“Well, you’re never going to find it on your own,” I said. He looked over at me stubbornly and opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off before he could do so. “You’re going to need my help.”
Ch. 7
The campus was a long stretch of white, barren and cold as a wasteland, and the sound of the distant wind screamed from somewhere far off. Since the rest of the students and staff were spending the weekend inside, Jack and I had taken the opportunity to sneak out unnoticed. As I walked behind him and tried to shield my face from the cold, I tried to decipher where we were going; any chance of asking him was denied by the sheer cold that struck my face whenever I pulled it from my scarf.
Jack bypassed the edge of the empty sporting fields and made his way to the woods before disappearing past the line of snow-covered trees that created the boundary between the Bickerby campus and the town. Only the knowledge that no one else was out in the sub-zero temperatures kept me from protesting that we would get caught, and I followed him beneath the branches.
The cold was painful. My feet were hard and stiff in my loafers and snow immediately slipped down into them and drenched my socks; my hands felt nearly as cold curled up in my pockets; and every time I tried to breathe through my nose, the air got stuck in frozen nostrils. I was well beyond shivering, and looking at Jack in his sweatshirt and light coat was only making me colder. Only his eagerness seemed to drive him on.
The town was not much warmer, though we stumbled out into it in relief all the same. I hadn’t seen much of it apart from the route that I took from the ferry to the front gate of the school, and everything around me looked unfamiliar and uninviting. With the heavy coatings of snow covering all the small houses and shops and the dimly-lit street lights, the place looked rather like the ceramic display that my grandmother used to set up at Christmastime, though the sight in front of me was much more forlorn.
“Where is everyone?”
Jack shrugged.
“School, work,” he supposed. “Wrapped up in blankets next to their electric heaters, shivering violently.”
“Or already frozen to death.”
“Could be. But don’t worry, it’s not much further. We’ll be there soon.”
He stopped outside our destination a short time later: a small house down a back street on the far side of the island. It was hard to tell if it was white or gray, for it had been a dark blue-green originally and the newer layer of paint had all but chipped away. The poor structure looked ready to collapse under the weight of all the snow that had built up on top of it and the short driveway hadn’t been plowed since the first snowfall of the winter.
“Very nice,” I commented.
“Yeah, well, it used to be,” Jack said. He wrinkled his nose as he looked over the worn façade. “It was Miss Mercier’s house.”
The evident abandonment of the place suddenly made sense, and my eyes lingered on the pathway leading up to the front door that hadn’t been touched by footsteps. A breeze shook a dead tree nearby and its branches rattled like death. The entirety of the place was forsaken.
Jack put his hands on the picket fence and hopped over it: the gate was frozen shut. He trudged towards the porch before realizing that I wasn’t following him.
“Well? Come on,” he said.
“Come where?”
I looked at the house of the dead woman and subconsciously took a step backwards. I didn’t even like looking at it; I certainly didn’t want to go closer.
“Inside.”
“Jack, we can’t just go in.”
I looked around, half expecting to see a police barricade barring us from entering, but the house appeared untouched by the authorities.
“Sure we can.”
We looked at one another over the fence, Jack looking confident, me dubious, before another gust of wind came over us and drenched me in cold. I conceded and climbed over the fence after him.
He jimmied the lock with his pocket knife and the door gave away easily as though the house had been waiting for someone to enter it again. I stepped carefully over the threshold. The inside was almost as cold as the outside: I could see my breath in white gusts against the dark wallpaper.
It was a quaint house, hardly anything to admire, but I supposed that it had been much nicer when Miss Mercier had still lived in it. The cold had seeped into the wood and created an air of deterrent all around, and there was a musty smell that made it unpleasant to breathe. I followed Jack into the small kitchen and saw that the table and chair set had not been removed yet. Glancing around, I realized that the entire house was still furnished even though no one had lived it in for over a month. There were dishes in the sink and a plate on the counter that had been left out for a meal that had never been eaten. My stomach twisted uncomfortably, but it had nothing to do with the sight of the rotting food. I quickly turned away.
“This place is a wreck,” Jack commented from the other side of the room.
For someone who had no sense of tidiness himself, the statement seemed a bit unprecedented until I saw what he was talking about. The area behind the kitchen had been used as a storage room of sorts. The walls were lined with shelves that had once been stocked with pantry items, though now the contents of them had been pulled down and strewn about the floor. Cereal boxes were ripped open, cans had been dented and ripped of their labels, and canisters were opened and cracked. Yet despite the mess covering every inch of floor space, there was no food in sight apart from a box of dry pasta that scattered the ground. Every other container had been licked clean.
“Where’s the food?”
“Rats?” Jack guessed. I immediately took a step backwards. He smiled wryly at me. “Don’t worry, Nim, they only come out at night.”
“That’s bats. Rats come out whenever they choose.”
“Right. Let’s go upstairs.”
