Penult (15 page)

I couldn’t bring myself to lay down on
the futon alone, so I stayed in the easy chair, drifting in,
drifting out. This way, at least I looked like I was making an
effort. My tactic paid off when I heard Karla come creaking up the
attic stairs sometime in the wee hours. She found me awash in
moonlight.

“
So did you do it?”
Excitement tinged her voice. “Did you go?”

That face, so eager. She would be so
pleased with if I said yes. I was so tempted to lie. “I … uh … no.
I didn’t get there. But I tried … really hard.”

Every last shred of love and empathy
drained instantly from her face. She looked incredulous. “What is
your problem?”

“
I don’t know. I tried! I’m
a different person now. I mean, I might never go back. I’m sorry.
It’s just how things are.”

“
I can’t believe you. I
just ask you to go and see. Is that really so
difficult?”

“
Yeah. It kind of
is.”

She huffed and went over to the futon,
collapsing heavily, dragging the covers over herself.

“
I can give it another shot
… tomorrow … after the funeral … or whenever.”

“
Good night.”

“
But … I have to tell you.
I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

“
I said good
night!”

I settled down next to her on the
futon. I tried putting my arm over her, she didn’t resist but she
didn’t exactly respond. It took me the longest time to fall
asleep.

***

My dreams had a different quality this
time, with the intensity, crispness of detail and sense of drifting
omniscience I had last experienced in London before we went up
north to find Sturgie. I saw that man again, not Wendell, but just
as nicely dressed. One of his gang perhaps, or one of the Friends
of Penult? Was he even a real person? Who’s to say?

I could tell he was in Wales from the
unpronounceable names on some signs. He wasn’t doing anything
suspicious or threatening, just walking through a parking lot, but
he carried an odd, bulging briefcase, like an old-fashioned
doctor’s kit like you see in old movies from the times when docs
still made house calls. My conscious hovered around him like a
gnat, before it was swept away by the flow and went flitting
through a hundred random minds.

I woke up alone. Karla was an early
riser. I figured she was just downstairs washing up or helping the
ladies with their morning chores, the way she was wont to do
wherever she went.

I went downstairs to find breakfast
preparations well underway. Helen and Jessica were setting a table
for six. Britt was frying sausage and eggs. Fiona was mixing Bloody
Marys.

The funeral was scheduled for eleven.
There was to be only a short ceremony at the cemetery because the
Boyles were not the most religious family. They were pretty much
agnostic.

“
You guys seen
Karla?”

“
No,” said
Britt.

“
She’s not with you?” said
Fiona.

“
Perhaps she’s in the
toilet, love,” said Helen.

I stood there and twiddled my thumbs,
feeling useless.

“
Anything … I can
do.”

“
No worries love, we have
things under control,” said Britt.

“
Why don’t you go and fetch
some parsley from the garden?” said Fiona.

I went out back and picked a fistful
of parsley sprigs. Karla loved sitting out in the garden. I hoped
to find her here, but the garden was empty.

Layers of cloud shuttled fast overhead
like they were in a hurry to get somewhere. A change in the weather
was in the offing.

I went back in and found the ladies
already settling in at the table with their Bloody Marys. Britt
went around and cracked fresh pepper into each glass.

“
No Karla?”

Helen looked at me, got up quickly and
checked the bathroom. The door was open, the room
vacant.

“
How odd. You’re certain
she’s not in the attic?”

Could I have missed her somehow? Was
she slumbering in the easy chair? I flew off the chair and ran back
upstairs.

The easy chair was vacant as was the
rest of the attic. I found the sheets rumpled where she had slept
beside me. But her little, battered suitcase sat open right where
she had left it. Her dirty clothes lay wadded in the corner. I
looked around hoping to find a note, but there was
nothing.

My heartbeat accelerated. A flush of
panic brought heat to my face. I thudded back down the
stairs.

“
She’s not
here.”

The ladies looked at me, their faces
blank. Jess got up from the table and went to the mud
room.

“
Her shoes are still here,
right by the door,” she said.

“
Her purse is gone,” said
Britt, checking the counter.

“
Oh, settle down you all,”
said Helen. “The girl just went for a walk. It’s a beautiful,
breezy morning. Give her a chance to breathe.”

“
She went for a walk
without her shoes?” said Jess.

“
Why not?” said Helen.
“It’s spring. Maybe she likes the feel of grass in her
toes.”

Jess pushed open the door and peered
out into the garden. “The marble vase … on the stoop … was it
broken before?”

“
Oh no!” said Fiona. “We
bought that in Thailand. My fault. I shouldn’t have left it on the
steps.”

Jess came back in and sat back down
with us. We passed around a pan of French toast and bacon. I wasn’t
that hungry to begin with, and my appetite faded even more with
every minute that passed and Karla did not walk through the door. I
kept staring at the empty dish beside me.

Afterwards, I helped clean up. I bused
the table and washed the dishes, but before I was done drying them,
Jess took my wrist and pulled me towards the door.

“
Come on you,” she said.
“Let’s go for a ride.”

***

We climbed into the same lorry that
Jess had once driven me to the train station in Cardiff back when
Sergei had a bounty on my head and every criminal in Europe was on
the lookout for me.

“
Let’s just drive around,”
she said. “Maybe she got carried away and went for a longer walk
than she planned. Maybe she’s lost her way.”

