The Hiding Place(70)

I collapsed into bed. Something fluttered briefly, like a soft gray moth, in my mind. Something about Annie, in her bed. Something important that was missing. But, before I could grasp it, it was gone again. Dissolved into dust. I pulled the duvet up to my chin and closed my eyes…





29





“And in the morning, she was gone?”

“She never made it back. The lump in the bed was a pile of toys. The hair—a doll.” I shake my head. “A pile of fucking toys. I should have seen it. I should have checked.”

“You sound like you were concussed yourself, not thinking straight.”

But I should have noticed what was missing. Abbie-Eyes. Abbie-Eyes wasn’t on the bed. Annie would never have left her down there. She would have brought her back.

“What happened then?” Miss Grayson asks.

“The police were called. Search parties sent out. I tried to tell them. Tried to explain how Annie would follow me sometimes, up to the pit. How they should look up there.”

“But you didn’t tell them what happened?”

“I wanted to. But by then Hurst had told the police we were all at his house that night. His dad backed him up. No one would believe me. Not my word against his.”

Miss Grayson nods and I think: She knows. She knows I am a liar and a coward.

“You didn’t go back to look for her?”

“I couldn’t get near and the police wouldn’t let me join the search parties. I just kept thinking they would find the hatch. They would find her. They had to.”

“Sometimes, some places, like people, have to want to be found.”

I would very much like to dismiss this as crazy. But I know she’s right. Chris didn’t find the hatch. It found him. And if it didn’t want you inside, you’d never find it again.

“I was going to confess,” I say. “I was going to go down to the police station and tell them everything.”

“What stopped you?”

“She came back.”

And they all lived happily ever after.

Except, there’s no such thing. My little sister came back. She sat in the police station, swinging her legs, an oversized blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Abbie-Eyes clutched tightly in her arms. And she smiled at me.

That was when I knew. That was when I realized what was wrong. So terribly, horribly wrong.

Annie’s head. Where was the wound? The blood? All I could see was a small red scar on her forehead. I stared at it. Could it have healed so quickly? Had I been wrong? Had I imagined the blow being worse than it was? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.

“Joe?”

“Something happened to my sister,” I say slowly. “I can’t explain what. I just know that, when she came back, she wasn’t the same. She wasn’t my Annie.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. No one does. And I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to forget it.” I look at her angrily. “You said you know what happened to my sister. You know nothing.”

She stares back at me, her gaze cool and appraising. Then she stands and walks to the desk. She opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of sherry and two glasses.

She fills both to the brim, hands one glass to me and sits back down, clutching the other. I’m not really a fan of sherry but I take a sip. A large one.

“I had a sister once,” she says.

“I didn’t know—”

“She was stillborn. I saw her, just afterward. She looked just like she was sleeping, except, of course, she didn’t breathe, didn’t make a sound. I remember the village midwife—an older woman—wrapping her up and placing her in my mother’s arms. And then she said something I’ll always remember: ‘It doesn’t need to be like this. I know a place you can take her—you could bring your baby back.’ ”

I want to make an acerbic comment. Something pithy, something puerile. I want to tell her that she was a child and misinterpreted the words. I want to tell her that memories become soft over time. As malleable as putty in our minds—we can shape them into anything we want.

But I find I can’t. That cold draft is back. A window open somewhere.

“What did your mother do?”

“Told the woman to get out. To never speak of such things.”

“Did you ever ask her about it?”

“My parents never talked about my sister. But then, very few of us talk about death, do we? It’s a dirty secret. And yet, in a way, death is the most important part of life. Without it, our existence would be unthinkable.”

I throw back the rest of the sherry. “Why did you want me to come back?”

“To stop history repeating itself.”

“You can’t. That’s what history does. We like to pretend we learn from our mistakes, but we don’t. We always think it will be different this time. And it never is.”

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”

I bark out a laugh. “Right now, I have no idea what I believe, or why I’m here.”

“Then let me help you—I believe that Jeremy Hurst has found another way into the cave you discovered. He has been taking children down there. I think he took Ben and something happened to him, just like your sister.”