Guardian of the Dead (8 page)

In the nearly empty theatre, the silence was very obvious.

‘So,' I said, striving to make my tone light. ‘You're allergic to cooked food, is that right?'

Reka didn't bother to make eye contact with me, preferring to lean her arm on the armrest, beside Kevin's. ‘That's right.'

‘I guess that must make a social life pretty hard.'

‘Lay off, Ellie,' Kevin ordered.

I blinked at him. ‘What do you—' He put his hand over Reka's as if to comfort her. ‘Don't make fun of people's disabilities!'

My teeth snapped together so hard they clicked. ‘Sorry,' I managed, after a moment. Kevin had never used that voice with me.

‘I accept your apology,' Reka said, and squeezed Kevin's hand.

‘What do you think about these Eyeslasher murders, Ellie?' Iris asked, tapping the newspaper's front page.

Even knowing she was trying to help couldn't stop my reply from being curt. ‘I think they're gross.'

The headline read M
ori Elder Murdered! and the story described the latest Eyeslasher victim as a pillar of the community; a general practitioner with a family practice, he had also been a respected
kaum
tua
. There was a colour photograph with the article, deliberately discordant against the description of the dead man's beaten and mutilated body. Looking steadily at the camera, a solid, grizzled man with a feathered cloak over his dark business suit stood in the middle of a crowd of kids on a
marae
, all of them with bare feet, dark eyes, and huge grins.

‘He just went out to buy milk,' Iris read. ‘That's so sad.'

‘It can't be that bad,' I said sourly. ‘There's still room on the front page for the sheep that ran away and lived in a cave for six years.' There was a picture of the sheep, too. It was very woolly.

Reka leaned over and took the paper from Iris without asking, her looped braids nearly smacking me in the face. I caught a whiff of something that smelled like expensive fruit.

‘Let's talk about something cheerful,' Kevin suggested.

‘Such as exams.'

I groaned.

‘It's only two weeks until our midyears!' Iris said. ‘And they're right in the middle of the production run, which is why we keep losing everyone. Sometimes I think I'd like to just run away.'

Kevin nodded. ‘Like Great-Uncle Robert.'

‘Oh, here we go,' I said.

Reka went very still, and then, apparently realising her cue, cocked her head at him. ‘Your great-uncle ran away from exams?'

‘Nope. World War II, according to Grandad. Robert was a pacifist, and he vanished in his first year of uni, a couple of days after war was declared on Germany. Grandad signed up, did manly, non-pacifist things in North Africa, and came back expecting his younger brother to turn up when the fighting was over.'

‘And he never did,' Iris said, far too sad about something that wasn't
her
family tragedy.

‘Nope. So Grandad named his son after his brother in case he wasn't a coward. Hedging his bets.' He pointed at me. ‘But the
relevant
part is that Grandad blamed the drama club.'

‘Do tell,' Reka said.

‘It was only after Robert joined that he got all those weird ideas about how it might be nice not to shoot people.'

‘How enlightened,' Reka said, nudging his hand with hers.

‘A better life through theatre,' I said flippantly, and stood up, before things got any worse. ‘Well, there's a Snickers bar with my name on it.'

‘You need protein,' Kevin said, but he didn't stand to join me.

‘Snickers are packed with peanuts,' I said, and loped up the stairs.

I ignored Iris's desperate look as Reka edged closer to Kevin. It was harder to ignore my own guilt. Iris and I weren't actually friends, I reminded myself. I wasn't obliged to deflect her imagined competition. And whether or not he came out to Reka was up to him, but if Kevin couldn't read the signals of interested persons and let them know he didn't reciprocate, it wasn't my job to fix the fallout.

Still, warned by some impulse, I turned to look at them just before I got to the exit. Reka was explaining something to Kevin, her hand on his arm, but she tilted her head to look me full in the face.

My skin prickled. It was probably a trick of the distance and the dim light, but for that brief moment, her eyes were dark from corner to corner, with no pupils or irises at all.

Even after a chocolate hit, I was in no mood to watch Reka be stunning and brilliant for the rest of the rehearsal, but it was full dark outside and I couldn't leave until Kevin did. Instead, I went to the greenroom and sulked in perfect privacy, picking holes in the collapsing couch instead of working on my
Odyssey
essay like a good Mansfield girl ought. This became less exciting after a while, especially when the tips of my fingers went numb with the cold. I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets and began poking around the little dressing rooms. The first two held Carla's sewing machine, the clothes they'd rented, and the costumes she'd been making herself, neatly hung on wheeled racks or folded onto rickety steel chairs.

In the last one, there was a bench built across two sides of the room. It was stained with make-up spills from the decades of actors who had sat in front of the four smeared mirrors to put on their faces. The box of costume jewellery sat open on the bench beside a toolbox filled with half-used make-up.

I sat down and pulled a strand of beads out of the box. It
was
only plastic, but the beads were a nice deep sapphire, and polished into irregular bobbles. I pulled the necklace over my head, pulled my hair out of its ponytail, and tossed it, smiling coquettishly into the mirror.

