Wet wood, frozen wood. Maeve searches the tree line, squinting to try and make out some kind of horizon, but there’s too much cloud and she can’t see anything in the dark.
Dan has not come back.
“What will happen to him now?” Maeve’s voice is grim.
Sim pauses, turns his head in her direction. “Who?”
“Dan. Will he just freeze to death?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He hauls the new wood inside. “Probably.”
She jars a little. It doesn’t seem the right response.
Maeve checks the door once, twice, to make sure it’s locked. Then again.
“He can’t get in,” Sim says. He leans into the hearth, working.
“It’s not that—” she starts. Although it is, mostly. “Last night, when Karo was sleeping, I had the strangest feeling that something was watching me.” She tips her chin out at the dark. “First, out there. But then I couldn’t shake it. I kept thinking I could hear a door somewhere, like a hatch, I don’t know. In the basement, maybe. A door opening. Something coming in.” She turns away, but her fingers still play at the latch to one side. Worrying at it. “I know it sounds crazy, but I dreamed there was a door to the outside. Another door.”
Sim listens but doesn’t say anything for a moment, waiting for the new fire to catch. Then: “There is a door, downstairs.”
Maeve turns to look at him, her body tensing.
“There’s a storage hall, for equipment. They keep a few ATVs down there in winter,” he says. “You can see it from the outside when there’s no snow. It’s like a little slope down to a steel door.” He looks pensive. “What did you hear?”
“I don’t know if I heard anything,” Maeve says quickly. But she can feel it, the way she lay there last night, fighting to stay awake. “It’s just—every time I fell asleep, I thought I heard it again.”
“But heard what again?” He sounds a little impatient now.
“A creak, I guess. The sound of a door or someone moving.”
He nods, thinking.
“We should go take a look.”
“No—” Maeve actually steps back. She remembers her dream too vividly: the dark hallway and unknown room, the door handle moving. Someone on the other side; something coming in. “No, I’m sure it was nothing. I don’t want to go down there.”
“Come on, I’ll show you where it is. There’s a steel door and a dead bolt—no one can get in that way. But you’ll feel better if you see it.”
“I really won’t.”
“Besides.” He’s on his feet now. “It’s so warm and steamy in the spa. It’s the last warm place on earth.”
Maeve stiffens. She almost feels like he might force her, drag her down there. She can’t really explain why she doesn’t want to go except that it’s dark and cold in the corridors, and the humidity of the spa will not warm her up, she’s sure. It will only make everything feel worse—damp, clammy, like a cave. Like a tomb.
There’s a beat of silence, and then he sighs.
“Okay, no problem. You stay up here on your own and I’ll go check it out. That way I can tell you for sure there’s nothing down there. Okay?”
But Maeve balks at this plan, too; she doesn’t want to be left in the darkness of the lobby by herself. The ceiling with its high chandelier looms over her, the glass beads now hanging still and silent.
“Maeve—okay?”
“Sure.”
Her hands are cold and she sinks them into the pockets of her coat. Hours, now, since she came back indoors, but she still can’t get warm. He gives her one last look before he disappears.
Once the door shuts, she regrets not going along. That same feeling—something dark and heavy, inescapable—seems to grow stronger at once. Stalking her. She closes her eyes to try a calm-breathing technique, but the sudden blindness scares her and she blinks them open right away. Stands by the fire instead, trying to warm herself, trying to shake it off. Shake off the fear.
That doesn’t work, of course. She knows that: with Iain, she wished her fear gone many times. Hard to break that kind of training, no matter how much you want to. She pulls out Anna’s bear claw and strokes the smooth bone. It’s soothing, in a strange way. Her breath and the soft crackle of the fire the only sound.
Iain left and didn’t come back only the one time, and she was at home when it happened, thousands of miles away. Wishing had nothing to do with it. Just another shooting among many.
