“I can’t even look after myself,” I said. “Just look behind you.” I waved an arm at the glow from the upstairs window in the distance. The faint wail of sirens reached us across the fields.
“But where are you going?” Her voice was a wail. “You’re going to see Jonas, aren’t you?”
My heart squeezed with sympathy for her, but what choice did I have? “You know you can’t come with me, Nina.” I began to slip-slide away from her again. “Go back to your parents.”
This time, there was no sound of her attempting to follow, and for once I was grateful for Leonora’s rules. I veered away from the island slightly, no longer believing Jonas might be there waiting for me—he’d have joined me by now. Instead, I planned to skirt around the island, cross the lake, and walk up past Milner’s Drain to the main road. I’d lived at Raven Hall for eighteen months; I felt confident I could find my way in the dark—perhaps Markus was right about me becoming a proper Fenland girl. While the fire engines battled the blaze in my Raven Hall bedroom, I’d be marching down to the village to seek refuge with Jonas.
But then a shout flew across the frozen lake. “Girls!” It was Markus’s voice from somewhere near the dock. “Nina! Beth! Where are you?”
I hesitated, and in that moment, I heard Nina’s breaths, short and sharp, moving toward me again. I swung around, trying to make out her shape in the darkness.
“Go back, Nina!”
“No!” She crashed into me and grabbed my hands in her icy fingers. “I’m coming with you.”
Markus’s voice boomed out again, and it sounded closer. “Girls! Please! Where are you? Come back!”
“Let go of me.” I freed my hands from her grip and stumbled away, no longer sure of my bearings.
“Wait!” she called out. “Hang on. Dad drilled his holes on this side. He said we mustn’t skate beyond the island.”
Nice try, Nina, I thought. “I’m not skating.”
She was still coming closer. “But it might not be strong enough . . .”
“Well, go back, then!” I turned in a circle and caught her outline in my peripheral vision. “I’m trying to get away from you too—can’t you understand that?”
And that’s when it happened. A loud snap, like the crack of a whip. A strange, slow-motion shift of the ice beneath my feet. And we were both slipping and tipping. And no matter how far I clawed my fingers onto the ice in front of me, my feet and calves and thighs slid down, down, down into the cold, deadly water. I couldn’t breathe. And I couldn’t move. The world closed in around me.
Sadie
January 2019
What’s your mother’s name?”
Joe’s question hangs in the frosty air between them, and Sadie stares at him as if not understanding it. Eventually, she clears her throat.
“Perhaps you could tell me exactly who you are, first.”
Joe looks startled, but he gives her a small apologetic nod. “Yes, of course. I’m Jonas Blake. I grew up in the village. My mum still runs the B and B there. I used to be friends with—” His gaze slides toward the lake, as if the rest of his sentence has been sucked away across the black water.
She waits for a couple of seconds. “Friends with who?”
“There were two girls who used to live here. Nina and Beth.”
Sadie’s heart is a drum. Is she finally going to hear the story her mother would never tell her?
“What happened to them?” she whispers.
He eyes her warily. “Surely you’d know that if you’re Beth’s daughter?”
She shakes her head. “Mum never told me anything about her childhood. Seriously, virtually nothing. I mean, I know she had a brother, Ricky, and he and her parents were killed in a road accident, but apart from that . . .”
Joe’s pupils are enormous in the torchlight. “You didn’t know she lived here?”
“No. How old was she then?”
“Fourteen, fifteen. Didn’t she mention the family, even? Leonora and Markus and Nina?”
“No, I told you. I wasn’t allowed to ask her anything. Little things could set her off. If she was reminded of the past, she’d withdraw from everything, shut herself away, didn’t want to talk about it. So in the end, I stopped asking.”
Joe looks horrified. “I tried to find her, afterward, but she literally”—he swings the torch in a helpless gesture—“disappeared.”
Sadie thinks of the charity her mother always insisted on supporting. “She was homeless for a while. I don’t know much more than that. She lived on the streets ’til she got pregnant with me, and then she got some support, and things got a bit better.”
“Good grief.” Joe shakes his head heavily. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just tell me what happened here. Please.”
“It was an accident,” he says slowly. “There was a fire, in the house. And while they were waiting for help to arrive, Beth and Nina went out onto the frozen lake, and they—”
“What?” Sadie says.
“The ice broke. They fell through. Into the water . . .”
Sadie hugs herself, thinking of all the times she complained of her mother’s heating being turned up too high, and her mother saying it was what her cold bones needed.
“The fire brigade had just got here,” Joe continues. “They managed to pull both girls out, but—”
Sadie remembers the line from the ramblers’ group blog: “Raven Hall has been abandoned and uncared for since a tragedy befell a local family in the late 1980s.” She takes a step backward and glances at the gentle glow from the drawing room window, no longer wanting to hear the rest of the story. What if her mother was responsible for the other girl’s death? Is that what happened? Beth and Nina went out onto the ice, but only Beth came back?
Joe catches at her sleeve, and his voice cracks. “It was my fault; that’s the trouble. I promised Beth I’d meet her on the island, but I wasn’t there—I was still at home. I hadn’t even set off. If I’d been here . . .” He gives Sadie a pleading look. “Where is she now? I’d love to see her again, to explain . . .”
Sadie gives a short laugh. “That’ll be tricky.”
“Why?” His eyes widen. “She’s not—”
“Dead?” Sadie pulls a face. “No, but she’s not exactly easy to get hold of. She quit her job a few months ago, gave away all her stuff, left me to sort out the tedious bits while she went off to join some cult in the wilderness.”