Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 27.5

This is not a spoiler.

The observant reader may have deduced that the section headings here dictate that Marcelo, my stepfather, must have killed Michael, whose corpse I’ve just discovered in the Drying Room. It makes sense; I’ve set the expectation that there will be a death in each section and, trust me, there has been.

I’ve always believed that there are more clues in a mystery novel than just what’s on the page. A book is a physical object, after all, which can betray a few secrets the author does not intend: the placement of section breaks; blank pages; chapter headings. Even a cover blurb suggesting there’s a big twist can, in revealing a twist is present, ruin an otherwise well-executed one. In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word – hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read. This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car. A good author must not only wrong-foot the reader within the narrative, they must do it within the form of the novel itself. There are clues baked into the very object.

I have to be aware that you’re aware I’m writing this all down, is what I’m trying to say.

Before you get a big head over it, you haven’t caught me out. While there is something to be learned from this book’s internal logic, it is not that. I may as well come out with it, spoiler and all. Marcelo did not kill Michael. He is not the Black Tongue.

I have not been dishonest, and neither is this a plot hole, although I promised there’d be one. As it happens, that was in the previous section too. If you recall, I said there’d be a hole in the plot you could drive a truck through. I meant it literally.

CHAPTER 28

Flecks of ash swirled in the air. My nose twitched as small particles danced around its tip. The Drying Room was not as gloomy as on my last visit: the orange heat lamp was now complemented by a shaft of natural moonlight pouring in through the back window, which was newly broken, the snowdrift behind it tunnelled through in a cylinder. Michael was lying slumped underneath it, a dark shadow even in the relative brightness, as he was coated head to toe in a thin layer of black grime. His wrists were bound to the upright strut of the coat rack nearest him.

I must have been the one who screamed, because Erin couldn’t have (she had her hand over her mouth) and Juliette was summoned by the noise, appearing with a worried expression, but I don’t remember it. I remember skidding to my knees in front of Michael, ripping the oven mitt off (with quite a bit of skin, but I didn’t feel it) and grappling with the zip-ties. It was futile with my mangled fingers. Behind me, I recall Erin yelling at Juliette to get scissors or a knife and, if she was in the bar, to bring Sofia back with her.

I gave up on the zip-ties and instead started pulling my good palm across Michael’s face, smearing the caked-on ash like I was opening a cocoon. The skin underneath was cold. His hair was grey with charcoal dust. I needed to get him flat to try to breathe into him, but Juliette still wasn’t back to cut the zip-ties. I stood and kicked at the frame, splintering the wooden post into a jagged spear, and sending Michael collapsing to the side. I rolled him over, straddled him and pounded his chest, one-armed. I swiped more black gunk from his mouth and tried to breathe into him. There was nothing but foul breath and slimy, tarred lips. I sat up. Raised my fist again. Pain shot up my busted arm with every movement. I pressed my mouth over his again, but came away gagging, vomiting on the floor beside his head. It’s not pretty, but it is true. I already knew he’d been dead a long time. Still, I wiped my mouth and tried again. And again. Then there was a hand on my shoulder, pulling me away.

On a last look, there were small dots of clear skin against the grime on his cheeks. I realised that was where my tears had fallen.

The family gathered in the bar, dotted around the room in separate clusters. Marcelo sat with Audrey, clasping her hand tightly. Lucy was with them, tucked under Audrey’s wing. Like all in-laws, they’d never gotten along perfectly, but they had mutual grief to share. Both of them had loved Michael. Both of them had never doubted him. Now, both of them felt robbed. Katherine was pacing. Andy was lying on his back on the floor.

I was only there because no one would let me back in the Drying Room. I’ve been told I was, apparently, hysterical. Erin was with me, keeping watch, but also marooned. She’d lost Michael too, but wouldn’t be welcome to share in Lucy and Audrey’s mourning. With Michael dead, she must have been wondering what her place in the family was. She was keeping a stiff upper lip, both in fortitude and in a literal sense, because she hadn’t escaped a few stubborn, snotty tears, which had hardened on her top lip.

