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“Why is someone doing this to us?” Lily asks again, and Rose is the only one to answer.
“We need to keep it together for just a couple more hours until low tide. You and Trixie are going to be okay. Do you hear me?” Lily looks more vacant than usual. “Lily, do you hear me?” She still doesn’t answer. “Do me a favor and go inside. I want you to find your diabetic kit and check your blood sugar. We all need to be well enough to leave when the tide goes out.”
“Okay,” says Lily. She looks like a person who has had their plugpulled out, and is surviving on a dwindling battery. “Can you wait a couple of minutes before you bring Nancy indoors? I don’t want Trixie to see her like this—she’s already seen far more than she should have tonight. I’ll get her back into the lounge and keep her there while you do whatever you have to do.”
Rose nods, and Lily walks toward the doorway, where Trixie is waiting. Then Rose stares down at the small bouquet tied to Nancy’s hand. “I sometimes think our mother named us all after flowers because that’s what she wished we were. Flowers are much easier to pick, and arrange, and cut down to size than daughters.”
I can tell I’m not the only one who thinks that was a strange thing to say given the circumstances. Conor looks equally puzzled.
“We need to move her inside,” he says again.
“Are you sure we should?” Rose asks, and Conor looks a little shocked. “Shouldn’t we be trying to preserve evidence for the police? Isn’t that what acrime correspondentwould say next? You’re probably getting some kind of sick thrill out of all this. I bet you can’t wait to call the news desk. Maybe this will help your career?”
“I know you’re upset, but none of this is my fault,” he says.
“Isn’t it?” Rose asks. She looks at him for a long time, then shrugs. “Fine, let’s move her. She’s dead. We can’t really make matters any worse. Where do you suggest we move her to?”
They stare at each other, and I feel as though I’m intruding on something I don’t fully understand.
“We could put her with the others?” Conor suggests.
Rose doesn’t reply straightaway. Apprehension is the mother of our mistakes, and tries to warn us before we make them, but we don’t always listen to our mothers.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Rose says eventually, sounding as though she doesn’t really believe it. She’s crying now. “We can keep them all together but out of sight until the police come. I’ll takethis end, you take the other,” she says to Conor, and we all bow our heads against the rain as we make our way toward the house. Carrying my mother seems to slow Conor and Rose down more than it should, and they fall behind. I can hear the two of them whispering again, but the sound of the wind and waves in the distance steals their words from my ears.
Something is different when I step into the kitchen, and it takes me a moment to realize what. The muddy footprints have been mopped up. It’s a strange thing for Lily to have done; she’s the untidiest person I’ve ever met, and I’m not convinced she’d know what end of a mop to use if I gave her one. Maybe she is just trying to protect Trixie from everything that has happened tonight, in whatever way that she can. I can hear them quietly talking in the lounge.
Rose appears in the kitchen doorway behind me. She is holding my mother’s feet and Conor is carrying Nancy beneath her arms. They are soaked to the skin, and I feel as though I am not doing enough to help. I step aside as they struggle past me, heading for the cupboard beneath the stairs. We all try not to look at Dad and Nana’s bodies as they carefully lower Nancy beside them. When Conor’s hand accidentally grazes Rose’s fingers, she pulls away as though he has burned her.
“Rose, I… I just want to say that I’m so very sorry.”
“For what?”
“All of it,” Conor says, and she frowns at him. “I just mean that I know what it’s like to lose a parent, and it’s okay to be… upset.”
“This is not the same as what happened in your family,” she replies, and Conor looks like he’s been slapped in the face.
We never knew for sure whether Conor’s dad started drinking again because he thought my parents were getting back together. The tree that fell on my dad’s car during the great storm of 1987 did more damage than anyone first realized. Dad stayed at Seaglass fora couple of months while he recovered, which meant Mr. Kennedy stayed away. Nancy spoke to him on the phone, but the next time we all saw him, he was very different from the man we thought we knew. He arrived uninvited and unexpected at Seaglass one day, demanding to see Conor. We all heard what he said.
“Thisis not your family.Iam your family, and I don’t want you coming here anymore.”
I was too young to understand that he was drunk. We found out afterward that he had lost his gardening job with the National Trust. It wasn’t long before Conor started regularly running away from home again, and turning up at Seaglass at odd times. But he was almost eighteen by then, and better able to defend himself. Nancy ended her relationship with Mr. Kennedy, and I think that everything that happened afterward broke what was left of her heart. A few months later, Conor left home for good, and none of us ever saw his father again.
“Are those your boots?” Rose asks, looking at the front door.
Conor and I both follow her stare and see the pair of large muddy men’s boots in the hallway. I’m sure they weren’t there before.
He shakes his head. “No.”
34
October 31, 3:45 a.m.
less than three hours until low tide
“Someone clearly left them here deliberately,” says Conor. “These boots are not mine.”
“Someone mopped the kitchen floor too,” says Rose.
