They Did Bad Things

by Lauren A. Forry

  “No, Gordon.”

  “But we—”

  “No, I don’t think it’s appropriate that ‘we’—you meant you, of course—see other people. You pursued me all those years ago, if you’ll recall, knowing I was married.” She leaned in and whispered the word. “You wanted me. You have me. You should’ve thought of the long-term consequences if this wasn’t what you wanted.”

  “I want something stable. Consistent. A relationship I can discuss openly. Not hide in the shadows.”

  “Lower your voice, darling. People might stare. Look, I can see you’re upset. Why don’t you take a deep breath and go fetch us some more coffees? And one of those pastries I like. The millionaire shortbread. Then, when you get back, we can continue to discuss this like rational adults.” Her smile was like the snap of her fingers. He went from the table, and her eyes traced the familiar slouched lines of his figure.

  The chime of her phone pulled her gaze away, which was when she first saw the message from the blocked number.

  Would be a shame if your husband found out.

  Ellie looked around the café, spotted Gordon in the queue but no sign of who texted her.

  Keeping Gordon around after all this time.

  And then came the picture. Her and Gordon in her car. The new car David had bought her last week.

  Gordon remained in the queue, speaking to the barista. Her hands shook as she typed a reply. She took the time to go back and correct her mistakes.

  What do you want?

  She waited. The caffeine made her edgy. Her bouncing knee banged the underside of the table. Money, favors. What could she offer to keep this from getting out? Even her daughter’s hand in marriage wasn’t off the table at this point. But the words that popped up on the screen were the last she’d expected. She gripped the phone with two hands to be sure she was reading it right.

  Caldwell Street.

  Callum.

  Wait for the email, princess.

  A millionaire shortbread appeared on a plate. Gordon said something to her, but all she could see was her phone. Somehow, she had made it to her car before screaming.

  How could a little decision she made years ago lead her here? If she had chosen to cut Gordon free when she was supposed to, would she even be here inside Wolfheather House now?

  As they walked down the passage, Ellie pressed her hand against her thigh to keep it from shaking. It was adrenaline, she knew that, coursing through her body. The adrenaline from taking care of young Mr. Caskie. It had been the right choice. She knew that. He couldn’t be allowed to get away from them. Not with what he said. Not with what he knew. She wished, though, that the adrenaline would hurry up and leave. It was the same way she reacted after a fight with David or after she smacked one of the children. This heat would linger inside her until she could go for a run or take a bubble bath or lock herself in the walk-in closet and scream until she ran out of breath.

  Those options weren’t on the table as she followed Oliver and Maeve up the steps at the end of the dark passage. She would have to hold it all in, hope her hand would stop shaking on its own.

  Oliver and Maeve paused at the top of the short flight of steps. Lorna, unaware, bumped into the back of Ellie, mumbled something that might have been an apology. Ellie’s glower went unacknowledged.

  Oliver pushed the door open.

  Peeling paint that might’ve been green but took on a bluish hue in the light from their phones covered the walls, except for places where door-frames had been bricked up long ago, the mortar chipped and gray. The windows at the front had been boarded up, like Maeve said, and those boards were covered—plastered—in photographs. Photos from their Caldwell Street days. Ones from earlier that year. Ellie even saw her decades-old engagement photo. She dug the nails of her shaking hand into her thigh.

  “This is some serial killer shit, this is,” Oliver said, startling her. He’d stuck close to her in the passage and remained close to her side now. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. Like he was trying to see inside her head. Like he no longer completely trusted her.

  “Yes. It’s disturbing,” she said, stepping away from him. He followed.

  “There are some doors down here that aren’t boarded up,” Lorna said, making her way down the length of the ballroom.

  Ellie’s gaze focused on one picture. Oliver moved the light away.

  “Hang on.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled it back to that spot. “I recognize this picture.”

  “I recognize a whole fucking lot of them.”

  “No, not like that.” She plucked it from the wall. The pin that had held it in place skittered to the floor. An adult couple in their forties, in a picture taken very much in the eighties, smiled in front of Wolfheather House.

  “Why do they look familiar?” Oliver asked.

  “Because Callum kept this picture stuck on the wall above his desk. I remember warning him that if he used Blu Tack it would ruin the walls and he might not get his security deposit back. Oliver, these are Callum’s parents. Do you remember how he used to say he was from Inverness but that his family didn’t live there anymore? That his dad had bought a place farther out?”

  “You think this is Callum’s house?”

  “Leave me alone, Maeve!” Lorna’s voice echoed to the back of the ball-room. Lorna waved her mobile. “Check over there for a way out.”

  “All right! I’m sorry.” Maeve crossed to the other side of the room.

  “We need to get out of here. Fast,” Oliver whispered to Ellie. “Find anything, girls?” he called out.

  As he moved down the other end of the ballroom, Ellie tried to return the photo to the wall but couldn’t find the tack. It seemed important, somehow, to return the picture where she found it, like she had further upset some balance by removing it. That this was somehow a more grievous error then the death of the man in the study. She knelt on the floor and rifled through the rubbish and belongings there, searching for the tack, until her hands fell upon a stack of notebooks.