Juliette was busying herself behind the bar, I assumed for a distraction. Just prior, she’d draped a blanket over my shoulders and brought me a hot chocolate, both of which had proved surprisingly effective at calming me down. So had her hand, warm and gently lingering on my uninjured one as she handed me the cup. Someone had given me back my oven mitt. I’d seen Katherine walk over and ask Juliette for a warm drink too, to which Juliette had replied, ‘What’s your room number?’ and Katherine had stalked off, offended.

The only people absent were Sofia and Crawford, for whom we were waiting to come back with a post-mortem report. I’d like to lie here and claim that I was in the Drying Room myself, poking around and making genius deductions, but I was in deep shock. I didn’t have the faculty to analyse a crime scene.

If I’d known the answer to the mystery yet, I would have deemed this a suitable place for a grand summation, being that all of us were gathered together. But the room had a very different feel to the parlour or library where the detective usually struts, one hand in their pocket, while they reveal their cleverness. The first difference was that I was still wearing a bathrobe, which meant that I would also risk revealing more than just my cleverness. But the attitude in the room was also wrong. This was not a room of suspects, it was a room of survivors.

Everything had changed. Before, we had the body of an unknown man, brutally murdered but almost comically so. Such was the strangeness of his death in fire and unmelted snow that we could all approach it with, as morbid as it sounds, an intellectual curiosity – or, for those who disagreed with Sofia’s serial killer theory, ignore it completely. Green Boots was a puzzle to be solved: an inconvenience, a curiosity. While I’d been strutting about pretending to be a literary detective, had I even bothered to care? But this time, the victim had a name. Regretfully, the whole damn thing. Michael Ryan Cunningham.

And me? I’d been trying to figure out what happened to Green Boots so I could free my brother from his improvised prison, feeling partly responsible for the suspicion that he was held in and guilty that I had caused him to be locked in there. Now, it seemed, I’d have to live with having sent him to his tomb. Now all I could think of was Michael, chained to the coat rack, watching the ash fill the air. Of Green Boots, clawing at his neck, splintering his fingernails. I started shaking – the oxycodone was wearing off – so I took a rattling sip of my hot chocolate.

Outside there were queues of people, luggage and children in their arms. The lights I’d seen while heading down the stairs were the headlights of two buses with huge snow tyres, parked in the turnaround at the bottom of the steps. The freezing wind was coming from the open foyer doors as people filed out. Tired of fielding complaints, Juliette had jumped on the break in the storm and hired the coaches up from Jindabyne to take guests who wanted to go back down the mountain. It was a limited time offer; the weather was only having a smoko and would return invigorated. My instinct told me that the weather alone wouldn’t have been reason enough for Juliette to organise such an exodus, not to mention the refunds she’d have to give. She’d seemed hesitant about alarming the guests when we’d talked in her office, but somewhere between my accident and the discovery of Michael’s body, she’d made up her mind and called for the coaches. It had turned out to be a good decision.

At first, take-up of seats had been half-hearted. There was grim weather sure, but there was a fireplace, board games and a bar to compensate, which, truth be told, was what most people had had in mind anyway. Of course, there’d been a corpse to factor in. But no one knew who he was, and, remember, us Cunninghams were really the only ones sticking our noses in it. The official story was still that Green Boots had died of exposure. A tragedy, sure, but not one worth cutting a holiday short for. Explaining to the kids on the eight-hour drive back to Sydney why they couldn’t go tobogganing: now, that would be the real tragedy. But, in light of a second death, this time more obviously violent, the whispered gossip of ‘Did you hear?’ had rapidly evolved into the panicked rumours of ‘Haven’t you heard?’ Those with four-wheel drives had dug them out and made a run for it. The rest were climbing over each other for a seat on the buses, many having to leave their cars for a few days until the storm died down.

Crawford led Sofia into the room. She was wringing her hands; they looked like she’d rubbed them in ink, or at least that’s what I told myself. Everyone leaned forward. Even Andy sat up and paid attention, crossing his legs like a child.

