CHAPTER 55
We parked the car outside a very different-looking town hall. Gone were all the cat cars and cat enthusiasts; instead, it was empty. We’d agreed to divide and conquer today. Ash and Emelia would go upstairs into the attic and search through old photo albums and anything else that was up there, while Mike and I checked out the room under the stage. And, if we found nothing there, we’d check out the library. The tension between us on the short drive had been tangible, like a heavy fog hanging in the air between us. Cold and clammy. We hadn’t said a word to each other, other than me congratulating him on his sister’s engagement, to which I’d really only gotten a half-hearted grunt in response.
“Let’s go.” He jumped out the car and I followed behind him.
We walked into the empty hall. The sound of our feet on the wooden floorboards bounced off the high ceiling and seemed to ricochet off the walls, creating a kind of ominous movie soundtrack. I could almost imagine us as characters from an Indiana Jones film, creeping towards some hidden treasure or other. We reached the stage and stopped. Mike turned to me and made brief eye contact, then looked away.
“Lead the way,” he said, pointing with the crowbar that he’d brought with us.
“Okay.” I got down on my hands and knees and shuffled under the stage, making my way past all the discarded props again. I crawled all the way to the back, to where the sealed door was, and stopped. I turned and looked over my shoulder. Mike was following me on his hands and knees, crouched low, trying to fit under the stage without bashing his head.
“Here.” I pointed at the door and Mike crawled up next to me. As he did, his body brushed mine, and I became hyperaware of his presence.
“Someone really didn’t want anyone to go in, now, did they?” He took the crowbar and slid it under one of the wooden beams that was keeping the thing shut. He gave a large tug and the first beam popped off with a crunching sound as the wood split and splintered. He made quick work of the next one, and the next. He was strong, after all; anyone who could pick me up the way he had the other night was . . .
I shook my head. I really couldn’t afford to be thinking like that again—thinking about that night together.
“You know,” he started. I could hear he was slightly out of breath from the physical exertion. “I don’t think I’ve ever broken into anything before.”
“I don’t think it’s breaking in, if you phone ahead and ask for permission to do it,” I said, referring to the call he’d made to the caretaker of the hall. “What did you say we were doing here, anyway?” I asked.
He looked over his shoulder at me briefly and then went back to cracking the fourth piece of wood. “I didn’t need to say anything; he owed me a favor.”
“Really?” I asked.
“I caught his sixteen-year-old son and some of his friends drinking beer on the beach, a month or so ago.”
“Ooooh! I see,” I said.
“I could have made a bigger deal of it, but I let it slide—with a very firm warning.” He stopped what he was doing for a second, as if thinking about something. “I remember what it was like to be that age.”
“I bet you do,” I said, with a smile. “According to Mrs. Devereux, you were a terror.”
He looked over his shoulder at me again and then stopped what he was doing. “And you?” he asked. “I bet you were an absolute horror as a teenager. I bet you were always in trouble, if your current behavior is anything to go by.”
I thought about the answer to that question for a while. It was a complicated one for me. “I was what I needed to be at the time,” I said thoughtfully.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I was never in one place enough to become who I was meant to be, I guess. If the people I was staying with were into sport, then I was into sport. If they were into church, then I was, too. When I was with one set of cousins, I dressed in black and listened to metal, because they did. When I was staying with my other cousins, I was into cycling. Even though I hated it. I was what the situation called for me to be.” I sat there, thinking about it for a while. Thinking about being this little lost person, moving from place to place and never really fitting in.
“Why couldn’t you just be yourself?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. “Um . . . I . . . I don’t know,” I stuttered. “That’s a good question. I guess I don’t know.” Only, I think I did know the answer. I couldn’t “be myself” because “myself” clearly hadn’t been quite good enough.
He nodded at me. He looked like he was going to say something to me, but then stopped himself and pulled the last piece of wood off.
