A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(143)

China looked at her brother evenly and for so long a time that he looked away. “I’m not like you,” she finally said.

Deborah saw that a secondary communication had passed between brother and sister with this. Cherokee grew restless and shifted on his feet. He shoved his fingers through his hair and said, “Hell. China. Come on.”

China said to Deborah, “Cherokee still surfs. Did you know that, Debs?”

Deborah said, “He mentioned surfing but I don’t think he actually said...” She let her voice drift off. Surfing was so patently not what her old friend was talking about.

“Matt taught him. That’s how they first became friends. Cherokee didn’t have a surfboard but Matt was willing to teach him on his own. How old were you then?” China asked her brother. “Fourteen?”

“Fifteen.” He mumbled his answer.

“Fifteen. Right. But you didn’t have a board.” She said to Deborah,

“To get good, you need a board of your own. You can’t keep borrowing someone else’s because you need to practise all the time.”

Cherokee went to the television and picked up the remote. He examined it, pointed it at the set. He turned the set on and just as quickly turned it off. He said, “Chine, come on.”

“Matt was Cherokee’s friend first, but they grew apart when he and I got together. I thought this was sad, and I asked Matt once why it happened that way. He said things change between people sometimes and he never said anything else. I thought it was because their interests were different. Matt went into film making, and Cherokee just did his Cherokee thing: played music, brewed beer, did his swap-meet number with the phony Indian stuff. Matt was a grown-up, I decided, while Cherokee wanted to be nineteen forever. But friendships are never that simple, are they?”

“You want me to leave?” Cherokee asked his sister. “I can go, you know. Back to California. Mom can come over. She can be with you instead.”

“Mom?” China gave a strangled laugh. “That would be perfect. I can see her now, going through this apartment—not to mention through my clothes—removing anything vaguely related to animals. Making sure I have my daily allotment of vitamins and tofu. Checking to be certain the rice is brown and the bread whole grain. That would be sweet. A great distraction, if nothing else.”

“Then what?” Cherokee asked. He sounded despairing. “Tell me. What?”

They faced each other, Cherokee still standing and his sister still sitting, but he seemed much smaller in comparison with her. Perhaps, Deborah thought, it was a reflection of their personalities that made China seem so relatively large a figure. “You’ll do what you have to do,” China told him. He was the one to break the gaze they each held steadily on the other. During their silence, Deborah thought fleetingly of the entire nature of sibling relationships. She was in water without gills when it came to understanding what went on between brothers and sisters. With her gaze still on her brother, China said, “D’you ever wish you could turn back time, Debs?”

“I think everyone wishes that now and then.”

“What time would you choose?”

Deborah pondered this. “There was an Easter before my mum di ed...A fête on one of the village greens. There were pony rides available for fifty p and I had just that much money. I knew if I spent it, it would be all gone, up in smoke for three minutes in the pony ring and I’d have nothing to spend on anything else. I couldn’t decide what to do. I got all hot and bothered because I was afraid that whatever I did decide would be the wrong decision and I’d regret it and be miserable. So we talked about it, Mum and I. There’s no wrong decision, she told me. There’s just what we decide and what we learn from deciding.” Deborah smiled at the memory. “I’d go back to that moment and live onward from there all over again if I could. Except she wouldn’t die this time.”

“So what did you do?” Cherokee asked her. “Ride the pony? Or not?”

Deborah considered the question. “Isn’t that odd? I can’t remember. I suppose the pony wasn’t all that important to me, even then. It was what she said to me that made a difference. It was how she was.”

“Lucky,” China said.

“Yes,” Deborah replied.

A knock sounded on the door at that, followed by a ringing of the buzzer that seemed insistent. Cherokee went to see who’d come calling. He opened the door to reveal two uniformed constables standing on the front step, one of them looking round anxiously as if checking the potential for ambush and the other having removed a baton which he was slapping lightly against his palm.

“Mr. Cherokee River?” Baton Constable said. He didn’t wait for a reply, as he clearly knew to whom he was speaking. “You’ll need to come with us, sir.”

Cherokee said, “What? Where?”

China rose. “Cherokee? What...?” but she didn’t apparently need to finish her question.

Deborah went to her. She slid her arm round her old friend’s waist. Deborah said, “Please. What’s going on?”

Whereupon Cherokee River was given the formal caution by the States of Guernsey Police.

They’d brought handcuffs with them, but they didn’t use them. One of them said, “If you’ll come with us, sir.”