‘It wasn’t me!’
‘No, but you went along with it. And then the two of you went sneaking around, trying to put it right. Putting yourselves in danger. I’m shocked, Frankie. I thought you were sensible. You keep telling me that you’re not a little kid any more and then you go and do this . . .’
I was on my feet, pacing around the table. At the back of my head, a voice was telling me to calm down, to stop yelling at her. I knew this explosion was partly caused by my own tension. But I was angry with her too. It had been stupid. And it played on something I had long worried about. We give kids access to these new online tools, like Instagram, but they don’t always have the emotional maturity to use them. I had thought Frankie was mature enough. I didn’t even know she’d managed to get online.
She got up from the table too. ‘I knew you’d be like this. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
I wanted to slam something too. And Ryan, who had started all this, and then allowed Frankie to run off into the darkening woods on her own, was the obvious target. I went outside to see if the Butlers were back, but their rental car was still gone.
Back inside, I rapped lightly on Frankie’s door.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said.
I pushed the door open.
She was lying on her bed, facing the window. As soon as I opened the door she rolled to face me. Her eyes were red and tears streaked her cheeks. ‘I said, leave me alone!’
She screamed it and a wave of contrition went through me. I was the adult here. I should have been handling this better. But I also knew that now was not the time to talk. I had to wait for us both to calm down. I left, closing the door behind me, and heard the click as she locked it.
She eventually emerged two hours later, thirsty and needing the bathroom. When she came out she had washed her face and tied her hair back.
‘What is it?’
I realised I had been staring at her. She looked so much like her mother, so grown-up. But I knew from experience that if I told her that, she would groan and roll her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said instead. ‘I shouldn’t have yelled at you.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, slumping on the couch.
I went over and sat beside her. ‘I understand why you didn’t tell me. But from now on, I want you to know you can tell me anything. I won’t blow up again. I promise. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Can I ask you about last night?’
She huffed. ‘I guess.’
I didn’t want to upset her again, but I needed to know what was going on. For the past couple of hours I had been replaying my conversation with Nikki. Maybe my grief and Frankie’s teenage hormones, combined with the imagination-stoking power of our surroundings, had led us to see things that weren’t there. But I hadn’t mentioned what I’d seen outside my window to Frankie. And I still thought my theory about what might have happened to Donna, though outlandish, needed to be examined.
‘When you said they didn’t look human, what did you mean?’ I asked.
‘Just . . . their faces. They looked like animals.’
‘Like they were wearing masks?’
She thought about it, then nodded.
‘Can you remember what kind of masks? I mean, what kind of animals? Was one of them a deer or a sheep?’
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to see it. ‘Maybe a sheep. And I think, yes, one of them was some kind of bird.’
‘And the other?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But there were definitely three?’
‘Yes. I think so, anyway. It was dark. Confusing.’
But whether there were two or three, I felt reassured that I wasn’t imagining things – and neither was Frankie.
Had Donna seen one of these masked figures too, and thought it was the Devil coming to punish her? Who were these people sneaking around in masks?
Everett Miller, said a little voice in my head. But surely, even as dark and thick as they were, he couldn’t have been hiding in these woods for twenty years, could he?
I decided to move on to the more important topic: the teenagers Frankie and Ryan had apparently upset. Buddy and Darlene, those were their names. In a way I didn’t blame them for being angry. I’d probably have felt aggrieved if I were them, living in a dying town, a couple of tourists coming along and calling it a shithole. But if the little kids Frankie had spoken to had been telling the truth, Buddy and Darlene had gone way too far. Killing a rabbit. Could they really have buried a cat alive? It seemed likely they had boasted about it to scare the small children without actually doing it, but even if they weren’t sociopaths, they still sounded like a couple of delinquents. Frankie and Ryan had chosen the wrong kids to make enemies of.