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‘Tell them,’ Gwen says beside her, her voice bold and furious. ‘Tell them what you’ve been through. Tell them, or I will!’
Riley flashes Gwen a grateful look. She sighs heavily and says, enunciating carefully, ‘I’m a journalist.’ She hesitates a bit too long. Takes another gulp of her drink – more straight Kahlua than coffee by this point.
‘Yeah? So what?’ Henry says provocatively.
Riley, feeling cornered, turns her eyes on him. She hasn’t really given Henry any thought, but suddenly she despises him. She looks around the room. She despises all of them, except for Gwen. Gwen is the only friend she has here.
‘I was stationed in Afghanistan – mostly in Kabul. I spent almost three years there. I saw terrible things.’ Her voice begins to shake. ‘I saw so many civilians killed – children, babies. Limbs torn off by bombs, just lying in the street. So much brutality—’ She stops. She can’t say any more. Her voice has fallen to a whisper now, and she feels Gwen put her arm around her shoulder. She focuses on the pressure of Gwen’s arm around her, grounding her. ‘Then I was taken hostage.’
‘What?’ Gwen says beside her, obviously shocked. ‘You never told me that.’
Riley stares down into her lap. ‘It was kept quiet. I was held prisoner for six days, until they negotiated my release. Every day they would hold a gun to my head and pretend they were going to fire. They would pick someone at random and shoot them on the spot.’ Her entire body is shaking now, and it makes her feel ashamed, even though she knows she shouldn’t be ashamed. ‘I thought I could do it. These were important stories, they had to be told. So I stuck with it for as long as I could. You try to cope. Until you crack.’ She waits a beat. ‘But after that,’ she falters, her voice a whisper, ‘I couldn’t do it any more.’
Gwen is rubbing her back now, in large, slow circles, comforting her. The others are deadly quiet.
Riley focuses on the feeling of Gwen rubbing her back in firm circles. It feels good, actually, to get this out. She’s tired of pretending she’s fine, when everybody’s looking at her like they obviously think she’s got a screw loose. At least now they’ll know why. She reminds herself it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Her illness is a sign of her humanity. When she speaks again, she tries to make her voice sound more matter of fact.
‘I had to come home. I’m trying to get well. I’ve got PTSD. I take medication for it,’ she says. ‘These horrible images keep coming back to me, and I never know when they’re going to come. I hear a sound – it’s like something trips in my head, and I’m back there, in the chaos, waiting for the killing to start.’ She raises her eyes then and looks at each one of them, their pale faces looming above their dark blankets, as if their heads are disembodied and floating in the air.
Gwen whispers, her face close to hers, ‘Oh, Riley – I’m sorry, I didn’t realize – I had no idea what happened to you.’
Riley’s hands are trembling, and she clasps them together. ‘Last night, when I was falling asleep, I thought I heard a scream, but I ignored it, because I didn’t think it was real. I hear screams in my head every night when I try to go to sleep.’ She lowers her voice again to a whisper. ‘And I hear them every night when I dream.’
When she stops speaking, the silence is complete, except for the crackling of the fire. Even the wind has died down for the moment.
Then Lauren says, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Henry says nothing.
Matthew plays nervously with his gun.
Beverly shrinks into her blanket, chilled to the bone. She’s sickened by what Riley has said. She watches Gwen rubbing Riley’s back. Riley’s obvious terror is contagious.
Beverly’s frightened of what’s out there, lurking in the shadows. She doesn’t think the killer is one of these people sitting around the fire. She thinks he’s out there, waiting. She feels like a cornered mouse, eyes bright, chest heaving rapidly with each breath.
Henry is sitting near the fireplace in the dark. She thinks about their children, Teddy and Kate. How will they cope if their mother and father don’t come home? She just wants to go home with Henry, she tells herself. She wants things to be the way they used to be.
David drinks his coffee down to the dregs, even though it’s cold now. He must stay awake. He got very little sleep last night, and now his eyes burn and feel gritty. He surveys his little flock of sheep. For that’s how he thinks of them. They seem like sheep because they are all frightened, and they don’t know what to do.
Matthew is making him uneasy. He seems a bit agitated. David would like to get the gun away from him, but doesn’t want a confrontation. He can’t predict what Matthew might do.
He can’t predict what any of them might do. The revelations about Riley make sense. Her history, her experience – they explain her volatile personality, her startled eyes, constantly scanning, her tension, her drinking. He knew she was a journalist, but if she’s been in Afghanistan for the last three or four years, maybe she doesn’t know about him at all. Maybe she was just jealous that he was interested in Gwen rather than her. Maybe Gwen has no idea about his past.
But Gwen told him there was something she wanted to talk to him about. No doubt it’s his murdered wife. Or – it just occurs to him now – maybe it’s something about her. Maybe she’s involved with someone, and neglected to tell him last night.
He will have no possibility of any kind of future with Gwen if they don’t make it through the night. He needs to think about the problem right in front of him. To hell with Riley and what she might think she knows.
David tries to look at the situation analytically, the way he would look at a case. The most likely scenario is that Dana’s fiancé, Matthew, killed her. They’d argued. Perhaps he’d pushed her down the stairs. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to, but once he’d done it, he realized he had to finish her off. Maybe.
But Candice … Maybe she did have something on Matthew or Dana. Or maybe she knew something about Dana’s death – perhaps she’d seen something, heard something. Had she been snooping on Dana and Matt? She knew who they were. She might have been listening outside the door, overheard their argument, and then scuttled out of sight when the door opened and seen – or perhaps heard – Matthew push Dana down the stairs. If so, why didn’t she say anything?
Maybe she was too afraid to say anything until the police arrived, and was biding her time. Maybe that’s what got her killed.
If he had to give an opinion, he’s with Henry on this one: he thinks it was probably Matthew. He lied about the argument; he’s the most likely one to have murdered Dana. Candice might have known something, or have had some connection to them in some way. And Matthew may be trying to throw suspicion on James and Bradley, while bolstering the view that there’s someone else out there.
Or maybe there is someone out there, killing them for sport.
And if he’s killing them for sport, because he can, because he wants to – none of them is safe.
Chapter Twenty-three
Saturday, 10:20 PM
GWEN TRIES TO relax into the sofa. She feels relatively safe here, surrounded by the others. She watches Matthew out of one eye. He’s hypervigilant, his eyes constantly scanning the dark void beyond them, as if alert to any threat. But the effect of his attentiveness is not calming at all, but the opposite. She has more confidence in David. His presence makes her feel safe. She pulls the blanket more tightly around her neck and withdraws into herself. She’s relieved that the truth is out about Riley. She hadn’t known about the PTSD, about her being held hostage, but it all makes sense. She thinks it will help Riley for people to understand her, to be supportive. And she will try to be more supportive, too.
Trauma changes people. She should know.
