The Likeness

5

The drive down to Glenskehy took almost an hour, even with no traffic and Frank driving, and it should have been excruciating. Sam slumped miserably in the back seat, next to the gadgetry; Frank helped the atmosphere by turning up 98FM nice and loud and bopping along, whistling and nodding his head and beating time on the steering wheel. I barely even noticed either of them. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and crisp, I was out of my flat for the first time in a full week, and I had the window rolled all the way down and wind streaking through my hair. That hard black stone of fear had dissolved the second Frank started the car, turned into something sweet and lemon-colored and wildly intoxicating.

“Right,” Frank said, when we hit Glenskehy, “let’s see how well you’ve learned your geography. Give me directions.”

“Straight on through the village, fourth lane to your right, way too narrow, no wonder Daniel and Justin’s cars look like they’ve been drag racing, give me good old dirty Dublin any day,” I told him, doing his accent. “ Home, James.” I was on a giddy one. The jacket had been freaking me out all afternoon—it was that lily-of-the-valley smell, right up close, I kept whipping round to see who had come up beside me—and the fact that I was being given the heebiejeebies by a jacket, like something out of Dr. Seuss, was making me want to giggle. Even passing the turnoff to the cottage, where I had met Frank and Sam that first day, didn’t sober me up.

The lane was unpaved and potholey. Trees gone shapeless with years of ivy, hedge branches rattling along the sides of the car and flicking in at my window; and then huge wrought-iron gates, flaking with rust and hanging drunkenly off their hinges. The stone pillars were half drowned in hawthorn grown wild. “Here,” I said.

Frank nodded and turned, and we were looking down an endless, graceful sweep of avenue, between cherry trees crowded with exploded balls of flowers. “Fuck me,” I said. “Why did I have doubts about this, again? Can I sneak Sam in with me in my suitcase, and we can just live here forever?”

“Get it out of your system,” Frank said. “By the time we reach that door, you need to be blasé about all this. Anyway, the house is still shitty, so you can calm down.”

“You told me they’d redone it. I expect cashmere curtains and white roses in my dressing room, or I’m calling my agent.”

“I said they were doing it up. I didn’t say they were magic.”

Then the drive gave a little twist and opened up into a great semicircular carriage sweep, white pebbles speckled through with weeds and daisies, and I saw Whitethorn House for the first time. The photos hadn’t done it justice. You see Georgian houses all over Dublin, mostly turned into offices and undermined by the depressing fluorescents you can see through the windows, but this one was special. Every proportion was balanced so perfectly that the house looked like it had grown there, nested in with its back to the mountains and all Wicklow dropping away rich and gentle in front of it, poised between the pale arc of the carriage sweep and the blurred dark-and-green curves of the hills like a treasure held out in a cupped palm.

I heard Sam take a fast hard breath. “Home sweet home,” said Frank, turning the radio off.

They were waiting for me outside the door, ranged at the top of the steps. In my mind I still see them like that, lacquered gold by the evening sun and glowing vivid as a vision, every fold of their clothes and curve of their faces pristine and achingly clear. Rafe leaning against the railing with his hands in his jeans pockets; Abby in the middle, swayed forwards on her toes, one arm crooked to shade her eyes; Justin, his feet precisely together and his hands clasped behind his back. And behind them, Daniel, framed between the columns of the door, his head up and the light splintering off his glasses.

None of them moved as Frank pulled up and braked, pebbles scattering. They were like figures on a medieval frieze, self-contained, mysterious, spelling out a message in some lost and arcane code. Only Abby’s skirt fluttered, fitfully, in the breeze.

Frank glanced at me over his shoulder. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Good girl,” he said. “Good luck. And we’re go.” He got out of the car and went round to the boot to get my case.

“Mind yourself,” Sam said. He didn’t look at me. “I love you.”

“I’ll be home soon,” I said. There was no way even to touch his arm, under all those unblinking eyes. “I’ll try to ring you tomorrow.”

He nodded. Frank slammed the boot—the sound was wild, enormous, bouncing off the house front and setting crows scattering from the trees—and opened the car door for me.

