The Start of Everything (21 page)

Her long hair hung in front of her. I’d worn my hair like that, too, the year I got a chest. Two big hanks, one on each side, covering up.
But that left the telltale bra line across my back, which got snapped a couple times a week. She wore a baggy sweatshirt. Teenage boys are bastards.

Mrs. Bennet asked her husband to invite the other residents down for hot chocolate and ornament hanging. I warned him that the Holsts were occupied, and Mrs. Finley told him off herself. That left the writer.

They didn’t refer to him by name. They said “Rory’s nephew” or “the writer.” He was using the flat while his uncle was on a trip.

Mrs. Bennet knocked, mug of chocolate in hand. He answered, wearing pyjama bottoms and a sweater. Maybe he’d been deep in work; maybe he’d been sleeping. He looked around, blinking, then looked down when he saw Katja next to me. “No, thanks,” he said, but accepted the hot mug.

There had been this brief thing between them. He’d slid a letter under the door of our flat. A proper letter! He’d written:

Dear Katja
—

Sometimes I’m lazy with my work and I look out the window instead. It’s a treat when you come out. You’re fun. You’re sporty. You’re pretty
.

But I worry that just watching makes me a creep. I’d like to meet you. I’m only here for a few more weeks
.

I write books. Well, I’ve written one book, and I’m writing another. I’m
trying
to write another, but I’m easily distracted. I would consider it a privilege to be distracted by you
.

Stephen

That was when I’d figured out who he was: the face from the book.

Katja answered his note with a note of her own, and all on papers slipped under doors they agreed to go out to dinner using his uncle’s car. I was only a little jealous of the romantic side of things and a lot jealous of Katja getting away from Deeping House to somewhere that didn’t have inflatable play equipment or paper placemats with crayons.

She came back too soon. They couldn’t have even got to the restaurant. She called him something ugly in Finnish, sounding really upset. I wanted her to tell me, but she wouldn’t. I remembered the rape scene
from his book when the conductor forced himself on a woman in his car. He’d specified every thud and rub of their too-big bodies against the car’s tight interior as she struggled and he pushed. I shuddered.

I don’t think it went as far as that, but, whatever he did to make Katja feel hurt and sad, I was glad he didn’t join in the tree trimming now. I was glad he felt guilty.

“Nothing wrong with an intimate crowd,” said Mrs. Bennet. “More biscuits for each of us!” she added, and the kids cheered. “Second batch after the ornaments,” she promised.

She handed out the pretty objects one at a time: a sleigh, a snow-flake, a donkey. The kids hung them as high as they could, which wasn’t high at all. The tree was going to look like it was wearing a skirt and no top.

Then she got to what were clearly the “good ones.” They were wrapped in tissue paper. It was a matched set: dozens of brass stars, a moon, and a full zodiac. She removed each piece reverently, making a stack of the tissue, which she smoothed flat with firm caresses. She directed the kids to sit for what turned out to be a reverent ceremony.

She handled each brass sign delicately, explaining what it was, showing Sagittarius’s bow and arrow, and Pisces’s intricate scales. She asked the children their birthdays, and lifted them to hang their own signs up high. Caitlin was Aquarius. Katja volunteered that she was, too, so they shared slipping the thread loop around a prickly branch.

“Cancer!” I announced, getting into the spirit of things. I wanted to hang the crab. I’d always liked that my sign was a beach creature. When my dad was alive we went to the seaside every August.

Mrs. Bennet’s smile stuck. It was the same smile it had been a second ago, but the sameness, the unmovingness, made it strange. Mr. Bennet was stuck, too, with his arm half-extended to swag the garland. Dan and Brent had some kind of squabble going on; Caitlin shushed them.

“We don’t have Cancer,” Mrs. Bennet said quietly. “We don’t hang that one,” she amended.

Open-mouthed, I looked to Katja. She glared at me as if I were an idiot, and mouthed “Max.” I knew there was another daughter. I didn’t know she was sick. Mrs. Holst had mentioned them both to me, and I
saw Dru around sometimes, outside reading. I just thought that Max stayed inside, or had football practice or a club or a class.

