The Secret Place

by Tana French

  ‘OK,’ Holly says, turning docile. ‘Lenie and Becs can come with me, right?’

  That gets Dad’s attention. ‘Say what?’

  ‘Their parents are away. They can come home with us, right?’

  ‘Um,’ Dad says, rubbing the back of his head. ‘I’m not sure we’re equipped for that, sweetheart.’

  ‘You said it’s only for a couple of days. What’s the big deal?’

  ‘I think it’s only for a few days, but this gig doesn’t come with guarantees. And I don’t have their parents’ permission to haul them away for the duration. I don’t fancy being had up for kidnapping.’

  Holly doesn’t smile. ‘If it’s too dangerous for me to stay here, it’s too dangerous for them.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s dangerous at all. I think I’m a paranoid bastard. Professional deformation, they call it. I want you at home so that any time I start getting panicky, I can stick my head in and look at you and take a few deep breaths. It’s for my sake, not yours.’

  His smile down at her and the weight of his hand on her head make Holly want to let every muscle go floppy: shove her face back into his shoulder, fill herself up with his smell of leather and smoke and soap, daydream there sucking her hair and say yes to whatever he tells her. She’d do it, except for the things Selena’s got stashed in her head, ready to spill out ping-ponging all over the floor if Holly isn’t there to keep them battened down.

  She says, ‘If you take me home, everyone’s going to think it’s because you know something. I’m not leaving Selena and Becca here thinking a murderer could come after them any time and there’s nowhere they can get away. If they’re stuck here, they need to know it’s safe. And the only way they’re going to know that is if you say it’s safe enough for me.’

  Dad’s head goes back and he snaps a chunk off a laugh. ‘I like the way you work, chickadee. And I’ll happily sit your mates down and tell them I’d bet a lot of money they’re safe as houses, if you want me to. But much as I like Selena and Becca, they’re their own parents’ responsibility, not mine.’

  He means it: he doesn’t think anyone’s in danger. He wants Holly home, not in case she gets murdered, but in case being around another murder traumatises her poor fragile ickle mind all over again.

  Holly doesn’t want a lovely Daddy-cuddle any more. She wants blood.

  She says, firing it at him, ‘They’re my responsibility. They’re my family.’

  Score: Dad’s not laughing any more. ‘Maybe. I’d like to think I am too.’

  ‘You’re a grown-up. If you’re paranoid for no reason, that’s your problem to deal with. Not mine.’

  The tightened muscle in his cheek tells her she might be winning. The thought scares her so she wants to take it all back, swallow it down in a great gulp and go running into the school to pack her things. She stays silent and stretches her steps to match his. Pebbles grind together.

  ‘Sometimes I think your ma’s right,’ Dad says, on a wry one-sided grin. ‘You’re my comeuppance.’

  Holly says, ‘So I can stay?’

  ‘I’m not happy about it.’

  ‘Yeah, hello? Nobody’s happy about any of this?’

  That brings up the other side of the grin. ‘OK. I’ll make you a deal. You can stay, if you give me your word that you’ll tell me or the investigating officers anything that could conceivably be relevant. Even if you’re positive it isn’t. Anything you know, anything you notice, anything that just happens to occur to you as a vague possibility. Can you live with that?’

  It occurs to Holly that this might be what he was after all along, or at least his backup plan. He’s practical. If he doesn’t get his dad wish, at least he can get his detective one.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, giving him all the straight look he could want. ‘I promise.’

