Lorna took the little card that read Congrats, Dad!
“I saw him in there last night,” Lorna said. “We both had a drink. It was late, sometime after midnight. He must’ve dropped it then.” Lorna paused and tilted her head to the side, examining the corner of the tag, and tensed. “That’s blood.”
“Are you sure?” Oliver asked.
She handed over the card. He grimaced and passed it to Maeve, who pinched it between her forefinger and thumb. No one said anything until Maeve handed the card back to Ellie. Ellie didn’t need to read it again. Instead, she watched Maeve, who was staring at the fireplace.
“Do you think it was Hollis who relit the fire?” Maeve asked.
No one answered.
“Did any of you do it?”
No one answered.
Oliver
A small key rested in the lock of the door beside the main entrance. The rest of their search had turned up nothing. This was the last place he and Lorna had left to check. Oliver twisted the key and, expecting a closet, grimaced as he looked down the wooden steps.
“Of course. A cellar,” he sighed. “I don’t see a reason to go down there, do you?”
He ran his fingers through his thinning hair, hoping Lorna wouldn’t notice how anxious he was. It used to be so easy to cover what he was really feeling. But the years had made it harder for him to hide behind his bluster.
“We’ve already checked the dining room, the kitchen, and the study,” Lorna said. “Nothing. Ellie and Maeve obviously haven’t found anything upstairs yet. Let’s just finish the job. There’s a light switch right here.” A single bulb sprang to life. “See? Not even a flicker. You’re not scared, are you?”
“When have you ever known me to be scared?” But he could think of at least one time. By the look on Lorna’s face, so could she. He motioned to the stairs.
“Ladies first.”
“If you push me, I’ll murder you.”
He held up both hands.
The steps creaked under their weight. Oliver plodded along behind. True to his word, he let her go unmolested all the way down the stairs. He hesitated on the middle step.
“Well?”
“Oh yeah,” she called up. “It’s a total nightmare. You might want to stay where you are. Could hurt yourself on an errant bath towel.”
The steps groaned as Oliver joined her below. “You know, Lorna, you’re just as funny as you were at school.”
“By that you mean not at all?”
“Glad to know some people don’t change.”
They stood side by side listening to the rain outside. A small cracked window at the top of the wall opposite revealed weeds driven sideways by the wind. The only cellar he knew was his grandfather’s, filled with vegetables and jars of pickled foods and jams, and an old bomb shelter Grandad refused to get rid of in preparation for “the next big one.” This cellar was as unremarkable as Lorna had implied. A few metal racks held a hodgepodge of items—old sheets and towels, extra wastepaper bins, mini-bottles of shampoo—but stacks upon stacks of cardboard boxes took up the majority of the space. Instead of dirt and onions and a broken jar of strawberry jam, this cellar smelled of wet cardboard, sawdust, and petrol. It reminded him of the junk room in Caldwell Street, the one stuffed with random bits of broken furniture and kitchen equipment, previous tenants’ junk mail, the bag of dirty laundry. He and Callum had tried to sort through it once early on and managed to pull out enough scraps to jerry-rig Callum a desk. Oliver had even sanded it down and restained it for him, and Callum had bought him several rounds at the Byeways in return. They spent the night being miserable at darts.
The memory put him on edge. As Lorna headed for a pile of disused furniture in the corner, he followed like a toddler dragged through a store by his mum. Yesterday, he couldn’t wait to reach the house after abandoning his hired car. Now, he calculated how long it would take him to walk back there, and if he could change the tire once he did.
“Jesus, look at this.” Lorna picked up a green Koosh ball and bounced it on her finger. “Callum had one of these on his desk. He used to throw it against the wall whenever he was studying. Drove me so mad I hid it from him once. He got so sad when he couldn’t find it, I didn’t have the heart to keep it from him.” She looked at it for another second, then placed it back into a box and continued farther into the cellar.
“What do you remember about him?” she asked.
“Not much.” Oliver nudged a box of wood blocks with his toe. “I mean, he was quiet, wasn’t he? Didn’t get in the way much. Not until . . .”
He crossed his arms and glanced at an empty bird feeder.
“But haven’t you been thinking about him? All of us here, that horrible sofa, hasn’t that brought anything back?”
“Nothing to bring back. We weren’t mates. Barely said hello to each other.”
“You know that’s not true. Maybe he didn’t go to your parties, but you two hung out now and then. And he got you that ticket for George Michael at Wembley.”
“If you tell anyone I went to a George Michael concert, I’ll cut your balls off.”
“So you do remember.”
Oliver pushed past her to a deeper corner of the cellar. Of course he remembered. Each minute he spent in her company brought back another memory of Caldwell Street. They were collecting like drips from a leaky faucet. No matter how much he twisted the taps, they kept getting in. He even remembered that stupid Koosh ball, except Callum’s hadn’t been green but pink. He remembered because he’d made a gay joke about it that made Callum wince so badly Oliver had wondered if he was gay, despite the hard-on he’d had for Maeve. He wasn’t going to tell that to Lorna, though. Let her guess what he did or didn’t remember. What had he done with the tire iron?
He kicked aimlessly at a stack of crates. A black cardboard box fell into his path.
“Hello there. Hey, Lorna . . .”
But she was staring up at the ceiling.
“Where are we?” she asked. “What’s above us?”
“I don’t know. The dining room? Son of a bitch. Lorna, look at this.” He turned the box over in his hands. “Lorna? Oi. Big tits.”
She snapped out of it and wiped a hand across her forehead.
“Knew that would get your attention. Here.” He shoved the box into her hands. “Know what that is?”
“A box.”
“Don’t be thick. What’s it a box for?”
Lorna tipped it toward the light. “JF100 Wall Mounted 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi Jammer. Are you fucking joking?”
“One of these babies can block all cellular and Wi-Fi signals for over a hundred meters.”
“I know what ‘jammer’ means, Oliver. How do you even get one of these?”
“Easy. Amazon. Where else?”
“Why do you know so much about them?”
He snatched the box back. “Don’t be suspicious of me, love. Out of all of us, I give the least shit about any of you.”
“So you keep saying.” She looked again at the ceiling. This time Oliver followed her gaze.
“Why do you keep looking up there?”
“I thought I heard something.”