“I don’t know,” I said.
13
Seraphine
ONE HUNDRED ANDforty miles of road lie between Alex Kaimal’s office and Summerbourne. Questions run through my head in a relentless loop as I allow the GPS to guide me home. Why did Alex look so shocked when I told him my name? Was he telling the truth when he denied contacting Laura? Why did he say I wasimpossible?
WhoamI?
The pounding at the base of my skull worsens with every mile.
A dead bird lies on my front doorstep when I finally reach home. I nudge it with the tip of my shoe. Spindly pink toes and black beak point to the sky; its eyes are half closed and sunken. I crane my neck to look for a mark on the window above—perhaps it stunned itself against the glass and failed to recover from the impact. When I step over it into the hall, a single black feather wafts across the tiles ahead of me, and my breath catches in my throat. I slam the door shut behind me. I could have sworn that feather was already inside the house when I openedthe door.I’m losing my mind.I turn my key in the lock, and stand on tiptoes to wrestle the rarely used bolt across.
My neck muscles tighten more with every minute that passes, and I draw my shoulders up under my ears. When I fumble for a packet of painkillers in the kitchen cupboard, Vera’s pot of sleeping pills tumbles out onto the counter. I swallow a couple of ibuprofen tablets, and then stand in front of the open fridge for several minutes, concentrating on taking slow, deep breaths as the chilled air washes over my skin. The tubs of cold pasta that Edwin left for me stare sullenly out. As the interior of the fridge reaches room temperature, I kick the door shut and rummage through the pantry for a packet of crackers.
A flurry of movement in the garden makes me jump. I press my forehead against the glass doors, peering at the overgrown bushes along the edge of the lawn. A band of pink still decorates the sky, but dusk is merging into night, and it’s difficult to distinguish shapes from shadows. A fox, perhaps? When I turn back to the brightly lit clutter on the kitchen surfaces, my gaze falls on Vera’s pill pot. The lozenges inside are tiny—could they really be powerful enough to override the whirling thoughts in my brain? The prospect of surrendering to a night of dreamless sleep is too much to resist, and I gulp one of the pills down with a glass of water, barely feeling it as it slips down my throat.
I munch through another cracker as I pace around the house, checking that all the windows and doors are locked. The drug begins to work sooner than I expected. Or perhaps it’s my own exhaustion that makes my eyelids droop as I haul myself up the stairs. A numbness sloshes through my thoughts, dragging them under the surface of my consciousness. I throw myself onto my bed without undressing, and slip into a deep sleep.
Images of the sea fill my mind as I gradually wake in the morning. Bright sunlight bounces around my room, and anintermittent buzzing grows more familiar until I realize it’s coming from my phone. It takes me a further minute to focus on the screen.
A text from Pamela Larch:I thought of something else. It’s not very nice, I’m afraid. If you can pop down to the office this morning, we can have a chat. Pamela.
What on earth does “not very nice” mean, coming from Pamela? Did she type something else, something more specific, and then change it to this blandest of warnings? A nurse who deals with cancers and amputations, death and mental breakdowns. What would count as “not very nice”?
My legs are heavy as I plod down the stairs, and I’m desperately thirsty, but I’m seized by an overwhelming need to see whether the dead bird is still on the doorstep. The stiff bolt hurts my fingers, and when I finally swing the door open, I am momentarily blinded by the sun’s glare. The bird has gone. I scan the drive. Perhaps a cat took it in the night, or a fox. Something catches my eye on the narrow curve of lawn that borders the circular driveway. I take a few steps toward it, but the sharp stones under my bare feet make me wince. It looks as though marks have been burned into the scruffy grass.
My heart pounds as I haul myself back upstairs to my bedroom window. The letters scorched into the lawn are angled as if designed to be read from this exact viewpoint. Chills creep along my arms as I stare at the word they form: “STOP.”
I stumble back down to the kitchen and try to think of innocent explanations while I pop more ibuprofen tablets through their foil seal, waiting for the kitchen tap to run cold. Village kids messing around? One of my brothers playing a joke? A rogue act by the unreliable gardening company? There must be a rational explanation. The pills make me gag. I have a sudden urge to escape from the house, to put some distance betweenmyself and those blackened letters while I work out what to do. The doctor’s office will already be open, so I’ll head straight there and find out what it is that Pamela has remembered. I hold my breath as I dash out to my car, my line of sight squeezed between the damaged grass on one side and the spot where Dad’s head hit the gravel on the other side. The steering wheel is clammy under my fingers, and I accelerate past the flint cottages although no neighbors are in sight.
As ever, the office is quiet. Hayley Pickersgill stares at me from behind her desk, and I ignore her, painfully aware that I’m still wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes and haven’t brushed my teeth this morning, let alone my hair. My head pounds. Pamela’s door is open, and when I peer in, I catch her scrolling through her phone. The staff here have too much time on their hands, I think.
“Seraphine, come in. Please, sit down.” Pamela’s bright eyes scrutinize me, and her mouth tightens.
“Pamela.” I attempt a smile. “You said you remembered something?”
She repositions herself in her chair. “Well, I wasn’t sure whether to mention it. Martin thinks I shouldn’t.” She frowns. “But it might be relevant. To what you want to know—about the pregnancies and births in your family, I mean.”
I nod, gripping the plastic arms of my chair, watching her.
“It’s something people used to talk about when I was little,” she says. “In the village. In the playground at school. Your mum was a few years older than us. In the top class, I think, when Martin and I were in the infants. But we knew all about her. You know what the village is like.”
I nod again.
“Well,” she says. “She had a twin. Your mother, I mean. She had a twin brother.”
“Oh right,” I say. “Yes.” The brother mentioned in my mother’s obituary. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Well, he died, you see.” She’s twisting a pen over and over in her hands, and she looks down at this now rather than at me. “Before he was born. Your grandmother was pregnant with twins, but only Ruth survived.”
“Oh.” I stare at her. “That’s so sad. Gran never said.”
“I don’t remember his name,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “Well, it was before you were born. It must have been terrible for Gran.” I think about Vera, and the way she always makes a point of referring to Danny and me as the Summerbourne twins. I feel guilty to remember how it sometimes irritated me, now that I know she lost her own twin baby, as well as her grandson Theo.
“But—” I say. “Why did Martin think you shouldn’t tell me?”