  One stood out from the rest, squarer and fatter with a cloth cover. Some daylight peeked through the boarded windows and she tilted the notebook to get a better look. The Cahill logo emblazoned the front, along with a familiar name written in fat permanent marker across the top: Eleanor Hunt. Inside, some of the ink was smudged and water damage warped the pages, but she recognized her own handwriting. Certain pages were marked with little tabs. The dates were printed neatly in the upper right-hand corner: 14 September 1994, 2 December 1994, 6 May 1995. She snapped the diary shut.

  She was stuffing it down the back of her waistband, underneath her jumper, when Lorna called out.

  “Hey guys. I think I found—”

  A door slammed, cutting her off.

  “Lorna?”

  “Lorna!”

  Ellie ran down the ballroom to where Oliver and Maeve were tugging on the door that must have shut on Lorna.

  “Lorna?” Maeve asked. “Are you okay?”

  A scream echoed through the hollow ballroom.

  Ellie could barely keep track of what was happening. Oliver and Maeve banged on the door, trying to open it. Lorna banged on the other side. They were screaming her name and she was just screaming. Ellie’s hand shook again, and she covered her ears.

  Like a rainstorm winding down, sounds faded away. First Lorna’s screams. Then Oliver’s banging and shouting. All that was left was a pitiful “Lorna?” from Maeve. Oliver leapt back and it took Ellie a moment to realize why. Something seeped under the doorframe. Oliver shone his light on it. Red.

  “Oh, my god, Lorna,” Maeve spoke softly. Suddenly, she threw her body at the door. It didn’t budge, and she backed up and tried again. “We have to get her out of there. We have to—”

  Oliver took Maeve by the wrist and held her back. “Do you see that? Do you see it?” He pointed again at the wet stain. “We don’t know who’s in there.”

  “Lorna’s in there!”

  “And who else?” />
  “Does it matter?” Maeve asked.

  “It does if you don’t want to be next.”

  “She could be alive. Head wounds bleed a lot.”

  “Yeah,” Oliver grunted. “Just ask Hollis.”

  Ellie slapped him. Not too hard but enough to hurt. Enough to make him shut up.

  “Give me your light,” Ellie said. He stared at her, and she didn’t think he’d listen. Then he slapped his phone into her palm.

  Oliver kept Maeve back as Ellie knelt down, careful to avoid the stream of blood. She shone the light in the crack between the floor and the door. Lorna’s glassy eye stared back. Her head rested in a pool of blood, the wound obscured by her hair and her position on the floor. Her half-lidded eye did not blink; no breath from her gaping mouth rippled the blood that passed beneath.

  “Lorna?” she whispered, but Lorna wouldn’t answer.

  Ellie sat up and handed Oliver his phone back. There was no need to tell them what she saw. Oliver kept looking at the door, then the floor, as if trying to figure out how they fit together.

  “If we all try the door,” Maeve said, tears glistening on her face, “if we all kick it together we can get it . . . we can open it . . . if we—”

  “She’s dead, Maeve!” Oliver clenched his fist, like he was ready to thump her, but he kept his hands at his sides. “There’s no point in opening the door. She’s dead. We lost her, okay? We . . . She was an idiot for wandering off like that anyway. She was an idiot.”

  First Hollis. Now Lorna. Another connection snapped. Another broken strand of a web. They were unmoored. Ellie could see them all drifting further apart when the three of them needed to remain closer than ever.

  The diary dug into her back.

  “She’ll keep coming after us,” Ellie said. “One by one. Until we’re all gone. It doesn’t matter if we get out of here. If we escape this island alive. If we return to our families. She knows where we live. She knows all about us. And she’ll keep coming until we’re dead. We’ll spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?” Maeve’s voice was foggy with tears.

  Ellie could keep them together. Keep them on her side. And, if not, at least keep them in sight.

  “We stop her here,” she said. “We stop her now.”

  Pp. 84–89

  When they were so certain they’d figured it all out, it took every ounce of self-control I had not to laugh. That was their problem. They were always so sure of themselves. That they knew everything. That they were doing the right thing. Even when it was obvious to anyone else how wrong they were.

  That April, the residents of 215 Caldwell Street moved like planets, large and foreboding but limited in their rotations, passing far enough apart to avoid disaster, waiting for some unknowable force to push them out of orbit. Hollis could be around any of the girls but never Oliver. Oliver could only be in the same room with Lorna. Maeve would not have minded Oliver, but he took exception to her. The possibility of Maeve and Lorna depended on Lorna’s mood. Ellie, attempting invisibility, avoided all, drifting from room to room like a lost satellite. No one paid much attention to Callum. Like Pluto, he once existed as one of them but no longer.

  Their lives continued in this way until the day they made the decision that would eventually result in their deaths.

  It started—though she would never acknowledge it—with Ellie, who on this day sat alone in her room as the world fell apart around her.

  The words on the letter in her hand swirled around the page, each understandable on its own, but when arranged together made little sense. A wild green parrot landed on her windowsill and looked at her through the glass. Ellie stared back.

