The Hiding Place(41)

The urge to hurl her out of a window, into the overgrown back garden, is almost overwhelming, but I’m seized by an even more unpleasant image of her crawling back to the house, her plastic, rosy-cheeked face pressed to the glass, peering in from the darkness.

Instead, holding her at arm’s length, like an unexploded bomb, I walk back down the stairs and into the kitchen. I open the cabinet under the sink, stuff her inside, along with the toilet brush, and slam the door shut.

Shit. My whole body is shaking. I’m not sure if I’m about to faint or about to have a heart attack. I pour a glass of water and gulp it down greedily.

I try to rationalize. Maybe I moved Annie’s doll myself and forgot—some kind of alcohol blackout. I remember Brendan telling me how, in his drinking days, he suffered from hallucinations and memory loss. Once, he woke to find he had pushed a wardrobe down the stairs. He had no recollection of doing it or any idea why.

“ ’Course, I was a lot bigger back then.” He winked. “Alcohol weight.”

Brendan, I think. I need to talk to Brendan. I try his number. It goes to voicemail. This isn’t comforting, despite Gloria’s assertion that he is fine. Gloria is not, I don’t think, a liar. But it would be good to hear his voice, even if it is just telling me to “feck off.” It occurs to me that I have come to count on Brendan being around when I need him, his presence as familiar and comforting as an old pair of jeans, or my boogie shoes. Worry gnaws at my already ragged edges.

I limp back into the living room. The folder is still open on the coffee table. I haven’t finished it. Some pages I skimmed. But I’m done for tonight. I get the message: Arnhill is a grim little village where a lot of bad things have happened. Jinxed. Cursed. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I start to pile the pages back into the folder. One of them catches my eye. It’s another newspaper cutting:

Tragic death of promising student

The picture: a smiling teenage girl. Pretty, with long dark hair and a glinting silver nose ring. Something about her smile reminds me of Annie. Despite myself, I scan the story. Emily Ryan, thirteen, a student at Arnhill Academy who killed herself with an overdose of alcohol and acetaminophen. Described as “bright, fun and full of life.”

“You ever lost one?”

Beth’s voice pops into my head. The student she talked about. Must be. But something about that is wrong. I sit down. It takes me a moment, my frazzled brain taking a while to haul itself up to speed. Finally, it clunks rustily into place.

I couldn’t tell you what day it is most of the time, but I could recite whole passages from Shakespeare (if you were very unlucky. And I really didn’t like you). I can memorize reams of text and random words. Just the way my mind works. I collect useless information like dust.

“One year, one day and about twelve hours, thirty-two minutes.”

That’s how long Beth said she had worked at Arnhill Academy. Which would put her start date at September 2016. According to this story, Emily Ryan died on March 16, 2016.

Of course, maybe Beth was wrong. Maybe she had her dates confused. But I don’t think so.

“Oh, I’m counting.”

Which means that Beth wasn’t a teacher here when Emily Ryan killed herself. Emily Ryan certainly wasn’t one of her students. So why did she lie to me?





18





I wake early the next morning. This is uncalled for. I half open one eyelid, groan and roll over. Annoyingly, my brain refuses to slip back into oblivion, even though the rest of my body feels like it has molded itself to the bed overnight.

I lie there for several minutes, willing myself back to sleep. In the end, I give up, peel myself from the mattress and swing my legs out, onto the cold floor. Coffee, my brain instructs. And nicotine.

It’s a gray, blustery day, the wind herding clouds across the sky like a parent hurrying along recalcitrant children. I shiver and finish the cigarette quickly, eager to get back inside to the relative warmth of the cottage.

Already the events of last night have become indistinct, blurred in my memory. I take Abbie-Eyes out of the cabinet. In daylight, she looks harmless. Just an old, broken doll. A little worse for wear, a little unloved. You and me both, I think.

I feel bad now about sticking her beneath the sink. So I take her through to the living room and place her on an armchair. I sit down on the sofa and finish my coffee. Abbie-Eyes and me, enjoying a little morning downtime.

I try Brendan’s number twice more. Still no reply. I re-read the newspaper article about Emily Ryan again. It makes no more sense this morning than it did last night. I try to distract myself by taking out a pile of papers to grade. I get about halfway through before I realize I have just written, “Feck, no!!!” beside one particularly clunky paragraph and give up.

I glance at my watch. It’s 9:30 a.m. I have no real desire to hang around the cottage all day. And nothing else to occupy my time.

There’s nothing else for it.

I decide to go for a walk.


—



The first tentative excavations in Arnhill began sometime back in the eighteenth century. The mine grew, expanded, was demolished, rebuilt and modernized over a period of two hundred years.

Thousands of men and families built their livelihoods around the mine. It wasn’t a job. It was a way of life. If Arnill was a living organism, then the mine was its beating, smoke-bellowing heart.