by Anni Taylor
I exhaled a breath through my teeth, stopping myself from grabbing Willow and Lilly and leaving right then. “Okay, we’ll talk.” I nodded at the girls to go back inside.
Marla folded her arms defensively. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. But Evie asked me if I’d babysit the girls for a few days. For a week, actually. Seems that she just needed some time on her own.”
“On her own?” I exploded. “Evie went away without Willow and Lilly?”
“Yes. And you’re just going to have to respect that.”
I lowered my voice. “The hell I do.”
“No point getting like that with me, Gray. Evie’s my friend. She needed help. What else was I supposed to do?”
“What exactly did she say to you?”
“She said you two weren’t getting on. She . . . she was worried for herself and the girls.”
“She said that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, fuck. What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“There was nothing wrong between Evie and me. Nothing.”
Marla just looked at me silently, a faint accusatory look in her eyes.
“I need to talk with my wife. Call her now, wherever she is.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Just call her. Tell her I made you do it.”
“No . . . she didn’t leave me a number. She said she would call me.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s be adults here. As if Evie wouldn’t leave a number. What if something happened with the girls?”
Her voice closed down, small and tight, like she was admitting to something she didn’t want to tell me. “I . . . had the impression that Evie was maybe going to check herself in somewhere.”
“What? You don’t mean like a psych ward or something?”
“I’m not sure. She just said her mind was a jumble and she really needed some time to get herself together. She said I couldn’t contact her where she was going.”
To her credit, Marla looked worried.
Where did I go from here? The police? Yeah, I could imagine how that would go. They’d be on Evie’s side. Abused wife flees home. No choice but to leave the girls at a friend’s house for their safety. The cops would be looking at me with sceptical eyes, wondering what I’d done to Evie. Hey, here’s a guy who just got dumped by his employer. And his wife and kids ran away from him. He’s not exactly stable, is he?
I could try calling all the local mental health clinics, but they probably wouldn’t tell me if she was there or not, especially not if she’d told them she needed to get away from me.
How did all of this even happen? What the hell spurred Evie to take these drastic steps? Was this the end stage of her strange moods over the last three months or so?
Marla was my only connection to Evie now. I had to try to stay on her good side. “Okay. I can see you’re stuck in the middle of this. That’s not fair on you. It’s a lot for you to have to look after the girls. I’ve got time off work, so I’ll take them.” I wasn’t about to let her know I’d lost my job.
She sucked her lips in hard. “I promised Evie I’d keep them here.”
“They’re my daughters.”
“But Evie said—”
“Whatever Evie said, she’s not herself. If she’s checked herself in at a clinic or something, then her head’s not where it should be. She’s probably saying stuff that isn’t quite right.”
“I don’t mean to get personal, but it sounded like there’s been problems at home.”
That sounded like the old Marla. Of course you meant to get personal. “We’ve had money troubles for a long time now. It gets to both of us. But it seemed like, with her new job, that we were starting to turn a corner.”
I caught a flicker of quickly controlled glee on her face. Trouble for Evie and me spelled trouble for our marriage. And that could only make Marla happy. Correcting herself, she drew her mouth down so far it nearly hit the end of her chin. “Well, if you two were fighting a lot, maybe it was having a bigger effect on Evie than you knew.”
“I didn’t say we were fighting a lot.”
“Maybe she kept it all to herself then.”
“Kept what to herself?” I wanted to wipe that self-satisfied look from Marla’s face—a look she could no longer hold back.
Another possibility bled darkly into my mind. What if Evie hadn’t gone to a clinic? What if she’d gone off alone to do something terrible to herself?
Would Evie do that? When someone committed suicide, their family often said it caught them unawares. Panic shot into my throat. “Look, Marla, I’m taking my daughters. Now.”
“Why don’t you just leave them one more night? Give you a chance to cool down.”
“I don’t need to cool down.”
“I think you do. Just leave.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t? Call the police? I can save you the trouble, because I’m going there myself.”
“Get real. You are not.”
“My wife’s missing, as far as I’m concerned. Something’s very wrong here, and I’m going to find out what.”
Realisation dawned on Marla’s face as she studied mine. She touched her fingers to her mouth in alarm. “She just said she needed time alone,” she said, repeating what she’d told me earlier, the resolve in her voice fading.
“Can you bring the girls out, please?” I kept my gaze level.
She folded her arms in tighter. “How are you going to work and take care of them?”
“I finished up the job this afternoon.” There you go, Marla. Another piece of information for you to gloat about.
“You lost your job?” Her eyes opened a touch too wide to be authentic.
“Whatever. Give me my kids, and I’ll go.”
Marla looked like she didn’t know whether to smile or frown, muscles wavering at the sides of her mouth. She had nothing left to argue. Hunching her shoulders, she marched inside. Willow and Lilly stepped from the house again, looking a little uncertain this time. I hoped they hadn’t heard any of what I’d been talking about with Marla. As I took their hands and walked down the path, Marla and her mother watched. No doubt they’d be busily speculating on what had gone wrong at the Harlow house, trying to figure out what Evie had run away from—all the things that must be wrong with me.
