A woman appears in the doorway to my right. She is lean and pale looking, her voice hoarse.
“That’s right. You must be Mrs. Webber.”
“Lisa, please. Mrs. Webber makes me feel soold.”
I take her in: a stony face that could seem cruel in the wrong light, shoulder-length hair, a tight smile that doesn’t quite touch her eyes. Her gaze darts over me.
“They still out front? We thought the heat would drive them away.”
“What’s going on?” Sam asks, placing my bag at the bottom of the stairs. “Who are these people?”
“Did you ever tell me where you were from, Sam?”
He hesitates as if anticipating a trap. Then, “Bristol.”
“Ah. Well, then. Banathel is a very small town you see, and in small towns people talk. After your visit down here last week, word got round that Alice was going to be in the paper ’cos she could speak with dead folk. We had a lad knock to see if she could ask the ghosts where his bike was. Said it got nicked last week and his mum was going mad. Paul sent him off with a flea in his ear but by midday half the county were on about it. Next morning a few people pitched up outside. Then a few more the day after that and the next day even more.”
“Herd mentality,” I say. Lisa frowns.
“Some of them drive over every day from Bodmin in a minivan. Some church or other, I don’t know. They don’t want to talk to me. Just her. Yesterday they started leaving stuff out there. I clear it away but they put it back. They light candles but they’re just melting in the sun.Andthey keep putting things through the bloody letter box. We’ve had to tape it up!”
“What kind of things?”
“Little notes, photographs. They’re all wanting something. They seem to think Alice can perform miracles.”
I look down at the dog collar the tall man had passed me.“Can she find Donald?”he asked.
“Come through,” Lisa is saying. “I’m afraid we’ve only got juice or milk but I can put the kettle on?”
“Tea’s fine.”
I follow Lisa downthe hallway and into the cramped kitchen. There is a pile of washing in a plastic basket, a puddle of brownwater beneath the sink. Lisa disappears into the pantry and reappears with a biscuit tin. She levers it open and holds it out to me.
“Go on,” she urges, almost whispering. “That lad of mine will have heard that lid come off from a mile away. They’ll be nothing left soon.”
“They eating you out of house and home, Lisa?” Sam asks, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. Lisa smiles tightly.
“It’s the summer holidays. I don’t know how we’ll get through it. They’re a plague of locusts, my kids. Roll on September. They’ll be the school’s problem, then. Oh, here he is. Couldn’t hear me calling him through for a bath last night but no problem hearing the lid come off the biscuit tin, ay?”
She scruffs Billy’s neck affectionately as he runs into the room, diving his hand into the tin and pulling out a handful of custard creams, laughing and ducking and running away. Sam watches him, then turns back to Lisa who puts the tin on the middle of the table and fills the kettle. The pipes rattle noisily.
“Are the girls here, Lisa?”
She nods, wiping her hands on her apron. Lisa Webber is only nine years my senior but she moves slowly and her face is netted with lines.She’s tired,I remind myself.She has three kids. You’d be tired, too.But it isn’t just that. It’s a weight, a gravity. Like something is dragging her down. I hear her spine creak as she reaches for the tea caddy, the sigh as she bends to the fridge. I wonder if she is ill. Arthritis maybe.
“Tamsin’s upstairs doodling. Alice, she’s outside sunbathing. She’ll look like a leather handbag in ten years if she keeps it up but there’s no telling her. I suppose I ought to be grateful she’s leaving the house at all after— well, after the last few weeks.”
She takes the cigarette Sam offers and sits opposite me at thedining table. It is Formica, like the one my parents have. I dig my finger into the blackened crater of a burn mark in the plastic, feeling awkward and out of sorts. Lisa blows a plume of smoke toward the putty-colored ceiling and looks askance at me.
“He’s told you, has he? What’s going on.”
I nod. She smiles.
“I know it must seem mad. Paul said—that’s my husband—Paul said maybe the heat is melting all our brains.”
I’m suddenly reminded of the man outside the cafe shouting“She said she could swim! I threw herin!”in his hoarse voice. Maybe Paul’s got that right, I think. Lisa leans back on her chair and opens a drawer in the dresser, rummaging through it, her cigarette clasped between her fingers. Smoke uncoils toward the water-stained ceiling.
“Here you are.” She pulls out a small wad of papers and places them in front of me. They are bound together with an elastic band. “That’s what we’ve had to put up with. We didn’t ask for none of this, you know. We just wanted someone to listen to us about our little girl.”