I got out, putting my hand to my side for a second as I straightened up. “Thanks, Detective,” I said to Frank. “Thanks for everything.”

We shook hands. “My pleasure,” Frank said. “And don’t worry, Miss Madison: we’ll get this guy.”

He pulled out the handle of the case with a neat snap and passed it to me, and I dragged it across the carriage sweep towards the steps and the others.

Still none of them moved. As I got closer I realized, with a shift of focus like a shock. Those straight backs, the lifted heads: there was some tension stretched between the four of them, so tight it hummed high in the silence. The wheels of my case, grating across the pebbles, sounded loud as machine-gun fire.

“Hi,” I said at the bottom of the steps, looking up at them.

For a second I thought they weren’t going to answer, they had made me already, and I wondered wildly what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then Daniel took a step forwards, and the picture wavered and broke. A smile started across Justin’s face, Rafe straightened up and raised one arm in a wave, and Abby came running down the steps and hugged me hard.

“Hey, you,” she said, laughing, “welcome home.” Her hair smelled like camomile. I dropped the case and hugged her back; it was a strange feeling, as if I were touching someone out of an old painting, amazed to find her shoulder blades warm and solid as my own. Daniel nodded gravely at me over her head and ruffled my hair, Rafe grabbed my case and started bumping it up the steps to the door, Justin patted my back over and over and I was laughing too, and I didn’t even hear Frank start the car and drive away.

This is the first thing I thought when I stepped into Whitethorn House: I’ve been here before. It zinged straight through me, straightened my spine like a crash of cymbals. The place bloody well should have looked familiar, all the hours I’d spent staring at photos and video, but it was more than that. It was the smell, old wood and tea leaves and a faint whiff of dried lavender; it was the way the light lay along the scarred floorboards; it was the little taps our footsteps sent flying up the stairwell, echoing softly along the upstairs corridors. It felt—and you’d think I would like this but I didn’t, it flashed danger—sign red right across my mind—it felt like coming home.

From there on, most of that evening is a merry-go-round blur, colors and images and voices whirled together into a burst almost too bright to look at. A ceiling rose and a cracked china vase, a piano stool and a bowl of oranges, running feet on stairs and a rising laugh. Abby’s fingers small and strong on my wrist, leading me out to the flagstoned patio behind the house, curlicued metal chairs, ancient wicker swing seat swaying in the light sweet breeze; great sweep of grass falling away to high stone walls half hidden in trees and ivy, blink of a bird’s shadow across the paving stones. Daniel lighting my cigarette, his hand cupped round the match and his bent head inches from mine. The full ring of their voices hit me like a shock, after the flattened-out video sound, and their eyes were so clear they burned on my skin. Sometimes, still, I wake up with one of their voices strong and close by my ear, fallen straight out of that day: Come here, Justin calls, come outside, the evening’s so lovely; or Abby says, We have to decide what to do with the herb garden, but we were waiting for you, what do you—and I’m awake, and they’re gone.

I must have talked too, somewhere in there, but I can’t remember most of what I said. All I remember is trying to keep my weight forwards on my toes like Lexie did, my voice up in her register, my eyes and my shoulders and my smoke at the right angles, trying not to look around too much and not to move too fast without wincing and not to say anything idiotic and not to whack into the furniture. And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I’d thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I’d been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it’ll slice to the bone.

It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. Abby and I rocked the swing seat lazily; the guys moved in and out through the small-paned French windows between the patio and the kitchen, making dinner—smell of roasting potatoes, sizzle of meat, suddenly I was starving—and calling to us. Rafe came outside to lean on the back of the seat between us and take a drag of Abby’s cigarette. Rose-gold sky deepening and great puffs of cloud streaming like the smoke of some faraway wildfire, cool air rich with grass and earth and growing things. “Dinner!” Justin yelled, against a clatter of plates.

