Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(25)

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    Back at the hotel, she unlocks the door to the suite. A soccer match is blaring on the television, but Jack is asleep. An empty plate rests on the table between the beds. Holly picks it up, and as she does, her foot strikes something. She leans down and discovers an empty pint glass under the bed. She sniffs it. Beer. Relatively fresh too, although she suspects her son will try to pass it off as belonging to the room’s previous tenant.

“Jack?” She shakes him, but he groans and curls up tighter. She sighs. She doesn’t have the energy to have this out with him right now. She puts the plate and glass into the hallway, locks the door, and falls into bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.



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She awakens to a knock on the door. Weak morning light is streaming through the windows—she never drew the curtains last night. “One moment,” she calls. She pulls a jumper over her nightshirt, then struggles to the door. When she looks out the peephole, no one is there, but there’s a breakfast hamper and a tea tray on the ground.

She opens the door and brings the food inside, placing it on the table in the suite’s dining area. Then she goes to check on Jack. He’s still sleeping.

Not for long. She shakes him awake.

“What?” he mutters, digging his head deeper into the pillow.

“Hey. Wake up. We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Jack!” Reluctantly he turns over to face her.

“Where did you get the beer?”

“What beer?”

“Come off it, Jack. I found it when I came back last night.” It’s clear from the expression on his face that he’d hoped she might not notice.

“So I had one beer, what’s the big deal? It’s England, I told you—everyone drinks over here.”

“Given that I actually grew up here, I beg to differ,” she says. “But the point is that I told you not to, and you deliberately disobeyed.”

“You didn’t tell me not to—you told me you wouldn’t buy me a drink at the pub yesterday,” he says innocently.

“Fine. Let me make it clear. No drinking while you are here. Period. Or at any other time, since you are underage. Do you understand?”

He nods sullenly.

“Good.” What she doesn’t say is she has no idea how alcohol or drugs might affect the injections and how long they last. Given how little they have left, she doesn’t want to chance it. But she can’t tell Jack that. He’ll freak out and ask questions she won’t be able to answer. Or, rather, doesn’t want to. “And to make sure, I’ll be having a word with the inn too.”

He glowers. “Is that all?”

“No. There’s breakfast on the table. Get up and get dressed. Study while I’m gone.”

She leaves to take a shower before he can mouth off to her. When she comes out, dressed in jeans, trainers, and a jumper, he’s at the table, wolfing down the baked goods. She takes a scone, kisses him on the head, and tells him she’ll check in with him at lunchtime. She’s happy to see he has a chem book out.

“Study hard,” she says, and closes the door behind her.

At Grace House, the nurses are clustered in the kitchen. Holly talks with them each individually before she searches the house and grounds again—there must be something she’s missed.

Interviewing the first two nurses leads nowhere. But Tala, the nurse who was on duty the day Eden disappears, is fidgety and anxious. As soon as the door shuts behind her, she starts to talk. She tells Holly that the nurses keep a few personal items in one of the bedrooms, for when they spend the night. She checked yesterday, when Dr. Darling asked them to search everywhere. A pair of her jeans and a T-shirt are missing.

Holly takes a breath. It could be coincidence—Tala could have lost the items, or another nurse could have borrowed them—but Tala shakes her head.

“I have asked everyone. No one has seen them,” she says. She starts to say something else, then stops. Tala is the youngest of the nurses, slender and petite. With her hair pulled back with a ribbon and her face scrubbed of makeup, she looks like a child.

“And?” Holly coaxes.

Tala shakes her head. She crosses her arms, looks down at the floor. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Holly waits. The silence builds. Tala shifts in her seat. “It’s just . . . ,” she says at last. “The bedroom we use—it’s the blue one on the second floor. You know which one I mean?”

Holly nods. Of course she does. She painted that room herself, the perfect shade of blue for the twins. It has two dormer windows that face the back and window seats upholstered with a truck print. She hasn’t been in it for years.

Tala leans forward, her voice dropping as if she’s afraid she’ll be overheard, although there’s only the two of them in the room. “It’s nothing really,” she says. “Just . . . I don’t like to stay there. Not by myself. It always feels like someone is watching. I’ve looked, and there’s no one there. But I still feel it. And then last week . . .” She pauses, looks at her lap. Holly follows her gaze, notices her cuticles are chewed bloody and ragged. “Last week, when I turned around quickly, I’d swear I saw a shadow by the window. And then it was just gone. Which is impossible, because that window is on the second floor.” She shakes her head. “Crazy, right?”