Tana French - The Likeness

A small, tense shift through the room. None of them were looking at each other. I searched for some tiny difference between their faces, anything that would hint that this conversation was hitting one of them harder than the others, that someone was protecting, being protected, guilty, defensive: nothing.

“Then,” Abby said, on a big breath. “Lex, I don’t know if you’d thought about what it would mean, if you sold your share to Ned. You don’t always… I don’t know. Think things through.”

A vicious snort from Rafe. “That’s putting it mildly. My God, Lexie, what the hell did you think would happen? You’d sell up, buy yourself a nice little apartment somewhere, and everything would be just ducky? What did you expect to get when you walked into college every morning? Hugs and kisses and your sandwich all ready for you? We would never have spoken to you again. We would have hated your guts.”

“Ned would have been at the rest of us,” Abby said, “all the time, every day, to sell out to some developer and turn this house into apartments or a golf club or whatever the hell it was that he wanted. He could have moved in here, lived with us, and there would’ve been nothing we could do about it. Sooner or later, we would have given up. We would have lost the house. This house.”

Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a creak of floorboards upstairs, a draft spinning down the stairwell.

“We all started shouting,” Justin said, low. “Screaming, everyone at once-I don’t even know what I was saying. You got away from Daniel, and Rafe grabbed you, and you hit him-hard, Lexie, you punched him in the stomach-”

“It was a fight,” Rafe said. “We can call it whatever we want, but the fact is we were fighting like a bunch of scumbags on a street corner. Another thirty seconds and we would all have been rolling around on the kitchen floor beating the living shit out of each other. Except that before we got that far-”

“Except,” Abby said, her voice slicing his off clean as a slammed door, “we never got that far.”

She met Rafe’s eyes calmly, unblinking. After a second he shrugged and slumped back on the sofa, one foot jiggling restlessly.

“It could have been any of us,” Abby said, to me or to Rafe, I couldn’t tell. There was a depth of passion in her voice that startled me. “We were all raging-I’ve never been that angry in my life. The rest was just chance; just the way things happened. Every one of us was ready to kill you, Lexie, and you can’t blame us.”

That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of my hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys. “I don’t,” I said. I wondered-I should have known a whole lot better, I must have read too many cheesy ghost stories as a kid-if this was all Lexie had wanted from me: to let them know it was OK. “You had every right to be mad. Even afterwards, you would’ve had every right to throw me out.”

“We talked about it,” Abby said. Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Me and Daniel. Whether we could all still live together, after… But it would have been complicated, and anyway, it was you. No matter what, it was still you.”

“The next thing I remember,” Justin said, very quietly, “is the back door slamming and this knife lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. With blood on it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.”

“And you just let me go?” I said, to my hands. “You didn’t even bother to find out if-”

“No,” said Abby, leaning forwards, trying to catch my eye. “No, Lex. Of course we bothered. It took us all a minute to catch up with what had happened, but the second we did… It was Daniel, mostly; the rest of us were basically paralyzed. By the time I could move again, he was already getting the torch out. He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready-”

“Which would have come in useful,” Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, “if we’d been delivering a baby in Gone With the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby’s embroidery needle?”

“-and he and Justin went looking for you. Straight away.”

It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan that kept them both busy, all within seconds. The guy was wasted on academia.

“I’m not sure we were really as quick off the mark as we think,” Justin said. “We could have been standing there in a daze for a good five or ten minutes, for all I know. I can barely remember that part; my mind’s wiped it out. The first thing I’m clear on is that, by the time Daniel and I got to the back gate, you were gone. We didn’t know if you’d headed for the village to get help, or collapsed somewhere, or-”

“I just ran,” I said quietly. “I just remember running. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding for ages.” Justin flinched.

“I don’t think you were, at first,” Abby said gently. “There wasn’t any blood on the kitchen floor, or on the patio.”

They had checked. I wondered when, and whether that had been Daniel’s idea or Abby’s. “That was the other thing,” Justin said. “We didn’t know… well, how bad it was. You were gone so fast, we hadn’t had a chance to… We thought-I mean, I thought, anyway-since you had got out of sight so quickly, it couldn’t be all that serious, could it? It might have been just a nick, for all we knew.”

“Ha,” said Rafe, reaching for an ashtray.

“We didn’t know. It might have been. I said so to Daniel, but he just gave me a look that could have meant anything. So we… God. We started looking for you. Daniel said the most urgent thing was to find out if you’d gone to the village, but it was all locked up and dark, just the odd light on in bedrooms; there was obviously nothing going on. So we started working our way back towards the house, going back and forth in these big arcs, hoping we’d cross paths with you somewhere along the way.”

He stared down at the glass in his hands. “At least, that’s what I assume we were doing. I was just following Daniel on and on and on through this pitch-black labyrinth of lanes; I had no idea where we were, my sense of direction was completely gone. We were afraid to switch on the torch and afraid to call you-I’m not even sure why, it just seemed too dangerous: in case someone in a farmhouse noticed or in case you hid from us, I suppose, I don’t know which. So Daniel just flicked on the torch for a second every few minutes, cupped his hand around it and did a quick sweep, then switched it off again. The rest of the time we felt our way by the hedges. It was freezing, like winter-we hadn’t even thought of coats. It didn’t seem to bother Daniel, you know what he’s like, but I couldn’t feel my toes; I was sure I was getting frost-bite. We wandered around for hours-”

“You didn’t,” Rafe said. “Trust me. We were stuck here with a bottle of disinfectant and a bloody knife and nothing to do but stare at the clock and go out of our minds. You were only gone about forty-five minutes.”

Justin shrugged, a tense twitch. “Well, it felt like hours. Finally Daniel stopped dead-I bumped straight into the back of him, like something out of Laurel and Hardy-and he said, ‘This is absurd. We’ll never find her like this.’ I asked him what else he suggested we should do, but he ignored me. He just stood there, staring up at the sky like he was waiting for divine inspiration; it was starting to cloud over, but the moon had come up, I could see his profile against it. After a moment he said-perfectly normally, as if we were in the middle of some dinner-table discussion-‘Well, let’s assume she’s headed for a specific place, rather than simply wandering around in the dark. She must have been meeting Ned somewhere. Somewhere sheltered, surely; the weather’s so unpredictable. Is there anywhere nearby that she-’ And then he took off. He was running, flat out, and fast, I didn’t know he could run like that-I don’t think I’d ever seen Daniel run before, have you?”