Suzie sighs. “It just feels—wrong. I hate lying.”
Cathy slides her gaze over to Suzie but wisely keeps her mouth shut. Suzie is already doing Cathy a huge favor, she knows that. She doesn’t want to jeopardize it by pointing out what a Goody Two-shoes Suzie normally is. She takes a sherbet lemon from the bag and twists off the wrapper.
“There was something in the house with her,” Cathy hears herself say instead. Her voice is quiet, not her usual, strident tone. Danny would be amazed if he heard it, she thinks.
“You mean Laurence Mitchell? The man Mr. Jenner saw?”
“No, not him. It was something else.”
Suzie grips the steering wheel a little tighter. She glances over at Cathy, who is staring straight ahead, still talking.
“I remembered Hazel saying that Mum had installed a nanny cam, so I watched the playback. Something crawled after her down the hallway.”
“One of the cats.” It isn’t a question. Suzie’s voice is level despite the chill that steals over her. She wants to be rational. “Or a spider on the lens. We get that sometimes with our door cam.”
Cathy crunches the sweet between her teeth. “I still have a scar,” Cathy continues in that same muted tone. It sounds to Suzie almost as if she is talking to herself. “From when I came off my bike. I needed stitches. The doctor said I was lucky I didn’t break my neck. When I asked Hazel about it later, you know what she said?”
Suzie shakes her head. Her jaw is clenched so tightly it feels like her whole head is vibrating.
“She said, ‘I’m scared of her too.’”
“I don’t know what any of this is about, Cathy.” Suzie’s chest burns with the lie. Beneath her smart leather gloves, her hands are on fire, skin crawling with an itch she can never quite scratch.
“You do. Iknowyou do. But no one ever wants to talk about it. Not my parents, not Hazel—not even Joe, who got hurt so badly he put her into a private hospital and hired a lawyer to start divorce proceedings.”
“What? What happened to Joe?” Suzie switches lanes and edges the car a little faster. Her mouth is so dry her throat feels like sandpaper.
“I heard it all secondhand, you understand. Hazel and I still weren’t talking, and Joe hated my guts after what happened at their wedding, so everything got channeled through my mum. It was her who told me that Hazel destroyed the hives.”
Suzie’s mind is completely blank.Hives?
“The bees.” Cathy unwraps another sweet. At this rate, Suzie thinks, the receptionist is going to be gifted a bagful of empty wrappers. “Joe had a dozen hives. He was an apiarist; it was his life’s work.”
“What did Hazel do to them?”
“She burned them down.”
Suzie feels that dreadful itch spreading from the beds of her fingernails to the first crease of her wrist. It’s agony, like dipping her hands into a hill of fire ants. She thinks of Abigail in the prom photo, sitting in her wheelchair with a shawl draped over her lap. That haunted smile.
“All twelve hives were destroyed. He’d only been gone an hour and when he came home, they were smoking, burned-out ruins. Hazel was covered in stings from her hands to her elbows. Dozens of them. Joe said it must have hurt like hell, but she just went right on standing there in the field, grinning as the hives burned.”
Up ahead, a sign for Belle Vue appears, small and discreet, giving nothing away. Suzie indicates to take the turning.
“Either way, it was the end for them, but from what I’d heard, ithad been heading that way regardless. Joe had started finding glass in his food.”
The car swerves. Just a little, but they both feel it.
“Sorry,” Suzie says quietly.
“He called Mum. I was there when she took the call. This was about a week before she set the fires. He was so worried. He said that Hazel had started talking about herself in the plural—we.”
Suzie nods. What was it Hazel had said in the pharmacy last week?We’re house-sitting for our parents.She’d even mentioned it to Cathy.
“That was just the start of it. He caught her eating weird stuff—insects and river mud by the handful, licking sap from trees. One afternoon they were out foraging, and he watched her scoop a minnow out of the river and bite it in half, still wriggling. Some mornings he’d wake up and there would be pine needles and leaf litter in the bed, like she’d been wandering the woods all night.
“When Joe started finding bits of glass and metal in his food, he started talking about sending Hazel away. He was afraid she was escalating, but Mum played it down. ‘Oh, Hazel’s always had an overactive imagination,’ that sort of thing. She told Joe that Hazel just needed more rest. God! Can you imagine? After she hung up the phone, I pointed at my scar and said to her, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ and do you know what she said back to me, Suzie?”
Suzie shakes her head.