The Witch Elm - Tana French Page 0,227

no hurry of course, so grateful for everything you did for Hugo stay as long as you like just with property prices doing so well and all the work to be done before we put it on the market . . . I thought of my apartment, tight-drawn curtains and stale air, alarm lights blinking and the red panic button hunched low beside my bed waiting for its moment.

I did think, a lot, about trying to talk to Melissa. Now that I hadn’t killed anyone, there seemed to be no reason why I shouldn’t. She hadn’t left—incredibly—because she had stopped loving me; she had only left because I was poking around playing detective, and she had in fact been right that that was a horrible idea, but now I could look her in the eye and swear that I was done with all that for good, also that the next time she told me something I would listen. Somehow I didn’t worry about convincing her I wasn’t a murderer. It made me cringe that I had ever thought she would believe that. Melissa had been way ahead of me, the whole time.

And yet I didn’t ring her. Because—when I got down to it, when I actually had the phone in my hand—why would I? What, from this dim house where ivy crisscrossed the windows and all my clothes smelled faintly of mildew, did I have to offer?

It was cold out. I didn’t go outside much; popping to the shops or going for a walk felt like bizarre foreign concepts, and although I occasionally wandered around the garden with some vague idea about healthful fresh air, I didn’t like it out there. My and Melissa’s optimistic marigolds and whatever had mostly died off—probably we had planted them wrong, or it had been the wrong season or the wrong soil, who knew. A few patches of skimpy, diseased-looking grass had sprouted, and there were some tall muscular gray-green weeds that looked like dandelions on steroids, but apart from that the earth was still a bare mess. The gap where the wych elm had been bothered me; even when I wasn’t looking that way it scratched at the corner of my eye, something essential missing and I needed to fix it, it was urgent— The sky was always gray, there were always crows flapping and conferring among the oak branches, the cold always bit straight down and sank deep, and I always went back inside within a few minutes.

It was cold inside, too. The heating system couldn’t cope with the size of the house, I was running out of firewood and no one had thought to bring me more. Drafts surged up out of nowhere like someone had stealthily opened a door or a window, but when I went looking for the crack I could never find it. Spiders were coming in for the winter; I saw more and more of them, in corners and along skirting boards, chunky gray-brown things with vaguely sinister markings. Woodlice trundled around the crack beneath the French doors.

A few weeks after she had her baby, Elaine McNamara went home, much to Haskins’s relief. He didn’t mention her again. She didn’t show up anywhere in Ireland in the 1901 census, but there was a woman in the right part of Clare who matched her mother’s info, with six kids born alive and six still living, so it looked like Elaine had married or emigrated or both. I couldn’t find any marriage record for her. Hugo would have known how to go about it, and about looking for the baby’s father, running complicated software to compare various DNA profiles, but I didn’t have a clue where to start.

Instead I wrote Mrs. Wozniak a report. I didn’t know the right format so it was short, just the bare facts and a few lines at the end, as close as I could get to what I thought Hugo would have written: Unfortunately I don’t have the skills to pursue this any further. Another genealogist might be able to do more. I hope this new information doesn’t come as too much of a shock, and I sincerely wish you all the best of luck in your search.

When I was done I read it out loud, into the empty air of the study, to the dusty books and the wooden elephants and Hugo’s old slippers left askew under his chair. “Hugo,” I said. “Is this right?” I had started asking him questions occasionally—not

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