  Selena’s in the bedroom and Becca wants to give her this red phone. It comes with a long explanation that Selena can’t keep hold of, but it lights a grave holy shine all round Becca and almost lifts her off her toes, so probably it’s good. ‘Thanks,’ Selena says, and puts the phone down the side of her bed since that’s where a secret phone belongs, except her own one isn’t there any more. She wonders if maybe Chris came and took it, and left this red one with Becca so he can text her later when he gets a chance because right now he has to be busy, only then that sounds wrong but she can’t track down why because Becca is looking at her, this look that dives down inside Selena and lands right on the place that’s trying hard to hurt. So she just says ‘Thanks’ again and then she can’t remember what they came up here for. Becca gets her flute out of the wardrobe and puts it into her hands and asks, ‘What music do you need?’ and for a moment Selena wants to laugh because Becca looks so calm and grown-up, riffling through her music case neat as a nurse. She wants to say That’s what you should be after school, you should be a nurse, but the thought of the look Becca would give her makes the knot of laughter swell bigger and harder at the bottom of her throat. ‘The Telemann,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’

  Becca finds it. ‘There,’ she says, and clicks Selena’s music case shut. Then she leans in and presses her cheek to Selena’s. Her eyelashes moth-wing against Selena’s skin and her lips are stone-cool. She smells like ripped green and hyacinths. Selena wants to hold her tight and breathe her all in, till her blood feels erased to pure again, like none of this ever happened.

  After that Selena stays as still as she can and listens to how her heartbeat’s changed, gone slow and rolling in underwater dark. She thinks maybe if she follows it far enough down the tunnel she’ll find Chris. Probably he’s dead if they all say so, but there’s no way he’s gone. Not the taste of his skin, not the hot mountaintop smell of him, not the upward curl of his laugh. She thinks if she concentrates hard enough she’ll at least find what direction he’s in, but people keep interrupting her.

  People ask her questions in McKenna’s office. She keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t break down.

  Just like Holly said, they get called into McKenna’s office one by one. There’s McKenna, there’s a woman with black hair, and there’s a fat old guy, all sitting in a row behind the long battered gloss of McKenna’s desk. Becca never noticed before – the couple of times she was in here, she was too panicky to notice anything – that McKenna’s chair is extra tall, to make you feel little and helpless. Actually, with three of them back there and only one tall chair, it just looks funny, like the woman detective’s feet must be dangling in mid-air, or like McKenna and the guy detective are midgets.

  They start with the stuff they ask everyone. Becca thinks back to what she was just a few months ago and does that, huddling up and tangling her legs and answering into her lap. If you’re shy enough, no one sees anything else. The guy detective takes notes and bites down on a yawn.

  Then the lady detective says – examining an unravelling thread in her jacket cuff, like this is no big deal – ‘What did you think about your friend Selena going out with Chris?’

  Becca frowns, bewildered. ‘Lenie never went out with him. I think maybe they talked to each other a couple of times at the Court, but that was ages ago.’

  The detective’s eyebrows go up. ‘Nah. They were a couple. You mean you didn’t know?’

  ‘We don’t have boyfriends,’ Becca says disapprovingly. ‘My mum says I’m too young.’ She likes that touch. Looking like a kid might as well come in useful for once.

  The lady detective and the man detective and McKenna all wait, staring at her from behind the sun-patterns slanted across the desk. They’re so huge and meaty and hairy, they think they’ll just squash her down till her mouth pops open and everything comes gushing out.

  Becca looks back at them and feels her flesh stir and transform silently into something new, some nameless substance that comes from high on pungent-forested mountain slopes. Her borders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she’s opaque, she’s impermeable, she’s a million densities and d
imensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.

  That night Holly stays awake as long as she can, watching the others like just by watching she can keep them safe. She’s sitting up with her arms around her knees, too electric to lie down, but she knows none of them will try to start a conversation. Today has gone on long enough.

  Julia is sprawled and far away. Becca daydreams, eyes dark and solemn as a baby’s, flicking back and forth as she watches something Holly can’t see. Selena is pretending to be asleep. The light over the transom does bad things to her face, turns it puffy and purple in tender places. She looks pounded.

  Holly remembers that time back when she was a kid, how everything felt ruined, around her and inside her. Slowly, when she wasn’t looking, most of that washed away. Time does things. She tells herself it’ll do them for Selena.

  She wants to be in the grove. She can feel it, how the moonlight would pour over them all, calcify their bones to a strength that could take this weight. She knows they would be insane even to think about trying it tonight, but she falls asleep craving it anyway.

