my fears of the night before seemed not just silly, but laughable.
“Puggle!” Petra shouted, bouncing up and down underneath her clips. “More puggle!”
But I shook my head, laughing too.
“No, that’s enough, sweetie, I’m wet! Look!” I came round to stand in front of her, showing her my soaked jeans, and she laughed again, her little face scrunched up and distorted through the crumpled plastic.
“Woan wet!”
Woan. It was the first time she had made an attempt at my name, and I felt my heart contract with love, and a kind of sadness too—for everything I could not tell her.
“Yes!” I said, and there was a lump in my throat, but my smile was real. “Yes, Rowan is wet!”
It was as I was turning the buggy around to start the climb back up to the house that I realized how far we had come—almost all the way down the path that led to the poison garden. I glanced over my shoulder at the garden as I began to push the buggy up the steep brick path—and then stopped.
For something had changed since my last visit.
Something was missing.
It took me a minute to put my finger on it—and then I realized. The string tying up the gate had gone.
“Just a second, Petra,” I said, and ignoring her protests of “More puggles!” I put the brake on the buggy and ran back down the path to the iron gate, the gate where Dr. Grant had been photographed, standing proudly before his research playground, so many years ago, the gate I had tied up securely, in a knot too high for little hands to reach.
The thick white catering string had gone. Not just untied, or snipped and thrown aside, but gone completely.
Someone had undone my careful precautions.
But who? And why?
The thought nagged at me as I walked slowly back up the hill to where Petra was still sitting, growing increasingly fretful, and it continued to nag as I pushed the buggy laboriously back up the hill, to where the house was waiting.
* * *
By the time I reached the front door, Petra was cross and grizzling, and looking at my watch I saw that it was long past her snack time, and in fact getting on for lunch. The buggy’s wheels were caked with mud, but since I had left the key to the utility room on the inside, I had no option other than the front door, so at last I got her out of the buggy, folded it awkwardly with one hand, holding Petra against my hip with the other to stop her from running off in search of more puddles, and left it in the porch. Then I pressed my thumb to the white glowing panel, and stood back as the door swung silently open.
The smell of frying bacon hit me instantly.
“Hello?”
I put Petra down cautiously on the bottom stair, shut the door, and prized off my muddy boots.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
“Oh, it’s you.” The voice was Rhiannon’s, and as I picked up Petra and began to make my way through to the kitchen, she came out of the doorway, holding a dripping bacon sandwich in one hand. She looked terrible, green around the gills and with dark shadows under her eyes as if she’d slept even less than me.
“Oh, you’re back,” I said unnecessarily, and she rolled her eyes and stalked past me to the stairs, taking a great bite of sandwich as she did.
“Hey,” I called after her as a blob of brown sauce hit the tiled floor with a splat. “Hey! Take a plate, can’t you?”
But she was already gone, loping up the stairs towards her room.
As she passed though I caught a whiff of something else—low and masked by the scent of bacon, but so odd and out of place, and yet so familiar, that it stopped me in my tracks.
It was a sweet, slightly rotten smell that jerked me sharply back to my own teenage years, though it still took me a minute to pin down. When the association finally clicked into place, though, I was certain—it was the cherry-ripe reek of cheap alcohol, leaching out of someone’s skin, the morning after it’s been drunk.
Shit.
Shit.
Part of me wanted to mutter that it was none of my business—that I was a nanny and had been hired for my expertise with younger children—that I had no experience with teenagers, and no idea of what Sandra and Bill would consider appropriate. Did fourteen-year-olds drink now? Was that considered okay?