It’s unmistakably Ed. And a small red feather has drifted onto his cheek.
Chapter Forty
Help me get her into a guest room,” Jane instructs Christopher. He scoops Nan up easily, and they move toward the staircase. Holly wants to follow, but her legs still aren’t cooperating. It’s not relief or terror or even a combination of those two feelings that keeps her locked in place. It’s guilt.
This is her fault. Hers, and no one else’s. If she’d told Christopher the truth right from the start, if she’d gone to the police, if she’d done something—done anything—Ed might be alive right now. She can’t fathom the world without him, without the space he takes up in it. The brown eyes and the long legs and the laugh and energy—all of those things that say Ed, that hold an Ed-shape in this universe—gone. Leaving a hole that for the rest of her life Nan will have to try not to fall into.
She staggers into the hall. She can hear Nan’s sobs, then her mother’s voice overhead. “Here,” Jane’s saying soothingly. “Let me help you.” But there is no help. Holly knows that, even if Nan has not yet discovered it. She will.
And then Christopher is coming down the staircase, walking down the hallway toward her. Graceful and sleek and dangerous. Oh, panther, she thinks irrationally. How very, very sharp your teeth are.
He leads her back into the library, shuts the door. “I’ll keep searching,” he says. “He has to have held the boys somewhere close. You said he let you look through the house?”
Holly nods. “No one else was there. I’m certain.”
“Do you know if Ed used drugs? The kid’s arms were a mess. Covered in bandages and track marks.”
Holly thinks of Ed’s clear gaze, his beautiful skin. The health he radiated on and off the field. “No,” she says. “Not a chance.”
“Then somebody was using him. Like some kind of science experiment.” He hesitates.
“What?”
“I have to report this,” he says. “There could be consequences for you, for your family.”
“Consequences?” Holly says bitterly. “There’s a woman upstairs who lost her brother, a boy she loved so much he was like a son. She’ll never see him again. Those are consequences. If I’d come to you earlier, or if I’d gone to the police, he might still be alive.”
“You don’t know that. Peter might have panicked, killed him sooner.” He lowers his voice. “He might have killed Jack too. At least right now there’s still hope.”
“Hope?” she says dully. “What’s that?”
“It’s what carries us.” He nudges her side with his hook, and she realizes she’s forgotten about it. It’s become normal to her. And then she stops thinking about what that means, thinking about anything, because he’s leaning forward. He kisses her, a quick, gentle kiss that breaks through the fog and pain around her like an electric shock. That drags her back into this world.
“I’m not saying it will be okay,” he says, pulling back. “I’m saying you’ll get through it.”
And then he’s gone, before she can ask him what the hell he was doing.
Or ask him to do it again.
* * *
When Jane comes downstairs, she looks exhausted, every bit of her seven decades, as if she’s aged twenty years in this one day.
“She’s sleeping,” she tells Holly, crossing to the decanter and pouring herself a drink. “I put her in the room next to mine and gave her two sleeping pills.”
“You can’t hand out those pills like candy,” Holly protests.
Jane sniffs. “The child has no family, nowhere to go. Sleep is the best thing for her, and she won’t get that on her own.” She takes a long look at Holly. “How are you?”
Holly shakes her head. “Numb.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jane says in a gentler tone. “Wendy, myself, you . . . we all did the best we could.”
“Right,” Holly says. She can’t talk about this. She leaves the library and climbs the stairs, stopping outside Nan’s room to listen for her breathing before continuing on.
In the nursery, she sits on the bed and looks at the sky, searching for the evening star through the clouds. She thinks of Ed, how he’ll never grow up, never get married, never dance at his sister’s wedding or give her away. She thinks of all those other boys, the ones Christopher told her about, pictures their gray faces in a twilight room somewhere, sleeping away their youth. Or scurrying down dark alleys, willing to trade everything for one more taste of Peter’s drug.