Kiss in the Dark (14 page)

SIDEKICKS OR RIVALS

“Hop!” Miss Carter screeches. “Left leg! Left, Lizzie! Your other left! God give me patience!”

Sharon Persaud and the hockey girls snicker in unison as Lizzie switches legs in panic and nearly falls over in the process.

“And … change!” Miss Carter blows her whistle. “Right leg now! All the way across the hockey pitch, come on! Build those quads!”

Plum, wobbling along at the end of the line like an awkward flamingo, wails, appalled at the thought of making her legs any bigger. Even I crack a smile at this.

“I’m sure I’m getting my period, Miss Carter,” she pleads for the third time this PE session.

But Miss Carter, though young, blond, and comparatively pretty, is as tough as old boots and totally unembarrassed about discussions of bodily functions.

“Nonsense,” she bellows cheerfully. “You said that last week!”

“I’m very irregular,” Plum says quickly.

“Best thing for irregular periods—regular exercise!” Miss Carter retorts. “You run your body, it doesn’t run you.”

“But—”

“Too many excuses!” Miss Carter blows her whistle again as we all hop gracelessly over the white boundary of the hockey field. “Down on your knees and give me ten push-ups, please!”

Plum looks down at the dirty, muddy grass.

“I’ll get filthy,” she wails.

Miss Carter smiles at a huffing Plum, her white teeth flashing in her rather weather-beaten face.

“Then do full push-ups,” she suggests. “You won’t get your knees dirty that way. And get on with it. Any more delay and I’ll make it twenty!”

I saw Plum in operation at St. Tabby’s, and I’m sure the teachers’ attitudes here are a huge shock to her. St. Tabby’s was such a social school that even the teachers were by no means unaware of which girls were the smartest, the coolest, the most connected to important people in the outside world. Plum exploited her advantages mercilessly. I’ve seen Mam’selle Bouvier, our old French teacher, playfully adjusting the lapels of Plum’s jacket, flicking the tie of Plum’s silk scarf, giggling away in French with Plum like a girl her own age as Plum talked her way out of not having done her homework. I’ve seen Plum widen her eyes and prattle on about the priest-holes at her parents’ stately home near Bath, in Somerset, instead of answering a question about the Reformation in history class.

And I’ve seen her use every single excuse in the book to get out of PE class at St. Tabby’s. She was fox hunting at the weekend with the Quorn hunt, and her legs are too sore from taking all those jumps on her new mount for her to do anything. She went to a Northern meeting held by the Duke of Argyll at Inverary Castle, and the Scottish reels have made her ankles too weak to play netball today. She’s getting her period, and her Harley Street doctor (the same one used by Princess Eugenie, whom she’s intimately close to) advises total rest when she’s in this condition.

Plum is as sharp as a knife, and she realized very soon that the name-dropping that carried her through St. Tabby’s went down like a lead balloon at Wakefield Hall. It only took her a few frigid stares and raised eyebrows from the teachers to stop her tossing out references to famous people she knew.

But her abiding weakness is that she still can’t believe that she’s being forced to do exercise. And she also can’t believe that nothing will work with Miss Carter but sucking it up (as Taylor would say) and hopping—on the correct leg—when Miss Carter tells you to hop.

A light rain drizzles down as Plum drops sulkily to her knees and starts her feeble attempts at push-ups. For Taylor and Sharon, this would be an opportunity to show off their amazing upper-body strength. For Plum, it’s total humiliation. I haven’t been this happy in ages.

“Being thin is not what we care about at Wakefield Hall,” Miss Carter says. “Is it, girls?”

“No, Miss Carter,” we all chorus.

“What do we care about?”

“Being strong, Miss Carter!”

“That’s right. Being able to do ten proper push-ups!”

Miss Carter stalks over to Plum, who is struggling miserably on the muddy ground. She grabs the back of Plum’s T-shirt, where her bra strap would be if Plum needed to wear one, and alternately hauls her up and pushes her down, making sure she completes the requisite number of push-ups. When Miss Carter eventually drags Plum up to her feet, Plum wipes her face with a dirty hand, leaving a big stripe of mucky grass across her forehead. Her expression is absolutely furious.

It doesn’t help when Lizzie giggles nervously at the blade of grass stuck to Plum’s forehead by a clump of mud.

“Sprint back across the field now, all of you!” Miss Carter shouts. “Then get your sticks and we’ll do some goal-shooting practice.”

