I’d lifted my fingers to it and found mascara printed on to my cheeks.
‘It’s make-up,’ I’d told her.
‘Messy.’
‘Very messy. Shall I do your hair, Edie?’
She’d turned so I could plait her curly, unruly locks. Glossy brown, like polished mahogany. The sun had been as warm and soft as butter.
‘Sam?’ It was Tony, from down the hallway. ‘Sam? Don’t worry about the screwdriver. I got in.’
I came to as if surfacing from a fitful sleep. I was hugging my knees to my chest as if I was trying to make myself as small as possible, down there on the floor in the dark of the cupboard, among the lint balls and folded towels and sheets that smelt soapy and old. The hairband was still in my palm. That memory, it was so acute, so painful, it was like subsidence beneath my feet. I could feel the slippage like an aftershock, making it hard to grasp reality. Sometimes grown-ups feel sad, I’d told her, and now I couldn’t even remember why I’d cried, what trivial upset had reduced me to tears on that lucid summer day all those years ago. I remembered the feel of her hair, slippery and glossy in my fingers, how we’d giggled when I told her I’d once cut my brother’s hair half off with the kitchen scissors when I was five years old, the way it had fallen to his feet in white curls like feathers. I put the hairband in my pocket where I could still touch it with the tips of my fingers, holding on to her as long as possible.
‘What did you find?’ I said as I entered Edie’s bedroom. Something crunched in the junk beneath my feet. One of her CDs, cracked down the middle. There were dents in the walls where she had frisbeed them across the room. Tony was holding up a small brown bottle between his thumb and index finger. He had driven the handle of a spoon from one of Edie’s discarded cereal bowls into the edge of the drawer, pulling it open.
‘Amyl nitrate,’ he said, and looked over at me. ‘Poppers.’
‘Oh.’ I folded my arms, clutching my elbows. ‘Well. Add it to her charge sheet, I guess.’ I laughed, but it came out like a mewl, soft and weak.
‘It’s not necessary.’ Tony put the bottle back in the drawer. ‘She’s hardly Tony Montana. We already knew about the drug use. The girls I spoke with were refreshingly honest about it.’
‘The Rattlesnakes?’
‘Heh. Jesus. I know, right? The Rattlesnakes. You know, I asked one of them why they chose that name and she said, “Because it makes us sound cool.” Can’t argue with that logic.’ He walked back towards me, hands in his pockets. ‘This brings me back to the point about the press, Samantha. A young, single mother with a tearaway daughter she can’t control who’s taking drugs and beating up other kids? They’ll tear you apart. I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for Edie. It might scare her right off coming back at all.’
I squared my shoulders. It was a defensive move, as pure and instinctive as raising my fists. I opened my mouth to dispute with him: You don’t get it, Tony, it’s not like that, you don’t understand. Only he did understand, didn’t he? They’d take us apart bone by bone, Edie and me. The fights, the absent father, her grades, our home. It made my stomach hurt to think about it.
‘Okay. What about the hospitals?’
‘What about them, Sam?’
‘Are you checking them? All of them? She might be lying in a coma somewhere.’
‘Lucky her,’ Tony said, and shook his head. ‘I’d welcome a coma right now.’
Me too, I thought. A long sweet coma, like falling backward on to a cushion of velvet and black mink. My numbness was starting to give way. Soon the pain would come, like splinters dug deep into the softest parts of me, and with it the slow certainty that Edie was dead. Not missing, not absent, but dead.
A hand on my arm, gentle. Tony was looking at me earnestly. ‘Sam? You going to get that?’
Distantly, I heard the phone ringing. I scrambled down the hallway and into my bedroom, no Edie waiting to jump out at me behind my bedroom door, and picked up the phone from its place on my bedside table.
‘Hello?’ I was breathless, desperate. I could hear the pleading in my voice even as I said it. ‘Edie? Honey? Is that you?’
More silence. The line crackled.
‘Say something. Please!’ I said. Tony came into the room and peered out the window into the street.
‘I know where she is,’ a voice said. It was a woman’s voice, but deep and bronchial-sounding, as though she had a bad cold.
‘Oh my God. You do?’
‘Yes.’
I clutched the phone and motioned to Tony. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you know! Where is she?’
‘Your daughter is in a house. It’s rural. A lot of ground. Farmhouse, maybe? I can see dogs, but not sheepdogs. Big ones, guard dogs.’
Tony was looking at me, his hands on his hips.
‘What do you mean, you see it? Are you looking at it now? Where is it? Hello?’
‘You got someone in your family with a lost limb?’
‘A what?’
‘A missing arm? I’m getting a missing arm. A man with no arm. Does that sound familiar to you?’
‘I don’t – I don’t think so.’
‘She’s been taken, but she’s alive.’
The phone was snatched from me. It was Tony. His eyebrows were drawn together, mouth quivering in a bow of distaste.
He lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Who is this?’ He waited while she talked, smoothing down the front of his shirt with the palm of his hand. Finally he said, ‘Piss off, pal.’ And hung up.
I stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s a fucking psychic. You’re going to get a lot of these calls. Fuck’s sake. You need to go ex-directory.’
‘She said she knew where Edie was.’
‘Yeah, sure she does. They’re touched in the head, these people. You start listening to them, you’re going to tie yourself into knots.’ He squatted in front of me, taking my hands in his. His knuckles bristled with dark hairs. ‘You got an answerphone?’
I nodded, my heartbeat finally beginning to slow. That woman, she had sounded so sure.
‘Use it to screen calls. You’ll get plenty of weirdos calling you now that word’s got out. They think they’re helping, but they’re parasites, so don’t give them anything you can’t afford to lose. That goes for your money, your energy or your time. Understand?’
His eyes drifted to the left, towards my bedside table. The drawer was half-open there, just a few inches, but enough to see inside. Tony leaned across me and pulled it open a little further. The object in there rolled forward and he picked it up, looking at me with interest.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked me.
I shrugged awkwardly. ‘A friend brought it back from the States for me.’
‘Take Down Spray,’ he read aloud. ‘What is it, Mace?’
‘Yeah. Pepper spray.’
‘Why do you keep it there? You afraid of burglary?’
‘Sure.’
He studied me carefully and I gave him a smile, folding my arms, elbows on my knees. Your body language, Sam, I told myself, is going to give you away. He’s a policeman; he must see people lie all the time. I’d asked Theresa to get it for me when she went to New York last year. I’d told her it was because I was frightened, living alone, and partly that was true. Partly.