him to listen to Karen’s phone message. Excellent. I motioned for Sunny to duck down behind the sofa and readied myself to hit the intruder with the rolling pin. The door opened.
Half an hour later and we’d forgiven Ned for the fright he’d given us. He was good at eliciting forgiveness, probably because he’d had plenty of practice at it. But when I came back into the room to find Sunny making pancakes with him and doubled up laughing, I decided he had more than paid for scaring the hell out of us. Sunny adored him and we spent a happy couple of hours laughing, playing charades and eating. She didn’t even mention the pancakes not fitting her picky white food-only criterion. He most definitely had a way about him, this Irishman. At midnight Ned said he had to be off, but not before gallantly offering to sleep on the sofa so as to ward off any late-night bakers who might decide to break into the house, looking to steal the impressive marble rolling pin I’d brandished at him. When I assured him we were fine, he packed a bag of overnight necessities and then stood staring at the side table with a look of bewilderment.
‘That’s very strange, now where’s the telephone gone?’
‘I couldn’t figure out where the tape went so I took it to Wellington, remember?’
‘Oh, that’s right. So you did. Well, I’ll just go up the road and grab a taxi off the rank then.’
‘What tape?’ Sunny asked, her back to us as she searched for her own phone between the sofa cushions. Ned and I exchanged a look. Neither of us wanted to say the tape with the message from your mother, recorded moments before she opened the door to her killer.
‘The tape on the phone needed replacing so I took it to the manufacturers in Wellington,’ I lied.
‘Found it!’ Sunny declared, holding her phone in the air triumphantly. ‘Okay, I’m going to bed now. Goodnight, you two.’ She pecked me on the cheek but hesitated in front of Ned, as awkward as the fourteen-year-old she was. Without any hesitation, he kissed her on both cheeks in the French manner and, though she flushed, her eyes were bright as she bounded up the stairs; a different girl to the one she had been a couple of hours before. I felt ridiculously grateful to Ned and when he repeated the cheek kisses with me I returned them with one in the Diane Rowe manner — the lips on lips version. It was a long sweet kiss that made us look at each other when it was finished. His smile mirrored mine. We had crossed a line into something else and we knew it.
Chapter 23
THURSDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2012
I have the dream again. The one of the car drifting down through the murky water thick with weed. Again it’s me inside the car. I’m in the front seat. My knobbly knees jut out from beneath the lace edge of my dress. The seat belt is tight across my chest as the car plummets down. Water bubbles up through the floor. Already it’s above my ankles, making my feet swollen and wobbly. The water is desperate to get into the car, cascading down from the tops of the windows, squirting out of the dashboard. The metal creaks and yaws with the pressure of the water trying to force its way in. The supermarket trolley, draped in long fingers of river weed, is buried in the silent grey mud beneath me. Falcon’s hands are around my neck. He’s crying. I take his hand in mine. Sticky, chubby little fingers. I look into his face, all gluey with tears and snot. It’s not Falcon. It’s Neo. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he says. ‘Don’t let me die.’
I startled awake to the sound of mynahs arguing in the tree outside the bedroom window. A distinctively Auckland sound; one of the sounds of my childhood. Sunny was curled up in bed beside me, her knees pulled up tight to her chest, her chin tucked into her neck. She looked heartbreakingly vulnerable. I hoped my dream hadn’t leached across and infiltrated hers. She must have plenty of nightmares of her own without mine adding to them. Slowly I extricated myself, careful not to wake her, and crept downstairs to make coffee.
I’d bought white bread for toast from the corner bakery and found some butter and marmalade in the fridge. I was pouring the coffee when Sunny