“Can you show me where my bag is?”
She points toward the big wardrobe opposite the bed. It is very large, and made of old, dark wood. I open the double doors. Inside, a strong smell of mothballs and a heap of clothes and shoes piled almost as high as the rail.
“You know you’re supposed to hang these up, right?”
I laugh, but I’m uneasy. I know what I’m looking at. These are the belongings of the women he buried in the woods. Women who werejust like me.
Lying on top of the pile is my battered old rucksack. Seeing it, so normal and solid and not of this place, makes me want to cry. I pull it out quickly, tipping the contents out onto the floor.
“Is it your phone you’re wanting?” Maria has moved over to the edge of the bed, peering at me. “Once they stop crying, they always ask for their phones.”
“Yeah, it’s my phone. Here, see?” I lift it up, trying to find a signal.
Maria watches me with her deeply hooded dark eyes, her face soft with sympathy. She knows that I won’t find a signal down here in the valley.
I check the battery. It’s on 7 percent. “Fuck,” I whisper. Strange to think something so essential to my everyday life has been so easily made redundant. “Useless lump of plastic. Might as well use it as a doorstop.”
I sit down heavily on Maria’s bed. There is a dread inside me that circles and circles and never rests. I realize it is almost certain that I’m going to die out here.
I put my head in my hands. I’m so tired and hungry I can barely think.
“Hazel?”
“I’m okay,” I tell her, looking up.
My eye falls on the little calendar on the bedside table. It’s old, from 2015, a Page-a-Day calendar that has been stuffed back into shape and presumably reused every year since.A new one every day, she’d said.
I pick up the quote for today. “‘Trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be,’” I read aloud. “Fuckinghell.”
That’s when I start laughing, unable to help myself. It’s a release of sorts, but just as it tapers off, I look at the quote and laugh harder, bent double, wheezing. It’s shrill, almost helpless, the way my eyes fill with tears, the way I can’t quite catch a breath. I lift my head and see Maria looking at me with confusion, and that does it, that just about finishes me off.
“This is ‘exactly where I’m meant to be,’” I tell her, gasping, and then I take a step backward and my foot slides on something lying there and I fall with a thud to the floor, knocking the air out of me. I lie there breathless, staring at the ceiling, small laughs still bubbling out of me in gulps and snorts.
My hand gropes beneath me to see what I’d stepped on, and when I lift it up in front of me, I can’t help but start that hysterical laughing all over again. It’s the can of hair spray I’d bought in the chemist.
“Oh, this’ll come in handy!” I tell Maria, who gives me a wavering, doubtful smile. “It’s so important to keep my hair looking nice right now!”
I clutch the hair spray to my chest and laugh again. It feels like I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, even though none of this is funny, none of it at all. I’m still giggling as I turn my head and look directly under Maria’s bed.
My other sister is lying there. She opens her black, ruinous mouth and smiles.
“Maria.” I say her name very slowly and clearly. I’m not laughing anymore. All of that has been knocked from me like a douse of ice water. “You need to get out of here.”
My other sister laughs. It is the gurgling sound of water going down a drain. Her eyes are round lantern lights in the dark.
26
Suzie and Cathy stop just once on the way to Belle Vue. Progress is slow, traffic building up as people leave their offices early to get ahead of the weather. Overhead, the dusky white sky is deepening into something gray and spectral.
“Pull over,” Cathy tells Suzie, leaning into the back to grab her leather jacket. “I need to go and get something.”
Suzie indicates and pulls up to the curb, watching as Cathy disappears into the newsagent opposite. When she returns, she is carrying something in a white paper bag. She gives Suzie a wink as she climbs back into the car.
“I never went to visit Hazel, but my parents did,” she tells her. “They said the receptionist there was partial to sherbet lemons, the old-fashioned kind. My dad said sometimes it meant the difference between getting a cup of tea with my sister or having to wait until the next day. Here.” She puts the bag of sherbet lemons on the dashboard.
Suzie frowns. “I’m really not comfortable with this.”
“It’s fine, Suzie. We’re not planning a heist, we just want information. Find out if Hazel’s there, and why she wroteBelle Vueon this note. There must be a reason.”