That long, laden table, immaculate in its heavy red damask cloth, its snow-white napkins; the candlesticks twined with strands of ivy, flames glittering miniature in the curves of the glasses, catching in the silver, beckoning in the dimming windows like will-o’-the-wisps. And the four of them, pulling up high-backed chairs, smooth-skinned and shadow-eyed in the confusing golden light: Daniel at the head of the table and Abby at the foot, Rafe beside me and Justin opposite. In the flesh, that ceremonial feel I had caught off the videos and Frank’s notes was powerful as incense. It was like sitting down to a banquet, a war council, a game of Russian roulette high in some lonely tower.

They were so beautiful. Rafe was the only one who could have been called good-looking; but still, when I remember them, that beauty is all I can think of.

Justin loaded up plates with Steak Diane and passed them around—“Specially for you,” he told me, with a faint smile; Rafe scooped roast potatoes onto them as they passed him. Daniel poured red wine into mismatched wineglasses.

This evening was taking every brain cell I had; the last thing I needed was to get drunk. “I’m not supposed to have booze,” I said. “The antibiotics.”

It was the first time any of us had brought up the stabbing, even indirectly. For a fraction of a second—or maybe it was just my imagination—the room seemed to stop motionless, the bottle suspended in midtilt, hands arrested halfway through gestures. Then Daniel went back to pouring, with a deft twist of the wrist that left less than an inch in the glass. “There,” he said, unruffled. “A sip won’t do you any harm. Just for a toast.”

He passed me my glass and filled his own. “To homecomings,” he said.

In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the back of my mind. Persephone’s irrevocable pomegranate seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on the wind. And then, sharper: If it was them, after all, and it’s poisoned; Jesus, what a way to go. And I realized, with a thrill like an electric shock, that they would be well able for it. That poised quartet waiting for me at the door, with their straight backs and their cool, watchful eyes: they were more than capable of playing the game all evening, waiting with immaculate control and without a single slip for their chosen moment.

But they were all smiling at me, glasses raised, and I didn’t have a choice. “Homecomings,” I said, and leaned over the table to clink their glasses among the ivy and the candle flames: Justin, Rafe, Abby, Daniel. I took a sip of the wine—it was warm and rich and smooth, honey and summer berries, and I felt it right down to the tips of my fingers—and then I picked up my knife and fork and sliced into my steak.

Maybe it was just that I needed food—the steak was delicious and my appetite had resurfaced like it was trying to make up for lost time, but unfortunately no one had mentioned anything about Lexie eating like a horse, so I wasn’t going to be asking for seconds—but that was when they came into focus for me, that dinner; that’s when the memories start to fall into sequence, like glass beads caught on a string, and the evening changes from a bright blur into something real and manageable. “Abby got a poppet,” Rafe said, dumping potatoes on his plate. “We were going to burn her as a witch, but we decided to wait till you got back, so we could put it to a democratic vote.”

“Burn Abby, or the poppet?” I asked.

“Both.”

“It is not a poppet,” Abby said, flicking Rafe in the arm. “It’s a late—Victorian doll, and Lexie will appreciate it, because she’s not a Philistine.”

“I’d appreciate it from a distance, if I were you,” Justin told me. “I think it’s possessed. Its eyes keep following me.”

“So lie her down. Her eyes close.”

“I’m not touching it. What if it bites me? I’ll have to wander the outer darkness for all eternity, searching for my soul—”

“God, I’ve missed you,” Abby told me. “I’ve been stuck with no one to talk to except this bunch of wusses. It’s just an itsy-bitsy dolly, Justin.”

“Poppet,” Rafe said, through potatoes. “Seriously. It’s made from a sacrificed goat.”

“Mouth full, you,” Abby told him. To me: “It’s kidskin. With a bisque head. I found her in a hatbox in the room opposite me. Her clothes are in bits, and I finished the footstool, so I figured I might as well make her a new wardrobe. There are all these old scraps of material—”

“And then there’s its hair,” Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. “Don’t forget the hair. It’s horrible.”

“It’s wearing a dead person’s hair,” Rafe informed me. “If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it.”

