I took a breath. “Do you think Aurelia committed suicide?”
She did a double take, and I closed my eyes, wincing at my own stupidity. I shouldn’t have asked. I knew I shouldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really shouldn’t have asked that.”
She smiled. “But you did ask it. Has Gaia said something?”
“Gaia? Not about suicide. I don’t think we’re meant to say . . .”
She pulled her face into a sensible pout. “No, no. Of course.”
“I suppose I just . . . Well, I was talking to Maren, and she said . . .”
“Maren,” she said in a grim voice.
“She . . . well, she . . .”
“What did Maren say?” Derry pressed, her voice rising in pitch and volume, and I felt my capacity to lie shrivel up as though she’d jabbed me with a syringe filled with truth serum.
“She told me that she didn’t think Aurelia killed herself,” I blabbed.
“What?”
“She said Mother Nature was punishing Tom for building on a river and that’s why she died.”
Derry reacted to this divulgence, her face frozen in a look of horror. But then, she laughed. A head-right-back, mouth-wide-open laugh. A nervous titter escaped my own lips. I rarely made people laugh, but yes, there was something hilarious about what I’d just said.
“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Derry said, dabbing her eyes. “Maren is just so . . . bonkers. I’d like to see what Tom makes of that theory.”
“I imagine he’d be very upset,” I observed.
Derry became thoughtful. “Maren was very taken with Aurelia,” she said, frowning. “It was a bit . . . concerning.” She put a hand on my arm, warningly. “And she hates Tom. He’s only keeping her on out of duty, but I’m worried.”
“Worried about what?” I said.
She bit back a reply, and visibly replaced it with something more tactful. “You do know Maren isn’t actually a housekeeper, don’t you?”
“Well, to be honest, that explains quite a bit . . .”
She leaned even closer. “She was an artist. Apparently a very talented one. Exhibitions and what have you. But somehow she stopped painting and started cleaning for Aurelia.”
I went to ask how a talented artist ended up scrubbing toilets for a living, but Derry cut in before I had a chance.
“Then things started to go missing. Belongings of Aurelia’s.”
I processed this, thinking back to Tom’s cruel comment to her. I don’t appreciate lies.
“Tom found them in Maren’s room,” she continued. “Small things, really. A pair of earrings, some of her photographs. As you can well imagine, he hit the bloody roof. Maren became obsessed with Aurelia, but Aurelia felt sorry for her. She was always so softhearted . . . She persuaded Tom to keep her on. Maren’s devious—”
“I don’t think she’s devious,” I said before I had thought it through, and Derry stopped walking and stared at me with an expression I couldn’t fathom.
“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” she said with a sympathetic shake of her head.
“What?”
She bit something back. Then, placing a hand on my arm and fixing me with those big blue eyes: “For my money, I’d say Maren locked you in that basement. Did you know Tom had called her earlier that evening to say we might not make it back that night?”
I drew a breath. “No?”
She gave a grim, I’m-sorry-to-say-so nod. “As far as Maren knew, nobody was coming. It was just going to be you, her, and the kids in the house.”
I felt my legs give. I would have been stuck in that basement all night.
“Anyway,” Derry said breezily, turning to nod at Granhus, which was now visible through the trees. “I’m here now. We can look out for each other, can’t we?”
16
the cliff and the forest and the beasts
THEN
Aurelia keeps her distance as Gaia plays in the forest. The snow is thick, the kind that turns the conifer trees into cottony white triangles and makes terrific snowmen. She and Gaia have had a fun morning building a family of snowmen, with carrot noses, pebble eyes, and twigs for arms and hair. Coco is still asleep in the baby sling, her little bobble hat slipping down over her eyes as she lolls against Aurelia’s left shoulder. Aurelia presses her camera to her eye and surveys the world through her lens. The trees are so tall that she can only capture their powdery white skirts and the virgin snow, foam-smooth, that sweeps across the forest floor. She leans close to a crooked branch adorned with a triangular prism of snow. Click. Gaia has discarded her fleece hat