He turned and went back out into the hall, but I remained where I was on the threshold. The eeriness of the house had not let up in the few minutes that we had been there; if anything, it had only grown stronger. I didn’t like the idea of sneaking around the house at all. It seemed like more of an intrusion because the owner was dead. A flickering part of me wondered if she was somehow watching us.
“Jack, what are we doing here?” I said hesitantly.
He stopped midway up the stairs and looked down at me.
“Having a look around,” he said with a shrug. “You know, see if we can find any evidence or whatever.”
“Evidence?” All at once the idea that we were looking for Miss Mercier’s murderer seemed ridiculous, as though Jack and I had been caught playing a game that we were much too old to partake in. “I thought she died in the woods – why would there be anything here?”
“She was found in the woods, but she came home first, so something happened between the time she got here and was dragged there.”
The steps creaked on their own accord; the wood was groaning from the cold weather. Jack eyed them warily.
“We just have to figure out what that was,” he said slowly. Turning from me, he hurried up the stairs before they could make any more noise. I watched him retreat into the dark hallway, but I was still hesitant to follow. It felt as though the house would shatter at any moment from the cold and bury us beneath it. I ran my eyes over the walls again, almost expecting to see the cracks confirming my fears, and then I ran after him. At least in his presence, the feeling that I was not entirely alone could be explained.
Apart from a small bathroom, the only other room upstairs was Miss Mercier’s bedroom. The feeling of sheer intrusiveness increased as I looked at it. It was bad enough that we had broken into her house: it was downright wrong to go through her bedroom. But the hallway was very narrow and dark, and the silence of the house was creeping up on me, so I stepped over the threshold regardless of how my conscience protested.
It took me a moment to find Jack. The door was partially closed and I edged around it, first only seeing the dresser and end of a
neatly made bed. When I nudged the door with my foot, Jack’s form came into my view next to a small table covered in picture frames and keepsakes.
“Find anything?”
“Not yet.”
He moved back and sat down on the dusted-rose-colored bedspread. When I saw him sitting there, his shoes leaving snow on the carpet, his dark clothing contrasting severely with the pastel trimmings, and the hood of his sweatshirt falling down over his narrowed, devious eyes, it struck me how out of place he was in Miss Mercier’s home.
The room was furnished in a gentle sort of way: there was an antique bureau between two small windows, each with ruffled curtains that matched the bed-skirt, a few paintings up on the walls, and a bookshelf lined with both English and French titles. Near the closet there was a pair of shoes that had toppled over from being kicked off, perhaps intended to be put away properly at a later time. On a chair by the far wall there was a light dress that had been laid out to be ironed. I stared at it for a long while. The light fabric and pale blue color seemed so incongruous given the amount of snow outside. She had picked it out to wear long before snow had come to the island. Though it was only a season ago, it felt like a lifetime.
“What do you think?” Jack said. “See anything that might identify a murderer?”
“Hardly,” I said. My legs were cold and aching but I didn’t want to move the dress from the chair to sit down. I fidgeted in place instead, hoping that we would be out in the open air again soon. “I doubt we’ll see anything the police haven’t already gotten.”
Jack hummed quietly.
“It doesn’t really look like they’ve been here, does it?”
I glanced around the room again. From what I could tell, he certainly seemed right. Even so, I said, “Well, they’re not supposed to touch anything, are they? They just take pictures and whatnot.”
“I guess.”
I moved over to the table that he had been standing at before and looked at the photos.
“That’s her sister,” Jack said, coming to stand behind me. The woman in the picture was a few years older than Miss Mercier had been. She was standing and pointing excitedly at a sign. “Those are her parents, and then that’s the whole family on holiday in Düsseldorf … Her brother-in-law and nieces, and that’s the college she went to in Rhode Island …”
He pointed to the pictures easily as though he was quite accustomed to seeing them, and all at once I remembered how much time he had used to spend with her, waiting after classes and visiting her during study-halls. I had always known that he had liked Miss Mercier, but I hadn’t quite realized the extent of his association with her. I replaced the picture frame back down on the table. My hands were too cold to hold it any longer.
“How do you know all this?” I asked as he finished relaying a story about a visit that Miss Mercier had taken to Quebec.
“She told me,” Jack said with a shrug.
“She told you about her family?” I asked. “While you were …?”
I trailed off, hoping that he would finish my sentence for me. When he didn’t, I was forced to complete it with a harsh-sounding allegation.
“…in her room?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t tell if he was baiting me. His response was easy and nonchalant, and all I could think was that he was either incredibly innocent or incredibly guilty. He had to have known how unfounded his suggestion sounded, though he was certainly acting otherwise. I rubbed my thumb over the jagged nail of my forefinger as I surveyed him.
“Jack,” I said, deciding to simply ask him rather than wonder about it any longer, “were you …?”
Yet before I could finish the question, a dark shape moved behind him. I leapt back and crashed into the table, sending the photos to the floor. The frames clattered against the wood.
“What’s that?”
Jack spun around as well, standing in front of me as he searched the room for what I had seen. Sure enough, a dark-gray creature had bounded across the room. Its claws scratched the hardwood with a coarse scraping sound as it propelled across the room, and then it ran to the wall and bounded off of it again to come back towards us. I could hear the rough sound of its hissing.