  When Holly’s breathing evens out, Becca sits up and takes her pin and her ink out of her bedside table. In the faint light from the corridor the line of blue dots swings across her white stomach like the track of some strange orbit, from her rib cage down to her belly button and back up to the ribs on the other side. There’s just room for one more.

  Selena waits till even Becca’s finally gone to sleep. Then she looks to see if there’s a text for her on the red phone, but it’s gone. She sits in the tangle of sheets and wants to go frantic, scream and claw, in case it did come from Chris. But she can’t remember how – her arms and her voice seem like they’ve been unhooked from her body – and anyway it would be too much work.

  She wonders, like a retch, if she did see this waiting all along, and closed her eyes because she wanted Chris so much. The more she tries to remember, the more it slips and twists and leers at her. In the end she knows she’s never going to know.

  She goes back to staying still. She carefully cordons off enough of her mind to do the necessary stuff, like showers and homework, so people won’t come bothering her. She puts the rest into concentrating.

  After a while she understands that something destroyed Chris to save her.

  After a while longer she understands that this means it wants her for its own, and that she belongs to it for good now.

  She cuts her hair off, for an offering, to send the message that she understands. She does it in the bathroom and burns the soft pale heap in the sink – the glade would be better, but they haven’t been back there since it happened, and she can’t tell if that’s because the others know some reason she hasn’t figured out. Her hair takes the lighter flame with a fierceness she didn’t expect, a whump and a wide-mouthed roar like faraway trees taking forest fire. She whips her hand away, but not fast enough, and her wrist is left with a small drumming wound.

  The smell of burning stays. For weeks afterwards she catches it on her, savage and holy.

  Chunks of her mind fall off sometimes. At first it frightens her, but then she realises once they’re gone she doesn’t miss them, so it doesn’t bother her any more. The burn scars red and then white.

  When Chris has been dead for four days, Julia hears that Finn’s been expelled for hotwiring the fire door, and starts waiting for the cops to come for her.

  They gave her and the others some hassle about Selena going out with Chris, but it was the cunning mirage hassle Holly talked about, looked impressive till you got up close and saw there was nothing solid there. It dissolved after a few days of blank head-shakes. Which means that Gemma couldn’t keep Joanne from flapping her yap altogether – in fairness, nothing short of surgery could – but she must have managed to get it through Joanne’s thick skull that, no matter how incredibly awesomesauce the drama would be, they need to keep the details quiet for their own sakes.

  But Julia couldn’t exactly get that through to Finn. (Hi, Jules here! Remember how u thot i was usin u 2 shag ur mate? U no wat wd b totes amazeballs? If u cud not mention dat 2 d cops. Kthxbai!!) All she could do was keep her fingers crossed he would somehow work out all the stuff Holly warned about, and this is the kind of situation that requires more than crossed fingers. A bunch of Colm’s idiots versus those two detectives: of course someone slipped up, in the end.

  She doesn’t have a clue what she’ll say when they come. As far as she can see, she has two options: spill her guts about how she wasn’t the only one meeting Chris, or deny everything and hope her parents get her a good lawyer. A month ago she would have said she’d go to jail before she’d throw Selena under a bus, no question; but things have changed, in ferocious tangled ways she’s having trouble getting a grip on. Lying awake late, she runs through each scenario in her head, tries to imagine each one playing out. They both feel impossible. Julia understands that doesn’t mean they can’t happen. The whole world has come apart and gone lunatic, gibbering.

  By the end of the week she thinks the cops are playing mind-games with her, waiting for the suspense to break her down. It’s working. When she drops a binder – she and Becca are in the back of the library, collecting binders full of old Irish exams for the class to practise on – she almost leaps through the roof. ‘Hey,’ Becca says. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I’m actually smart enough to decide for myself whether it’s OK or not,’ Julia snaps in a whisper, scooping dusty pages off the staticky carpet. ‘And believe me, it fucking isn’t.’