Sharon Persaud is at the head of an arrow formation of hockey girls who shoot off, like a pack of dogs after a fox, their target the hockey sticks piled in the grass. Taylor and I follow more slowly. We do enough running as it is, and we don’t want to be knocked down in the stampede. To my surprise, Plum is keeping pace, her storklike legs allowing her to take much longer strides than either of us, though she’s puffing for breath. And she gasps out at me angrily:

“I nipped out for a smoke by the barns at lunchtime, Scarlett, and I saw your boyfriend going into one of the sheds and running a wood chipper. He looked very suspicious to me. He couldn’t be concealing evidence of something, could he?”

Don’t let her get to you! I tell myself firmly, since Taylor, who would normally say exactly that, is resolutely silent as she jogs by my side.

“Oh my God!” I exclaim, easily, because I don’t get winded by jogging across a hockey pitch. “You saw Jase doing his job! Haven’t you got anything better than that? I’m actually disappointed in you, Plum.”

I lengthen my stride, till I break into a fast run. Taylor speeds up too, and we shoot away from her, reaching the pile of hockey sticks in just a few steps. As I extract my stick, I look back at Plum, who slowed to a walk as soon as she crossed the field boundary line. She’s talking to Susan, and even from here I can see that whatever she said was a barb. Susan flinches and ducks her head, visibly wounded.

“She just took it out on Susan,” I observe to Taylor. “I can never get over how mean Plum is to her friends.”

“Girls like Plum don’t have friends,” Taylor corrects me, grabbing her own stick. “They have sidekicks or rivals. I saw enough Plums in high school. The sidekicks never know what’s coming next, so they’re always wary, and the rivals have to be pretty tough to stick it out.”

She looks sideways at me and smirks.

“You’re definitely a rival. Especially because you keep challenging her.”

“So what about you?” I say, meeting her gaze full-on.

Why aren’t you challenging her too? I want to say. But I keep quiet because I’m still not sure I can handle going there right now.

“I’m your sidekick,” Taylor answers lightly. “What a dumb question.”

It gets dark by six this time of year. And I want the cover of dark for what I’m about to do.

I feel guilty and ashamed in equal measure. Guilty, because I obviously don’t trust my boyfriend at all, if I’m willing to listen to the poison about him that Plum Saybourne’s all too happy to pour in my ear.

And ashamed, because here I am, sneaking round the corner of the shed where all the gardening equipment is kept, dressed in all black, acting like a fool. I wouldn’t put it past her to have made the entire story up just to laugh at my reaction.

The shed is padlocked, of course. I didn’t expect anything else. Not only is the equipment expensive, my grandmother’s very strict about keeping everything that’s out of bounds locked up. But I’ve taken good note of Jase’s trick for accessing the barn. I circle the shed, trying each loose plank, giving each one a good tug to see if it’ll come free at all. A board almost next to the wooden door has enough give in it that I can ease it toward me, making a gap large enough so I can wriggle through the space at the bottom and then work my fingers around it to pull it roughly back into place again.

It smells wonderful inside. Warm and rich with sawdust and freshly cut wood. A small pile of logs is stacked in a wheelbarrow standing next to the wall, its wheels heavily clotted with mud. Wakefield Hall uses a lot of wood as fuel; my grandmother has an open fireplace in her living room, and there are woodstoves in various cottages that need to be fed with staves. Naturally, nothing goes to waste. The small pieces produced by the chipper are used for mulching into the soil. They make really good compost, apparently.

It’s standard maintenance work for Jase to be sawing wood and feeding it into the chipper. I don’t even know what I expect to find here.

I stand up, dusting myself off, and walk over to the chipper, using the tiny torch on my key ring to guide my way. In front of it there’s a pile of wood waiting to be fed in: tree limbs and branches, mostly, but scanning around slowly with the miniature bluish light, I see an old wooden chair frame, its cane seat torn and ragged, broken into a couple of pieces already.

The shape of the chair legs—rounded spokes—triggers a memory in my head.

The marks on Mr. Barnes’s body. Long welts that could very well have been made by a blow from a broken-off chair leg.

But as I get closer to the chair, I see that it’s draped with cobwebs, pushed off to the side, as if it’s been there for years. Certainly it wasn’t used on Mr. Barnes a couple of nights ago.

There’s nothing else in the pile of wood that looks like it could have been the kind of weapon that inflicted those marks on Mr. Barnes. But now, thanks to the chair, I know what I’m looking for. I walk closer to the chipper itself, the gaping mouth where the wood is fed in. Gingerly, I brush away the thick covering of sawdust and focus my tiny torch on the scary metal teeth.

