The Secret Place (73 page)

She feels Joanne behind her, high in the library window. Her stare zipping through the sunlit air to fingernail-pinch the back of Holly’s neck, twisting.

She says, ‘I’ve actually known that for a while. Remember?’

She can tell by Dad’s head rearing back that she’s taken him off guard. They never talk about that time when she was a kid.

‘OK,’ he says, a second later. Whether he believes her or not, he’s not going any farther down that trail. ‘I’m relieved to hear it. In that case, I’ll have a word with Costello, ask him to interview you now, get it out of the way. Then you can pack up your stuff, nice and discreetly, and come home with me.’

Holly was expecting this, but she still feels her legs go rigid against it. ‘No. I’m not going home.’

And Dad was expecting that; his stride doesn’t change. ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. And it’s not forever. Just for a few days, till the lads get this sorted.’

‘What if they don’t? Then what?’

‘If they don’t have their man locked up by Monday, we’ll review the situation. It shouldn’t come to that, though. From what I hear, they’re pretty close to an arrest.’

Their man.
Not Joanne. Whatever the detectives have against this guy, sooner or later it’s going to crumble in their hands, and they’re going to go hunting again.

‘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 dimensions 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.