She turned the ignition, put the car in gear—I was glad I had protested because my LA license definitely did not cover manual cars—and pulled away.
It was only as the car pushed up the ramp toward street level that a thought occurred to me.
“How did you know which room was mine?”
Harper changed gear, swiveling the wheel to push us onto the street.
Eyes on the road, she answered. “I followed you last night when you were hammered. I wanted to make sure you got in safely.”
———
Somewhere around Maidenhead we turned off the motorway and onto long, winding country roads, barely a single lane wide, the only light shining from the beams of the car, which were blinding in such deep darkness.
If a car came from the other direction we would collide, metal grinding against metal, shredding through.
I shut my eyes and clutched the door handle like it might help in the event of our inevitable annihilation.
“Why are you doing this?” Harper asked. I opened my eyes again and turned to her—but she was focused dead ahead as she rounded yet another sharp, tree-lined corner. “Why didn’t you turn me in?”
I swallowed. I didn’t have an answer for her. (I didn’t have an answer for myself.)
So I turned from her back to the road ahead. I would rather face oblivion than this. Than her.
“Well, why did you come to my door?”
Her hands clenched a little on the wheel, but she didn’t answer. She faced oblivion too.
And we kept on driving.
———
We pulled up to the house just before midnight, thoughhousewas too modest a word. You forget in LA where absurd sums are spent on a few stories just what money can buy you—and here it was, a sprawling mansion down a private country road. It would have been popular out there, where a facade is a beautiful thing, a craft worth appreciating. Here it felt gauche, new-build grandiosity trying desperately for a touch of antique glamour.
Harper leaned across me for the glove box, and I held my breath, like it might help (fruit and flowers and blood), until she fished out the key to the automated gate. The wheels crunched against gravel in the drive, and it sounded like gunshots in the quiet night air.
We slipped out silently in its echo.
“What now?” she asked.
Now? My plans reached about this point before fizzing out, focused on getting Harper and the body out of the city.
“We need to hide the body,” I said. “We need to convince the police thatifsomething happened to him, it happened on another night when you have a solid alibi. So we need to do something with it now.”
She reached for the cap on my head, plucking it off and turning it in her fingers. “They think he made it home.”
“Hedidmake it home,” I said. “You were upset that you didn’t win. He proposed coming home early, so you did. Tomorrow, or the day after maybe, you’ll get into a fight and he’ll storm off and that will be the last you ever saw of him. But he made it home.”
“He made it home,” she repeated, opening the boot so we could unload the suitcase and the body within. “Do you have anywhere in mind for this? We both left England so long ago that …”
That we did not know it anymore. If we were farther north, I might have options—forests, moors, the same ocean thatswallowed my parents. I thought of Maldon, not too far away, two hours perhaps, but its tide was continuous, rolling in and out twice a day and dredging up history in its wake.
And then, I had a sudden thought.
“How far away is Barlam Thicket?”
———
Another half hour or so, it turned out. I traced it on a road map, marking out our path as Harper hunted down the keys for one of Joel’s other cars. He had several, apparently. Though all were expensive and hardly inconspicuous but better than taking the same Aston Martin back out.
