Apples,” Dean Martin’s voice turning the happy words somehow mournful and nostalgic, a song for a long dark road far from home; all of a sudden I wanted her close. “Come here,” I said, taking the tablecloth out of her hands and tossing it back on the table. “Dance with me.”
After a moment she drew a long breath and her body relaxed against mine. I tightened my arms around her and we swayed in slow circles. Candle-flames fluttering and winking out one by one, wind moving through the invisible treetops with a ceaseless sea-sound and nudging at the door.
We could get married in the garden, a good landscaper would have it knocked into shape inside a week. I knew from Sean that you had to give a few months’ notice to get married but Hugo could hang on that long, I knew he would, with that to keep him going, or maybe they had some kind of exemption for emergencies? My mother would cry her way through the whole thing, my father would be smiling for the first time in months; Sean and Dec would gleefully slag the shite out of me, Zach would find a way to smash the wedding cake, Carsten would turn out to be an eight-foot Uncle Fester type who made somber pronouncements in an incomprehensible accent; Miriam would perform some chakra-based ceremony to guarantee a long and happy marriage and we would all dance till dawn. We could invite the detectives, Martin’s missus could disapprove of the decor and Rafferty seemed like the type who would disappear early with someone’s exotic second cousin . . . Melissa sighed against my shoulder. I buried my face in her hair.
Eight
And then, finally, the detectives came back. They came the next morning, while I was fighting with the radiators—the autumn chill had come in hard, Hugo felt the cold badly, all the radiators needed bleeding but of course no one knew where the key was so I was struggling with a wrench and some old towels and I was covered in dust and WD-40. Rafferty and Kerr on the doorstep were ironed and smooth-shaven, spic-and-span and ready to take on the world.
“Morning,” Kerr said cheerfully. “I’d say you thought we’d abandoned you, yeah? Did you miss us?”
“He’s only messing,” Rafferty told me. “No one ever misses us. We’re used to it; doesn’t even sting any more.”
“Oh,” I said, after an idiotic pause. “Come in. My uncle’s upstairs working, I’ll just—”
“Ah, no,” Rafferty said, wiping his feet on the doormat. “Leave him to it. We only need a few minutes, sure; we’ll be gone before you know it. Will we go into the kitchen?”
I offered them tea or coffee, got them glasses of water instead, washed the dirt off my hands and sat down at the table opposite them while Kerr got out his notebook and Rafferty surveyed the garden (dead leaves everywhere, thin chilly sunlight glittering on scraps of plastic blown in by the night’s wind) and bullshitted me about how great it looked with the new plants in. The sight of them had hit me with the old full-body flinch, but this time it hadn’t left me paralyzed. If they were back, it had to be because they had something new, and if my luck was in and I played this right, they were going to share it.
“Just to confirm,” Rafferty said, once we were all nice and settled. “We took this away with us the other week, remember? You said it was yours?”
He swiped through his phone and held it out to me: a photo of the old red hoodie, spread out on a white surface beside its paper bag. Someone had attached a labeled tag to it, which felt somehow both sinister and ridiculous.
“It might have been,” I said. “I mean, I had a red hoodie, but I’m not sure it was exactly—”
“Your cousins both say you had one like this.”
“I guess. Lots of people had red hoodies, though. I can’t say for sure if this one was—”
“Hang on,” Rafferty said, taking the phone back. “This might help.” He swiped again and held out the phone.
Me, sitting among daisies with my back against a tree trunk and a can of something in my hand, smiling up at the camera. I looked so young—slight, floppy-haired, open-faced—I had to close my eyes for a second. I wanted to yell at that guy to run, far and fast, before I caught up with him and it was too