No one meant to kill him. The bar was crowded; he simply got in the way. Maeve heard about the shooting on the morning news before she heard Iain was dead. The phone call had come later in the day.
She said all the right things—that she was shocked, that it was a shame. A tragedy.
It’s true that she was shocked. She wandered through the rest of the day in a kind of fog, deep in her own memory, her vivid imagining of killing him herself. But Maeve hadn’t killed Iain.
It briefly felt unbelievable. Not that he was dead: that someone else got there first.
On the six o’clock broadcast, the whole story came out. It wasn’t a random shooting, whatever that means. It was a murder-suicide gone wrong: the shooter’s real target was the hotel barmaid. His girlfriend.
His ex-girlfriend—she’d left him two weeks before. Maeve, alone in her kitchen with the radio, wanted to laugh.
There’s a burst from the fire and she jumps, startled out of the memory. Above her, the barest tinkle from the chandelier. She looks up. The heat from the fire slowly rising, shifting things around. She thrusts the bear claw down into her coat pocket and bites her lip.
Sim is still not back yet. No sound from the stairwell.
If he’s telling the truth, he was in the building for hours—arriving while Maeve was out in the woods, searching the rooms, watching for her out the mezzanine windows. But wouldn’t he have checked the basement storage area then? If he knew there was a door to the outside? Wouldn’t he have checked the spa?
Maeve pauses, thinking that over.
Perhaps not.
But if he found the door wedged open and got in that way himself—wouldn’t he wonder who else was inside?
Who might be down there now.
She shivers, still not over her chill. It feels strange, ominous that he’s been gone for so long.
She wonders, briefly, if she should go after him. Or at least call down the stairwell? But the idea gives her another chill and she has to breathe through it. She’s just letting her anxiety get the best of her; there’s nothing down there, no one. No one could have come in the secret service door. No one could be hiding there or lying in wait. He’s only checking every room, carefully, one by one. That takes time.
The service door is locked, she reminds herself. Locked.
But Dan, of course, would have the key. Karo’s words come back to her: He’ll be in it now. Until this thing is finished.
She steps closer to the fire. A few yards away, the door to Sim’s gallery sits half open. He’s been so careful with it before. How many times in the past days has she watched him lock that door? Protective of the space and whatever he’s doing in there. The great mystery installation.
She could go in now. He’d never know.
Still no sound from the stairwell. She looks over her shoulder. The windows along the back of the building reflect the darkness of the room, the darkness outside. Only in one panel can she see the glow of the fire, a bright heart near the bottom of the pane, fading as the light reaches higher. And she sees herself, of course, her own outline standing near it, her legs and shoulders and breasts and head in a kind of firelit silhouette.
Maeve steps back quickly, trying to douse the reflection. Anyone watching from outside would see the fire, would see Maeve standing alone. She refocuses, but her shadow is still there in the slim light and she has the impulse to run, to get out of the fishbowl of the lobby. Only where would she go?
She looks over at the gallery again, at the tall, heavy door st
anding open.
Maeve shoves her way in. It’s dark in the gallery but there’s a flashlight hanging from a peg on the wall and she flips it on, then shuts the door and leans against it. The room smells of sawdust and adhesive, a chemical smell. It’s colder in here than in the lobby. She takes a breath and the air is sharp against her nostrils.
She doesn’t want to think of the kitchen, the dark freezer. She aims the light ahead.
The gallery is just a mirror of the lobby, vast and high-ceilinged with its own curving staircase—the rails now covered in drop cloths—winding up to a mirror mezzanine above. Just as vacant. Maeve just as small within it.
She moves slowly, aware of the sound of each footstep and the odd, jutting piles of leftover materials, shards strewn around on the floor.
Her light follows the curving staircase to where the ceiling stretches high above. In the top corner of the room, the plaster rosettes have been covered over with plank wood—to support the installation, she realizes. The light plays along the ceiling and she trips slightly as she walks. Some piece of plaster underfoot.
