that happen.
I had to get the job.
But when I did . . . and when I met Bill that first night, and realized the kind of man he was, God, it’s like a metaphor for this whole thing, Mr. Wrexham. It’s all connected. The beauty and luxury of this house, and the seeping poison underneath the high-tech facade. The solid Victorian wood of a closet door, with its polished brass escutcheon—and the cold, rank smell of death that breathes out of the hole.
There was something sick in that house, Mr. Wrexham. And whether Bill had been sick when he went there and brought it with him, or whether he had caught its sickness and become the man I met on that first night, that predatory, abusive man, I don’t know.
All I know is that the two run hand in hand, and that if you scratched the walls of Heatherbrae House, scoring the hand-blocked peacock wallpaper with your nails, or gouging the polished granite tiles, that same darkness would seep out, the darkness that lay very close beneath Bill Elincourt’s skin.
Don’t look for him. That was one of the few things my mother had said to me about him, before she shut off the subject completely. Don’t look for him, Rachel. Nothing good will come of it.
She was right. God, she was so right. And how I wish I’d listened to her.
“Come on,” I said at last. “Up to bed, Rhiannon. You’re tired, I’m tired, we’ve both had too much to drink . . . We’ll talk about all this in the morning.”
I’d ring Sandra and explain. Somehow. With my head aching from the beginnings of a hangover, and tiredness scratching at the back of my eyes, I could not quite think of the words, but they would come. They would have to. I couldn’t carry on like this, being blackmailed by Rhiannon.
For a moment, as I climbed the stairs, Rhiannon in front of me, I had an absurd mental picture of Sandra welcoming me with open arms, telling me I completed their family, telling me— But no. That was ridiculous, and I knew it. Even the most generous of women would take time to adjust to a long-lost stepchild turning up, and to find out this way, in these circumstances . . . well. I had no illusions how the conversation was likely to pan out. Difficult would be the best-case scenario.
Well, I had made my bed, and I would have to lie on it. I would almost certainly be sacked—I couldn’t really see any way around that. But I was fairly sure that Bill would not want to sue his estranged daughter, to whose mother he had paid just pennies in child support, before disappearing for good. It would not be a good look for Elincourt and Elincourt. No, it would be swept under the rug, and I’d be free to carry on. Alone.
And far away from Heatherbrae.
* * *
I hadn’t really thought about my room and where I was going to sleep until we got to the second-floor landing, and Rhiannon turned the handle on her graffitied bedroom door and flung her shoes in, with total unconcern.
“Good night,” she said, as if nothing had happened, as if the events of the night had been just another family row.
“Good night,” I said, and I took a deep breath and opened the door to the bedroom. The strange phone was hard in my pocket, and my necklace—the necklace I had feared Bill Elincourt might recognize—lay warm around my neck.
Inside, the door to the attic was shut and locked, as I had left it. I was about to grab my night things and take them downstairs to the sofa to try to catch a few hours before dawn when there was a sudden gust of wind, making the trees outside groan. The curtains flapped suddenly and wildly in the breeze, and the fresh pine-laden scent of a Scottish night filled the room.
The room was still painfully cold, just as it had been earlier that night, and suddenly I realized. The cold had never come from the attic—it must have been the window, open all along. Only before I had been so fixated on finding out the truth of what was behind the locked door that I hadn’t even glanced towards the curtains.
At least the chill was explained then. Nothing supernatural—just the cold night air.
But the problem was, I had not opened that window. I hadn’t even touched it since I slammed