The Secret Place

by Tana French

  They were looking at me like I’d gone flash-bang and turned two-headed. Joanne’s finger had stopped moving.

  ‘If I don’t have an opportunity to interview Rebecca O’Mara before all of you students are called inside, then I’ll have to liaise with Detective Conway, and I’ll have no option but to bring her into the loop. I assume you gave me this information because you wanted me to utilise it. Not because you wanted to hand the credit for any results to Detective Conway. Am I correct?’

  Three identical pairs of eyes, staring. Not a move, not a blink.

  ‘Orla? Am I correct?’

  ‘What? Um, yeah? I guess?’

  ‘Very good. Gemma?’

  Nod.

  ‘Joanne?’

  Finally, finally, a shrug, and her hand came off my leg. Conway’s smackdown, way back in the art room, was paying off. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Then I think we’re all agreed.’ I handed out a thin smile for each of them. ‘Our top priority is for me to speak to Rebecca. Our chat will have to wait.’

  Nothing. Just those eyes, still staring.

  I stood up, evenly, no sudden moves. Brushed myself down, straightened my jacket. Then I turned around and walked away.

  It was like turning my back on jaguars. Every inch of me was waiting for the claws, but nothing came. Behind me I heard Joanne say, pompous and pitched just loud enough for me to hear, ‘Potentially valuable material,’ and a triple spurt of giggles. Then I was out, on the endless white-green lawn.

  My heart was going like bongos. That drunken dizzy rushed up and over me; I wanted to let my knees fold, sink down on the cool grass.

  I didn’t do it. Not just the watchers all round. What I had told the three of them was true: somewhere out there, in the dapple of black and white and murmurs, was Rebecca. She was now or never.

  It was exactly what Conway would expect out of me. It was what Mackey would put money on.

  The white glare of the art room, staring down at me. Laughter, joyful, somewhere far away among the trees.

  I owed Conway fuck-all. I’d brought her the key to her make-or-break case, she’d used me while I was useful and then kicked me out of the car going ninety.

  The moon pinwheeling above the school. I felt like I was dissolving, fingers and toes sifting away.

  She was everything Mackey had warned me about. She was the lifetime kibosh on my daydream partner, the one with the red setters and the violin lessons. She was edge and trouble, everything I had always wanted far from.

  I know my shot when I see it. I saw it bright as day.

  I found my phone.

  Text, not ring. If Conway saw my number come up, she’d think I wanted to whinge about the wait; she’d let it ring out.

  I could feel something happening to me. A change.

  Message icon on my screen. Conway, a few minutes back, while I’d been too busy to notice. She must have pulled the plug, or Mackey had. I was just in time.

  Got anything yet? Stalling him long as I can but lights out is 1045 get a move on

  ‘What the fuck,’ I said out loud.

  The grin came on top of it, grin like my face was splitting open and every colour of light bursting out.

  Idiot, me, supersize idiot and I could’ve punched myself in the head for it. For a second there I forgot all about Rebecca, didn’t care.

  Go for a nice walk, admire the grounds, Conway had said to me outside the door of the art room. See if you can get Chris’s ghost to pop up for you. Meaning Get outside and talk to those girls, stir them up as hard as you can, see what you can get out of them. Clear as day, if I’d been looking. I’d been so busy staring at how Mackey could’ve used me to fuck me up, I’d missed what she was waving in front of my face.

  Conway had trusted me: not just trusted me through all Mackey’s doom-peddling, but trusted me to know she would. I could’ve punched myself all over again for not doing the same for her. Made my stomach turn cold, how close I had come to too late.

  I texted her back. Meet me out the front. Urgent. Don’t let Mackey come.

  Chapter 26

  May comes in restless, fizzing in the warm air. Summer is almost close enough to touch and so are the exams, and the whole of third year is wound too tight, laughing too loud at nothing and exploding into ornate arguments full of slammed desks and tears in the toilets. The moon pulls strange hues out of the sky, a tinge of green you can only see from the corner of your eye, a bruised violet.

  It’s the second of May. Chris Harper has two weeks left to live.