So we cruised the streets of Brynmawr,
up and down its avenues and alleys, car parks and vacant lots.
There was a brown-haired girl sitting on a bench on the riverfront.
I got excited for a moment, but it wasn’t her. She wasn’t anywhere
on the streets of Brynmawr. Jess made sure of that, covering every
stretch of pavement that could be accessed by vehicle.

“
Could it be … she went off
to that place?” said Jess.

“
What place?”

“
You know. The place you
told me about. Root?”

“
Well maybe, but you do
realize that we … our bodies … don’t physically go there. Just our
souls. Our bodies remain behind.”

Jess sighed. “I did not know that. So
you’re like … ghosts … over there?”

“
No. Just … different
bodies.”

“
How odd. Two bodies. One
soul.”

We drove past a row of restaurants and
pubs.

“
Maybe she’s in some
café?”

“
But why?” I said. “She
knew you guys would be making breakfast.”

“
Ah, let’s not worry
ourselves unnecessarily. I’m sure she’ll be back in time for the
funeral.”

“
I sure hope
so.”

“
Did you two have a
disagreement or something?”

“
Not really. I mean she
wanted a favor from me. And I couldn’t deliver. But not because I
didn’t try.”

“
She wanted you to
cross.”

“
Yeah. How did you
know?”

“
You told us. Over Spades.
Remember?”

“
Sorry. I’m not thinking
straight.”

“
Give her a chance. She’ll
come back. She’s probably just making a show of her displeasure.
Maybe she’s back at the house already.”

***

She wasn’t at the house. And she
didn’t come back in time for the funeral either. That deep sense of
dread I knew so well from my teenage days descended back over me
with a vengeance, smothering, suffocating me with fear. It was the
feeling that something unspecified but most definitely bad had gone
down and being powerless to reverse it.

Helen took me aside as we were headed
back to the cars at the cemetery.

“
Don’t you think, at this
point we should call the constables? File a missing person
report?”

“
What do we tell
them?”

“
That a young woman
disappeared without a word and without her shoes, breaking a vase
in the process.”

“
I suppose we
could.”

“
What do you suppose
happened?”

“
I don’t know. She either
ran or way, or got taken. Or both.”

“
Both?”

“
Maybe she took off to be
alone, and someone found her. Maybe it’s the same thing that
happened to Isobel.”

“
Oh my. You
mean—“

“
Edmund and his nut cases
might have grabbed her. It’s one possibility.”

“
There are
others?”

I hadn’t told Jessica about Wendell
and wasn’t sure I wanted to get into all that.

“
Yeah. There’s other
possibilities related to Root.”

That was about as far as I wanted to
explain, and Jessica didn’t pry. To tell you the truth, after what
happened to Sturgie and the farm, I didn’t want to think about what
they might have done to Karla.

My best hope was that she had simply
run off to teach me a lesson. At least she took her purse which
held most of my remaining cash.

“
Should we go straight to
the Gwent police station then?”

“
You can go. I
shouldn’t.”

“
Why not?”

“
I’m traveling under a
false identity.”

“
Alright. I’ll take Helen
and we’ll file the report. They already have one for Izzie, so
maybe they have some leads already. If not, maybe this will stir
them into action. Two sisters, both gone missing in the same
year.”

***

The rain that threatened never came.
The clouds split and gave way to a perfect sunny day, but this
world had rarely looked so bleak and dark to me. It had nothing to
do with the funeral. Sturgie was an afterthought, I’m ashamed to
say. I barely knew him. But Karla was everything to me. And as hard
as I tried to think positive thoughts about what had happened to
her, the worst case scenarios came to dominate. I sat there at the
funeral and brooded, blaming myself for being so stubborn in
avoiding the Liminality. I certainly could have done better than my
half-hearted attempts to cross.

During the service, various people got
up and said nice words about Sturgie, most recounting stories from
before college and before Karla and I knew him. He wasn’t
originally intending to go to college right away. I was his virtual
replacement at the farm, at least in terms of the fence repairing
and menial tasks that used to be his responsibility. To think if he
had stayed another year tending goats, none of this would have ever
happened to him. And Karla and I would be in a different place
right now. Maybe together. Maybe not. I couldn’t help thinking of
what might have been. These alternative scenarios were always
better, of course, than what really happened.

Renfrew sat next to his brother at the
service. It was nice to see him somewhat reconciled with Ralph. It
must have happened at the wake sometime after Karla and I had left,
the process undoubtedly lubricated by the whisky that Renfrew’s
doctor had forbidden him to partake.

I never learned what slights or
insults or acts of betrayal had led to their estrangement, but if
nothing else, Sturgie’s death provided the nudge that enabled them
to let bygones be bygones.

Back at the house, I sat in the garden
alone most of the rest of the afternoon keeping an eye on the front
gate, hoping Karla would appear. Fiona brought me tea at four and
then, when the clock struck five, a vodka and tonic. But I just sat
there in a wicker chair, feeling small and staring out at the
darkening world. The early blooming sunflowers that Karla had cooed
over the day we arrived now looked ghastly to me, their gaping
solitary eyes staring at me like a bunch of Cyclops. Everything had
looked so green when we had arrived, but now green was just another
shade of grey to me.

If Karla had not gone off on her own,
I could narrow the likely suspects down to two: Edmund and Wendell.
I could only pray that neither wanted her dead. With Edmund, I was
less sure. Yes, Karla was his daughter, but from what Karla told
me, he had long ago condemned her to hell and would not hesitate to
have her removed from this world.

As for Wendell, why would he kill
Karla? Sure, killing was what he did and he was good at it. But
what possible incentive could that provide for me to go back to
Root in aid of their cause?