I strapped the girls into their car seats and drove away. My first instinct was to head straight to the police station. But I needed time to think. What was really going on here?
Just how long had Evie planned this? A day? A week? I needed some more details before I made a statement to the police. And I needed to get my head around the reasons why my wife had left me.
Nothing was making sense.
THE FIRST CHALLENGE
14. EVIE
NO ONE WANTED TO RETURN TO the gloom of the monastery after breakfast. We stayed outside in the garden, hanging near the stream, eating warm fruit straight from the trees and feeling decadent.
Everyone took the chance to introduce themselves. I tried to remember them all, but I’d never been good with names. I knew I’d remember Poppy, Richard and Cormack. And probably Ruth. After ten minutes, I could recall only a few others. Louelle, an older American woman who liked country music. Mei, a petite Chinese girl with a severe gambling habit. Eugene, a chubby businessman from the Ukraine. Thomas, a teenager from Ireland who told the corniest jokes. Yolanda, Greta and Roxy—the three women who’d been sunbathing earlier.
When night fell in the garden, it felt like a thick crush of velvet, unlike any night I’d known before. Beautiful and dream-like and strangely suffocating all at once, lulling me with the heady scent of fruit ripening on the vines and trees.
In the refectory, we sat and ate a dinner of hot, fresh bread and soup.
Internally, I felt parts of myself relaxing, parts that had been wound up for so long they’d rusted tight. The daily grind of dressing and feeding young children, of trying to str
etch the budget to buy enough groceries for the week, all the laundry and cleaning and worry. All the endless squabbles between the girls.
It felt as if drops of unseen oil were unspooling all the overwound parts of me.
Here, I was being fed, looked after, no one to worry about but myself. I was with people who were trying to help me, not judge me. That was the biggest thing. The not judging. Back when I’d found out I was pregnant with Willow, I’d been a smoker. The people who’d primly told me that a pregnant woman smoking was disgusting didn’t help me at all. Cue my mother. Even Marla told me that women who smoke during pregnancy should be charged as criminals. It was Gray who helped me quit. He quit with me, and he was with me every step of the way. Gray didn’t tell me when he lapsed and started smoking again. Not wanting to tempt me, he kept it well away from the house. He tried to quit two more times after that before giving up for good a few months back.
I grew nervous again as the bells signalled it was time to head to the dormitories.
Poppy squeezed my arm as we walked along the hall. “This is it. The first night of the challenges.”
“I feel sick,” I said in reply.
“Me too. But we just have to see it as getting one step closer to the prize, right?”
Kara knocked past me and was first to enter the women’s bathroom. I glimpsed her staring straight ahead into the mirror as she brushed her teeth, her eyes fierce in the dim light.
Had something happened to her between when I saw her at the casino and now? I hoped she’d relax enough to talk to me.
She was already in bed and turned away from me when I filed into the dorm behind Poppy.
Poppy hugged me. “Good night. Sleep well, and good luck!”
Ruth rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s not luck if you know what you’re doing.”
The lights snapped off.
WHEN THE CHURCH bells rang through the room’s loudspeakers at midnight, I startled from sleep, thinking I was at home and it was the fire alarm.
Lilly. Willow. Gray. In that order—smallest to biggest—thoughts of them flashed through my mind.
In a breathless panic, my eyes sprang open.
This was no fire alarm. It was bells.
Dimly lit lamps had automatically sprung on in the room.
I pulled out my arm from where it was folded underneath my side, a wave of pins and needles coursing through it. On the wristband, the digital display was flashing a green number one. I gasped a quick breath. I was in the first group to go out tonight.
From the other side of the room, Poppy held her bracelet up high. “One!”
Everyone pulled themselves to a seated position, checking their bracelets, looking halfway between sleepy and confused in the orange-hued glow of the overhead lamps.
Ruth held up her flashing bracelet, eyeing Poppy and me. “How in the name of all that’s holy did I get in with you two?” She jumped from her bed. “Move it, people! The rest of the group must be from the men’s dorm.”
Poppy and I rushed to the door after Ruth.
Ruth rattled the lock, which was one of those panic exit devices—a horizontal bar that extended the width of the door. She swore when it didn’t open. “How are we supposed to—?”
Then a loud click announced that the door had unlocked itself.
They locked us in at night? I didn’t know that.
With cheers and claps echoing behind us, we ran out into the hall. The door shut automatically behind us.
Simultaneously, Richard and three other men raced out from the dorm next door.
I hadn’t spoken to the men apart from Richard, all of whom appeared to be in their thirties or forties.
Ruth marched up to Richard. “You? My night just keeps on getting better. You’d better not be involved in any shady dealings that’ll get us disqualified.”
“Got it,” Richard replied. “If I know anything, I’ll be sure not to share it with you.”
One of the men held his hand out to me in a handshake, his facial features disproportionally small, like a child whose head had suddenly ballooned. “I’m Duncan. I don’t believe we’ve met.” He indicated towards a big, clumsy-looking man with glasses. “This is Saul.” He then pointed at the third man, a short guy with deeply olive skin. “And this is Andre. So, we’ve got our team.”