  Holly can’t sleep. Selena still has her fake headache, and Julia is being a bitch; when Holly tried to talk to her about whatever’s up with Lenie, Julia blew her off so viciously that they’re still only kind of speaking. The bedroom is too hot, over-intimate heat that sends waves of itch across your skin. Things feel wrong and getting wronger, they twist and pull at the edges, drag the fabric of her all askew.

  She gets up to go to the toilet, not because she needs to but because she can’t lie still another second. The corridor is dim and even hotter than their room. Holly is halfway down it and thinking cold water when the shadow of a doorway convulses, only a foot or two away. She leaps back against the wall and grabs a breath ready to yell, but then Alison Muldoon’s head shoots open-mouthed out of the shadow, vanishes in a burst of urgent squeaky noises, and pops back out again.

  ‘Jesus!’ Holly hisses. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack! What is your problem?’

  ‘OhmyGod, it’s you, I thought— Jo!’ And she’s gone again.

  By this point Holly is getting curious. She waits and listens; the rest of the corridor is silent, everyone deep under the weight of the night.

  After a minute Joanne appears in the doorway, frizz-haired and wearing pale-pink pyjamas that say ooh baby across the chest. ‘Um, that’s Holly Mackey?’ she snaps, examining Holly like something in a display case. ‘Are you retarded or what? I was asleep.’

  ‘Her hair,’ Alison bleats, just above a whisper, behind her. ‘I just saw her hair, and I thought—’

  ‘OhmyGod, they’re both blond, so is like everybody? Holly doesn’t look anything like her. Holly’s thin.’

  Which is the biggest compliment Joanne knows. She smiles at Holly, and rolls her eyes so they can share a laugh at how thick Alison is.

  The thing about Joanne is you never can tell. Today she could be your snuggled-up best friend, and she’ll get all wounded if you don’t play along. It puts you at a disadvantage: she knows who she’s dealing with; you have to figure it out from scratch, every time. She makes Holly’s calf muscles go twitchy.

  Holly says, ‘Who did she think I was?’

  ‘She came out of the right room,’ Alison whines.

  ‘Which means she was going the wrong way, duh,’ Joanne says. ‘Who cares if she goes to the loo? We care if she goes out. Which, hello, is that way?’ Alison chews a knuckle and keeps her head down.

  Holly says, ‘You thought I was Selena? Going outside?’

  ‘I didn’t. Because I’m not retarded.’

  Holly looks at Joanne’s tight face, too hard for the cutesy pyjamas, and it occurs to her that Joanne is kicking Alison because she’s some strange combination of relieved and disappointed. Which is crazy. She says, feeling her way, ‘Where would Selena be going?’

  ‘Don’t you wish you knew?’ Joanne says, tossing Alison a smirk. Alison lets out an obedient sharp giggle, too loud. ‘Shut up! Do you actually want to get us caught?’

  Holly’s heartbeat is changing, turning deeper and violent. She says, ‘Selena doesn’t go out on her own. Only when we all do.’

  ‘OhmyGod, you guys are so cute,’ Joanne says, with a nose-crinkle that doesn’t thaw her eyes. ‘All this blood-sisters-tell-each-other-everything stuff; it’s like an old TV show. Did you actually do the blood-sisters thing? Because that would be so totes adorbs I could just die.’

  Not bessie mates, not tonight. ‘Just give me a sec,’ Holly says. If Joanne shows you her
teeth, you bite first and hard. ‘I’m trying to look like I actually care what you think about us.’

  Joanne stares, hand on her hip, in the thin dirty light. Holly catches the moment when she starts seeing a more interesting football than Alison. ‘If you’re such perfect little buddies,’ she says, ‘how come you don’t know where your friend goes at night?’

  Holly reminds herself that Joanne is a lying cow who would do anything for notice, while Selena is her best friend. She can’t picture Selena’s face.

  ‘You’ve got trust issues,’ she says. ‘If you don’t do something about them, you’re going to turn into one of those crazy women who hire private investigators to follow their boyfriends around.’

  ‘At least I’ll have a boyfriend. One of my own, not one I had to steal.’

