Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“Yes.”

Nicholas guessed that this was unusual and Hannah habitually walked home with Miriam.

“What were the two girls arguing about?” asked Waller.

“Hannah never spoke to me.”

The girls were having a fight. That explained their separation.

“Was Miriam still in her school uniform when you dropped Hannah home?”

“I never saw Miriam.”

Miriam had made it home after school, but she’d gone missing afterward-sometime in the night.

“You say you were at the presbytery with Reverend Anand and Laine Boye. Till when?”

“I don’t know. Ten or so.”

“Did you drive straight home?”

“Yes.”

“Did you stop at any shops? Gas station? Parks?”

“No.”

He was left alone in the room then for a quarter of an hour, before Waller came in again. Her voice was even, but her frown was heavy as lead.

“You’re free to go, sir. There’s a taxi stand at the Transit Center across the road.”

Without realizing why, he’d asked her to phone Laine Boye.

And so now he was hugging the police building’s front wall, trying to stay dry. He lifted his fingers to his neck. The wooden beads felt warm. His back against the stone felt frozen.

Eventually, to his surprise, Laine arrived.

T he car’s tires hissed on the road. Nicholas slumped in the passenger seat. They drove in silence for a long while. He looked at Laine. Her eyes were as gray as the sky.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

Laine glanced at him. Was that a flash of self-consciousness?

“What do you mean?” she replied.

“I mean, how do you feel?”

The rainy-day traffic was stop-start and the cars inched ahead like cattle toward a crush. She didn’t answer, so he spoke again.

“There are nights I still dream that Cate is lying beside me. And then I wake up. And at that moment when I… remember, I feel like I feel now. Heavy.” He watched the rainy world sliding idly by. “Like if you laid me on the ground I’d just sink into the earth.”

Laine drove, grim-faced.

“I used to feel like that,” she said. “Then Gavin killed himself.”

He looked back at her. Her profile was strong and fine. Hers was a face out of antiquity, anachronistic. She should have been born in a city of Renaissance sculptors, or the daughter of some Pharaoh, not today when culture was a thousand hits on YouTube. No wonder she was always angry.

As if feeling his gaze, she turned suddenly to face him. “Did you love her?” she asked. “Cate?”

Nicholas nodded. “Very much.”

Laine lifted her chin. “You said last night that you can see…” She hesitated. “That you see ghosts. Did you ever see her? Cate? After she died?”

Nicholas was quiet. For some reason, this seemed deeply personal, like a new lover’s questions about past partners. He didn’t want to answer. But his tongue betrayed him. “Yes.”

Laine drew a long breath through her nostrils. “You must be so sad.”

He thought about that. “I’m not sad. I’m angry.”

Laine smiled. “I was angry. Now I’m sad.” She flicked on the turn signal. “Aren’t we a pair?”

The car turned onto Coronation Drive, and their speed picked up.

“Where am I taking you?” she asked.

Before he could think why, he answered, “The church.”

She nodded, checked her mirrors, and changed lanes. As she turned, Nicholas saw a small cut on her cheek.

“What happened to your face?” he asked, and guessed: “Mrs. Boye?”

“Yes.”

Her tone said the talking, for now, was over.

O utside the church, a group of middle-aged and elderly men and women huddled under umbrellas, hardly moving, heads turning this way and that. To Nicholas they looked like a team of mallard ducks-dignified and vulnerable. Their heads all followed Laine’s car as it slowed and stopped. He would have been unsurprised if they’d sprouted wings and fled, honking forlornly. He wound down his window. “Hi. The rectory’s around the side.”

An old man with a long face and wide, hairy nostrils looked down at him. “We do know.”

Nicholas shook his head. Then why…?

“The reverend is dead, and his replacement is in hospital.”

“Who?” asked Nicholas. “Pritam? Reverend Anand’s in hospital?”

An old woman with sagging wattles looked at him as if he were a fool. “Do you know any other replacement? We’re discussing what to do.”

Nicholas looked at Laine.

At that moment, Laine’s lips lifted in a sudden, pained snarl and her head threw back hard against the headrest. For a moment, her long fingers snatched at the air and then at the fresh wound on her face…

“Laine!”

Her gray eyes rolled back in her head and she sank limp into her seat.

H annah sat in her beanbag stroking Swizzle. The cat’s girth was growing in direct proportion to his unwillingness to go outside. Hannah liked his warmth on her lap. If she thought about nothing but the immediate task of scratching behind Swizzle’s ears and keeping the rumbly motor inside him purring, things were okay.

Her bottom hurt where her father had hit her for lying. Just thinking of how his face had been a twisted fist at once so angry and terrified made her want to start crying all over again.

She had been dragged up from the depths of ugly sleep by motion, sliding. She’d opened her eyes and looked right up into the pale, angry, scared face of her father. This morning her father took a moment to process the empty bed, the picture frame on the floor, his youngest daughter blinking sleepily on it, before whispering, “Where’s your sister?” The memory of the spiders tumbled back as heavily and hard as stones off a dump truck, and Hannah started to bawl. Her father asked her again and again until Hannah finally stuttered through sobs, “The spiders took her.”

Before she could explain that she’d had no choice, that if she’d let them in she’d be dead too, or if she’d screamed he and Mum would be, her father spanked her. Hard. And stalked out of the room.

Hannah hung around in a distant orbit as her parents set fire to the morning with raging phone calls, storming to the car and screeching away, storming back, standing at the door and yelling for Miriam. The fire died and became something quiet and tight-lipped. When Hannah heard her name mentioned, it was quickly snapped up by her father hissing about “ridiculous dreams.”

It was ridiculous that a black, silent army of spiders would come in the dead of night to steal one girl and, bested, would take her older sister. But it was true. So Hannah sat in the beanbag, petting Swizzle and nursing her still-stinging bum, trying not to think about what had happened to Miriam after the spiders got her. She was still in her beanbag when the police came. When the lady police officer came over and asked Hannah if she’d heard any funny noises in the night, Hannah knew she would be a fool to say anything but “No.”

Miriam was down in the woods. Hannah searched inside herself for the smallest feeling that disagreed, but found none. But if it hadn’t been Miriam, it would have been her. The fact that she was so relieved not to have been taken by the spiders and cocooned up alive and screaming, to be bitten and poisoned and sucked dry or whatever else spiders did made her feel guilty and even glummer. Something had tried to get her yesterday, leaving the horrible dead bird disguised as a crystal unicorn. It had failed, and instead had taken Miriam to the woods, taken her because Hannah had chosen to hide silently in her room instead of doing something.

As Hannah sat, her lap warmed by Swizzle and her buttocks by the hot sting of a hard slap, surrounded by a buzz of men and women in blue and her parents clenching each other’s hands, she realized what she had to do.