“See what I mean?” Abby said, to me. “Wusses. It’s got real hair. Why he thinks it’s from a dead person—”

“Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction.”

“And what graveyard? There’s no graveyard.”

“There is somewhere. Somewhere out there, every time you touch that doll, someone twitches in her grave.”

“Until you get rid of the Head,” Abby said with dignity, “you don’t get to slag my doll for being creepy.”

“That’s not the same thing at all. The Head is a valuable scientific tool.”

“I like the Head,” said Daniel, glancing up, surprised. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It looks like something Aleister Crowley would carry around, is what’s wrong with it. Back me up here, Lex.”

Frank and Sam hadn’t told me, maybe they’d never seen, the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn’t been able to catch the power of it, any more than they’d caught the house. It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with his hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless.

My main feeling was that I was fucked. These four had harmonies close as the most polished a cappella group on the planet, and I had to pick up my line and join in the jam session without missing a single beat. I had a little leeway for weakness and medication and general trauma—right now they were just happy I was home and talking, what I actually said was beside the point—but that would only carry me so far, and nobody had told me anything about a Head. No matter how upbeat Frank had been, I was pretty positive that the incident room had a sweepstakes going—behind Sam’s back; not necessarily behind Frank’s—on how long it would be before I went down in a spectacular fireball, and that most of the spread was clustered under three days. I didn’t blame them. I should have got in on the action: a tenner on twenty-four hours.

“I want to hear the news,” I said. “What’s been happening? Was anyone asking after me? Do I have get-well cards?”

“You got hideous flowers,” Rafe said, “from the English department. Those huge mutant daisy things, dyed lurid colors. They wilted, thank God.”

“Four-Boobs Brenda tried to comfort Rafe,” Abby said, with a one-sided grin. “In his time of need.”

“Oh God,” Rafe said in horror, dropping his knife and fork and putting his hands over his face. Justin started to snicker. “She did. She and her bosom-age cornered me in the photocopy room and asked me how I was feeling.”

That had to be Brenda Grealey. I couldn’t see her being Rafe’s type. I laughed too—they were working hard to keep the mood up, and Brenda was starting to sound like a geebag anyway. “I think he quite enjoyed it, deep down,” Justin said demurely. “He came out reeking of cheap perfume.”

“I almost asphyxiated. She pinned me up against the photocopier—”

“Was there wucka-wucka music playing in the background?” I asked. It was feeble but I was doing my best, and I caught Abby’s quick sideways smile, the flick of relief across Justin’s face. “What on earth have you been watching in that hospital?” Daniel wanted to know.

“—and she breathed all over me,” Rafe said. “Moistly. It was like being molested by a walrus soaked in air freshener.”

“The inside of your head is a horrible place,” Justin told him.

“She wanted to buy me a drink so we could talk. She said I needed to open up. What does that even mean?”

“Sounds like she’s the one who wanted to open up,” Abby said. “So to speak.” Rafe made a fake gagging noise.

“You’re disgusting too,” Justin said.

“Thank God for me,” I said. Talking still felt like poking black ice with a stick. “I’m the civilized one.”

“Well,” Justin said, giving me a small, tucked-in smile. “Hardly. But we love you anyway. Have more steak; you’re eating like a wee bird. Don’t you like it?”

Hallelujah: apparently Lexie and I shared the same metabolism, as well as everything else. “It’s gorgeous, silly,” I said. “I’m still getting my appetite back.”

“Yes, well.” Justin leaned across the table to spoon steak onto my plate. “You need to build up your strength.”

“Justin,” I said, “you’ve always been my favorite.”

He flushed right up to his hairline, and before he could hide behind his glass I saw something painful—what, I couldn’t tell—flick across his face. “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “We missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said, and gave him a wicked grin. “Mostly because of hospital food.”

“Typical,” said Rafe.

For a moment I was sure Justin was going to say something else, but then Daniel reached over to refill his glass and Justin blinked, the flush subsiding, and picked up his knife and fork again. There was one of those content, absorbed silences that go with good food. Something rippled round the table: a loosening, a settling, a long sigh too low to hear. Un ange passe, my French grandfather would have said: an angel is passing. Somewhere upstairs I heard the faint, dreamy note of a clock striking.