“Fuck – what is that?” Jack said, jumping back as I had done. We backed up against the wall in alarm. The creature was blocking our path to the door and I dug my fingers into the wallpaper in the hopes that the wall would collapse to give us another escape route. For a moment we stood tensed in place, but then Jack leaned forward with squinted eyes to peer at the thing on the floor in front of us.
He visibly relaxed and sighed.
“It’s a cat.”
Surely enough, it was. Its exterior was a bit off due to a large amount of loose, matted fur that hung from its form. It was emaciated to the point of death and appeared to be more of a ghostly skeleton that was wearing another animal’s flesh in an attempt to masquerade as a living creature.
Jack looked over at me with a pointed expression, and as I let go of the wall and crossed my arms with a nod, we both silently agreed to never tell anyone that we had been so afraid of a house-pet.
“Miss Mercier had a cat?”
“Not exactly,” Jack said. “It’s a stray, but she used to feed it and would let it in for the night sometimes. She was afraid a fox might get it.”
The cat hissed at me and raised its body in an arching position as though preparing to attack. Its pale yellow eyes were fixed on my face.
“She should have let the fox get it,” I muttered.
“Nim!” Jack said, giving me a look. He stepped forward and knelt down in front of the strange creature, holding his hand out to it. I rolled my eyes.
“It’s not going to shake your hand, Jack.”
“I don’t expect it to. I’m letting it sniff me.”
“Why?”
“To get acquainted.”
When the cat came closer, he reached over and picked it up. I made a revolted face.
“Jack, that thing is probably crawling with diseases,” I said. “Just chuck it outside and wash your hands.”
“I’m not going to chuck it outside, Nim.”
“Whatever, place it nicely outside, then,” I said. “Just so long as you get rid of it.”
“I’m not getting rid of it,” Jack said. He gazed down at the cat in his arms and rubbed its neck affectionately. “Look at it, Nim, its hungry.”
“What do you want me to do? Buy it lunch?”
“We have to feed it,” he said.
“No, we don’t.”
“Nim,” Jack said, looking at me sternly. “This thing’s been locked inside the house for over a month. It must be starving – you saw the pantry downstairs. It’s eaten everything it could get its hands on.”
“Paws.”
“Paws, sorry,” Jack said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, have a heart. How would you like it if you hadn’t eaten for a month?”
I hadn’t eaten for nearly a year, but I thought that it wasn’t the moment to inform Jack. There was no point in arguing with him, anyhow.
“All right … I’ll see what’s in the fridge.”
I trudged down the stairs and back into the kitchen, feeling even odder now that I was snooping through a dead person’s kitchen looking for ingredients to make a meal. My eyes fell again on the empty plate on the counter. I wondered if Miss Mercier had eaten her meal before she had been killed or if there hadn’t been time. Perhaps the cat had mewed at the closed door as it waited for her to come back before finally hopping up on the counter and eating it itself.
Shaking myself from my thoughts, I crossed to the refrigerator to return to the task at hand. No sooner had I opened the door, however, than I immediately turned my face away. The contents of it were horribly gone by: sour milk, old eggs, and a selection of cheese reeked from their shelves. I pulled my sweater up over my nose and pushed a few leftover containers filled with potatoes and vegetables to the side before determining that there was nothing rem
otely edible there and shutting the door.
“Find anything?” Jack said from the doorway. The cat was mewing softly in his arms.
“Not unless you want to poison it,” I said. “Which might be for the best …”
“Nim – what’s with you and this cat?”
“It’s not this cat,” I said. “It’s cats in general. I don’t like them, and I’m fairly certain that I’m allergic to them.”
“You’re not.”
“I could be.”
“We’re not poisoning the cat,” Jack said.
“I’m just trying to be humane,” I said. “It’s either food poisoning or hypothermia – either way the thing’s going to die.”
Jack looked down at the creature with a frown, suddenly consumed by the idea that Miss Mercier’s cat was going to starve to death.
“I have to take it back to school,” he said.
“No. Jack – no.”
“Come on, Nim … It needs food.”
“No – where would we put it?”
“In our room.”
“Jack, we can’t have pets at Bickerby. It’s against the rules.”
Jack rolled his eyes.
“Right, so is smoking and drinking, and yet we’ve been doing pretty good with that for seven years.”
“Only because you threaten Sanders regularly,” I argued.
“So this will be no different,” Jack replied. He cocked his head to the side and gave me a look. “Come on, Nim … please? It’ll starve …”
I shook my head at his theatrics, knowing that he was purposefully playing off of my inability to see him whine. He continued to make a face at me over the scruffy head of the ugly creature and I averted my gaze. The room gave another causeless creak and I shivered. The house was too haunting: I had to get out of it. Looking at Jack and realizing that he was not going to be the one to cave, I sighed and muttered, “Fine.”
He smiled gloatingly.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 13
