The Family Game by Catherine Steadman (82)

The first childhood room I stumble across is all in pink. Matilda’s, I surmise, and quickly move on. The next room is green and filled with sports trophies, wrestling, football, boxing. A photo of a young man padded up for a football game—broad, muscular, his helmet raised in triumph. Oliver’s room.

The next is red, on its walls jet fighters twisting in the air, miniature supercars lining the shelves, a faded 1997 Pirelli calendar hanging dog-eared by the window. Stuart’s room. I fly on down the corridor.

The next room is blue. I pause, instinct telling me to. This room is harder to read. It’s eerily impersonal. A computer, a 1990s beige plastic box, dominates the sparseness of the space. Pictures line the walls; a young man sailing, rowing, swimming. Again, trophies. Bobby rowed, but so did Edward. It’s impossible to tell from the doorway whose room this was, but the computer edges me toward it being Edward’s.

A door slamming somewhere deep in the house forces my gaze back down the corridor in the direction I have just come, but of course there is no one there.

I check the time on my mobile phone in the pocket of my blazer dress. I have been going for sixteen minutes already. Time is ticking, and I’m pretty sure I know what will happen if I lose this game.

I walk into the blue room and head for the nearest photo. It’s of Edward—younger, his face fuller, with an expression I do not recognize. There is something different in his eyes. I scan the room for another photo and find a framed one on the dresser; Edward sits beside Eleanor and someone else at a garden table, flowers in bloom around them. I gasp. The boy in the photo isn’t Edward, because Edward, much younger, is sitting right beside him.

The boy is Bobby. This is Bobby’s room. They looked so alike as children, and I realize that up until now I haven’t seen a photograph of them together when they were young. The uncanny thing is that young Bobby looks incredibly similar to Edward as he is now, as an adult. And now that I think about it, this whole room, its aesthetic, had felt like Edward’s room when I entered it. The computer, the color, the tidiness, the simplicity. Which makes me wonder: were they always so similar, or did Edward become more like his brother after the accident?

I leave Bobby’s door ajar and head to the next room.

Edward’s bedroom door swings open and I feel my brow pucker with confusion. This last room is incredibly busy, the walls lined with lithographs of historical architecture, intricate blueprints of elaborate and complex buildings. Columns and cornicing depicted in forensic detail, cross sections, elevations. I step into the room, uncertain; I must have mixed the rooms up somehow, because nothing about this room is Edward. I let my eyes sweep the surfaces for anything that reminds me of him but there isn’t even a computer in here. Just books; books on books: Roman history, the Greeks, the American Civil War, the world wars. History.

I take a photo from the bedside table. It is the whole family, except him; Edward must have taken it himself. I replace it carefully, my eye drawn to another photo hanging back by the door, Edward flanked by his mother and father. Eleanor is beaming, while father and son are serious; the usual spark behind Edward’s eyes is not present.

I try to shake off the odd feeling swelling inside me that I do not recognize the man I love from this photo, from this room. Bobby’s death must have changed him more than I ever considered, I think. But then my parents’ death made me who I am. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle; this must be what Robert wanted me to see. That Edward changed, after Bobby’s death. That Edward was not always as he is today. My Edward seems to fit the childhood bedroom of Bobby more than his own, but then he had to fill Bobby’s shoes, didn’t he?

The sound of a clock chiming somewhere in the house shakes me from my reverie. I need to keep moving. I need to find the next clue.

A childhood bed, not what it seems, I puzzle, paraphrasing the first clue.

On an impulse, I head toward Edward’s bed and slip a hand under his pillow. My fingers come into contact with the stiff card of another envelope.

Another clue.

You know me well, but not well enough.

Come look harder, though you scramble and scuff.

Peer into my darkness, it’s cold and deep,

But to win you must find the secrets I keep.

My hand goes to my mouth as I realize this clue leads me outside. I need to scramble and scuff in the cold and dark.

I try to shake off the dread of what I don’t quite understand yet.

I carefully reread my clue.

“You know me well, but not well enough,” I repeat out loud, and just like that the words jump into focus. “You know me well, but not well enough.” I will find the next clue out by the well.

The well that Edward showed me earlier today—the well that used to supply the property with water.

You must find the secrets I keep.

There’s something in the well. I have to get in it. Scramble and scuff. I think of the inky blackness I stared down into this morning. The damp hole spiraling down into darkness. Whether I want to do this or not, whether it is safe or not, I have to go.

I gave up my right to an easy life when I did what I did twenty years ago. My secret must be kept, because there is no excusing it.

You can say I didn’t know what I was doing back then, but I did. I wanted him to hurt like I did; I wanted him to pay. And this is the price I now have to pay.

This game might be my shot at wiping the slate clean. Robert hinted that my prize might just be that: my secret safe.