The Family Game by Catherine Steadman (86)

The cold is inside me now, my whole body quaking. I need to get out. I need to find this body and get out of here.

I stuff my clue card into a pocket above the waterline and shine my torch across the dark pool. I know what I need to do. I don’t want to do it, but that’s irrelevant. Someone’s in here and I need to see whatever is around her neck.

I wade through the foul water, my arms searching for something solid in the soup.

It touches my bare right leg first, and in spite of knowing it’s coming, I leap back, causing stinking water to splash up as far as my hair. I quickly wipe putrid water from my eyes using my dry shoulder, then I shine my torch into the water above the submerged object. It’s funny, there’s knowing something, and then there’s experiencing it. I have experienced dead bodies, I have felt them, the strange weight they suddenly have, the cooling and hardening of once soft skin, the difference life makes to flesh, to bone, to hair.

I know and yet, inches from this person, I am scared. An animal instinct, a reflexive fear of death overriding my system. It’s strange, because the dead are really the only things in the world who can’t hurt us anymore.

I push away thoughts of who this girl might be, of how she ended up down here. All I need to focus on is what is around her neck.

Do not look at her face, I remind myself. If you do see it, you will never forget it. Do not look at her face.

I thrust my hands deep into the brown water. They make contact as expected with cold slippery flesh and tangled-up clothing. She is hard and soft at the same time, like rotten fruit. I slip one arm under her and cradle her body up toward the surface.

Do not think, I remind myself, just do.

She breaches the surface white and bloated, the stench overwhelming. I gasp in spite of myself. A bare shoulder comes into view but I keep my gaze elliptic, skimming over the edges of what I see as I handle it. Mousy brown hair tangled into wet swirls curled against the gray-white flesh. It’s Melissa. Aliza had jet-black hair. Melissa is wearing a red blouse, rotten and waterlogged. Khaki slacks, a belt. Each image I let in is an image I know will haunt me. I’ve played this game before. I know how it goes. Then I locate it: a silver necklace around her bruised throat.

I focus only on that, my torch gritted between my teeth. I catch the edges of her chin, a bottom lip thick and purpled. Her hair is so close to my face; the smell, too much.

The silver of her chain twinkles, and as her head tilts back into the water I use my free hand to turn her necklace. The charm on it glistens into view, winking in the torchlight. It’s a star. A sparkling diamond star.

That is all I need.

I let her sink back into the water and she disappears, the pool eddying around her until it is still once more. I do not have time to mourn. I think of Melissa’s family, her friends perhaps unaware she is even gone yet, and my heart is full of sadness.

I am shuddering enough to ripple the water around me now. I need to get warm or risk hypothermia. I need to get out.

I scramble across to the ladder and haul my soaking body out, cold hands raw against the rope.

My Christmas Eve present, and whatever fresh hell that might entail, is hidden under a star. And I know exactly where I might find one of those.





46


Something Clicks


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25



I barrel back across the lawn toward the house. There’s a chance I could still win this, if everyone else has been going through the same awful things I have.

I push from my mind what might happen after this game ends. My desire to call the police and confess everything just so I can drag the whole Holbeck family kicking and screaming to justice is pretty heady, though I know I’d only go down with them.

Right now, I tell myself, I just need to finish this game. I need to win—and when I know every single thing each of these people has done, I will decide what I should do with that knowledge. I’m going to beat them at their own fucked-up game and then I’m going to beat them for real.

I scramble past the maze and on to the ornamental garden, my trainers slipping in the snow, my muscles erratic and juddering from the cold. Ahead, the lights of the house are warm and inviting and so close.

Something catches my trainer and sends me sprawling forward into the snow, knocking the air from me.

I roll over, arms up to protect myself, but there is nobody there. I rise on my elbows and look at what tripped me. There’s a half-buried wellie jutting from the snow.

Immediately I know whose boot it is; she was standing here with me in them spewing bile less than an hour ago. Dread rises inside me as I clamber to my feet.

“Fiona,” I call softly, but there is no one there.

I scan the ground for footprints, and in the beam of my torch her tracks appear heading back toward the maze. Judging by her gait, and the fact that she didn’t stop to retrieve her boot, she must have been running. Something must have scared her so much that losing a boot seemed irrelevant. Something tells me to ignore this diversion and carry on with my own game, but if something happened to her, even though I don’t like the woman, I’m not sure I could live with that.

At the maze’s entrance, I notice a torn piece of red silk flapping, snagged on a low branch.

Oh God. Not in the maze, seriously?

If I’m going in there, I need something with a bit more heft than the paperweight in my pocket. I look around the maze’s entrance for something, anything, I can use as a weapon. I really only have one option. I squat over the wooden maze arrow sign and heave it from the frozen ground. It pops out of the earth after a few wiggles and I fall back, a sharp wooden stake in hand.