‘Michael’s dead,’ Sofia said, though she barely needed to. Her diagnosis was etched across her face. She’d looked pale when she’d vomited after carrying Green Boots, fragile as she’d drunk her rattling tea that morning, but now she looked positively gaunt. Maybe it was due to the cold and the stress and the grief, but it was clear to me that her constitution would only hold up to one more corpse. On the plus side, such was the truth in her pained expression that even Katherine didn’t bother to object to her medical opinion. ‘He was murdered, I have no doubt. Tied up and suffocated.’

‘Jesus.’ That was Marcelo. Crawford had done his best to hold everyone out of the room once I’d found the body, only yielding to Sofia. And while the whisper that Michael had been killed had worked its way among the group, so no one was shocked by Sofia’s first declaration, only Erin and I already knew how he’d died. I could see the terror in Marcelo’s face, mingling with the grief. He was going over our last conversation, just like I was.

I’m certain someone’s cleaning something up.

‘For fuck’s sake, Sofia,’ Erin snapped, skipping the denial stage of grief outright and heading straight for anger. ‘You were right, okay? Enough with the theatrics.’

Sofia scanned the room, perhaps trying to figure out how provocative what she was about to say would be, and if it wasn’t too late to snag a seat on the second bus. She sighed, knowing she couldn’t lie. It wasn’t fair that she’d been tasked with explaining these horrors, that she wasn’t allowed to collapse like the rest of us, but she drew a deep breath and channelled as much bedside manner as she could. Any doctor will tell you their special talent is delivering bad news. ‘Yes, Erin. I think Michael was killed the same way as the man this morning.’

‘We can’t be sure of that,’ Lucy was quick to object. I was reminded that she hadn’t seen Green Boots’ body at all, so had no reason to doubt the official story. ‘This is ridiculous! You’re just scaring people. That first guy probably died from exposure.’

‘You need to be realistic, Lucy. He was murdered too.’ Sofia challenged the room to object. I could see Lucy was itching to contribute again, but was still figuring out what to say. ‘Someone tied a bag around Green Boots’ head and filled it with ash. He would have died with or without the showmanship, being gagged in plastic and all, but it’s sort of the killer’s calling card. They did the same thing to Michael, although this time the ash was the fatal ingredient. We found’—she gestured to Crawford as if asking him to validate her finding; he just nodded—‘sticky residue of tape over the broken window. The snow behind it has a narrow tunnel in it. Remember, the Drying Room is pretty airtight and the door is rubber sealed, which would have helped with sound as well. Not to mention we were all down at the lake anyway. If the killer pushed their circulation system through the snow tunnel and then sealed it into the window with plastic and tape, maybe some packed snow, the room is still airtight. The ash would have been easy to mix up into the air.’

Katherine tried to ask a question, but choked on tears. She wiped her eyes with her wrists and kept on pacing.

‘I’m sorry.’ Andy put his hand up. He was the least upset but the most concerned; his eyes kept flicking to the window, to the queues filing into the buses. Even if it was only in the interest of self-preservation, I was glad someone was asking questions, because I was in no state to. ‘Circulation system?’

‘To use ash in this way, you have to move the air around. The snow is gouged into a cylinder, so I’d say someone stuck a leaf-blower through the snow.’

I dimly recalled thinking the jagged edge of the wind had sounded like a chainsaw as Sofia and I stumbled up to the maintenance shed. I say dimly because it was a faint memory, but also because I think myself rather stupid: I should have registered the sound as unnatural at the time. But wind in your ears sounds like all kinds of things – chainsaws, trains, screams – so I didn’t deliberately obfuscate the information, which would breach Rule 8. If the sound I heard was, in fact, the burr of a leaf-blower, that meant that Michael had been murdered while I was out playing detective. It also meant, if you’re keeping score, that Sofia, who was with me at the time, now had an alibi for both murders.

‘How do you know it was a leaf-blower?’ Lucy had found her objection. I thought it strange she was trying to poke holes in Michael’s death, but I supposed her adamant refusal of the facts was a sign that she was struggling to accept it on the whole.