Daniel cut his eyes sideways at Abby, so subtly I barely caught it. He was the one who had done the least talking, all evening. He was quiet on the phone videos, too, but this seemed to have a different flavor to it, a concentrated intensity, and I wasn’t sure whether this just didn’t translate well onto camera or whether it was new. “So,” Abby said. “How’re you feeling, Lex?”

They had all stopped eating. “Fine,” I said. “I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy for a few weeks.”

“Are you in any pain?” Daniel inquired.

I shrugged. “They gave me supercool painkillers, but most of the time I don’t need them. I’m not even gonna have much of a scar. They had to sew up all my insides, but I only got six stitches on the outside.”

“Let’s see them,” Rafe said.

“God,” said Justin, putting his fork down. He looked like he was seconds from leaving the table. “You’re a ghoul. I have no desire to see them, thanks very much.”

“I definitely don’t want to see them at the dinner table,” Abby said. “No offense.”

“Nobody’s seeing them anywhere,” I said, narrowing my eyes at Rafe—I was ready for this one. “I’ve been getting poked and prodded all week, and the next person who goes anywhere near my stitches gets his finger bitten off.”

Daniel was still inspecting me thoughtfully. “You tell ’em,” said Abby.

“Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?” There was a pinched, white look around Justin’s mouth and nose, as if even the thought had him in pain. “It must have hurt, at first. Was it bad?”

“She’s fine,” said Abby. “She just said so.”

“I’m only asking. The police kept saying—”

“Don’t poke at it.”

“What?” I asked. “What did the police keep saying?”

“I think,” Daniel said, calmly but finally, turning in his chair to look at Justin, “that we should leave it at that.”

Another silence, less comfortable this time. Rafe’s knife screeched on his plate; Justin winced; Abby reached for the pepper shaker, gave it a hard tap on the table and shook it briskly.

“The police asked,” Daniel said suddenly, glancing up at me over his glass, “whether you kept a diary or a date book, anything along those lines. I thought it was best for us to say no.”

Diary?

“Dead right,” I said. “I don’t want them looking through my stuff.”

“They already did,” Abby said. “Sorry. They searched your room.”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” I said, indignant. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

“We didn’t get the sense it was optional,” Rafe said dryly.

“What if I’d had love letters, or—or stud-muffin porn, or something private?”

“Presumably that’s exactly what they were looking for.”

“They were fascinating, actually,” Daniel said. “The police. Most of them seemed utterly uninterested: all routine. I would have loved to watch them do the search, but I don’t think it would have been a good idea to ask.”

“They didn’t get what they were after, anyway,” I said with satisfaction. “Where is it, Daniel?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said, mildly surprised. “Wherever you keep it, I assume,” and he went back to his steak.

The guys cleared the plates away; Abby and I sat at the table, smoking, in a silence that was starting to feel companionable. I heard someone doing something in the sitting room, hidden behind wide sliding double doors, and the smell of wood smoke seeped out to us. “Peaceful one tonight?” Abby asked, watching me over her cigarette. “Just read?”

After dinner was their free time: cards, music, reading, talking, slowly knocking the house into shape. Reading sounded like the easiest option by about a mile. “Perfect,” I said. “I’ve got loads of thesis catching-up to do.”

“Relax,” Abby said—that small one-sided smile again. “You’re only just home. You’ve got all the time in the world.” She stubbed out her smoke and threw open the sliding doors.

The sitting room was huge and, unexpectedly, wonderful. The photos had caught only the shabbiness, missed the atmosphere altogether. High ceiling, with moldings along the edges; wide floorboards, unvarnished and lumpy; horrible flowered wallpaper, peeling in patches to show the old layers underneath—rose and gold stripes, a dull cream-colored sheen like silk. The furniture was mismatched and ancient: a scuffed card table in inlaid rosewood, faded brocade armchairs, a long uncomfortable-looking sofa, bookshelves jammed with tattered leather covers and bright paperbacks. There was no overhead light, just standing lamps and a wood fire crackling in a massive wrought-iron fireplace, throwing wild shadows scudding among the cobwebs in the high corners. The room was a mess, and I fell in love with it before I was through the doorway.