Slivers of wood are caught all along them. Nothing unusual there. I poke around more bravely now, having checked that the switch on the side is definitely turned off. There’s something sticking out of the side, in a gap the width of two fingers between the last steel tooth and the rim of the mouth. I work my thumb and index finger around it as best I can, trying to pull it out. This is where I really need more fingernails than I have. Just a few millimeters projecting beyond the tips of my fingers would really help.

But then, if I were the kind of girl who had fingernails, I wouldn’t be poking around in a wood chipper at night, would I?

It’s no use. I’ll never get it out like this. And the more I try, the more curious I am about it, because it looks a little like the chair leg—from this angle, anyway.

I step back and fish around in the wood pile till I find a slab of wood with a loose nail hanging from it. I work the nail free by knocking the wood on the ground to push the nail back through the hole it made. Then, armed with the nail, I approach the chipper once again. Very carefully, I stick the nail into it as low as I can reach, and use the pointed tip for leverage—the danger is that I’ll knock the dangling piece of wood down into the belly of the chipper, where I won’t be able to reach it. I wriggle it back and forth, working the piece of wood up toward me until, finally, it’s projecting enough from the mouth of the chipper so I can close my fingers over the rounded top of it and drag it loose.

It splinters more as it comes out, because I have to wrestle it out where it’s caught on the side of the tooth. So it’s pretty damaged, and it would be very hard to say with any certainty what its original use might have been. The closest thing it resembles, to me, is the spoke of a banister. It’s a long, narrow piece of pole, and running my fingers down it, I can feel that it was once smooth and polished. Not a fence pole, or even a broom handle. It’s been lacquered at some stage, to give it a shiny finish. Definitely something that was meant for inside a house.

I stand there, running the flashlight over it, squinting hard to see anything out of the ordinary. Halfway down one side is a shadow, and I turn the flashlight to get a better look at it. But the shadow’s still there. It’s a dark stain of some sort, maybe from mold. Who knows how long it’s been lying here in the dirt, waiting to be made into wood chips?

I scratch at the stain with my fingernail. It flakes off. Not mold. My heart jumps into my mouth at the realization of what it could be.

And then I nearly jump out of my skin when I hear an unmistakable sound from just outside the shed.

Someone’s sliding a key into the padlock that secures the door.

IT COULD BE ALL SORTS OF THINGS

Even I didn’t know I could move so fast. Thank God, the wood chips beneath my feet muffle any sound I might make as I dive to the far end of the shed and look around frantically for any kind of shelter in the pitch-dark. I don’t spot any, so I curl into as tiny a ball as I can, dragging the sleeves of my black sweater down to cover my hands, ducking my head into my arms so my white face won’t show.

The door’s being pushed open. Pale light gleams in the doorway, a little illumination from a faint moon, and the next second it’s blotted out again as the person who undid the padlock steps in and stands there. I hear the footsteps stop for a moment as, presumably, their eyes become more adjusted to the dark. And then they start again, just a few steps, crossing to the side wall. (I squint through the join of my arms to see that much.) I hear a clicking sound, and with absolute horror, I realize what it is.

In a split second, the shed is flooded with light.

I’m pressed right into the corner. I can’t get any lower than I am now without lying flat. I wait, panic-stricken, for a shout, for footsteps to march over to me, or for the sound of a piece of wood being picked up to use as a weapon.

If I hear that, I’ll jump up and run, I tell myself frantically. I can’t just wait for someone to attack me.

There’s absolute silence. Which of course could mean that whoever is in here with me is staring at me, incredulous, working out their next move.

And then the footsteps cross to the chipper. I know that much, because I can hear wood being kicked out of the way as they approach it, which means they’re moving through the pile of debris waiting to be fed in. I hear another switch being flicked, and then a busy, buzzing noise as the chipper turns over whatever’s left in its belly and spits it out.

I lift my head fractionally, just enough to see that I’m actually in a pool of shadow. The single bulb hanging from the shed roof is casting a circle of light in the center of the room but leaving its corners dim.

As long as I don’t call attention to myself by making any noise, I should be okay….

I don’t dare to turn my head at all. Instead, I slide my glance along to the edge of my eye sockets, which is by no means a pleasant feeling, but just about allows me to get a glimpse of the person standing by the chipper. I have the oddest feeling that it’s going to be Aunt Gwen, though I couldn’t have said why.

Oh no. That’s a lie. I want it to be Aunt Gwen. I want it to be her so badly I’m biting my lip with desperation, every nerve in my body aching to see her.