A sharp crescent was thrust into my hand. “You can hang the moon,” said Mrs. Bennet. My dad used to say that I “hung the moon.” I don’t know why that means “I love you,” but that’s how he used it: “You hung the moon, Grace Genevieve.”

I said I had to go to the toilet. I ducked into the flat I shared with Katja, kicking through her yesterday clothes that were still on the floor. I closed the door and sat. If I were ever rich, I would design my house to have a huge bathroom, with a massive tub and a TV. Sometimes a bathroom is the only place you can be where no one will try to talk to you. Dad used to read the morning paper in there, because he couldn’t bear conversation until he’d been up for at least half an hour. I never thought about Dad. This was stupid. He’s been dead a long time.

I’d expected to return to the promised carol singing, but Dru was shouting: “If Max were home from hospital, you wouldn’t care if I sang or not!”

Danny started crying. The box wasn’t empty, but the tree was covered well enough. I’d seen in the TV schedule that
The Snowman
was going to be on this afternoon, the one with the pastel drawings and the boy soprano and no words. “Who wants to watch cartoons?” I said.

On the screen in our little flat, the snowman sailed across the sky, little boy in tow. The kids ate fistfuls of sugar cereal from the box. On the other side of our wall, the washing machine
slosh
ed and
thunk
ed. Katja had been supposed to do the washing this morning, but she always puts it off. She hates that the Holsts don’t make me do theirs. She says it’s because of Cambridge that they don’t ask, but what does that have to do with it? And even if that is the reason, Katja studied literature for two years at a uni in Finland. If she doesn’t act like it, whose fault is that?

The crescent moon ornament worked a small hole in my jeans pocket. I hadn’t said a thing while the Bennets tidied away the ornament wrappings, just kept my hand on it as if its outline would have shown through the denim. I felt that outline through the thin cotton pocket, against my leg. The familiar rush spread out from there, a quick high that distracted and comforted me.

CHAPTER 19

CHLOE FROHMANN

D
r. Holst laughs. “Oh, that sounds grand, doesn’t it?” she says. “A ‘nanny.’ No, Grace was just temporary help for over the Christmas holidays. Not even an au pair, strictly. The agency clarified that. In official terms, she was a ‘mother’s helper,’ though I find that rather sexist, don’t you? She was as great a help to my husband as to me. We had a deadline coming, and a round of editing to work on.”

The Holsts are academics. Journals and papers are piled everywhere. Dr. Holst clears a chair by adding its stack to one on the coffee table. Neither Keene nor I move to take the seat, so Dr. Holst takes it herself. Her hands clutch each other in her lap primly, and she tilts her head up to us. Her curly halo is wound into a bun stabbed through by a red pencil.

The two upstairs flats each get fully half the footprint of the house. The division between the Finleys and the Holsts runs lengthwise, creating two long flats, rooms railroading into rooms. This
lounge overlooks the back. Between and under the windows’ pastoral views, bookshelves fill the Holsts’ walls. Their contents age up: obvious children’s books on the bottom, working up to fiction, reference, and journals literally over their heads. One topmost shelf holds a varied selection of sex manuals.
Well, the kids have to get here somehow
.

“She was a help while we were getting the final edits done, but having someone else underfoot at home … This is a spacious flat, but, you can see, it is only a flat. Even with her sleeping downstairs, with Katja …”

“Have you kept in touch with Grace?” I ask.

“No,” Dr. Holst says. “No, why would I? The children liked her, but it’s not like they would bond over a month.”

“Under what circumstances did she leave, Dr. Holst?” Keene says.

It comes together for her. She gets up to pace. “Oh, dear. Oh—no, you don’t think? The body in the fens?”

“Had you considered it might be her?” I ask.

“No! Of course not. I would have contacted the police if I’d had any … She’s not blond, for one thing. Katja was. Oh! Oh, you don’t think it’s Katja, do you? I thought she wasn’t tall enough to match the description!”

