Daylight Saving (21 page)

“A
concealed
security camera,” Mum said. “What else are you hiding, Mr. Evans?”

“I’m not hiding anything. Your husband — sorry, your
estranged
husband — is making up ludicrous stories about young girls being attacked in forests. I will not have Leisure World’s good name dragged through the mud again.”

“Again?” Mum said.

Evans looked away.

Beeps and static hissed through Officer Bracket’s radio. “Receiving,” she said, and walked off to a corner of the room. It wasn’t long before she returned. “They’ve found two bodies,” she said.

Evans smashed his fist against the wall, and Dad held his head in his hands. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I killed that fella.”

“You didn’t kill anybody,” Officer Bracket said. “These bodies were badly decomposed. Early signs indicate that they’ve been in the forest for two years.”

“What?” Dad said. He looked at me, and I met his stare. The reality of her body, out there in the forest, hit me hard. I put my hands over my eyes and tried to imagine what Lexi would say. She’d tell me that she’d left her body a long time ago, that it was just dead cells. Just matter.

“Daniel, are you OK?” Mum asked.

“I will be,” I said.

The police would still need to talk to us, they said. They’d need to talk to Evans, too. In the corridor I heard Mum calmly telling Officer Bracket that my father’s statement had been confused due to his mental state: his son was missing, and he was enduring a difficult divorce. She said he’d probably just found the body and gone into shock.

Dad came out of the restroom a moment later, and Mum stopped talking. We walked, the three of us, out to the parking lot. The sun was coming up, and the birds were calling. In the car park, Mum kissed me and told me she would see me soon.

“Do you want to come back in the car with us?” Dad asked.

Mum smiled. “Richard. I’ve got my own car. I can’t just leave it here,” she said.

“No. I suppose not.”

She put a hand on his arm and then let it fall. I got into the car with Dad, and we watched Mum drive away. Then we followed.

The twisted trunks of the trees went by my window like the letters and words of a language I didn’t know. Incomprehensible yet reassuring. Through the gaps, I occasionally saw the flashing light of a police car. We passed the glistening lake, the Pancake House, the noble Dome.

I twisted in my seat to make sure Dad had brought all my bags. On the back shelf stood the cherry tomato plant, its fruit huge and red and bursting with life.

I found it hard to watch the news channels as the information came in. Her name was on the banners that scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen. The story filtered through over the next few weeks and months.

The body of Alexandria Cocker was found in a covered ditch in the pine forest, close to that of Marcus Fielding, age thirty-four. Fielding had worked in the bookings department of Leisure World but had left without notice. Guests had made several complaints about his behavior toward young women, all of which had been ignored by the Leisure World management. The torched wreckage of a stolen sports car found on the site around the time of the murder was thought to be the car he had used. At the time, the car’s theft had been attributed to local vandals.

The girl in the news articles was not really the Lexi I knew and loved, and it made me strangely angry.
You don’t know her,
I thought, when I saw her school friends — most of them at university now — talking about her. It wasn’t that they said she was better or worse than she was, just different. Experience changes people, of course. I know it has changed me.

I couldn’t eat the tomatoes from the plant, and Dad only ate a few. I much preferred to watch them grow, checking every day that their progress had not reversed. It never did, and Dad began to neglect the plant, leaving it out in the cold garden. I have never watched anything rot with such relief and glee. The shriveling, blackening, exploding mess was beautiful to me.

Dad, of course, was much more disturbed by the news coverage. He had spoken to a girl on the lawn of his holiday cabin a few days before, seen her running through a pine forest, and now the TV was telling him she’d been dead for two years. Credit to him, he didn’t angrily try to explain it away, as I thought he would. And he didn’t blame me. If he’d have asked, I’d have told him everything, but he didn’t.

He went to see a psychotherapist Chrissy had recommended. I don’t know if he talked about what he had seen at Leisure World, but I suspect he talked about Mum and about me. He’s getting better. One step at a time. He bought a new TV, but it still links up to the security camera. We can’t seem to disconnect it.

I went back to school as soon as I could. I don’t know if I behaved any differently, but you don’t ask the fat kid (or even the “slightly-thinner-than-before” kid) if he had a holiday romance when he was suspended from school. I settled back in. I swam a lot.

For a while, I felt pretty sad, and it seemed that every time I started to feel better, another one of those news item came up. There was something in the paper about a possible charge against Evans for obstructing the course of justice or a piece of evidence linking Marcus Fielding to another crime. But in the February after we returned from Leisure World, BBC news interviewed Lexi’s dad, Paul Cocker, outside his house. He was talking about starting a charity in Lexi’s name. I wasn’t really listening, because I was staring past him, at his other daughter. Lexi was right: she was a beauty, and behind her was the glass door, the sails of the ship coated in frost on that cold morning. I thought, briefly, about going there, to the house. I was pretty sure I could find it. But in the end, I didn’t go. I couldn’t. Not without her permission.

In March the clocks went forward, and we lost an hour.
Good riddance to it,
I thought.

Around that time, I was watching a documentary about the massacre at Wounded Knee, and I noticed a mark on the TV. I squinted hard, but it was difficult to make out. I switched the TV off and crouched down in front of the set. Burnt shapes began to emerge. For a moment, I thought Dad had used the security camera to check who was downstairs. I actually thought the person whose orange shape I could see on the glass was me. But it wasn’t. It was a girl, with her arms folded. She seemed to be wearing a feather in her hair.

After that, every once in a while, I would be standing in a crowd or waiting in line for the bus, and I would feel a little tap on my shoulder. I would spin around and sense someone running away. It’s called a coup, and it’s a brave and difficult thing — to touch someone and then let them go.