‘Well,’ Sofia admitted, ‘that part I surmised from the news reports on the Black Tongue. Like I said though, there’s a cylindrical tunnel in the snow.’

‘No. I don’t believe you. That bloody fool got himself killed by the weather and then you’—Lucy pointed at Crawford—‘locked up my Michael and someone . . .’ Her voice started hitching, but she pushed it out. ‘Someone used all this panic that you’re making . . . thought it was an opportunity to . . .’ She gathered herself. ‘It wouldn’t be that hard to find these fire killings or whatever in the news – to, you know, copy them. I looked them up myself.’ She was oscillating between explanations. Her head swivelled around the room. It was obvious she was looking for someone else to blame. She proceeded to snipe at everyone individually, growing more angry and frantic with each accusation. Crawford: ‘You made him a sitting duck.’ Sofia: ‘You started all this panic.’ Katherine: ‘You brought us all here.’

Then she reached Erin. It would be hyperbolic to say a shadow crossed her face, but some kind of feral change settled in her eyes all the same. Something had dawned on her. Something else to cling to. ‘Like I said, someone with the right motive might have taken the opportunity given to them. He was just clinging to you while he was in prison. You were a pastime. A plaything. Because he knew that I’d be waiting for him on the outside. Once he was out, he didn’t need you anymore. I knew he’d snap out of it once he saw me. If he didn’t love me, then why did he fix . . .’ A cruel smile blossomed. ‘He probably told you that? Right? As soon as you got here – that he realised he’d made a mistake? I wonder how you took that?’

Then she buried her glare into me instead. ‘And you.’ The word festered in her mouth. My heart hammered as, for a second, I thought she was about to reveal she knew about the money. That would give me serious motive. Lucy sneered instead. ‘Maybe you did it together. Why was Ernest so desperate to get downstairs and see Michael, as soon as he woke up, huh?’ she appealed to the room. ‘Because no one had discovered him yet, and he wanted to be first. That’s all I’m saying.’

People have a habit of saying ‘That’s all I’m saying’ when they’re saying an awful lot, I’ve noticed. I could hear Erin grinding her jaw beside me, her leg bouncing up and down underneath the table.

I decided to stick up for myself. ‘Why would I hurt Michael?’

‘He was fucking your wife, for one thing.’

‘Lucy!’ Audrey hissed, pulling away from her. I don’t know who was more shocked, Lucy or me, that my mother was sticking up for me. ‘You can blame who you want, but only one person here insisted that Michael be put in the only room with a lock on the outside.’

The room was silent. Audrey was right. And though she’d been quiet up until now, she was seething with rage. Just like everyone else, she’d found someone to blame. She hadn’t been defending me, she’d just wanted to drive the knife into Lucy. Lucy had been the one to suggest the Drying Room. The only room he couldn’t escape. I might have felt that he was in that room because of me, but Lucy had literally put him there. That was why she was slinging accusations around the room: she felt guilty too.

Sofia whispered something to Crawford, who unlocked and passed her his phone. She walked over and crouched in front of Lucy to show her the screen.

‘I don’t think you’ve seen this yet,’ Sofia said, her voice soft and calm. ‘I know what I’m saying sounds crazy. But if you’d seen . . .’ She let the image on the phone finish the explanation for her. ‘There is a killer here. This man did not die of exposure.’

The blood drained from Lucy’s face. The hatred had scuttled back to her edges, like a closet full of roaches exposed to the light. When she looked up from the screen, she seemed almost confused, like she didn’t remember she was in a room full of us in the first place. An anger hangover, Erin and I used to call them: when you argue over nothing and realise in the cold light of morning that you just look stupid. That’s how Lucy looked. Confused and humiliated.

‘This is the man you found outside?’ Lucy whispered. She could now see what we’d all seen in his blackened face: that Green Boots had died a strange, violent death. And it only further reinforced that Lucy, in suggesting the inescapable Drying Room, had pretty much served Michael up on a platter.