Only it’s not plaster he’s been sawing through. The smallest rib of a great blue whale. What’s underfoot is real bone, a skeleton, the pieces jagged and polished and clean. She lets the light sweep along the ceiling until it hits a weird kind of shadow. She stares.
The thing he’s been working on all this time.
Here, there is no crystal chandelier. The installation hangs directly above, spider-like. Long, curving segments radiate out from a central hub, falling away from one another almost like flowers in a vase. Bound by a neat coil of wire.
She climbs the first few steps almost unconsciously, adjusting her angle, the shadow of the thing on the wide blank wall beside her. Maeve suddenly recognizes the shape.
A hand. The whale’s rib bones curving and spreading apart, not like flower stalks, but like claws, like fingers. Looming over her, inescapable. Maeve feels trapped, pinned to the floor beneath it. The very feeling she’s been fighting for days, a darkness pressing in on her. She brings the light down fast, and the change is disorienting: she stumbles, trying to navigate the staircase. The sweep of the light along the floor reminds her of the video Sadie took—this is what he meant it for. She can imagine the hand hovering over the projection, Anna and Dan moving together under its shadow; Dan grasping Anna’s hair, her head tipping back, taut.
Maeve’s stomach lurches. At the foot of the stairs she trips again and falls, her flashlight spinning on the floor—but it’s not whalebone underfoot, it’s something soft. The pack Sim took on the hike down the mountain, now spilled out. She moves through the contents with a light hand, trying to stuff it all back inside—a headlamp, a few power bars, the remaining tarp.
Then something smooth, cold to the touch.
There’s a creak and Maeve jerks her head up. She grabs for her light: “Who’s there?”
She stands up quickly enough to make her head spin in the dark. He’s back by the door, a bleached silhouette in the flashlight’s beam—and then suddenly he’s there beside her. He pulls the pack out of her hands.
“You have the gun,” she says. “Dan’s gun.” She had it in her fingers. Another moment and it would have been tucked away in her own coat pocket.
She doesn’t say anything else and he roots through the pack, checking to see that the gun’s still there.
“I told you,” Sim says. “He flipped out. He took off.”
Maeve steps back against the rail.
“You never mentioned you got the gun away from him,” she says.
He pulls his hand out suddenly, and she startles—but when he opens his palm, there’s only a handful of loose bullets chinking against one another.
“It’s not loaded.” He pockets the rounds. “I took the ammunition out to make sure there wouldn’t be another accident. Doesn’t explain what you’re doing. Just looking through my stuff? Is this why you sent me downstairs, so you could sneak in here?”
It’s dark and cold and the fragments of white whalebone scattered on the ground make the room feel like a grave. Maeve wishes she’d had more time with the pack. She wishes she had found the bullets instead of the gun so she could count how many were left.
“What really happened out there?”
“I told you.”
She reaches into her coat pocket, draws out the red scarf, holds it out to him. Sim takes it, hesitating. Then:
“I already told you,” he says.
“Tell me again.”
“They fought. Down at the gates, and then on and on.” He leans closer. “Dan has an ugly temper. You saw it. You know.”
“So Dan just shot him?”
“No.” Sim seals up the pack but he doesn’t let go of it; he keeps a hand on the strap. “You want to know exactly? Fine. They’re fighting, it’s dark, it’s a storm. We can’t see each other. We can barely hear each other. I only knew Dan pulled out the gun because it went off. Maybe he meant it like a warning shot, I don’t know, but he hits Justin. Justin’s down in the snow, and I get on his back—Dan’s—trying to get the gun away from him. Sadie’s on the ground screaming. You know like she did with Anna, after we found Anna’s body? She’s down there, and I’m on Dan, and he just keeps firing. And suddenly it goes real quiet.” Sim’s voice is cutting here; he’s almost spitting the words. “And he just drops the fucking thing. He saw what he’d done. And he starts running,” Sim says. “Why do you think I have the gun? He took off.”
Maeve shakes her head slowly.
