“Hang on. I want to disable the security features first because I am not doing that again.”
Ellie craned her neck to watch the phone screen as Lorna found the call log.
“No. No, he didn’t make any outgoing calls.” She searched through his recent messages. “Someone left a voice mail last night, though. Linda, again.”
She put it on speaker.
“Hey, Dad. Sorry to bother you on your weekend away and all. But something a bit weird happened. The police came by, which isn’t all that unusual for us, yeah, but they weren’t local. Came from down south and said they needed to ask you questions about something. There was a fire at some house on . . . hang on. I wrote down the name. Coldwell Street? No, Caldwell. Can’t read my own writing. Anyway, I said I didn’t know what you’d have to do with a fire last month when you were being the big Catherine Marcus hero up here, and I said they could check that with DI Thompson and DS Khan, but then they said it wasn’t so much the fire itself, but that they have reason to suspect the fire had something to do with a death that happened there in the nineties when you lived there as a student? Which I said didn’t sound right ’cause you went to Nottingham. Anyway, I think it’s probably the lads playing a joke ’cause of your promotion and all. But the whole thing felt really, I don’t know, weird. Anyway, hopefully it’s just your phone being wonky up there in the Highlands. But give me a call when you get this. And remember to take a picture of a coo for me! Okay, love you! Bye bye bye.”
“She sounded nice,” Ellie said. “His daughter sounds very nice.”
“So Maeve burned down the Caldwell Street house?” said Oliver. “Probably took out all the furniture beforehand. Had it shipped up here. How long has she been planning this?”
Lorna tapped the phone against her palm. Oliver drank straight from the bottle and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. Neither of them noticed Ellie as she inched toward the doorway.
“I want to see what else Hollis has on that phone.” He reached for it, but Lorna pulled it back.
“I can look.”
“Then shut up and do it.”
Ellie stood in the hall now, waiting for them to yell at her to come back. But their argument took up all of their attention.
“Didn’t you listen to that voice mail?” Oliver was saying. “If the police are suspicious enough to travel up to Manchester to interview Hollis, it must be because Maeve already sent them something. And we don’t know what it was or what else he has.”
“But what if it wasn’t Maeve?”
“Then who else . . .”
“I . . . I think . . .”
A roll of thunder drowned out the rest of Lorna’s reply and covered Ellie’s footsteps as she back-stepped down the hall.
Bad things happened when Ellie drank. Alcohol reminded her what she was capable of. Revealed the side of herself she worked so hard to hide. The side these people brought out in her. She’d only had two small glasses downstairs, but on an empty stomach that was enough.
The house creaked and groaned in the storm, and Ellie turned around with every step, expecting someone, perhaps even Callum, to appear behind her. She rubbed the scratches on her arm and hurried upstairs to her room.
She reached under the bed and grabbed the jammer. Held it in her hands, torn between cradling it to her chest and throwing it out the window. Her phone beeped, and she welcomed the distraction. A text from Jilly.
if u dunt let me go 2 Kevs party ill h8 u 4eva
Ellie laughed. How had she never noticed how innocent her daughter was? Kevin Barlow’s party—a life or death situation. If only Jilly knew.
Ellie tied back her hair in a stiff ponytail and reread the last text she’d received from the Unknown Number:
Is it done yet?
Ellie tightened her ponytail again, letting the hairs pull at her scalp. She was good at following instructions. She could accomplish each task like a checklist no matter how difficult—come to Wolfheather House, bring a cellular signal jammer, feign surprise when the others arrive. But no matter how many times she checked her phone, no further instructions seemed forthcoming.
When she first got that text last night, as she ran the water for the shower to cover the sound of her movements, she had immediately retrieved the signal jammer from her suitcase and plugged it in underneath the bed. She thought it was safest to get rid of the box somewhere and had managed to hide it in the cellar before entering the dining room for the first time. How was she supposed to know Lorna and Oliver would go looking down there? And how had they found it behind those dusty old boxes anyway? It was almost as if they had known what they were looking for. Or at least Oliver had because didn’t he say he was the one who found the box?
She wondered now if Maeve had been given instructions, too. And if the two of them had known what they were really getting into this weekend, what about Oliver and Lorna? How much of what they said was the truth, and how much of it was an act?
Ellie stuffed her phone in her pocket, then took the signal jammer to a different room, sliding it underneath a random bed, and returned to the hall, where she heard Oliver and Lorna arguing in the room with Hollis’s body. But as she prepared to return to them, she noticed an open door. One in the closed wing, just on the other side of the rope. One that had not been open when they’d last been together on this floor. Ellie looked over her shoulder, then ducked under the rope.
Enough light filtered through the window that she knew what she was seeing had to be real. The wire-framed bed and crate of cleaning supplies. The framed photos hanging on the walls. The paperboard desk that took up too much space. Like the room that housed Hollis’s body, this room had been turned into a replica of her Caldwell Street bedroom. A memory came to Ellie, long buried underneath years of purposeful forgetfulness, and she yanked open the drawer to the desk, but there was no folder. No notebook. No diary. Only a blue envelope with her name typed on the front. She pinched it with two fingers and extracted it from the drawer.
There once was a girl named Ellie,
Who faked being good and jolly.
She always thought it not her fault
Whene’er she committed assault,
So her brain’s now about to be jelly.
Oliver
“Let me get this straight,” Oliver said. “You don’t think Maeve killed Callum because she killed MacLeod?”
“Yes. I mean no. I mean . . .” She pressed her palms into her eyes and let out a frustrated groan. “I mean I don’t think it’s as simple as we think it is. Something’s not quite right.”
“Dunno. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Maeve murders Callum. Decides she doesn’t want any witnesses, so she lures us all here to finish us off. Old man MacLeod isn’t supposed to show up but he does and she takes him out, too.”
Lorna threw up her hands. “But why? What’s her motive? You said you watch Forensic Files, right? The murderer always has a motive.”
“I told you. We’re witnesses.”
“And if Callum had been killed last week, I’d buy that. But it’s been over twenty fucking years, Oliver. I didn’t feel like the police were suddenly closing in on me. Did you? They never even investigated his death as a murder. This”—she waved her hands at the house—“only reopens something that had been shut tight, nice and tidy. If Maeve killed Callum, she wouldn’t be thick enough to restart something that would get the finger pointed at her.”