  ‘Jules,’ Becca says gently. ‘It is. I swear. It’s all going to be totally fine.’ And she runs the backs of her fingers along Julia’s shoulder, down her arm, like someone calming a spooked animal.

  Julia, whipping upright to rip her a new one, finds Becca looking back with steady brown eyes and not a hint of a flinch, even smiling a little. It’s the first time in weeks she’s looked at Becca properly. She realises that Becca is taller than her now, and that – unlike Selena and Holly and, Christ knows, Julia herself – she doesn’t look like shit. The opposite: she looks smoothed, luminous, as if her skin’s been stripped away and remade out of something denser and so white it’s almost metallic, something you could shatter your knuckles on. She looks beautiful.

  It makes Julia feel even farther away from her. She doesn’t have the energy to rip anyone anything; she just wants to sit down on the disgusting carpet and lean her head against the bookshelves and stay there for a long time. ‘Come on,’ she says instead, heaving up her armful of binders. ‘Let’s go.’

  After another week she realises that the cops aren’t coming. Finn hasn’t given them her name. He could have used it to bargain down the expulsion into a suspension, thrown it to the cops to get them off his back, but he didn’t.

  She wants to text him, but anything she said would come out as Ha-ha, you’re in the shit and I’m not, sucker. She wants to ask his friends how he’s doing, but either he’s told them everything and they hate her, or he hasn’t and it would start rumours, or they’d tell him and he’d hate her even more, and the whole mess would just bubble up viler. Instead she waits till the others are asleep and bawls like a stupid whiny baby all night long.

  After two and a half weeks the centre of the world is starting to turn away from Chris Harper. The funeral is over; everyone’s talked themselves tired of the photographers outside the church and who cried and how Joanne fainted during Communion and had to be carried outside. Chris’s name has fallen off the front pages, into the occasional snippet in spare corners that need filling. The detectives are gone, most of the time. The Junior Cert is just a few days from pouncing, and the teachers get narky instead of guidance-y if someone messes up a class by bursting into tears or seeing Chris’s ghost. He’s drifted off to one side: there, all the time, but in the corner of your eye.

  On the way to the Court, under trees puffed up with full summer green, Holly says, ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Hello?’
Julia says, eyebrows shooting up. ‘And walk straight into a dozen of your dad’s buddies just waiting for someone to be that incredibly fucking stupid? Seriously?’

  Becca is hopscotching over cracks, but Julia’s whipcrack voice gets her watching. Selena keeps on walking with her head tipped back, face turned up to the sweet swirls of leaves. Holly has her elbow to make sure she doesn’t smash into anything.

  ‘There aren’t any detectives. Dad’s always complaining about how he can’t even get surveillance authorised on, like, major drug dealers; no way would they authorise it on a girls’ school. So duh, incredibly fucking stupid yourself.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it just awesomesauce to have an expert on police procedure right here. I guess it never occurred to you that maybe your daddy doesn’t tell you everything?’

  Julia is giving Holly her fiercest better-back-down glare, but Holly’s not backing anywhere. She’s been waiting weeks for this; it’s the only thing she can think of that might fix things. ‘He doesn’t need to tell me. I have brain cells—’

  ‘I want to go,’ Becca says. ‘We need it.’

  ‘Maybe you need to get arrested. I honest-to-God don’t.’

  ‘We do need it,’ Becca says, stubborn. ‘Listen to you. You’re being a bitch. If we have a night out there—’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t give me that crap. I’m being a bitch because this is a stupid idea. It’s not going to get any less stupid if we—’

  Selena wakes up. ‘What is?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Julia tells her. ‘Never mind. Go think about pink fluff some more.’

  ‘Going out tonight,’ Becca says. ‘I want to go, so does Hol, Jules doesn’t.’

  Selena’s eyes float over to Julia. ‘Why not?’ she asks.

  ‘Because even if the cops don’t have surveillance on the place, it’s still a dumb idea. Have you even noticed that the Junior Cert starts this week? Have you even heard them, every single day: “Oh you have to get sleep, if you don’t get sleep you can’t concentrate and you won’t be able to study—”’