Sofia nodded. I knew she was trying to console Lucy, not persecute her, by showing her the facts. But it wasn’t working. All Lucy could see was blame.

‘I can’t be here anymore.’ Lucy stood. ‘I’m sorry, Ernest, Erin, for saying that stuff – everyone. I’m so sorry.’ She walked out.

No one really tried to stop her leaving. Crawford gave a half-hearted chase out into the foyer, calling to her to come back, but she shrugged him off with something acidic that I only half heard but sounded like ‘You’re the boss’, which clearly implied he wasn’t. The rest of us peered around the doorframe to make sure she headed away from the Drying Room, where Michael still lay, just in case. She trudged up the stairs, possibly to the library. Possibly to the roof to try to get reception. Not a cigarette. You and I already know she’s smoked her last.

CHAPTER 29

‘Sofia.’ Audrey said gently once Lucy had gone. These were the calmest words she’d spoken all weekend, so we hung on them. ‘My son is dead, and I would like to know why. We’re all upset, and we’ve all got someone we’d like to blame’—I’m not sure if her gaze flickered to me, or if I imagined it—‘but the more information we have the better. Because I would like to find whoever did this. And if they’re still here, I would like to hurt them.’ She took a breath, found control. I’d mistaken her tone for calm, but it was, instead, ice. ‘So, would you mind explaining, for some of us, how a leaf-blower and a bag of coal can kill someone?’

‘Ash, actually, not coal. It’s the flaky stuff,’ Sofia said, and she couldn’t hide a tiny lilt of excitement in her voice, pleased to finally be asked to espouse her theories. ‘Because there’s so many fine particles, it forms a kind of cement in your lungs when you inhale it. You basically suffocate from the inside.’

My mother thought for a moment, then twirled a hand, the way someone might waft theirs over a glass of wine, mimicking the imaginary cycle of stirring the ash. ‘So, you’d have to breathe in quite a bit of this, right? For it to hurt you?’

‘Yes,’ Sofia replied. ‘A fair bit. Less in a room without fresh air.’

‘She’s asking how long it would take,’ I added, also interested. It was almost imperceptible, but I noticed a curt nod of acknowledgement from Audrey.

‘Oh. Hours.’

‘Hours?’ Audrey asked aghast, her façade slipping.

‘Did it hurt?’ Katherine sniffled.

Sofia didn’t answer, which effectively answered the question. It would have been agonising.

‘Hours?’ Audrey said again, and I realised this time she was addressing Crawford. And she wasn’t asking for clarification, she was asking for an explanation. ‘The doctor here has kindly explained the science. So now you can tell me, copper, how my son took hours to die in a room that you were guarding.’

Crawford cleared his throat. ‘Ma’am, with respect’—this was a bad start; my mother never took well to either formalities or excuses—‘the rubber seal on the door makes the room pretty soundproof.’

I made to suggest the storm had been very loud, but I’d learned my lesson from the last time I’d supported a police officer, and zipped it.

‘But, honestly, I didn’t hear anything because . . .’ Crawford trailed off.

‘Out with it.’

‘I wasn’t there.’

The room suddenly felt very quiet but intensely charged, teetering on the edge of exploding. It could have gone two ways: a lengthy silence or Audrey getting up and ripping Crawford’s head clean off. In the end, it was neither, but Audrey was the first to speak. She couldn’t summon more than a deep whisper.

‘You put my boy in a locked room and then left him there all by himself?’

Marcelo patted her between the shoulder blades, firm but tender.

‘Ma—’ Crawford made to call her ‘ma’am’ again, this time with an American lilt (marm), but caught himself. He looked flustered. He started again, settled on calling her Mrs Cunningham, hyphen absent, and said, ‘The room wasn’t even locked.’

Those of us whose attention had been dwindling, namely Andy, or were about to pass out, namely me and Sofia, who was swaying on the spot with exhaustion, snapped their eyes back to Crawford.

