Flynn Berry: Under the Harrow

Not far from here is a corner shop. I could buy kitchen roll, a jug of fuel, and matches. This is so clear I may have already done it. I imagine the weight of the jug rocking in my hand as the fuel glugs out. It splashes on my feet. It darkens the brick. I imagine the smell of petrol. I imagine carefully wiping the fuel from my hands before lighting the kitchen roll.

I consider the house. I consider the house burning, but I would only be doing him a favor, destroying evidence.

I keep thinking of the officers swarming the woods behind her house. They had seemed so certain of the direction, that they’d find something. Then and all the nights since, like a clock steadily ticking, he has been here.

• • •

Louise meets me in the alley behind his house. “It was him,” she says. Her teeth chatter. “He told me he took care of it.”

She dials the police station in Abingdon, which we decided would act on the information more quickly than the one in Stoke. “My name’s Louise Rosten. A friend of mine just confessed to the murder of Rachel Lawrence.”

The desk officer transfers her to a detective whose voice I don’t recognize. Louise tells him about the confession and says she’s scared he’s going to hurt her now. She describes what he did to the dog. It still hasn’t come out in the press, only the police and the emergency workers who came to her house that day could know about it, and the person who did it. The detective asks her to hold the line. Her teeth don’t stop chattering.

When he returns, the detective says he has spoken to the station in Stoke, which will send patrol cars to the shop to arrest him. In the meantime, he asks Louise to wait somewhere safe.

• • •

I went cliff jumping once in Dorset, so I recognize this, that I am paralyzed with fear. Even with the handful of other shops, the block is quieter than I expected. The shop walls are made of plaster that was scraped into crescents before it dried. There is no side or rear exit. The building stands near the middle of the block. The lights are on, weakly, and I think I can see the shape of a person through the window display.

Louise will be gone by now. We agreed she would take a train back to Oxford. The detective will call her in for a full statement.

The police will be here soon. The Stoke police station is two miles away, but there might be a patrol car closer by. I command myself to move, which is as useless as when I told myself to jump off a fifty-foot cliff into Mirror Lake, which I did eventually, out of some combination of weariness and fatalism, like I had already done it and died, and I move toward the door. I take my hood down.

Martin Hold is behind the counter, and at first his face is blank and open. Then something slides over it. He recognizes me. It is as obvious as the moment when the friend you are meeting first sees you.

He is younger than I expected. Not far past thirty. He wears a gray sweater with holes at the hem. He has red in his hair. There is a deep wrinkle across his forehead. He has a short beard, and his hair is grown out. He looks like anyone, but just underneath it is the adolescent, when his skin was worse and his hairline shaved back. He is so familiar, like one of the boys we grew up with.

I don’t remember starting to cry but my face is wet.

“Hello,” I say, in the voice I used to have. I can tell that my face is contorting.

He stares at me without saying anything. I lift the pistol from my bag and point it at him.

“Roll your sleeves up.”

His eyes are wide. He lowers his head and slowly pushes up one sleeve.

Both of his arms are covered in red marks. One of the scars forms a neat half circle around his forearm. The dog’s jaw. My body is shuddering now. I want him dead. It’s what Rachel would want me to do, I know that now.

“Did it take a long time?” I ask.

He continues to watch me, and I don’t think he will answer.

“No,” he says.

I lower the gun and walk outside. The road is quiet under a gray sky. I can hear the sirens. At first I think I am imagining them, a disruption somewhere in the distance, but the sound grows steadily louder, and I start to move away from it.

• • •

Both of us went cliff jumping in Dorset. The water was so clear that after Rachel jumped I could see her on the other side, plunging down through the center of what looked like a cascading, clear swell.

MARTHA IS WAITING FOR me at a pub in Battersea. It’s warm enough now that people sit outside cafés on the King’s Road.

I turn down an alley. A man appears at the far end, walking toward me, and I consider turning back. As we pass, he nods at me, and then I am out the other side, and rushing across the bright road.

• • •

I know I’m going to be all right. And I know I will never stop missing her.

What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall? I asked her. But it wasn’t what I meant. I meant, what’s your favorite thing about being alive?

And she said, Well.

She said, To start—

I wish to thank: Michael Adams, my first reader; Emily Forland, my agent; and Lindsey Schwoeri, my editor.

The three of you are ferociously intelligent, wry, and kind. You have each made this thrilling in different ways, and I am enormously grateful.

All at the Michener Center for Writers and Yaddo.

Everyone at Penguin.

My friends, and especially Nick Cherneff, Kate DeOssie, Donna Erlich, Jackie Friedman, Allison Kantor, Suchi Mathur, Justine McGowan, Madelyn Morris, Althea Webber, and Marisa Woocher.

My aunts, Kassia Dellabough, Marlitt Dellabough, and Liana Rödegård, who have been the best possible source for research.

All of my family, and especially my parents, Jon Berry and Robin Dellabough.

And Jeff Bruemmer.