personal about finding my necklace hidden up there, amid the darkness and the rotting feathers. I should have been thinking about Rhiannon, worrying about where she was, and the argument we were bound to have when she walked through the door. I should have been thinking about Sandra, considering my options and trying to work out what to say—how to tell her the truth.
I was thinking about both things. But above and below and around those thoughts were twined like the links of my necklace, as I tried to figure out chronologies and timings and work out how my necklace could have disappeared inside a locked room, behind a door to which the only key lay in my pocket, up a corridor sealed by a hundred unbroken spiderwebs. Had it been up there before, when Jack and I first broke in? But that explained nothing. That cupboard had been boarded up for months, years. The dust traces, the thick swags of cobwebs, no one had entered via the stairs for a long, long time. And the window was barely large enough for me to get my head and shoulders through, and it looked out onto sheer slates.
After I found the necklace I had scoured every inch of the room looking for trapdoors, loft hatches, hidden doors—but there was nothing. The Victorian floorboards ran from side to side in an unbroken line, the walls gave onto nothing except for the roof tiles, and I had moved every stick of furniture, looked at every inch of the ceiling from below. Whatever else I was unsure of, I was absolutely certain that there was no way in or out apart from the flight of stairs leading up from my room.
The moon was still high in the sky, but the clock above the stove had ticked through 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. when I at last heard tires on the gravel of the drive, whispered laughter outside the porch, and the sound of the front door swinging automatically open as someone activated the thumbpad lock. The door closed stealthily as the van drove off, and I heard cautious footsteps, and then a stumble.
My stomach flipped, but I forced myself to stay calm.
“Hello, Rhiannon.” I kept my voice level, and I heard the footsteps on the hallway flags freeze, and then an exclamation of disgust as Rhiannon realized she had been busted.
“Fuck.”
She walked unsteadily through to the kitchen. Her makeup was halfway down her face, and her tights were laddered, and she smelled strongly of some mix of sweet alcohol—there was Drambuie in there, I thought, and Malibu too, along with something else, Red Bull, perhaps?
“You’re drunk,” I said, and she gave a nasty laugh.
“Kettle, black. I can see the wine bottles in the recycling from here.”
I shrugged.
“Fair point, but you know I can’t let you get away with this, Rhiannon. I have to tell your parents. You can’t just walk out like that. You’re fourteen. What if something happened and I didn’t know where you were or who you were with?”
“Okay,” she said, slumping down at the kitchen island and pulling the biscuit tin towards her. “You do that, Rachel. And good luck with the fallout.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
As she picked out a biscuit and pushed the tin away, I took a biscuit too, dunking it calmly in my tea, though my hands were shaking a little beneath my careful control. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to tell your mum. If I lose my job, so be it.”
“If you lose your job?” She snorted derisively. “If? You’re delusional. You’re here under a fake name, probably with fake qualifications, for all I know. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up getting sued.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll take that risk. Now get upstairs and wipe that stuff off your face.”
“Fuck you,” she said, through a mouthful of biscuit, her words accompanied by an explosion of crumbs that spattered across my face, making me recoil, blinking and brushing fragments out of my eyes.
“You little bitch!” My temper, so carefully held, was suddenly fraying fast. “What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Yes, you. All of you, actually. Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to any of you? Do you actually want to be left here alone? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you keep being such a fucking bitch to the staff.”
“What the fuck do you know about it?” she spat, and suddenly she was as angry