  “I think I’m failing out of university.”

  The bird cocked its head to the side, then flew away, disregarding her petty human complaints. Ellie tried again to read the letter in full but found that she could not and gave up. Daddy always said it was fine to give up some things if she found they didn’t suit her, like field hockey or horseback riding, but she was fairly certain one of those things wasn’t a university education. Daddy thought women should be strong, self-sufficient, educated, and with a good job. “Let a man marry you for your money,” he would say, but now that she thought about it, she didn’t think it was a joke at all.

  She set the letter on her desk so the words could not be read, but the orange Cahill emblem burned from the page like the eye of Sauron on the cover of the Lord of the Rings book Callum had abandoned in the front room. She stood up, slid the letter into an empty A4 folder, and sat back down. Then she stood up again and put the folder into her desk drawer alongside her diary. But the letter could not live there forever. Someone else would have to see it. She tried to imagine what it would be like to sit down with Daddy and Mother in the living room, surrounded by photographs of herself and her accomplishments, and explain to them the contents of this letter. She found that she couldn’t. So she tried to imagine what it would be like if she simply handed them the letter and watched them react to its contents. She found that she could not do that, either. She could not visualize them receiving the contents of that letter in any form because in no future was it possible for her to explain to her intelligent, well-educated, happily employed parents that their only daughter was failing out of school. It had been bad enough when she’d only managed to get into Cahill. She blamed it on clearing, that she’d got a bad operator at the other university who didn’t get her the spot she wanted, but that hadn’t been true, and she suspected her parents knew as much. They could not see the letter without their perceptions of her potential changing once again. Ergo, they could not see the letter.

  A sharp knock interrupted her thoughts. She thought it was the letter attempting to escape.

  “Hey,” Hollis called. “The letting agency’s on the phone. They want to know if you want the room next year.”

  As with the letter, she had difficulty understanding him.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, they’re asking each of us. I can give them your answer if you want.”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean I’m not sure yet. I’m waiting to hear what some other friends are doing,” she lied. “When do they need an answer by?”

  “They said today. They need to start advertising it for the autumn term.”

  “Do you think they could wait until Friday?”

  Hollis said he would ask, and it turned out that, yes, they could wait until Friday but no later. If she hadn’t decided by then, they would assume the answer was no.

  “Are you staying?” she asked. If Hollis was staying, that would be all right, wouldn’t it? She liked living with Hollis. But then she looked at her desk drawer and remembered it wasn’t up to her if she wanted to stay.

  “Might as well. I mean I . . . Look, this is weird talking through the door. Can I open it?”

  “What? Yes, sorry. Of course.” She had a smile on her face by the time the door opened. “Sorry, I was studying.”

  She sat on the bed with no books or papers in sight.

  “Right, well.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll stay, then I can leave my stuff over the summer instead of—”

  “Let’s order from that Indian place on Sandal Road!”

  “Let’s what?”

  “Take away. Let’s all get take away. Have dinner together. Order me a chicken tikka masala. With jasmine rice. Oh, and naan bread.”

  “Okay. Chicken curry. Jasmine rice. Naan bread. Got it.” He waited in the doorway. Her smile struggled to hold as she waited for him to leave. “So, uhm, are we all going to pay for ourselves this time, or . . .”

  “Oh. Oh! Yes, I have cash. Hang on.” She grabbed her handbag from the back of the chair. When she opened her wallet, she saw a twenty-pound note, some change, and the credit card Daddy gave her for emergencies.

  “They take card over the phone, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, but they won’t split order
s. So if you want—”

  “That’s all right.” She handed over the card. “I’ll pay for everyone. My treat.”

  Hollis hesitated. “Seriously?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  He took the card as if he were afraid it would run away before he could grab it.

  “Okay. Cheers. I won’t tell Oliver, though. He finds out it’s free he’ll—”

  She waved him off. “I don’t mind. Tell Oliver. Tell everyone.”

  Hollis looked at the card, then at her. “Right. Well, I’ll let you know when the food’s here so you can . . .” He glanced at her bare desk. “Keep studying.”

  Her smile lingered a few moments after he closed the door, like the after-image of a camera flash.

  Though Indian from Sandal Road normally took over an hour, in what seemed like no time at all, Hollis was again knocking on her door. The letter’s presence remained with Ellie as she walked down the stairs. The memory of its contents wrapped around her waist like an unwanted hug and held her back from the kitchen as her housemates unpacked the food. The smell of curry and spices covered the fetid stench coming from the bin no one had emptied in almost two weeks. Brown paper bags, Styrofoam, and plastic containers littered the countertop. Like foxes in a rubbish bin, her housemates picked and pulled at what they found and filled their plates.

  The most Ellie had ever charged to the card was £15 for a train ticket home and that had been for an actual emergency when her grandmother fell ill, but there had to be at least £100 worth of food strewn across the counter. She knew her parents could afford it, but this was a wasteful expense. Daddy hated waste. Wasting money, wasting time, wasting education.