And I know it wasn’t yours,” Ellie admitted, looking at Maeve. “You’ve waited two decades for me to say it, so there it is. It wasn’t yours. But I swear it wasn’t mine.”
“What pregnancy test?” Oliver asked.
“The box Lorna found in the bathroom bin,” Maeve said. “The night of the snowstorm.”
“We are such idiots,” Ellie said. “We forgot about her. I don’t remember her name. Can’t even picture her face. But I remember thinking she was too pretty for him. Sometimes I’d see her coming in and out of the house. Don’t you remember? Callum’s girlfriend.”
Lorna watched Oliver and Maeve’s reactions, wondered what her own face showed, while in her head she looked at Caskie’s body and did some math.
“Shit. I remember. I would hear them arguing,” Oliver said. “Even though they didn’t shout, the sound would travel across the hall into my room.”
“I did, too,” Lorna chimed in. “From my side of the wall.”
“Terrible insulation, Caldwell Street.” Ellie sipped her wine. “Maeve, don’t cry. We all forgot things about those days.”
Maeve wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “It’s not that I forgot. I really never knew.”
“So,” Oliver said, his brain ticking slower than the rest. “Callum had a girlfriend. She’s the one who used the pregnancy test and . . .” He looked at Caskie’s body. As Lorna had already done, he now did the math on Caskie’s age. “Fuck. Oh, fuck me!”
“We were wondering what Caskie’s motive was,” Ellie said.
“They . . .” Maeve stammered. “They have the same hair.”
Oliver kept cursing. “Some crazy bitch went to all this trouble because she thinks we killed Callum, and Ellie’s gone and gutted her son?” He threw a barstool across the room. No one flinched. “We’re so fucking dead!”
“Unless we get out of here,” Ellie said.
“You want to run?” Maeve asked.
“As fast as I can. We can figure out the rest later. But first we have to get out of this house. Get to the quay. Caskie said he left a boat there. Even if that was a lie and we have to wait a day for a ferry, we’ll have the water at our backs and a clear view of the land in front. She can’t sneak up on us. Out there in the open, four against one, those are chances I’d take. Oliver’s right. If we stay here another night, we’re dead. No matter who killed Callum, she’ll hold us all responsible for this. I checked him already, and he didn’t have the keys on him. Maeve, did you see a way out through the other wing?”
Maeve was chewing so hard on a hangnail, Lorna thought she might tear her whole thumb off. She took her finger from her mouth and wiped it on her jeans.
“No. I don’t know. It was dark. There are windows, but they’re boarded up. There might be other rooms we can get into. I didn’t search the whole place. Like I said, it was creepy.”
“Right, then.” Oliver took the glass from Ellie’s hands and placed it on the bar. “No time like the present. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Ellie followed him to the door, while Maeve and Lorna lagged behind.
“We’re just going to leave him here?” Lorna asked.
“You want to stay here alone and keep him company, be my guest. Come on, Ellie. Maeve, show us the way.”
Oliver and Ellie left the study. Lorna spared James Caskie another glance, then followed. At the doorway, out of the others’ earshot, Maeve tugged on her sleeve.
“Lorna . . .”
But she shrugged Maeve off and kept walking without looking back. The only way out of here now was to keep moving forward.
Ellie
It had all started innocently enough, of course. A glance at one another during an Avon party she was hosting at Bethany Stone’s house. He was the only man there, meant to be watching the children while Ellie hosted and Bethany and the other women played little parlor games and oohed and aahed at the free samples. But the children kept screaming in the back garden, disrupting Ellie’s concentration. None of the women acknowledged the flaws in her performance, but she knew they noticed. As soon as she packed up her kits and drove off without a sale, her awkwardness would become the hot topic of conversation among Bethany and her friends, and Ellie would be back to spending hours at home, staring at the walls, pretending to care about linen selections while David worked fourteen-hour days.
She had left the women smelling samples of next spring’s fragrance line and excused herself to the kitchen, where she helped herself to a glass of water. Outdoors, the children—seven or eight of them—wrestled on the ground, pulling each other’s hair, a football forgotten by the fence.
He stood inside the garden doors, looking out at them with the same exhaustion she felt inside. He noticed her then, smiled and shrugged. The women in the front room burst into a laughter that pierced Ellie’s ears. She winced, and he saw it. So she smiled and shrugged. To her amazement, he’d laughed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d made David laugh, and suddenly she didn’t feel as tired and distracted as before. She returned to the party with renewed vigor and pulled out her biggest sales of the year. Bethany, who received a commission for hosting, was well pleased and held her
back after the other women and their children had left. The man, whom she had assumed belonged to one of those other women, remained. Bethany introduced them as she prepared some tea.
“Ellie, dear, have you met my brother, Gordon?”
He was tall and muscular, with thick, dark hair, white teeth all in a row like a Hollywood movie star. And nothing like David at all.
Gordon texted her two days later. He’d swiped her number from Bethany, he said, and wanted to meet her for a drink somewhere, and soon. Ellie, a good girl, immediately replied that she was flattered but also that she was married. His response had been simple: I know. That should have been enough of a warning, but Ellie had never learned to heed warnings. Sex followed quickly—the first time a hurried affair in the back of her car. Then later his flat, a hotel, even Bethany’s house when she and the family were away in Majorca, on the same table where she’d so carefully presented samples of hand lotion and perfume.
But as quickly as it had begun, it turned sour. As with many things in her life, Ellie got bored. She thought she could cast him off as fast as she’d led him on, but the text messages continued. She didn’t respond. Then came the phone calls. Then showing up on her doorstep. David had chased him away with a broom handle. After failing to convince David that the handsome young man had been some religious fanatic, Ellie crumbled under the weight of this new lie and promised to break it off. Promised she’d never do anything like that again. David promised to be a better husband, more loving, more attentive. And he was. But then Jilly was born several months later, and Gordon came back to her life. Whenever David slipped in his attentions, Gordon was there to entertain her. Sometimes it was only for a single day. One day spread out over years. Sometimes it lasted a week. A month. But she always broke it off again and she never told David.
After fourteen years, Gordon had become as familiar as an old handbag. One of sentimental value. Worth almost nothing but well-worn. Comfortable. A staple of her wardrobe that she liked to drag out of the closet now and then. Remember how it felt. The years had put lines on his face and gray in his hair. Made him unattractive to others. Kept him hers. How many times had she sat with him in that bustling Costa on the Kings Road, surrounded by mums with prams and students with laptops, each too engulfed with themselves to notice this strange couple always teetering on the edge? He was her junior, but it was she who enjoyed these childish games, played with him as she had with her toys when she was a girl. Picking them apart and piecing them back together so that they were never quite the same. Never letting anyone else touch them.
They Did Bad Things Page 19