  ‘Yay you?’ Holly says, turning away. ‘I guess everyone has to be proud of something?’

  ‘Hey!’ Joanne snaps. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m talking about?’

  Holly shrugs. ‘Why? It’s not like I’m going to believe you.’ She starts for the toilets.

  The hiss flicks after her: ‘Come back here.’

  If things were normal, Holly would wave over her shoulder and keep walking. But they’re not, and Joanne’s clever in her own special way, and if she actually knows any of the answers—

  Holly turns. Joanne snaps her fingers at Alison. ‘Phone.’

  Alison scurries back into the sleep-smelling cave of their room. Someone heaves herself over in bed and asks a drowsy question; Alison lets out a wild shush. She comes back carrying Joanne’s phone, which she hands over like an altar boy at the offertory. Part of Holly’s head is already hamming up the story for the others, snorting into her palm with laughter. The other part has a bad feeling.

  Joanne takes her time pressing buttons. Then she hands the phone to Holly – the curl of her mouth is a warning, but Holly takes it anyway. The video is already playing.

  It hits her in separate punches, with no room to get her breath in between. The girl is Selena. The guy is Chris Harper. That’s the glade. It’s turned into something Holly has never seen it be; something gathered and dangerous.

  Joanne feels closer, licking up anything Holly lets out. Holly makes herself start breathing again and says, with no blink and her dad’s amused half-grin, ‘OMG, some blond chick is snogging some guy. Call Perez Hilton quick.’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t act stupider than you can help. You know who they are.’

  Holly shrugs. ‘It could be Selena and Chris Whatshisname from Colm’s. Sorry to ruin your big moment here, but so?’

  ‘So oopsie,’ Joanne says, pursed-up and cute. ‘I guess you’re not bessie blood sisters after all.’

  Bite fast and hard. Not one I had to steal— ‘What do you even care?’ Holly says, lifting an eyebrow. ‘You were never with Chris Harper. Just fancying him doesn’t make him your property.’

  Alison says, ‘She was too.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Joanne hisses, whirling around on her. Alison gasps and vanishes into the shadows. To Holly, icy again: ‘That’s none of your business.’

  If Chris actually dumped Joanne for Selena, Joanne is going to take Selena’s throat out. ‘If Chris cheated on you,’ Holly says, carefully, ‘he’s a prick. But why be pissed off with Selena? She didn’t even know.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Joanne says, ‘we’ll get him.’ Her voice calls up a sudden cold gleam, away in the thick dark corners of the corridor; Holly almost steps back. ‘And I’m not pissed off with your friend. It’s over between them, and anyway I don’t get pissed off with people like her. I get rid of them.’

  And with that video, she can do that any time she wants. ‘Clichés give me a rash,’ Holly says. She hits the Delete button, but Joanne is watching for that: she grabs the phone back before Holly can confirm. Her nails scrape down Holly’s wrist.

  ‘Excuse me, don’t even think about it?’

  ‘You need a manicure,’ Holly says, shaking her wrist. ‘With, like, garden shears.’

  Joanne slaps her phone back into Alison’s hand, and Alison scuttles off to put it away. ‘You know what you and your pals need?’ Joanne says, like it’s an order. ‘You need to stop acting like you’re such super-special amazing bessie friends. If you were, that manatee wouldn’t be lying to you about shagging Chris Harper; and even if she did, you’d like know telepathically, which you so didn’t. You’re exactly the same as everyone else.’

  Holly has no comeback to that. It’s over between them. That scraped-out look to Selena, ice wind ripping right through her: this is why. This, the most obvious typical clichéd reason in the world, so typical she never even thought of it. Joanne Heffernan got there first.

  Holly can’t take one more second of her face, swollen fat with all the delicious gotcha she was after. The corridor lights flicker, make a noise like paint spattering and pop out. Through the surge of chicken-coop noises from Joanne’s room, Holly feels her way back to bed.

