Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

When I open the door, I think someone else is inside. I have a sense of the pressure changing, a floorboard lowering. I wait on the step, listening, but I don’t hear another creak, or a door close.

I can’t do this. The blood staining the floors and the walls has turned black. My ears start to ring. But she might have left something inside about Keith, or someone following her, or her friend from the hospital.

I raise the thermostat, and there is a roar as the boiler comes on in the basement. My whole body twitches at the sound. I look at the banister. The dog’s lead didn’t cause any damage, and in the row of four turned wooden posts the one he hanged from doesn’t look different from the others, except for a few stains. I think, nonsensically, of the houses on Priory Walk in Chelsea, the identical white decoys on either side.

I check the ceiling, and it does have a long crack across it. Keith was telling the truth about that much. The radiators start to hiss as I cross the living room. Anything important will probably be in the files under her desk, but I decide to start downstairs. I move through the rooms, looking for anything out of order, anything the police might have missed.

All the surfaces are covered with a thin layer of black carbon. I run my finger through it and sniff, but it doesn’t smell like anything. The police also left ice in the sink in the kitchen, though other than that the room is unchanged. The pot on the hob. The slate bowl of chestnuts.

Her ax is propped against the back door. The sight of it prompts a burst of hope, as though she has a chance now.

I imagine coming in with a fire lit, and the living room filled with people, and someone cooking dinner in the kitchen, and the lamps burning against the dreck. It wouldn’t have made it easier. I imagine a priest walking through the rooms, reading a psalm, but the only lines that come to mind are from a poem. And I have asked to be / Where no storms come.

Through the front window, I look across the valley until I think I find the hole cut in the trees. He might have come in the house on one of the days he watched her. She left a key under the mat, he could have let himself in when she was at work or asleep. I try not to think of it. I can’t decide if I would feel safer with the front door locked or unlocked.

I switch on a lamp and the kitchen glows faintly, with the drizzle at the windows. The round wooden table near the entryway, the rag rug, the oven across the room. A thick bunch of parsley stands in a glass of water by the sink. On the shelf above it is a package of pasta striped pink and green, shaped like tricorner hats. Rachel had an alert on tickets to Rome, and I imagine the travel deals still filing into her in-box, unread messages ticking in one by one.

I open the cupboards, which smell, as they always have, faintly of incense, and stare at the boxes of tea, bags of lentils, flour, the jars of sherbet lemons and wine gums and licorice ropes. A few weeks ago, we came back from the cinema and she walked to the counter, where the jar of licorice stood empty.

“Was this you?” she asked.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. She hadn’t even taken off her coat, she walked straight to the counter and pointed at the jar with her gloved hand. I can’t remember if she sounded scared, or just annoyed at me for finishing it. It was a strange way to phrase it, I realize now. Who else could it have been?

As I leave the kitchen, I stumble. My hearing tunnels, then disappears, and my vision breaks into spots like pixels. I lean my forehead on the counter until I can hear the wind gusting around the house again, and the slush of a car driving by, and myself sighing.

I am going up the stairs, and then for a long time I am staring at her handprint on the steps. I can see the notches in her fingers and the three deep lines across her palm.

I hold on to the banister, then tip forward onto the step. I crawl up the stairs and the corridor stretches dim and empty in front of me. Past the open doors, the other rooms are bathed in pale light. I press myself flat to the floor where I last saw her. I don’t think I’ll be able to get up again. I think of her socked feet.

• • •

Her bedroom still smells like her. Across the valley, the red light on the radio tower has a foggy halo. The radiators hiss steam into the room.

Her desk has two filing cabinets underneath it, and I start to sort through the papers. Someone may have written to her. She was clever. If she knew she was being stalked, she would keep a record of it.

Stacks of bureaucratic papers, from the hospital, from the bank, from the purchase of her home. Old letters, recipes, lists of projects around the house. It takes a long time to go through all of it, and I find nothing, no mention of Keith, or someone named Martin, no suspicious notes or letters.

In the bathroom there is a jar of olive oil and sea salt. My heart lurches. It seems an impossible thing for her to have done. Who has the time? Though it doesn’t take any, of course, pouring a thick cup of olive oil and stirring in the salt. The jar is the same brown as the bottle of hydrogen peroxide next to it, which she used on cuts and to dry the water in her ears after swimming.

She was moving to Cornwall, five hours away. I wonder if that would have been far enough. It felt safe, though. All those small villages. The walls of trees. Smugglers hid there for centuries. St. Ives is large, too, she could blend in.

At the Chinese restaurant, I asked Lewis why it would take the man who attacked her in Snaith so long to find her. “He might not have known her name,” he said.

I wonder if Rachel thought she was about to lurch out of the house, call for help, survive. If as she died, she was thinking, On the count of three—

There are two full suitcases in the boot of her car. She had started to pack for Cornwall.

I WAS ON the cliff path in Polperro. There were beach roses. I was hauling groceries to our house. Bottles of tonic, cherries, potatoes, spinach, crisps, lemons, and a dozen channel scallops. The shop in town sold ice and firewood. All the grocer’s shops in Cornwall sold ice and firewood.

The bottles of tonic knocked against my knees. Below the cliff, a fishing boat motored through a cloud of seagulls. It looked talismanic, with the birds whirling around it, but, then, so did a lot of things here, like the pointed white caps on the dock pilings, and the anchor ropes disappearing under water.

We ate dinner together every night in Cornwall and had an endless number of things to say. She was my favorite person to talk with, because what caught her attention caught mine too. Rachel cooked and I did the shopping, which I didn’t mind. I liked seeing all the boats straining in the same direction in the harbor and the traps stacked on the quay.

I was starving. We both were, all the time. “Sea air,” said Rachel. I went to the grocer’s nearly every day to replenish our stocks. I wanted salt and vinegar crisps, which tasted like seawater, and Rachel wanted pots of toffee. “What has toffee got to do with the ocean?” I asked, and she said, “It’s delicious.”

I carried the groceries down the path. The beach roses were pink and the Kilburn high street was hundreds of miles away. Later, after I unpacked the groceries, the sun sank through bars of gray cloud, lighting a red path on the water. “The sun road,” said Rachel.

ON MY WAY BACK from her house, the priest stops me and introduces himself. He is only in his thirties and reminds me of the boys I went to school with at St. Andrews. Who knows how he ended up here. He should be banking.

He asks about arrangements for the funeral. “They won’t let me bury her,” I say. We stand by the rill, a thin, decorative stream that runs down Boar Lane between the houses and the road. He tells me we can still hold a funeral and offers to perform the service.