“That’s the case. When did you last see both of them?”

“It was all perfectly ordinary. Grace was only to be here another day or two, then back to Cambridge. Term was soon to start.” So Grace had kept up the fiction of returning to Cambridge. No wonder Stephen Casey wrote to her there. “But I’d hit a block with the chapter I was editing, and I thought I’d spend some time with the kids.… I told her she didn’t have to work the rest of the time. She could stay, but she didn’t have to work. I even paid her early.”

“And?” Keene had to prompt her. She’d stopped walking, stopped talking.

“The day after the snow, she was gone. I wasn’t really surprised. She was young, she had adventures ahead of her.… I assumed she and Katja had left together, with Rory’s nephew. Stephen, the writer. He seemed nice. He looked like a student still, that long hair … but he’d had some actual success. That had to be attractive.”

“Were Grace and Stephen friends?” I say it casually but deliberately leave Katja out.

“They were all three young people, more likely to be friends than anyone else in the house.”

Interesting
. So she didn’t see any particular spark between Stephen and Grace.

“Did any of them seem sexually interested in one another?” It can pay to be direct.

Dr. Holst blinks, then sighs. “This is about Katja, isn’t it? Eleanor told you. It’s such a ridiculous … It’s not as if it happened in the next room while the children were napping.”

“So you heard it, too?” Keene asks.

“We were home that day. We all were. But we didn’t hear a thing. It’s not as if these walls insulate us from sound; we regularly hear Rory Casey sing in the shower. In fact, I wondered at first if Eleanor had been exaggerating.”

“Really? Does Mrs. Finley do that often?” Keene asks.

She looks sternly at us. “This isn’t the sort of thing I would pass on, but I know that she will have done already: the incident with Marcus and the blond woman. He knows he did wrong, and there was an emotional affair of sorts that ought not to have been. Then the evening she found them in the car, they kissed. It was, according to Marcus, the first time that had happened. The way Eleanor described it, you’d think the car had been rocking.”

“You’re close with him, then. He tells you a lot of things,” I prompt.

“He needs someone to talk to sometimes.”

“You believe him about the supposedly first kiss? It sounds convenient, is all.” That was Keene, elbowing in.

“You can believe him or not, as you like. But I know the two of them, Eleanor and Marcus, and I know what I think. He knows he did wrong, and feels terrible about those things. But he can’t be sorry for all the things Eleanor accuses and that he
didn’t
do. The point, though, is what happened on the snowy day. Marcus confirmed Eleanor’s account. He said it really was mortifying, and he would have been embarrassed to look Katja in the face after that.”

“Did he?” Keene asks.

“Did he what?”

“Look her in the face after that.”

Mrs. Holst gazes out over the back lawn. “I don’t know,” she says. “He would have avoided it if he could. I assumed they got a lift with the writer. Stephen drove Rory’s car to the train station and left it there for Rory’s return.”

“Did you see either of them get into Stephen’s car?” Keene asks. But we already knew she couldn’t have. Their flat runs along the back of the manor. They have a view of cars moving along the drive but not of the car park, not of people getting in and out.

“No,” she says. “No, it’s just what I assumed.”

Keene looks at me. Stephen said he’d left Deeping House alone.

“Anyone else go by car that day?” Getting a lift from someone known to them was the most likely option; a taxi would have been exorbitant, all the way from Peterborough.

“The Finleys’ car slid partly off the drive and blocked it. No one could get in or out. That’s partly why I felt sorry for Katja. It’s not that big of a house when we’re all in it at the same time. She’s young, Stephen’s young.…” Dr. Holst shrugs. “A neighbour with a tractor pulled the car out maybe late afternoon? After that, Ian—that’s Ian Bennet, the owner,” she stresses to me, supervising my note-taking. “Ian took the Christmas greenery to the recycling centre in Whittlesey. And—oh, yes! Marcus—Marcus Finley—had to pick up their kids from Grandmother’s house. Shame they missed sharing the snowfall together.”