The armchairs looked cozy and I was right on the edge of heading for one of them when my mind slammed on the brakes, hard. I could hear my heart. I had no idea where I was supposed to sit; my head had gone blank. The food, the easy slagging, the comfortable silence with Abby: I had relaxed.

“Back in a sec,” I said, and hid in the bathroom to let the others narrow things down by taking their places, and to let my knees stop shaking. By the time I could breathe right, my brain had come out of neutral and I knew where my seat was: a low Victorian nursing chair to one side of the fireplace. Frank had shown me photos by the handful. I had known that.

It would have been that easy: sitting down in the wrong chair. Barely four hours.

Justin glanced up, with a faint worried furrow between his eyebrows, when I went back into the sitting room, but nobody said anything. My books were spread out on a low table by my chair: thick historical references, a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre open face-down across a lined notepad, a yellowing pulp novel called She Dressed to Kill by Rip Corelli—presumably non-thesis-related, although who knew—with a cover picture of a pneumatic lady wearing a slit skirt and a gun in her garter (“She drew men like honey draws flies… and then she swatted them!”). My pen—a blue Biro, the end covered with toothmarks—was still where I had put it down midsentence, that Wednesday night.

I watched the others over my book for any signs of edginess, but they had all settled to reading with an instant, trained concentration that was almost intimidating. Abby, in an armchair with her feet up on a little embroidered footstool—her restoration project, probably—flipped pages briskly and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. Rafe sat across the fire from me in the other armchair; every now and then he put his book down and leaned forwards to poke the fire or add another chunk of wood. Justin lay on the sofa with his notepad propped on his chest, scribbling, occasionally murmuring something or huffing to himself or clicking his tongue disapprovingly. There was a frayed tapestry of a hunting scene on the wall behind him; he should have looked incongruous beneath it, with his corduroys and his little rimless glasses, but somehow he didn’t, not at all. Daniel sat at the card table, his dark head bent under the glow of a tall lamp, only moving to deliberately, unhurriedly turn a page. The heavy green velvet curtains were open and I imagined how we would look, to a watcher in the dark garden beyond; how securely wrapped in our firelight and concentration; how bright and tranquil, like something from a dream. For a sharp, dizzying second I envied Lexie Madison.

Daniel felt me watching; he lifted his head and smiled at me, across the table. It was the first time I’d seen him smile, and it had an immense, grave sweetness to it. Then he bent his head over his book again.

I went to bed early, around ten, partly as a character choice and partly because Frank had been right, I was wrecked. My brain felt like it had just done a triathlon. I shut Lexie’s bedroom door (smell of lily of the valley, a subtle little eddy swirling up my shoulder and round the neck of my T-shirt, curious and watchful) and leaned back against it. For a second I thought I wasn’t going to make it as far as the bed, I’d just slide down the door and be asleep before I hit the carpet. This was harder than I remembered, and I didn’t think it was because I was getting old or losing my touch or any of the other appealing possibilities O’Kelly would have suggested. Last time I had been the one calling the shots, deciding who I needed to hang out with, for how long, how close I needed to get. This time Lexie had called them all for me and I didn’t have a choice: I had to follow her rules to the letter, listen hard and nonstop like she was on a faint crackly earpiece and let her run me.

I had had this feeling before, on some of my least favorite investigations: Someone else is running this show. Most of them hadn’t ended well. But then it had always been the killer, a smug three steps ahead of us all the way. I had never had a case where that someone else was the victim.