I shook their hands in a series of quick grabs. “We have to go!” My voice was edged with an impatience that didn’t sound like me.
Poppy nodded fervently.
We ran in the direction of the cloister.
The hallway speared into darkness. I wished the monks would use more light, but I guessed they lived too frugally for that.
The monastery at midnight was a different entity to the monastery at any other time of day. I couldn’t have described it to myself in words. It was more a sensation, of being caught somewhere that no one should be. An in-between place. I guessed it was the age of the monastery bearing down on me—hundreds of years of history, the knowledge that people called the afflicted had once roamed the halls.
It seemed to me that I could hear the same kind of rustling, scuffling noises behind the walls that I’d heard in the morning. Like things were running along with us. Only, the sounds were even more muffled beneath the echoes of our feet pounding the stone floor.
No one else seemed to hear any of it. They were focused on the destination. I told myself that lots of old places had rats, and this place was old.
Still, I stopped and turned, looking back.
A ripple of clothing—monk’s robes—vanished into the alcove I’d blundered into in the morning. I took a few steps back, peering into the alcove. “Who’s there?”
There was no one in the alcove. Just the winged statue, staring back at me. There hadn’t been any monk. What I’d seen had just been some trick of the darkness and my own fear.
“C’mon, slowpoke,” Poppy breathed, running back and pulling me along.
I was holding everyone up. I had to forget everything and just concentrate on the challenge.
The four mentors were waiting for us in the garden, like statues in their white robes.
Brother Sage smiled warmly. “Ah, the first of our groups to begin the challenges. Are you ready?”
“I was born ready,” Ruth told him.
“Good,” he said. “The challenge room awaits you.”
Brother Vito nodded at us. “Come this way.”
We followed them to an arched doorway and through to a curved corridor. The inner six rooms were here.
Brother Sage unlocked the door of challenge room one.
“Remember,” Brother Vito said close to me in hushed, reassuring tones, “just do the best you can do.”
Inhaling deeply, I gave him a quick smile.
The door slid open automatically on being unlocked. As the last of us stepped through, the door swiftly closed again.
The room was exactly the same size and shape as every other room I’d seen in the monastery so far: hexagonal and enormous in size. This room was completely bare except for a wooden hexagonal prism about the height of my chest in the middle.
“Okay, so . . . where’s the challenge? Bring it.” Richard puffed out his shoulders.
“I think this is the challenge.” I stepped up to the prism. The aged box was constructed of a dark wood, with six rectangular sides and a top and base that were hexagonal. On top it had six inlaid triangular-shaped panels of a lighter shade, the triangles all pointing inwards to a single point in the centre. “Maybe it’s some kind of puzzle box. I bet the challenge is to open it. Though . . . I can’t see any lid.”
Poppy wrinkled her nose. “I hate puzzle boxes. I had one for a money box as a kid. I ended up smashing it open.”
“Says a lot about you,” said Ruth. Marching to the box, she placed her hands on its surface like a religious healer. “It’s old and it’s a beauty. They told us the rooms are challenges of the mind. We just have to figure this out.”
“We’ve got t
welve minutes,” said Duncan, the guy with the overstuffed head and tiny features.
“Say what?” Ruth angled her face around, her brow deeply creasing as if annoyed by the interruption.
Duncan pointed at the only object in the room besides the box—an aged clock on the back of the door, with twelve illuminated markings around its perimeter. “The hand has moved halfway to the next point since we came in here. I’d say we’ve only been in here less than half a minute. That means we’ve got twelve minutes.”
My breaths grew shallow. “Twelve minutes? We’ve got to hurry.”
In a panic, the six of us examined the box, looking for any clue as to how it opened, hands moving everywhere over the box, prodding and pressing in frustration.
Richard thumped the box. “I’ll kick you open in a minute!”
We all went silent for a moment.
“Wait.” I listened carefully. “Do you hear it?”
“What?” Richard snapped in exasperation. “Angels singing?”
Poppy glanced at me then pressed the side of her face onto the box so hard that her cheek squashed flat like a child’s against a window pane. “It’s ticking.”
“Ticking?” The short man, Andre, wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Like a bomb?”
“How would I know?” Poppy squinted up at him with her free eye.
Pulling her away roughly, Ruth put her ear to the box and listened. “It’s a metronome. Richard’s thumping must have set it off.”
Stepping around to another section of the box, I knocked on it and listened.
A slow ticking started.
I knocked again.
The ticking sped up. Another knock and the ticking sped up yet again, the sound echoing hollowly. I moved around the box to my right, bumping into Ruth. I began knocking again, this time knocking a fourth time. The ticking went back to slow on the fourth knock.
I stood. “What if below the six triangles are six hollow compartments, each with some kind of metronome device? They seem to go faster for three knocks then go back to slow again.”
I glanced up at the clock. Eight minutes to go.
Poppy elbowed Ruth as she hurried to knock and listen to each section of the box. “Yep. Six metronomes. The pitch is different with each one.”
