Flynn Berry: Under the Harrow

In the early dusk, uniformed figures move in the long grass at the edge of Rachel’s lawn. I leave the road in front of her neighbor’s property and walk around the horse paddock. Behind it, a path climbs the ridge.

I walk slowly, stopping sometimes to use my hand for balance on the rocks, until I am across the valley from Rachel’s house. All the lights are on, and figures move in the upstairs windows. I count eighteen people searching in the grass, under the roiling sky. The blue tape is still stretched across the door and a man in uniform stands beside it.

Snow starts to fall. A gust of white smoke billows up over the cliff edge. Someone is in the professor’s house below the ridge. I lean over until I can see its roof and chimneys. Twists of steam rise, melting into the snow. The professor is walking up the drive, throwing handfuls of yellow sand and salt. At the edge of his property he looks across the road to Rachel’s house. His shoulders slump, and the empty paper bag hangs at his side.

He stands there, waiting, I think, for someone to come down the hill so he can ask if there is any news. They will have interviewed him already. I imagine there are tears in his eyes. He liked Rachel. And I think he must have been scared last night, maybe unable to sleep.

I look up, my chest raw and aching. The snow stops, hovers, swirls in fast horizontal gyres. I walk toward the spine of the ridge, away from the cliff edge, through a band of low, twisting trees. They are barely taller than my head, stunted by the wind. A branch jabs out from one with a piece of stiff yellow fabric hanging over it. I step onto a flat rock, and when I come down its other side, I land in a mess of beer cans and cigarette ends. The back of my neck prickles and heat rushes over my skin. I look up slowly and there, framed in a gap between the trees, is Rachel’s house.

The branches form a portrait oval around it. In the dusk I can see people moving through the rooms of her house. As night falls, the pictures in the windows will grow sharper and clearer. She didn’t have any curtains, except for one in the bathroom. I can see its white gauze, but even that reaches only to the sash. You would be able to see the top of her head when she stood at the sink to brush her teeth, when she came out of the shower.

Someone drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills and watched her. I search the ridge behind me. I pick up a sharp rock and turn in a circle, so the litter and dry leaves crackle under my boots. I wait for a man to appear. I’m not frightened, I want to see who did this to her. As the minutes pass, the chance that someone else is here sags, then collapses.

Through the gap in the branches, I watch the snow fall on her house. The ridge is so quiet I think I can hear the snow as it lands on the frozen ground. An absolute bleakness takes hold of me. The men searching the grounds move deeper into the woods. I notice the snow melting on the cigarette ends, so they soften and expand.

I call Lewis, whose car is parked at the bottom of her lawn. I watch him duck under the tape and come out of the house. He stands on the drive in a dark overcoat. In the silence, I watch him take the phone from his pocket and check the screen.

“Hello, Nora.”

“I found something.”

“Where are you?”

I scramble out onto the path, in front of the thorn trees, and start to wave. “Here.”

He rotates his head, then sees me. He stops. His face is a distant blur, his tie twisting in the wind, his trousers bagging above his shoes.

By the time I hear him on the path, I am frozen. As he steps into the gap in the trees, I know from his expression that I look absurd.

Lewis stares at me, his face slackened and sad, through the portrait oval of the branches. Two more years, he said in the car, but I can see he wishes it were none. The thorn branches arch above him.

He ducks under them and kneels to look at the ground. I wonder if he expects to find nothing, that I have been guarding nothing. As he stands, he turns and sees the house, framed by the gap in the trees, in a perfect oval, as though someone cut back the branches. His shoulders drop.

“Someone was watching her,” I say.

“Nora,” says Lewis, “why did you come here?” He stands a head taller than me, and he addresses the question into the space above me.

“I wanted to see the house.”

He nods, staring over the cliff. “Did you think someone was watching Rachel?”

“No.”

We look at the valley, and the stands of trees forming dark pools in the white snow. In daylight, a man would be invisible up here, and at night he could move closer. I imagine him circling the house, putting his hands on the windows.

A man in a forensic suit — the thin fabric stretched over his shoes and pulled taut over his head — comes up the path. Lewis asks him to bag the material, and we start down the ridge. Ahead of me Lewis leaves a trail of footprints on the snow. Off the far side of the ridge, the forest below is a series of crosshatches.

We scramble down the rock and emerge behind the paddock. I follow Lewis to the road, my legs growing heavy as we trudge through the snow.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

• • •

The Emerald Gate has plastic tables and photographs of the dishes backlit above the till. A young man in chef’s whites lifts a metal basket from a fryer and shakes it before letting it submerge again, and the smell of oil makes my mouth water. My last full meal was two days ago, at the pub in London.

I watch the pearls of jasmine open in my tea, groggy and fascinated. My fists push my cheeks up to my eyes. Lewis slides his knees under the table, looking too large for his chair. I rub my thumb over my cheek, which was scratched by the thorn trees.

Our food arrives on the counter. Lewis ordered moo shu pancakes, and I’m having the same, since I couldn’t face making a decision. The rhythm of it calms me, spooning the mixture onto a thin flour pancake, folding it into a triangle, dipping it into the plum sauce. We assemble and eat in silence as the snow drifts under the streetlamps.

“Nora,” he says, “why did you go to the ridge?”

“I told you, I wanted to see the house.”

Behind the counter, the cook ladles wonton soup into a plastic container, and the salty smell of the broth drifts over to us.

“Did Rachel ever say anything to make you think to look there?”

“No.” I fold the edges of the pancake. Lewis has stopped eating and is watching me.

“When did she get her dog?” he asks.

“Five years ago, when she moved to Marlow. She was twenty-seven.” I dip the pancake into plum sauce.

“Did anything else important happen that year?”

“No.”

“But she got a German shepherd.”

“Lots of people do,” I say.

“We found papers in her house. The dog was bred and trained by a security firm in Bristol.”

I stop with a spoon halfway to my plate. “What?”

“They sell dogs for protection.”

I remember Rachel on the lawn, calling commands while Fenno raced around her. She said she had to train him so he wouldn’t be bored. “She told me she adopted him.”

“Maybe she was scared,” says Lewis, “because of what happened in Snaith.”

By the time he finished, she couldn’t walk. Every one of her fingernails was split from fighting him.

“Do you think it was him?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he wait fifteen years?”

“Maybe he was looking for her.”

WE WENT TO a party the night she was attacked. It was the first week in July and I had a job at the town pool as assistant junior lifeguard, which meant that if three people were drowning at opposite ends of the pool I could rescue the smallest one.