“You actually came,” he said.
“Wait. Were you joking about the invitation?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Can you go back?”
All the time and distance that they’d been apart fell away, and Stevie was full. Full of love and feeling, not just for David, but for everything—the built-in wardrobe, the slightly crooked window blind, the reusable plastic water bottle with the school logo; taking in the general vibe.
“I was only sort of joking about being busy,” David said. “I have a lecture I have to go to. I’ll be back in about two hours. You guys can get settled and then I’ll meet you back here at four? I’ll take you guys over to the local, and then I have a surprise.”
“What?”
“A surprise surprise. The kind where you don’t know what it is.”
“The local,” Stevie clarified. “What’s the local?”
“That’s what they call the pub. Your pub is your local, and we have a local. And you have to go. It’s the law.”
Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her. It wasn’t designed to be a long kiss, since he had to go—but it was also the kind of kiss meant to make up for time already lost. A strong kiss, one that made solid contact and held it and seemed to ask, “Are you really here?” She grabbed him around the back of the neck, pressing him harder into her. She forgot how you could hear the other person breathe, feel the warm exhale, know that they were alive, that they wanted to be with you so much that they pressed their mouth against yours and then the room spun away.
David broke the embrace first, taking a step back and smiling.
“There will be plenty of time for that,” he said. “I wish I could skip. See you in an hour.”
When he was gone, Stevie unzipped her suitcase and looked down at what she smilingly had called her “packing.” Unlike Janelle, who had planned outfits for every day and layered them in day-to-day order in compressed packing cubes, Stevie packed like someone who just heard that reports of the monster were true, and it was headed toward the city. And what was weird was that she had really tried. She had pulled things out of her drawers and closet at Ellingham and put them on the bed and tried to make sartorial sense of it all. She was the kind of person who had both kinds of shirts: the T-shirts with writing on them and those without. There were the jeans she liked, the ones that fit okay, and the ones that fit badly but she’d bought them and was therefore stuck with them for the rest of her life, or whatever it was that happened to jeans. She’d brought the one dress she owned, which was black and still had the tags on it. All these things had been shoved into the bag in a teeth-grinding frenzy the day before she left because she was up late the night before writing a paper that was already two days late. She had, she discovered, only brought three pairs of socks.
One thing, however, was securely packaged and packed. She removed this and took it down the hall, where Janelle was delicately removing her journaling supplies from her carry-on bag and lining up her pens and notebooks on the desk.
“I need to show you something,” Stevie said, coming in and shutting the door behind her. “Do you want to see what I bought? For the thing.”
Janelle’s eyes opened a bit wider.
“Let me see!”
Stevie ripped into the packaging.
“I got it yesterday right before we left,” she said. “I had to shove it in my bag before I could even open it.”
She ripped through the inner plastic bag, knocking loose two silica gel packs. She shook out the garment and held it up for inspection.
Janelle stared for a long moment.
“Is that a union suit?” she said.
“It’s a fleece-lined onesie.”
“I can’t believe it. You found a sex hoodie.”
“Hear me out,” Stevie said. “It doesn’t seem like it’s for sexy times, but it’s got all these buttons . . .”
She indicated the buttons as proof.
“And you can undo the buttons and . . .”
Stevie looked at the onesie that hung from her hands. All the details stood out to her—the brightness of the black-and-red check, the body-obscuring thickness of the fleece, the sturdy closures. It had made so much sense when she’d picked it out.
“I think whatever works for you is the right thing,” Janelle finally said. “And that is the most you thing I have ever seen.”
June 24, 1995
8:00 p.m.
IN THE AFTERNOON, THE RAIN STARTED UP AGAIN. NOT LIKE LAST night this time—it didn’t pound the roof and windows. It pattered. It misted the glass. It rinsed the flowers and turned the earth soft, releasing the smell of ozone. The house fell into soft shade, and the Nine sat inside it, quiet and broken, as the day slipped away. Outside, there were three police cars and a van, officers in uniform walking across the muddy lawn. Sooz watched them from the sitting room window. An hour before, she had been sobbing so hard that she had been physically ill.
They had been asked to remain in the house, and specifically in the sitting room, while the police examined the rest of the house. One by one, they had been taken out to give statements. Sebastian had been asked to come out for a second round, as it was his house and the police had some additional questions. They were waiting for him to return. Angela sat between Peter and Yash. Theo curled in on herself in a reading chair and stared at the cold embers in the fireplace. Julian paced around the room, looking at the shelves, the walls, the backs of the furniture. It was cold inside Merryweather, but no one had the initiative to start a fire, nor would it have been clear if they would be allowed to do so. Could you burn logs after a murder?
“What the hell is happening?” Sooz said, mostly to herself. “Are we having a nightmare? All of us?”
There was a creaking sound. Sebastian was returning down the stairs from his questioning. They all turned to look at him as he entered the room. The normally bouncy and smiling Sebastian was now hunched. The color had not returned to his face, and he kept rubbing his skin as if there still might be blood somewhere on it. He had washed his face at least six times, rubbing the skin until it was raw. He walked straight to the bar cart and reached for the nearest bottle.
“They said we’re allowed to go to our rooms if we want,” he said. “They’re finished up there. We still can’t go outside. We’ll have to stay here at least for tonight. After that . . .”
He let the sentence trail off. After that . . . who knew? The future had changed.
“They also said there have been a string of burglaries recently,” he went on. “Four times in this area in the last few weeks. They’ve been nicking tack and things.”
“Burglars,” Yash said after a moment. “Fucking burglars?”
It was so horrifically absurd. It sucked the meaning out of the world.
Sooz began to tap her foot on the floor, then got to her feet and circled the sofa.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Wasn’t that shed locked? You said everything was locked. How did Rosie and Noel get in there if it was locked?”
“I don’t know.” Sebastian swirled his drink to steady himself. “I suppose Rosie and Noel went in after the door was ripped open. They must have heard them or seen them, tried to stop them. Or they went in there and the burglars came back and found them.”