A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(175)

Deborah looked at China in some confusion. China shrugged her own mystification. These were waters far too deep just to wade in. Obviously, some sort of life belt was needed.

“I’d already given it to Guy anyway,” Cynthia said. “Months ago. I told him to carry it with him always. It was stupid, I know. It wasn’t anything but a stupid stone. But I told him it would keep him safe, and I expect he believed...because I told him...I told him...” Her sobbing renewed.

“But it didn’t, did it? It was only a bloody stupid stone. ”

The girl was a fascinating mix of innocence, sensuality, naivete, and vulnerability. Deborah could see her appeal to a man who might want to educate her in the ways of the world, to protect her from it simultaneously, and to initiate her into some of its delights. Cynthia Moullin offered something of a full-service relationship, a definite temptation for a man with a need to maintain an aura of superiority at all times. In fact, Deborah could see herself in the younger girl before her: the person she might have been had she not struck out on her own in America for three years. It was this realisation that prompted her to kneel by the girl and put her hand gently on the back of her neck. She said, “Cynthia, I’m terribly sorry for what you’re going through. But please. Let us take you into the house. You want to die now, but you won’t want that always. Believe me. I know it.”

“So do I,” China said. “Really, Cynthia. She’s telling you the truth.”

The idea of sisterhood implied in their statements seemed to reach the girl. She allowed herself to be helped to her feet and once upon them, she wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her sweatshirt and said pathetically, “Got to blow my nose.”

Deborah said, “There’ll be something you can use in the house.”

Thus, they got her from the wishing well to the front door. She stiffened there, and for a moment Deborah thought she might not enter, but when Deborah called out a hello and asked if anyone was at home and no answer came, Cynthia became willing to go inside. There, she used a tea towel as a handkerchief. Afterwards, she wandered into the sitting room and curled into an old overstuffed chair, putting her head on its arm and pulling down a knitted blanket from its back to cover her.

“He said I’d have to have an abortion.” She spoke numbly now. “He said he’d keep me locked up till he knew if I’d need one. No way was he going to have me running off somewhere to have that bastard’s bastard, he said. I said it wasn’t going to be anyone’s bastard because we’d marry long before it was born, and he went quite mad at that. ‘You’ll stay till I see the blood,’ he said. ‘As for Brouard, we’ll see about him.’ ” Cynthia’s gaze was fixed on the wall opposite her chair, where a collection of family pictures hung. Central to them was a large shot of a seated man—presumably her dad—surrounded by three girls. He looked earnest and well-meaning. They looked serious and in need of fun. Cynthia said, “He couldn’t see what I wanted. It didn’t matter to him. And now there’s nothing. If I at least had the baby from it all...”

“Believe me, I understand,” Deborah said.

“We were in love but he didn’t get it. He said he seduced me but that’s not how it was.”

“No,” Deborah said. “It doesn’t happen like that, does it?”

“It doesn’t. It didn’t. ” Cynthia crumpled the blanket in her fists and brought it up to her chin. “I could see that he liked me from the first and I liked him back. That’s what it was. Just us liking each other. He talked to me. I talked to him. And he really saw me. I wasn’t just there in the room for him, like a chair or something. I was real. He told me that himself. And it happened over time, the rest of it. But not one single thing that I wasn’t ready for. Not one thing that I didn’t want to happen. Then Dad found out. I don’t know how. He ruined it for both of us. Made it ugly and foul. Made it sound like something Guy did for a laugh. Like he had a bet with someone that he could be my first and he needed the bedsheets to prove it.”

“Dads are protective that way,” Deborah said. “He probably didn’t mean—”

“Oh, he meant it. And that’s what Guy was like anyway.”

“Getting you to bed on a bet? ” China exchanged an unreadable look with Deborah.

Cynthia hastened to correct her. “Wanting to show me what it could be like. He knew I’d never...I told him. He talked about how important it was for a woman’s first time to be...he said...exultant. Exultant. And it was. Like that. Every time. It was.”

“So you felt bound to him,” Deborah said.

“I wanted him to live forever, with me. I didn’t care he was older. What difference did it make? We weren’t just two bodies on a bed shagging. We were two souls that found each other and meant to stay together, no matter what. And that’s how it would’ve been if he hadn’t...he hadn’t...” Cynthia put her head back on the arm of the chair and began to weep again. “I want to die, too.”

Deborah went to her. She stroked her head and said, “I’m so sorry. To lose him and then not to have his baby either...You must feel crushed.”

“I feel destroyed,” she sobbed.

China remained where she was, a few feet away. She crossed her arms as if to protect herself from the onslaught of Cynthia’s emotion. She said,