“Why not ask Callum what you’re capable of? Oh, that’s right. He’s dead.”
Her wet cow eyes fixed on Oliver. “Oliver, I wouldn’t hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt any of you. You are, you were, my friends. I care about each of you. That’s the only reason why I looked you up. I missed you. Lorna, you know I—”
He grabbed her by the arm.
“Please! Oliver, I swear I wouldn’t hurt you. I couldn’t. I—”
Oliver tightened his grip, but in the struggle, Maeve’s oversized jumper caught on the corner of the banister. As she fought to free herself, a stack of cards fell from her pockets. Oliver scooped them up before she could get them.
“What do we have here?”
“Give those back! Those are personal!” She grabbed for them, but he held them out of reach.
“We know how much our benefactor loves note cards. Oh, and these are laminated! How posh. Let’s see what they say. Accept the kindness of others. Be strong, stay strong. Oh, this is a good one. You’re a good person. People like you. What kind of self-help bullshit is this?” He laughed. “So what else do you have in your pockets, eh?”
“Nothing!”
He grabbed her again.
“Stop touching me!”
And pulled a long, thick piece of twine from her pocket.
“What’s this for, Maeve?”
Then he saw the specks of red where the rough twine had cut into MacLeod’s neck as he was strangled. As Maeve had strangled him.
He looked at Ellie. He looked at Lorna. Then they all looked at Maeve.
“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never seen it before. I don’t know how it got there, I swear.”
Oliver took three steps back and knelt by MacLeod’s body. He held the twine against the marks on the neck. It matched.
“So,” he said. “Did you suffocate Callum, too?”
But Maeve was already running up the stairs.
Maeve
The smooth cards slipped from her fingers, leaving a trail like breadcrumbs. Maeve knew she should let them go, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She managed to stuff the ones that were left into the pocket of her jeans and keep running. She wasn’t sure where she was in the house. She had gone upstairs, but one flight or two? All the halls looked the same. It hadn’t been far, but her lungs were burning. When was the last time she’d gone jogging? Sometime in her thirties with Bev, who lived next door during that brief stint in Birmingham.
Their voices sounded on the stairs.
This wasn’t the time to be thinking about Birmingham.
She tried the door nearest to her, which turned out to be a linen closet. She shut it and tried another. A guest room. She slipped inside and closed the door as quietly as she could. Her first thought was to hide under the bed. And maybe she could have when she was younger, but the years had added another layer of padding barely concealed by a John Lewis jumper. So she went into the bathroom and hid behind the door. The floor was cold and hard beneath her, but she didn’t dare move, not until the sounds quieted outside. She tried to calm down, tell herself this was like playing hide-and-seek with her niece and nephew. All she had to do was sit very quietly until those searching got bored and forgot about her. But she wouldn’t emerge to find this pack of animals watching Teletubbies.
That’s what they had transformed into again: the pack. Ravenous, rabid animals that would do anything to protect themselves, including attacking one of their own. Someone had called them that to their faces once. It had been in the spring because she could remember the rain and the green leaves outside. Who had said it, she couldn’t recall. Possibly Lorna or one of the hundreds of girls Oliver brought around during those months. Or had it been Callum? It didn’t matter. The pack had returned and singled her out as the weak link, the easy target, and they would stop at nothing until they had trapped her, and once they had . . .
Maeve lowered her head to her knees. She didn’t want to think about what would happen, but now that the thought had entered her mind, her anxiety wouldn’t let it go. Nervous energy filled her like bubbles in a shaken soda bottle, and the breathing exercises her therapist taught her weren’t working. She pictured Hollis’s body—his head split open, a piece of his skull missing, the pink-gray color of his exposed brain—and imagined her own cracked head lying beside his. How had a piece of twine she’d never seen before ended up in her pocket? How did a man who wasn’t supposed to die turn up dead?
Crouched in the bathroom, she bit her knuckle to muffle the sound of her crying as footsteps ran back and forth in the hall. Doors slammed. Once someone shouted, but the shout came to nothing and eventually Maeve heard nothing more. How long she’d been sitting there she couldn’t tell. Minutes? Hours? Long enough that her bum had gone numb and her right foot had fallen asleep. Pins and needles shot up her leg when she stood, but she stopped herself from crying out.
She hopped from the bathroom to the bedroom on one foot, shaking her leg as she went. With some relief, she lay back on the firm mattress. Her body wanted sleep, and she wanted to give in, but how long would this room remain safe? If she were at home—at Max’s home—she would be in bed, watching an afternoon documentary on the little television Max and his wife moved in for her from her nephew’s bedroom. Maybe with some popcorn and a glass of wine, the taste of which she was teaching herself to enjoy because that was what adult women were supposed to drink.
Her eyes closed against her will, her body sinking into the mattress, and she wondered if it even mattered if they found her. Why not let them take care of things once and for all? Twenty-three years was a long time. Twenty-three years Callum had lain in his grave. She remembered how they used to lie next to each other on the floor of her bedroom, staring up the ceiling, pretending the stains were stars. They’d talk about how much of a dick Oliver was being that day, plans for the weekend, where they saw their lives headed after university. It used to calm her before an exam or after an argument with her mum. Callum would reach out his hand. Sometimes she’d take it. More often, she didn’t.
Her chest rose and fell, the tears drying on her face as the memory passed her by, and she took a deep breath.
Lavender.
Maeve opened her eyes. She hadn’t imagined it. The room smelled strongly of lavender. Bottles of perfumes, lotions, and air freshening sprays lined the back of the desk. A silk nightgown lay folded on the seat of the armchair. A silver suitcase stood in the corner of the room. Maeve read its tag:
Eleanor Landon
“Shit.”
She slapped a hand over her mouth and hoped no one had heard her. Of all the rooms she could have stumbled into, it had to be Ellie’s.
Shit shit shit, she mouthed and tugged at her hair. If they got tired of the hunt, if Ellie said she needed to lie down for a little while . . . At any moment that door could open. But was it safe to move? Maybe they’d given up searching. Maybe they were drinking. Maybe they were searching the house for weapons they could use to beat her to death. Buckets to put her different organs in after they tore her apart like a pack of dogs. She bit her cheek to stop the thoughts whirring around her brain and imagined her therapist’s words:
Don’t overthink. Find a way to relax.
“Relax,” she whispered. “Relax, relax, relax. They think you’re a murderer and probably want to kill you, but relax.”