But I bite my lip still deeper with disappointment as I realize the figure beside the chipper is much too wide and tall to be Aunt Gwen. Of course it’s Jase. Who else has the keys to the shed, other than his father?

The chipper clicks off again. I don’t think he fed anything into it at all; he just let it run for a minute or so. Then darkness overwhelms the shed again. The thin crack where the door is ajar suddenly becomes the only focal point in the room.

My thighs are aching, my feet are hurting where my toes are bent under me, my arms are sore from being raised and wrapped round my head, but I still don’t dare to move a fraction. Now that the wood chipper is turned off, the silence in here is absolute. I’m holding my breath, afraid even to let it out.

I can’t believe that I’m crouching in the corner of a shed, hiding from my own boyfriend, scared to breathe. I’ve seen people die and I’ve prevented a murder, but in my whole life, this is the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Because I’m spying on the person I love.

Then the silence is broken by a strange, gulping noise. For a second I think Jase is throwing up. Then I realize that he’s crying—big, heaving sobs that sound dry and painful. A crash makes me open my eyes and focus on where he must be standing. As my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness, I see that he’s sent the wheelbarrow that was leaning against the wall flying, its wheels spinning with the force of his kick. And now he’s knocking his head against the wooden wall, twice, three times, in rhythm with his sobs.

Oh God, this is so awful. I can’t bear it.

But I have to. I have to hear Jase cry his heart out, and not only can I not comfort him, I’m terrified he isn’t just crying because his father’s dead, but for something much worse….

And I’m terrified he ran the chipper because he was worried he hadn’t fully got rid of the incriminating piece of wood he fed into it earlier, when Plum saw him. The piece of wood I’m clutching in my hand.

The one with the stain on it that looks a lot like blood.

After dinner, I sit in my room, turning the piece of wood over and over in my hands, not knowing what to do.

I don’t want to admit that I’ve got any kind of trust issue with my boyfriend, let alone that I might seriously be suspecting him of killing his—I can’t even say it. But the wood in the chipper and Jase’s breakdown in the shed … add those things together and it looks very bad.

I really can’t believe that Jase would do any harm to a fly, let alone his own father. Yet if I went to Taylor and told her the whole story—or, worse, to the police, God help me—they wouldn’t see the Jase I trust and love. They’d see someone with a motive, opportunity, and now with potential evidence against him.

I look down at the piece of wood, lightly touching the stain with my thumb. It could be all sorts of things. Paint. Spilt varnish. And yes, blood. There, I said it. But honestly, the only scenario that I can picture that portrays Jase as the killer is one where Mr. Barnes came after his son and Jase had to grab something and defend himself. Even then, I’m sure Jase would have rung the police straightaway to tell them what happened. Why wouldn’t he?

A branch knocks against my bedroom window, battered by the wind, and I jump; it sounds like that scary bit at the start of Wuthering Heights when the ghost knocks on the window, trying to get in. The weather wasn’t that bad when I was walking home. There must be a storm coming. Opening my desk drawer, I hide the piece of wood inside, pushing it right to the back. I close the drawer, no closer to understanding what all this means than when I was sitting in the shed’s pitch-darkness after Jase eventually locked up and left, more confused than I have ever been in my life.

Wham! The branch clatters against the window so noisily that I jump to my feet, worried that it’s going to shatter the glass at any moment. I throw up the sash and reach out into the dark cold night, feeling for the branch so I can try to bend it or break it.

And then I scream like a banshee, because something has just grabbed hold of my wrist. My whole body goes clammy with terror. Frantically, I try to whip my hand away, but I can’t, and I look down in panic, shaking. Even though my eyes are glazed with fear, I see a hand wrapped around my wrist. I look down still farther and exclaim:

“Jase?”

He’s holding on to the drainpipe with one hand, his face upturned, staring at me, his eyes wide and vulnerable and pleading.

“I really need to see you, Scarlett,” he says breathlessly. “Pull me in, please.”

But seeing Jase doesn’t abate my panic, it pumps it up instead. I’ve broken out in a cold sweat. Because this isn’t the first time a boy has stared up at me desperately, hanging from a drop, needing me to pull him up. Last year, Dan McAndrew’s brother Callum was clinging to my wrist, his life depending on mine. The flashback is so powerful and intense that I freeze, slapped hard in the face by déjà vu.

And my wrist goes dangerously limp as all my muscles slacken, sending Jase sliding a foot farther away from me down the wall, as he scrabbles to reestablish his foothold.

“Scarlett!” Jase hisses frantically. “I’m slipping! Help me!”