“She was telling the truth,” Lorna said. “Someone catfished her.”
“I’ll concede a ‘maybe.’ Happen to see Hollis’s notepad anywhere?”
He tapped the phone against his palm as Lorna shifted a few more of Maeve’s belongings but soon quit. They both knew it wouldn’t be here.
“So . . .” he drawled. “You’re saying I was wrong?”
“I’ll also give you a ‘maybe.’ We did find the twine in her pocket, and it does look like that was what was used to strangle MacLeod.” Lorna bit on her fingernail. “What if MacLeod is somehow connected to Callum? Unlike Caskie, he’s old enough to have known him. Maybe he was behind this? He’s the one who catfished Maeve? She finds out he tricked us and strangles him?”
Oliver nudged the suitcase with his toe. He needed a drink to sort this all out. Puzzles were Hollis’s thing, not his.
“Another maybe,” he said.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
He remembered Maeve following each of them around the house, trying to impress them with a new outfit, a good exam score. Offering free beer or food. Telling them about how she almost bumped into Noel Gallagher at the grocery store. Any scrap she could offer she waved in front of them, even though none of it ever helped.
“If it’s true,” he said, “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t tell us. We’ve all been wondering how we got played. If she found out who it was—and not only found out but killed him?—she’d want the credit. Maeve’s always been worried about status. And what better way for her to raise our esteem of her than by saving us? It just doesn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have told us.”
“No, you’re right,” Lorna said. “She would’ve told us. She would’ve woken the whole house to tell us. So then why did she kill him?”
“Maybe the better question is, how did that twine end up in her pocket?” Oliver asked.
“She was always a deep sleeper. What if someone snuck into her room this morning and planted it there? She was the last one up.”
Wind struck the house, and Oliver stood up straight, cocking his ear toward the hall. “Was that a door?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
He held up his hand, listened.
“What do you—”
“Footsteps.” He listened to the movement of someone below.
“Maeve,” Lorna said. “If it’s not her . . . She’s on her own down there. Whoever locked us in will have a key to the cellar, and we left her alone. Shit. We’ve left her alone.”
Oliver took Lorna’s arm and held her back. “Where’s Ellie?”
Maeve
During the day, the flat was hers. She’d pop open the curtains, put her books on the coffee table and her shows on the TV, move the potted plants to where she liked them best. She’d make a coffee and breakfast, sit down at the table with a paper, and pretend this was her life. Pretend every morning was a Sunday morning, and that this was the one day a week she needn’t go to her artsy job in the West End, or the BBC Studios, or the National Theatre. She often pretended that she had a little dog—a terrier mix rescued from Battersea Dogs Home—that slept by her leg while she ate her eggs and toast. She’d speak to him some days—Duncan, she called him—comment on articles in the paper, pretending she knew the people involved. Some mornings she got so entrenched in her daydream, she would offer him scraps from the table and become confused when he didn’t take them. On these days, she burst into tears and had to scrub her face an extra five minutes before heading down to the unemployment office.
Whenever she had an appointment, she always came with a detailed list of the places she’d applied to or had interviewed with. Sometimes she really would have applied to one or two of them. She never had an interview. Afterward, she’d run errands, do a little cleaning, and watch her imagined life drip away as she restored Max’s flat to its original state. One by one he and his family would return, bringing reality with them. When the kids got home from their after-school clubs, they commandeered the television to watch their programs and eat their snacks on their sofa. Max’s wife was the next to return. She’d talk to Maeve about her day as she changed clothes and removed her jewelry, helped Maeve set the table. Unless he was working late, Max usually arrived home in time for dinner, the kids screaming his name, the conversation shifting away from Maeve as if they’d exhausted everything they had to say to her. Like they’d filled their daily quota of being kind to the strange spinster auntie who had taken over their spare room.
That was why Maeve disappeared to her room after dinner—to spare them the pain of having to tolerate her for the rest of the evening. To let them pretend it was only the four of them, the happy family, no fifth wheel. And Maeve would turn on her little television and eat a bag or two of M&M’s and pretend the sounds echoing throughout the rest of the flat were only neighbors.
It was on one of these nights, when she had already retired to the spare room—eating some stale Pringles she’d found under her bed and watching reruns of The Simpsons—that she got the text.
See you soon.
She sat in bed, the phone in one hand, a Pringle in the other, and wondered if it was too late to back out. Her thumb hovered over the phone, ready to reply. To decline. But her hand shook. So she got out of bed and opened her desk drawer. There on top was the picture she kept of Callum. The picture of the two of them, smiling, his arm around her shoulders at some party. The last time a man had touched her with kindness. She typed a reply.
Ok
That simple two-letter response had led her to a cold dirt floor a thousand kilometers from home.
Grit coated her tongue. She tried to spit it out, even licked the back of her hand, but as the taste of dirt retreated, fear advanced.
“I can’t see. I can’t see!”
She remembered reading something online about a man who got hit in the head by a falling sign and lost his vision. What if she would never see again? Her last image would be Oliver at the staircase. And not even Oliver in his prime. Middle-aged Oliver.
“Oh god.”
Tears fell, and she punched herself in the thigh.
“Stop. Fucking. Crying.”
She brushed the dirt from her fingers, then wiped the tears from her eyes. Shapes emerged from the darkness. She hadn’t lost her vision. The cellar was simply that dark. Grasping the wooden railing, she made her way up the stairs one by one, her right ankle smarting with each step. The door at the top was locked, but she found the light switch. She pressed it. Nothing happened.
The darkness crowded in around her. Panic crept in at the edges of her mind. How had that old man, MacLeod, died? How had the murder weapon ended up in her pocket? Maybe she had done it in some psychotic state. Perhaps she’d been sleepwalking. Run into him while she slept. But no. Oliver said he could only have been dead for at most three hours, and she’d been up longer than that. But Oliver was hardly a coroner. He could’ve been wrong about the time of death.
“No. Stop it.”
She gripped her hair and pulled on it to stop her racing thoughts.
“You didn’t strangle that old man. You didn’t strangle anyone. It was Ellie. It must’ve been Ellie.”