Rachel Bennett - Little Girls Tell Tales

‘I’m sorry.’ Dallin lifted his hands in a shrug. ‘I thought you got my email. I didn’t mean to rock up here without warning. I know you don’t like that sort of shit.’

‘I just … I don’t understand why you’re here.’ I gave him a shrug of my own. ‘How did Cora even find you?’

‘We met on the forum. I stumbled onto it a while ago, and, y’know, obviously I was interested, because there was at least one person on there who remembered,’ Dallin flapped a hand at the curraghs, still without looking in that direction, ‘all this. I ended up chatting to some of the folks. That’s how I met Cora.’ He came to stand next to me, turning so he could lean his back against the wall, facing the house. ‘I told her I knew about the curraghs legend first-hand. I mean, obviously, that wasn’t something I should’ve done. There’s a lot of crazy people on forums like that. And when Cora told me her story …’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I had to take it with a pinch of salt, you know? I was okay with messaging her and hearing her story, but I was ready to bail if it turned out she was one of the crazies.’

‘What convinced you she wasn’t?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt Cora’s story. But then, I always thought the best of people. Yet another thing that had consistently driven Beth nuts.

‘She understands it’s a longshot,’ Dallin said. ‘She’s not coming here with a burning sense of surety that this time she’ll definitely find Simone. This has been going on for a lot of years. She says she began looking seriously about three years ago, and she’s not let up since.’

Why then? I wondered. What had kickstarted her search after so many years, rather than when she was much younger?

‘What she’s doing here is following one more possible lead,’ Dallin said. ‘She understands, completely understands this might come to nothing. And she’s prepared for that.’

‘So, if I went back in and told Cora I didn’t see anything in the wetlands that day, that I’d made the whole thing up, she’d be okay with it?’

Dallin laughed. He leaned his head back so he could look at the dusky sky. ‘C’mon, Rose-petal. We all know you didn’t make it up. You invented some daft stories in your time, but you didn’t have that morbid sort of imagination.’

It was a backhanded compliment at best. ‘You shouldn’t have brought Cora here,’ I muttered. ‘All you’ve done is give her false hope.’

‘It’s not false hope. There’s a chance she’ll find something.’

‘No, there’s not.’ I turned so I was facing him. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve walked the curraghs? I’ve searched every inch of that place. If there was anything to find, don’t you think I would’ve found it?’

Dallin gave me a lop-sided smile that was so familiar I had to stop myself smiling in return. ‘Not necessarily. I’m not doubting you. I’m just saying there’s an outside chance you’re wrong.’

My expression hardened. ‘If you won’t tell her she’s wasting her time, I will.’

Dallin laughed again and gestured at the house. ‘Go ahead. Let me know if she listens to you, because she sure as hell didn’t listen to me when I told her the exact same thing.’ As I walked away towards the house, he added, ‘I should probably mention, she’s come prepared. Very prepared.’

Cora’s bag was a green satchel, decorated with applique owls. From inside the satchel, she produced a wodge of folded papers, which she spread out on the table.

‘There aren’t a lot of maps available online, would you believe that?’ Cora said. ‘But I got what I could and I cross-indexed it with a bunch of aerial photos, so I think we’ve got as accurate a picture of the land as we’re going to get.’

Dallin put the kettle back on. It looked like he was starting to feel more at home. I ignored another pang of distress. Everything about this situation was distressing. When was the last time there were this many people in my kitchen? My eyes watered from trying to look at both Dallin and Cora at once.

‘The main paths run through here and here,’ Cora said. She drew a finger along a pale line that meandered from one corner of an A3 photo to the middle. Her nail polish was a delicate pink, chipped at the tips. ‘As I understand it, there are dozens of other paths that lead off from the main trail. Plus unofficial animal tracks and such. Is that right?’

I startled, realising the question was addressed to me. ‘Um. Yes.’

‘And there aren’t any trail maps of the marshlands? Not even unofficial ones that people or tourists maybe use to find their way?’

I dropped my gaze to the photos so I didn’t have to maintain eye contact. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If anyone’s walking around the curraghs, they either know where they’re going, or they stick to the main paths.’

‘Does anyone ever get lost in there?’ Cora seemed to have a direct way of asking questions which, honestly, was preferable to Dallin’s habit of skirting around every issue. She fished a pencil out of her satchel and held it poised over the maps.

‘Depends what you mean by lost.’ I picked up my mug of mint tea, which I’d left sitting on the side. ‘Now and again someone wanders off the trail. Last year a group of ramblers on a wildflower walk got distracted trying to follow a wallaby. It took them an hour to find their way back.’

Cora’s lips twitched in a frown as she glanced at Dallin. ‘So there really are wild wallabies here?’

‘Told you so,’ Dallin said. He stirred a hefty spoonful of demerara sugar into his tea. ‘You owe me a tenner.’

‘Forgive me for not believing such a weirdly specific bit of trivia.’ Cora looked at me again. ‘How big are the marshlands anyway? It doesn’t look like much on the photos.’

‘It’s not, I guess.’ I was trying to figure out whether our house was on the photos. It was difficult to tell from the aerial shots. ‘It’s not the biggest area of forest on the island, not by a very long way. But it’s easy to get lost in there. It’s—’ My throat went dry. How to describe the curraghs to an outsider? Looking at those maps and photos, it was difficult to imagine how anyone, even a child, could lose their way in such a small patch of land.

‘Are you able,’ Cora asked, ‘to narrow it down at all? When you found the body, do you know roughly where you were? Even as little as, “more to the north” or “more to the south”?’

I chewed my lip. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re expecting from me. But I was a kid. I don’t even know – I’m not certain what I saw.’ I closed my eyes. For so many years I’d insisted on telling the truth, even when no one believed me. Now, with a person who for some crazy reason did believe me, I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.

But I had to try. Because, as I knew perfectly well, no hope was better than false hope.

‘Sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘you have to accept that what you think you saw isn’t necessarily what you did see. Especially when you’re a child. People searched the curraghs. I searched. No one found anything.’ I lifted my chin and shook the stray wisps of hair out of my face. ‘I was mistaken. There’s nothing here for you to find. I’m sorry.’

A few seconds passed in silence. Then Cora said, ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For being honest. There’s been a lot of people over the years who’ve been happy to spin me a story, for whatever reason.’ Despite the way she held herself with hunched shoulders and restless fingers, there was steel in Cora’s gaze. ‘Some people will do anything for attention.’