‘Ellie?' someone said, and I jumped to my feet, turning guiltily towards the door.

It was Puck, whose real name I still hadn't learned. He was staring, with an expression I didn't recognise at first, because it was so seldom directed at me. I was used to being invisible to guys. At best, I was a friend, a funny girl, a good laugh. But he was looking at me the way people sometimes looked at Kevin or Iris, the way I feared I looked at Mark.

‘Sorry,' I said, and put the necklace back. ‘I know I shouldn't mess with—'

He grinned and shook brown curls out of his eyes. ‘Don't pay any attention to Carrie,' he said. ‘It'd set a terrible precedent.' He stepped closer to me. My skin prickled. ‘I like your hair, Pandora.'

‘I washed it last night,' I said, and then wanted to die.

He laughed. ‘Well, it looks good. Iris wants you there for notes.'

‘Thanks,' I replied, and followed him back out to the stage, where everyone was pointedly waiting for us. Kevin raised an eyebrow at me, and I glared back. If Iris had notes for me, I didn't hear them, but I did catch Puck's name. It was Blake.

Carrie tried to catch my eye, but I decided staring at the floor was the better part of valour.

I didn't tie my hair back, though.

LAMENT FOR THE NUMB

‘G
O DO YOUR ESSAY
,' Kevin said on Saturday morning, trying to glare at me from his position in the Year Thirteen boarder–lounge beanbag.

‘I can't do my essay,' I told him. ‘I'm doing my laundry.'

‘Not right at this moment.'

‘No, right at this moment I'm waiting for the midday news while the dryer does its thing.' I eyed the beanbag enviously. The lounge was nearly full of students avoiding the dining hall's attempts at a hot lunch; Kevin must have been in here since the morning cartoons to have snagged it.

‘You could do your essay while the dryer does its thing,' he suggested.

‘Kevin! It is vital that I keep myself up to date on current affairs.'

‘Is it vital that you watch
Ellen
?'

I scooped another forkful of two-minute noodles into my mouth and slurped defiantly. ‘Maybe. Besides, I've got all tomorrow to write it.'

‘We have rehearsal tomorrow night.'

‘About that. Does Iris really need me for—' ‘Hang on, shut up,' Kevin said, and turned up the TV. The lounge conversation died into silence as the solemn-voiced news reporter made her announcement.

Two more murders had been discovered. The victims had been a fifth-generation slaughterhouse worker from Lower Hutt and a Canadian journalist in Wellington, only recently emigrated. They'd both not come home last night, and were discovered dead this morning. And their eyes were gone.

The usual din of the lounge was subdued after the Eyeslasher story finished. I threw the rest of my noodles into the overflowing bin as the news ended with a final update on the very woolly sheep.

The laundry room was warm, if uncomfortably humid. I surrendered to the impulse to bury my face in the armful of laundry, for the comfort of warm, clean fabric against my face. The sensation was only a little spoiled by the not-quite-lemon scent of the generic laundry powder Sheppard gave us.

When I straightened, there were wet spots on my white school blouses. There was no reason for me to cry; I hadn't known any of these people. Napier wasn't even on the list of places the Eyeslasher had struck. But looking at the fuzzy pictures of the man and woman on the crappy TV, I had felt an odd sense of connection; as if they were people whose names I had heard, once, and recognised.

I folded clothes into the basket, then hauled it back to my building. Samia and Gemma Chant were in the tiny living room, their accounting notes spread over the coffee table, and they didn't look up as I came in; I tiptoed past into my room and quietly shut the door.

It was my second load of laundry today, and the building designers had not been generous with storage space. I grabbed some of the folded jerseys and yanked open one of the drawers under the bed.

The contents clattered.

‘Oh, crap,' I breathed, staring at the empty beer cans. I'd completely forgotten about them. Three days later, even in my cold room, they were distinctly fragrant. I'd have to smuggle them out in my backpack, pretend I was going to the library, and dump them in a bin at school when no one was watching.

There was a sudden bustle in the living room, all the glad greetings and excitement that hadn't met my entrance.

‘Ellie?' Gemma said. ‘She's in there.'

I shoved the drawer closed, wincing at the sliding rattle, and dumped the jerseys on my bed.

‘Ellie?' Iris called from outside my door.

I twisted on my knees. ‘Come in!'

She poked her head in. ‘Are you ready to go?'

‘Go?' I wondered, then stood up, remembering. ‘Go! Oh, props shopping! Yes, just a minute.'

‘Am I interrupting? I can wait.'

I emptied my backpack, shaking books onto the bed, and threw my wallet in. ‘No, not a problem.' What the hell was wrong with my memory? I'd remembered Mark wanting to speak to me, only he hadn't; I didn't know the Eyeslasher victims, but it felt as if there was something in the way they'd died that I'd been warned about. But where the warning had come from, I couldn't remember. My head felt as if it were stuffed with used tissues.