  She says nothing. Not to Becca who would freak out, not to Julia who would tell her she was talking bullshit, not to Selena; especially not to Selena. When Holly can’t sleep a few nights later, when she opens her eyes to Selena’s whole body one curve of concentration over something cupped glowing in her palms, she doesn’t sit up and say softly Lenie tell me. When a long wait later Selena takes a shivery breath and shoves the phone down the side of her mattress, Holly doesn’t start making up excuses to be on her own in the bedroom. She lets the phone stay where it is and hopes she never sees it again.

  She acts like Selena is totally fine and everything’s totally fine and the biggest problem in the world is Junior Cert Irish which OMG is going to destroy her brain and turn her whole life into a total failure. This makes Becca chill out and cheer up, at least. Julia is still a bitch, but Holly decides to think this is because of exam stress. She spends a lot of time with Becca. They laugh a lot. Afterwards Holly can’t remember about what.

  Sometimes she wants to punch Selena right in the soft pale daze of her face and keep punching. Not because she got off with Chris Harper and lied to them and broke the vow that was her idea to begin with; those aren’t even the problem. But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.

  Becca is not stupid and, no matter what people sometimes think, she’s not twelve. And a place like this is riddled with secrets but their shells are thin and it’s crowded in here, they get bashed and jostled against each other; if you’re not super-careful, then sooner or later they crack open and all the tender flesh comes spilling out.

  She’s known for weeks that something is wrong and spreading. That night in the grove, when Holly was going on at Lenie, Becca tried to think it was just Holly having a mood; she does that sometimes, digs into something and won’t let go, all you need to do is pull her attention somewhere else and she’s fine. But Julia doesn’t care about Holly’s moods. When she jumped in to make everything all sweet and smooth, that was when Becca started knowing something real was wrong.

  She’s been trying hard not to know. When Selena spends the whole of lunchtime staring into her hand wrapped in her hair, or when Julia and Holly snap like they hate each other, Becca digs her heels into the ground, stares at her beef casserole and refuses to get pulled in. If they want to act like idiots, that’s their problem; they can fix it themselves.

  The thought of something they can’t fix sends her mind wild, yipping with terror. It smells of forest fires.

  It’s Holly who corners her into knowing. The first time Holly asked – Does Lenie seem, like, weird to you, the last while? – all Becca could do was stare and listen to her own crazy heartbeat, till Holly rolled her eyes and switched to Never mind it’s probably all fine. But then Holly starts sticking to her harder and harder, like she can’t breathe right around the others. She talks too fast, she mak
es smart-arsed jabs at everything and everyone and keeps going till Becca laughs to make her happy. She tries to get Becca to do things just the two of them, without Julia and Selena. Becca realises that she wants to get away from Holly; that, unbelievably, for the first time ever, they all want to get away from each other.

  Whatever’s wrong, it won’t go away by itself. It’s getting worse.

  A year ago Becca would have kept slamming doors and turning keys between her and this. Got a load of books out of the library, never stopped reading even when someone talked to her. Pretended to be sick, stuck fingers down her throat to puke, till Mum showed up tight-jawed to take her home.

  Now is different. She’s not a little kid any more, who can hide on her friends when something bad is happening. If the others can’t fix this, then she needs to try.

  Becca starts watching.

  One night she opens her eyes on Selena sitting up in bed, texting. The phone is pink. Selena’s phone is silver.

  The next day Becca wears last term’s outgrown kilt to school, and gets sent back to her room to change into something that doesn’t show the world her legs. It takes her like thirty seconds to find the pink phone.

  The texts turn every soft part of her to water, spilling away between her bones. She’s crouched on Selena’s bed and she can’t move.

  This little thing, harmless, this is what’s turned everything wrong. The phone feels black and hot in her hand, denser than rock.

  It takes a long spinning time before she can think. The first thing her mind holds up: there’s no name in the texts. Who who who, she thinks, and listens to the lonely hoot of it through her mind. Who?

  Someone from Colm’s; that’s obvious, from the stories about teachers and rugby matches and other guys. Someone cunning, to fracture a crack into their high white wall and wiggle his sly way through. Someone smart, to guess how Selena would sway to all these poor-sensitive-me stories with her arms out, how she would never abandon anyone so special who needs her so much.