turned and went into his room and closed the door.
“He seems OK about all this,” I said to Melissa, in our room, as we put away the pile of clean clothes I had brought up and left on our bed that morning. It felt like weeks ago.
She nodded, rolling my socks into neat balls. “I think he is. It’s taking his mind off being sick.”
“What about you? Are you OK with it? I mean, this really isn’t what you signed up for.”
She thought about it, hands moving deftly, eyes down. “I’m not sure what I am,” she said, in the end. “I suppose it depends a lot on whether there are more bones in the tree or not.”
“Baby,” I said. I stopped sliding T-shirts into a drawer and put my arms around her from behind, pulling her close. “I know it’s creepy as hell. But whatever’s in there, they’ll get rid of it tomorrow. You should’ve gone back to your place for the night.”
Melissa shook her head, a quick decisive snap. “It’s not that. They’re just bones. I don’t think I believe in ghosts, and even if they’re out there, I don’t think the bones make any difference. I’d just like to know. A skull could have got there loads of ways. But a whole skeleton . . .”
“Rafferty said the tree’s over two hundred years old. Even if there’s a skeleton in there, it’s Victorian or something.”
“Then would it really be the Guards doing all this? Wouldn’t it be archaeologists?”
“They might not be able to tell the age straight off. They probably have to do tests. And there is an archaeologist. Rafferty said so.”
“You’re probably right.” She leaned back against my chest, hands coming up to cover mine. “I’d just like to know what we’re dealing with. That’s all.”
I kissed the top of her head. “I know. Me too.”
She tilted her head back to examine my face, upside down. “And you? Are you OK with all this?”
“I’m fine.” And when her face stayed upturned, waiting for more: “Well, it’s not what I had planned for the weekend. And yeah, I’d love them to just disappear. But it’s not a problem. Just a pain in the arse.”
Apparently I sounded convincing, or at least convincing enough. “Good,” Melissa said, smiling, and reached up an arm to pull my head down and kiss me, and then she went back to rolling socks.
None of us slept well, though. Over and over, I twisted looking for a comfortable position and caught the dark shine of Melissa’s open eye, or was jolted out of a half-doze by the creak of a floorboard or the close of a drawer through the wall, in Hugo’s bedroom. At some point I got out of bed, too restless to stay still another second, and went to the window.
Yellowish city-dark clouds, no stars, one golden rectangle of light in the towering wall of the apartment block. The wind had died down to a covert stirring in the ivy. Uncanny blue-white glow like a will-o’-the-wisp, below me: one of the uniformed cops, I couldn’t tell which, was leaning against an oak tree, wrapped in a big overcoat, doing something on his phone. On the other side of the garden, there was a fresh, shocking gap in the silhouette of the treeline: the wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.
I fumbled in a drawer as quietly as I could for my Xanax stash, and swallowed one dry. “Are you OK?” Melissa asked softly.
“Fine,” I said. “Just checking that Chief Wiggum isn’t pissing in the flowerbeds,” and I slid back into bed beside her.
Six
The cops and the tree surgeon and the rest of the posse were back in the garden bright and early on Sunday morning, eating doughnuts and drinking out of thermoses (“See?” I said to Melissa, at our bedroom window, “thermoses”) and squinting up through fine drizzle at a thick gray sky. I wondered how hard it would have to rain to make them go away.
We got dressed before breakfast, instead of going down in our bathrobes—no pretty little hair-brushing ritual today, Melissa gave her hair a fast going-over and pulled it back in a ponytail. In the kitchen Hugo was at the French doors, also dressed except for his slippers, his back