‘Juliette had checked the forecast and mentioned to me that she was thinking of taking some people down the mountain when there was a gap in the weather, before it got worse. So we made the decision that, seeing as he’d cooperated so far, we would move Michael into one of the guestrooms. When we went to tell him this – this was after you spoke to him, Ernest, but before I followed you to the shed – he was asleep. Curled up on the bench, with his back to the door. He had pillows and things – he looked comfortable, so we didn’t want to wake him. Juliette was there. She can back me up, right?’

‘He’s right. I was there.’

‘Then I had to chase these two’—he nodded at Erin and me, neglecting to include Sofia—‘from the maintenance shed, and that turned into Titanic for a bit for this fella, and then by the time we’d gotten him back here, the buses had arrived, and I was roped into helping usher people on them. And people’s cars needed digging out. It was non-stop. But, I swear, I didn’t want Michael locked in the room when I wasn’t there, in case he woke up and couldn’t get out. In case there was a . . .’ He stopped short of the word ‘fire’, perhaps figuring out the irony. ‘I opened the lock before I left. I’m certain of it.’

I was desperately trying to remember if I’d slid the bolt back myself before I opened the door, and I didn’t think I had. Crawford was right: the door had been unlocked.

‘Was the window broken when you last saw him?’ I asked.

Crawford appealed to Juliette, who gave a shrug. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you sure he was asleep?’

‘I mean, I didn’t ask him.’

‘Was he breathing?’ This time I asked Juliette.

‘I didn’t . . . Look, I didn’t check. Nothing seemed suspicious.’

‘What are you thinking, Ern?’ Sofia asked.

‘Green Boots had a serrated cut in his neck from the plastic zip-ties,’ I said. ‘If Michael had struggled against them, they’d have chewed up his wrists. I didn’t see any damage to his hands when I found him. Did you, Sofia?’

She thought a second. ‘No. But there wasn’t any blood or bruising on him either, which I’d expect if he’d put up a fight. Then again, there was a lot of ash, so maybe I didn’t see it.’ I could tell she didn’t believe that. ‘A clean hit, maybe, but it meant that whoever hit him he trusted enough to turn his back on.’

I thought aloud. ‘So the window maybe was, maybe wasn’t broken. It was pretty obvious when I found him; there was glass on the floor, extra light, and surely you’d have noticed the wind, seeing as the storm was still heavy, so let’s assume—’ Erin nudged me hard in the ribs with an elbow, but I ignored her. Everyone was watching me piece together the timeline. Analytical as it was, the energy of discovery was helping me work my way out of my shock. I’m sure everyone else would have preferred to scurry back to their rooms and have their own private breakdowns, but we all knew this was important. It could lead us to a killer. ‘Let’s assume the window wasn’t broken yet when you saw him. Though he may or may not have been sleeping.’ Erin nudged me again. ‘What?’ I hissed at her.

‘This is all very useful, but it’s only reinforcing that you were the last one in the room with him awake,’ Erin whispered. Everyone heard it.

I turned back to the room. Oh. That was why I had their attention.

‘He was alive when I left him,’ I said. But, with everyone’s stern faces, I felt like I was addressing a jury. I knew I shouldn’t do it – if you watch any interrogation, only the guilty repeat themselves unbidden – but I couldn’t help myself. It came out as begging. ‘He was alive when I left him.’

None of us got on a bus. There was a tacit understanding in the room that whoever wanted to get down the mountain the fastest was probably the fleeing killer, so we all silently bluffed each other into staying. By this point, most of us thought the killer was probably one of us. Some of us, me and Sofia included, wanted to stay and find out who it was. The rest alternated between scared and defiant. Audrey wouldn’t leave without Michael’s body, which she couldn’t very well load into the belly of a coach. Katherine stayed because she was worried about Lucy. Andy stayed because Katherine stayed. Marcelo probably stayed because he’d finally been promised a room in the guesthouse. Crawford never said we could or couldn’t go, but knew he couldn’t leave us to our own devices or else he might have to explain a massacre when his superiors finally showed up. Juliette joked that she couldn’t leave us in case we burned the place down. We would anyway, but she didn’t know that at the time.