“I didn’t want to scare you, Maeve. I didn’t want to upset you even more—”
“And then—”
“He’s out there. Somewhere. I came back here.”
“No,” she says. “Justin and Sadie. You just left them there.”
There’s a silence.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
The story is almost the same. The story about the fight is the same, Justin and Dan, but the first time he told it, Dan was waving the gun, Sadie was running around, and Justin started it. This time, Justin gets hit right away, Sadie gets on the ground with him, Sim hears the sound of the gun before he sees it. She gives it a moment to sink in.
Trauma makes it hard to remember details. Maeve knows that from experience. But it’s not the details that make her doubt the story, it’s the tone. It’s like he’s going through the motions. Like he’s angry at Maeve for even asking.
Maeve hesitates, trying to put her finger on which part of it bothers her most. What she knows is this: every minute she spends here feels more like a threat.
The best thing would be to defuse the tension. This, too, Maeve knows from experience. Avoid conflict. Just pretend. Be nicer, smile, don’t say what you really think. There’s a name for this, a therapy name. What do they call it?
Sim slings the bag onto one shoulder. “Don’t go getting into things that don’t belong to you, Maeve.”
“I’m not—I don’t want to get into anything,” she says. Steady now.
Tend and befriend.
Not forever. Just long enough to get away.
“I know you knew him for a few days, Maeve, but sometimes people are good at hiding who they really are.” He takes the light from her hand and aims it at the shadows above. “Do you like it?”
There’s a silence.
“It’s a hand,” she says finally. “Isn’t it? Made of whalebone.” She’s dizzy, still imagining Anna there, projected on the floor.
Or not Anna. Maeve, the video of Maeve. Her skin, the scar at her belly gleaming.
“A puppet hand,” she says.
“It’s my hand,” Sim says, and he holds one up, spread flat, and lets it hang there in the air. “This is where I wanted you dancing. You and your coil of rope.” He looks up almost wistfully. “I wonder who’ll see it now.”
He nods to the door, inviting her to leave.
Years of ballet training taught her one thing: get up.
She left Iain whi
le he was away on tour. Packed the children’s things and her own in twenty-four hours, left the furniture and the car, moved house silently and secretly and almost totally on her own. He was supposed to be gone for a week. The next day, she went to the studio for the first time in a year. To feel grounded, at home in her skin. To work. To try and reclaim something of herself, what career she had left.
Get up or you’ll lose your spot. Get up or some other girl will get your place, and there is always some other girl, waiting.
Iain was supposed to be gone for a week, but she should have known.
If the music hadn’t been on so loud or if there hadn’t been construction outside, she would have heard him coming. His footsteps or the key in the lock. Instead, there was only a sudden brilliant flash as the door flew open. A flood of light, hitting all the mirrors at once, and Maeve, blinded, came flying out of a turn and missed her landing. She hit the ground hard, hip first, then knee, shoulder, wrenching her neck to save herself.
Get up.
He’d gotten home and found the house half empty. Someone had told him she was here, some assistant or junior corps dancer. Or else he just guessed.
Or else he followed her. He’d done it before.
The music swelled louder and Maeve, dazed, tried to get her bearings on the floor. She could taste blood already; her tooth tearing through her lip as she fell. She could still feel herself spinning. For a moment, her eyes focused on the mirror and she saw someone else there. A woman. Another dancer, stretched out on the ground.
She should get up, Maeve thought. She needs to stand up now, get up and save herself.
The image blurred and then came back before Maeve realized what she was looking at. The woman was just herself. Her own reflection.
By that time, it was too late. He’d shut the door behind him. Not some other dancer but Maeve who was on the floor. She got up, and he knocked her down again. And again. But she’d had that spotlight moment, the clarity of seeing herself, finally, from outside. When he kicked the mirror in and it shattered, she grabbed her shard of glass and held on, even as he ripped it from her hand.
The Retreat Page 24
