She remembers her spinning head, the vertiginous mix of alcohol, excitement, and fear as the taxi crept slowly down the tiny lane, almost vanishing into the blackness.
As they slowed to a halt, Jane saw ahead of them a wooden fence that followed the curve of the Heath. Beyond that was nothing.
“Wow,” Jane had said. “It looks like the last house in the world.”
“Sometimes,” the man had said, “it feels like maybe it is.”
They walked through a green gate and onto a small driveway just bigenough for the open-backed army jeep parked across it. Jane’s father once had an old jeep, similar to this one, and, like this one, it had sat outside their house for years rusting into a grotesque eyesore.
A woman had come to the window at the sound of their footsteps, a pretty woman with black hair in a feathered bob, dark eyes watching warily. At the sight of her, Jane had begun to sober up. As they approached the front door she could hear the rumble of the taxi making its way out of the hamlet, and suddenly she’d wanted to turn and run, flag it down, beat on its doors, ask it to take her home. But then the man with no name touched her elbow gently and said, “Here, let me introduce you,” and Jane had found herself, as she had so often over the course of her stupid, mismanaged life, being dragged along into someone else’s narrative, because she had never had one of her own, and so she had followed him, that tall, imposing man, into his house, and been introduced to his wife and made awkward small talk with her while the man with no name mixed her a martini, and her memories are hazy now, splashes of color, a detail or two: a brown cabinet housing a home computer, photographs of a boy and girl, both around eight or nine, a gray cat, a Liberty-print lampshade. Her image of the woman is hazy too, but she remembers a large engagement ring, a pursed mouth, and she remembers the sudden blinding, deafening realization she should not be there, that she had taken the wrong fork in the road, and then as the man passed her the martini there was a scream and a thud from upstairs that made her jump so hard she knocked the glass out of the man’s hand.
“Fuck,” he’d said, angrily, under his breath.
“I’m really sorry,” she’d said.
The woman jumped to her feet. “The children,” she’d said.
Neither made a move upstairs; there was no sound of a weeping child.
“I’ll make you another one,” he’d said.
“You know, actually, I think I’ll probably skip the drink. I think—”
“Nonsense,” he’d said, with enough force to make Jane flinch. “I’ll make you another.”
He’d gone to the cabinet again and she had smiled nervously at the wife, who had given her some kind of warning glance; Jane couldn’t tell if it was friendly or unfriendly, but there had been a long silence, she remembers that, and inside that silence she made her plan.
“Is it OK if I go outside?” she’d said. “To smoke a cigarette?”
She remembers not waiting for permission, she remembers the solid feel of the strap of her handbag held inside her fist, she remembers the pulse of adrenaline that pushed her heart up hard against her rib cage. She remembers the tall man coming toward her, a fresh martini in his hand, and staring at her. “Stay,” he’d said, holding it out to her. “Drink your martini.”
“I won’t be long,” she’d said lightly. “I can’t drink gin without nicotine, you know what it’s—”
“Stay,” he’d said again, and she remembers the feel of his other hand on her wrist, the sense of being tugged, and she remembers the wife putting herself between them.
“Let her go,” she’d said to the man. “The children are awake.”
Jane had felt the tension drop, his grip soften and then loosen entirely.
Her hands shook as she lit her cigarette outside the front door. She’d looked up at the dark windows above, wondering about the scream and the bang, but all was dark, all was quiet. And then, with a driving sense of urgency, she’d tiptoed across the crunchy gravel, quietly unhooked the inside latch of the gate, and then, and only then, had held her bag tight to her stomach and run and run and run.
Now as she watches the dot on her phone app moving through the Vale toward the house called Thornwood, she feels it in her gut, even before they get there:It’s the same house.
chapter three
There’s a wooden sign nailed to the fence with the word “Thornwood” painted on it, which Jane doesn’t remember from that long-ago night, and there is a plastic button attached to a post by the gate that Jane presses. She hears the faint tinkle of an old-fashioned electric bell-chime from inside the house and notices Hugo react to it, look around expectantly, the beginnings of a low growl forming in the back of his throat.
There is the sound of a door being opened, and then a male voice calling from the other side of the beaten-up jeep, which is still there.
Jane feels her breath catch at the sight of it. If the jeep is still there then the man must also still be there.
“Yes?” comes a male voice.
Dexter and Jane exchange a look. “Oh,” Jane calls back. “Hello. Have you lost a dog?”
There is a brief silence and the sound of large feet on gravel. Then a man pulls the gate open and stares at them.
Jane braces herself for the man from that chilling night all those years ago but it is not that man. It is a very different man indeed.