We stayed in the bar, and our grief, anger, blame and accusations slowly faded to trading memories quietly through thick throats. Andy mentioned to me Michael’s best man speech at my wedding. He’d thought it would be clever to mimic one of my books and had prepared the ten rules to the perfect best man’s speech, but then he piled on a bit too much liquid courage and forgot seven of them. It seemed a foolish thing to bring up in present company, but the awkwardness quickly faded into hiccupped, snotty laughter. I’m not glib enough to shrug off Michael’s actions as simple mistakes, but there was more to him than just the last three years.

Once we all realised we weren’t leaving, someone suggested we should get some sleep and there was an exhausted murmur of acceptance. Crawford locked the Drying Room, not wanting to move Michael’s body, and warned us all away from it. Juliette handed out new room keys for the now emptied guesthouse rooms. I declined, preferring my chalet. If someone wanted to murder me, at least I’d see them coming up the loft’s ladder. Besides, I needed to go back to my room anyway: I hadn’t checked the bag of money since that morning. I wanted to be close to it. Now that I’d learned Marcelo was unaware of the cash, I was grateful no one except Sofia and Erin knew about it, because it gave me motive. Coupled with the fact that I was the last person to talk to Michael, the group, who had mostly dismissed me with a wary suspicion, would have torn me apart if they’d known I had his quarter of a million dollars. Family money.

People trotted out, yawning. As Katherine passed me, I tapped her on the elbow, asking if I could have the bottle of painkillers for the night.

‘Sorry, Ern, they’re too strong. I’m hanging on to them.’ She gave me a slight grimace of an apology, and then folded a single pill into my oven mitt.

I’d thought it strange when she’d first given me the pills upstairs, but this protectiveness of them was doubly so. There was no doubt she suffered pain down her leg, which must be excruciating at times and would have traditionally been managed with some kind of medication. But she’d chosen natural therapies since the accident. In her words, ‘alternative medicine’. In doctor’s parlance, ‘hogwash’. But it didn’t matter to Katherine; she was reformed and sober and nothing would break that. Not a Panadol for a headache, not a glass of wine for a bad day at work. When she gave birth to Amy, she’d even declined any painkillers. She was on a wagon and she wasn’t getting off for anything.

As I got older, I’d begun to understand how important it was to her. She’d been drunk at the time of the accident that had crippled her leg, so she held anything that impaired her, even for her own good, in contempt. Her faculties were more important to her than her pain: she never wanted to lose her mind again. That was why I’d recommended Sofia ask her about AA if she needed it, because Katherine was staunch, immovable. She was – and I would never say this to her out loud – inspiring.

On top of all that, I’d always felt the pain in her leg, her limp, was somewhat of a penance. A reminder of her passenger that night, her best friend. One she didn’t want dulled. One she felt she deserved. If you’re wondering if the passenger survived, check the chapter numbers.

Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe the injury had gotten worse with age, and Katherine had finally succumbed to her doctor’s advice. Maybe it was excruciating in the cold weather, though Katherine had picked the resort herself; it seemed an odd choice if she was so afflicted. Maybe she had caved to pressure, probably from Andy (though Juliette clearing her throat when I awoke, forcing another pill out of her, sprung to mind) that the pills were essential for my injury, but she could still only bring herself to ration them out in the most conservative doses. If she’d had her way, she probably would have given me some breathing exercises instead. Lucy could have even sold her some essential oils, which I think are next on the list of independent businesses to pursue after Tupperware and cosmetics.

So I decided to be grateful for the slim ration I did get, swallowing the pill with a shot of used-to-be-hot chocolate and placing my mug on the bar on the way out. I was surprised to find Erin waiting for me in the foyer. The front door had been left open, and pebbles of ice skittered across the tiles.

‘I don’t know how to ask you this . . .’ she started, but more words disappeared before she could find them. She looked at her shoes. Wind tussled her hair. Then she looked back at me. Those atoms in the air changed. ‘I don’t want to be alone tonight.’