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But Conor doesn’t answer. It’s been like this between us for a long time. No matter how sorry I am, he can’t seem to move on, just like my sisters. I know he’d probably rather never see me again, but I’m glad that he chose to come anyway this weekend, for Nana. What happened certainly wasn’t her fault.
The rest of the evening is a blur at best. I’m exhausted, but I never seem to be able to sleep these days, and the atmosphere in the house feels even more polluted than before. We heard the others decide to turn in and call it a night too almost as soon as we left the kitchen. Nana’s room is the largest bedroom at the back of the house, and she whispers good night as she passes my door. Lily and Trixie take the room that Lily and Rose used to share as children. My mother is the last person to come up. I only knowit’s her because I hear her talking to someone in a hushed voice at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll get out of here as soon as it’s light. I knew the old witch wouldn’t leave us a penny.”
I listen at the door as she scuttles along the hall to the guest bedroom she used to share with my father. Rose stays downstairs, choosing to sleep on a sofa in the library. Dad also said he would rather stay downstairs, sealing himself in the music room that was his sanctuary when he was a childandwhen he had children of his own. He always needs to disappear inside his music when the real world gets too loud. But Seaglass is no longer noisy; it has returned to its own variety of silence.
I can hear the sea outside my window, and Conor’s slow and steady breathing. I can tell he’s still awake. I keep completely quiet when I hear him get up and tiptoe across the room, and I listen as he opens his laptop on the desk in the corner. There’s no internet here, but it seems that Conor still can’t resist doing a little work this weekend. He’s become a workaholic since getting the crime correspondent job at the BBC. Perhaps because sometimes, when you work that hard for something, you live in constant fear of losing it.
He creeps out of the room—presumably to use the bathroom down the hall—and while he is gone, I get up, cross the threadbare carpet to his side of the bedroom, and stare at the laptop screen. What I see is nothing to do with work; it looks more like a poem. Which is odd, because Conor has never been one to dabble with fiction or anything creative; he is a man who only likes to deal in facts. Or at least, he was.
I hear footsteps in the hallway, creaking floorboards telling tales on anyone out of bed, and know I have to hurry. In a childish attempt to get Conor’s attention and make things less awkwardbetween us, I type a Halloween-inspired message with my index finger. I can’t type properly and am dreadful with modern technology, but I smile to myself as the letters appear on the screen.
Boo!
Then I return to my side of the room, watch and wait. Conor stares at the word when he returns, then spins around, frowning in my direction. I wish he’d say something,anything,but as usual, he doesn’t. Conor stopped speaking to me around the same time as Rose, and nothing I say or do seems to change things. Sometimes the way he stares so hard at me seems to physically hurt. I’m like a word he can’t read, or a puzzle he can’t solve, just like the Rubik’s Cube he couldn’t work out as a kid, no matter which way he tries to twist me. Conor lies back down on the daybed and faces the wall. I turn my back on the disappointment I feel, wondering why he still can’t see me for who I am now, or talk about what happened then. Nobody can run away from their own shadows, but he’s always been determined to try.
It’s cold in this part of the house, and I shiver on the other side of the room as I lie on the bed that was always mine. I blink into the darkness, listening to the sound of Conor’s breathing as he pretends to sleep again. There are a galaxy of stars on the ceiling. They are the glow-in-the-dark sticker variety and almost as old as me. I expect they will continue to shine long after I am gone, just like the stars in the sky, and sometimes it feels as though nobody in this family would really notice if I just disappeared. Sometimes I think they wish I’d never been born. I close my eyes and a single tear escapes them, rolling down my cheek and dampening the pillow.
Sometime later, I hear a noise downstairs. I have never been a good sleeper; I’m not even sure whether I was asleep just now.That nightmare people sometimes have where they feel like they are falling? I have itallthe time. When I check the clock in my room, I see that it is almost exactly midnight. A few seconds later, the eighty clocks downstairs begin to chime their agreement. As soon as the final clock strikes twelve, I hear a terrible scream.
9
October 31, MIDNIGHT
six hours until low tide
The screaming stops.
“Did you hear that?” I whisper, but Conor isn’t there.
I rush out of my bedroom, along the landing, down the stairs, across the hall, and into the kitchen at the back of the house. My niece is standing in the middle of the room wearing pink pajamas that make her look much younger than she is. Trixie is crying. When I look down, I can see why.
Nana is lying on the floor in a white cotton nightdress. Her eyes are closed, her skin is gray, and there is a large gash on her head and a pool of blood beneath it. Poppins the dog is lying next to her, and neither of them is moving. A chair has toppled over as though Nana might have been standing on it and fallen. And I see that there is blood on the Aga oven, where it looks like she could have hit her head. Everything becomes silent and still inside the room, and seconds seem to stretch into minutes. Even the sea and the rain outside are suddenly quiet as I take in the scene, as though my world hasexperienced a freeze-frame. Then the sound of Trixie crying plays in my ears again. Tears are streaming down her face.
“Shh, it’s okay. Just tell me what happened,” I say to Trixie, rushing over and getting down on the floor next to Nana, careful not to touch her or make things worse. “Nana, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t move, but Poppins looks up at me with sad eyes and starts to whimper.
“She’ll be all right, old girl. We just need to stay calm—”
“What the hell is going on? Why are you out of bed, and what’s with all the screaming?” asks Lily, marching into the freezing-cold kitchen wearing nothing except a pink silk nightdress. Her daughter runs to her side. Most teenagers are children dressed up like adults, but my niece is still a child in so many ways.
“Oh my god,” Lily says, seeing Nana’s body. “Is she…?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
“What happened?” asks Rose, appearing from out of nowhere, and fully dressed as though she must have slept in her clothes. “Stand back and let me see.”
“Why?” Lily asks. “You’re not a doctor.” Lily takes a step closer to Nana, and Poppins starts to growl. I have never seen or heard the dog behave this way before.
Rose steps between them. “It’s okay, Poppins, we’re just trying to help Nana. Come on, old girl. Move out of the way.” Poppins does as she is told, as though she understood every word Rose just said, and watches from a short distance with her head bowed, quietly whimpering.
Rose gently feels for a pulse, but I don’t need to be a doctor—or a vet—to know that this isn’t good. The gash on the side of Nana’s head looks deep, she’s lost a lot of blood, and I have to look away when I see what might be brain matter in the red puddle on the floor. I’ve seen the same shade of gray skin on the faces of too manyresidents at the care home for the elderly where I volunteer, and fear I know what it means.
Conor appears in the doorway—fully dressed like Rose—and I wonder what took him so long and where he has been. Lily turns her back on him and tries to comfort Trixie. That’s when I notice Nana’s hands. One is holding a copy ofDaisy Darker’s Little Secret.The other is holding what appears to be a cigarette, but when I take a closer look, I see that it is a piece of chalk. I stare at the black wall at the end of the kitchen. The recipes and sketches that were there earlier have all been wiped off. Instead there is a poem, just like the ones in Nana’s bestselling book about me. But the words have been changed. Thebookbegins with the lineDaisy Darker’s family were as lovely as can be.But the chalk poem on the wall is very different.
“Look,” I say, and one by one, everyone in the room turns to read it.