One thing, though, felt easier. Last time, in UCD, every word out of my mouth had left a nasty taste behind, something tainted and wrong, like bread gone moldy. Like I said, I don’t like lying. This time, though, everything I’d said left nothing except the clean-cotton taste of true. The only possible reasons I could come up with were that I was fooling the living bejasus out of myself—rationalization is a major part of the undercover’s skill set—or that, in some tangled way that ran deeper and surer than cold hard fact, I wasn’t lying. As long as I did this right, almost everything I said was the truth, just Lexie’s rather than mine. I decided it would probably be a wise move to peel myself off the door and go to bed before I started thinking too hard about either of those possibilities.

Her room was on the top floor, at the back of the house, across from Daniel and above Justin. It was midsized, low-ceilinged, with plain white curtains and a rickety wrought-iron single bed that screeched like an ancient mangle when I sat down on it—if Lexie had managed to get pregnant in that thing, respect to her. The duvet cover was blue and freshly ironed; someone had changed my sheets. She didn’t have a lot of furniture: a bookshelf, a narrow wooden wardrobe with helpful strips of tin on the shelves to tell you what went where (HATS, STOCKINGS), a crap plastic lamp on a crap bedside table, and a wooden dressing table with dusty scrollwork and a three-way mirror, which reflected my face at confusing angles and gave me the creeps in all the predictable ways. I considered covering it up with a sheet or something, but that would have taken some explaining, and anyway I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reflection would keep doing its own thing behind there, just the same.

I unlocked my bag, keeping a sharp ear out for any noise on the stairs, and dug out my new gun and the roll of surgical tape for my bandages. Even at home, I don’t sleep without my gun handy—old habit, and not one I felt like breaking right at that moment. I taped the gun to the back of the bedside table, out of sight but in easy reach. No cobwebs, not even a film of dust on the back of the table: the Bureau had been there before me.

Before I put on Lexie’s blue pajamas, I peeled off the fake bandage, unclipped the mike and stashed the whole shebang at the bottom of my bag. Somewhere Frank was going into a full-blown conniption about this, but I didn’t care; I had reasons.

Going to sleep on your first night undercover is something you never forget. All day you’ve been pure concentrated control, watching yourself as sharply and ruthlessly as you watch everyone and everything around you; but come night, alone on a strange mattress in a room where the air smells different, you’ve got no choice but to open your hands and let go, fall into sleep and into someone else’s life like a pebble falling through cool green water. Even your first time, you know that in that second something irreversible will start happening, that in the morning you’ll wake up changed. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters’ children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.

I found a beautiful, illustrated, fragile old edition of the Brothers Grimm in the bookshelf and took it to bed with me. The others had given it to Lexie on her birthday, last year: the flyleaf said, in slanted, flowing fountain pen—Justin’s writing, I was almost sure—“3/1/04. Happy Birthday YOUNG girl (when are you going to grow up??). Love,” and their four names.

I sat in bed with the book on my knees, but I couldn’t read. Every now and then the quick muffled rhythms of conversation seeped up from the sitting room, and outside my window the garden was alive: wind in leaves, a fox barking and an owl on the hunt, rustles and calls and scuffles everywhere. I sat there and looked around Lexie Madison’s strange little room, and listened.

A little before midnight, the stairs creaked and there was a discreet tap on my door. I leaped halfway to the ceiling, grabbed at my bag to make sure it was zipped up all the way and called, “Come in.”

“It’s me,” said Daniel or Rafe or Justin, close behind the door, too soft for me to tell which one it was. “Just saying good night. We’re going to bed.”

My heart was pounding. “Night,” I called. “Sleep tight.”

Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets’ chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams.

I sleep lightly and I have good ears. Sometime in the night I woke up, instantly and completely. Across the hall, in Daniel’s room, someone was whispering.

I held my breath, but the doors were thick and all I could make out was the flicker of sibilants in the dark; no words, no voices. I reached out my arm from under the covers, carefully, and found Lexie’s phone on the bedside table. 3:17 a.m.

I followed the faint double trail of whispers, weaving between the bat shrills and the rolls of wind, for a long time. It was two minutes to four when I heard the slow grate of a doorknob turning, and then the soft click as Daniel’s door closed. A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.