I’m not sure what has woken me, until I hear it again. A car engine, a sound so alien it takes me a while to identify it, muffled as it is by the storm. The rain has grown heavier in the time I’ve been asleep, so violent now that I think it may be hailstones hammering the skylight. But there it is again, in the distance, and when I raise my head I find that my body moves normally again.
The room feels unsteady around me as I stand, but as the door swims into focus I realize that there is no lock. I can’t hear anyone else, but we’re too far up to know for sure, and I can’t stay in this room any longer no matter what.
‘Mary?’ I grip her by the shoulders, shaking, trying to force focus. ‘Robin? You have to come with me.’
She looks directly at me, finally.
‘I’m going to stay here.’
‘Please, just come with me. I know you think that you’re safer here but you’re not, this is not safety. This is prison.’
I know it’s hopeless, but I keep trying in spite of myself, trying different combinations of words to convince her as though there exists one single sentence that will unlock her mind. I played this game with my mum so many times, against the advice of doctors who told me it was hopeless to use logic in the face of delusion.
‘Robin, listen. Don is dead. Don is dead, and Ruth and Barb let him die, and they’re in charge now and I don’t know what they’re planning but it’s nothing good. Do you understand what I’m saying? Don is gone.’
I’m holding her tightly now by both shoulders, and she seems truly adrift, further away than ever.
‘We have to go,’ I almost yell at her, my voice cracking, her bones so sharp beneath my hands. ‘Please.’
‘I can’t. Maybe you can.’
And I let go of her, my throat closing up with tears and I blink my eyes hard to keep them dry, moving as quietly as I can through the door and down the corridor without looking back. There is nobody on the first floor of the house, and nobody in the kitchen to stop me and I keep my eyes forward, forward, forward, until I’m out and running in the direction that I know in my bones is away.
‘Hey!’
I jolt to a standstill as a lasso lands around my torso, but with a twist of my head I realize it’s Barb’s arms holding onto me, and I run my elbow as hard as I can into her face and don’t stop to watch her stagger backwards. My muscles are still stiff and my legs heavy, blood struggling to pump like it should as I sprint down the sloping lawn and into the trees, still not looking back for fear that I will see them following me. The rain is coming hard and thick, the heavy, gummy drops that soak you to the bone within seconds, the sodden ground sinking beneath me with every step.
I’m going to die if they catch me. The thought comes to me fully formed as numb disbelief settles in and I just keep running, all of my training with Tyra coming back to me as I make low, light-footed strides, focusing on landing on the ball of my foot first. God, Tyra. I’m leaving them all. The thought has no weight, there’s no room in my chest for anything but fear and yet their faces are all in my head, because how long have they all been here really? If I don’t get out now I will die here. If I don’t get out now I will die here. If I don’t get out now I will die here.
Suddenly there is no more path, nothing but trees and no clear way through them, and every step I take is strangled by roots and tangled branches. I slip on leaves and fall hard, and for a second I’m completely frozen in place as my brain tries to function in a fog, my thoughts on a loop. If I don’t get out now I will die here.
And then, flat on the ground, I hear it. The undergrowth is alive under my cheek. I’m blind, almost, the woods around me damp and endless and I pray they’ll keep me safe.
‘Caitlin!’
The voice is so close but I still can’t recognize it, can’t identify it as male or female even, and when I listen hard I can’t hear it at all. I’m imagining it, but what if I’m not? If I’m wrong, if I show myself now, they will crush me and literally trample me into the dirt after all this. There’s soil in my lungs, inhaled as I breathed too hard, and the cough spasms inside me as I press both hands against my mouth. I can’t breathe. My ears ring.
‘Caitlin!’
I cough, hard, and start running again blindly away from that voice, its presence now my only sense of direction, but I can hear trampling in the undergrowth behind me, footsteps much too close. When the lasso lands around my torso again I scream, and thrash, and try to twist in its grip but it’s so much tighter now, pinning my arms to my sides.
‘Caitlin,’ he says, his breath warm against my ear and his voice so close. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me.’
I freeze.
‘Let me go.’
He does, slowly, and I try to steady myself. Close my eyes, tightly, and open them again to see whether he vanishes. He’s still there, hair plastered against his forehead, his skin paler than I remember but his eyes just as warm, and I’m shaking.
‘What are you doing here?’ I try to scream at him, but it barely comes out a whisper. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I’m sorry I left. Everything’s going to be okay now.’
‘You have no idea. You have no idea what’s been happening.’
‘Tell me,’ Jake says urgently, stepping closer to me and pressing his hands against my cheeks, cradling my face. So I tell him.
‘Don tried to rape me while I was barely conscious, and I cut his throat with your knife. Sharper than I expected for such a small blade. Ruth and Barb know about it, they don’t care, they seem thrilled at the chance to take over. Ruth apparently thinks Doomsday is coming soon. They injected me with Thorazine when I tried to run. That’s an antipsychotic. My mum was on it once. And they made me dig a grave and I think Don is buried in it now, somewhere over there.’
The hysterical laughter that’s been building in me for hours now finally comes out, and I can barely breathe I’m laughing so hard, in jagged shrill bursts that I can’t stop. I push my face into Jake’s chest when he pulls me in, holding onto him despite myself.
‘What month is it?’ I ask him.
‘October. Today is October twenty-third.’
‘Don told me it was January. I knew that was... I knew I hadn’t been here six months.’ But I didn’t know. It took so little effort for him to convince me I was wrong. Damaged, diseased, dangerous.
‘The police are here,’ Jake says into my hair.
‘What?’
‘That’s where I went. I knew things here weren’t right, and I had it all planned out. I was gonna leave, go straight to the nearest town and tell the sheriff’s department everything, get them to come out here. I knew I didn’t have much solid to tell them, but I had Kris, I had some details about him, I could tell them that he died out here and they buried him like a dog and never told the authorities. I knew that would be enough, at least to get the place investigated. But when I got out there, on my own, it took me a while to get my head straight. It was like I was withdrawing.’
‘You were,’ I say, voice still muffled against him. ‘The cider, I think it’s drugged. Maybe the food, I don’t know, but it’s something that makes you ecstatic or makes you hallucinate, makes you believe you’re losing your mind. I don’t know why—’
‘Just to keep you off-balance. Easy to control. That’s what it’s all about, here. That’s what I liked, having all my decisions made. But wait, Caitlin—’ Jake tugs my head gently upwards to face him. ‘Don’s dead?’
I nod, swallowing down bile.
‘And he tried to—’
He can’t bring himself to say it.
‘Yes. He’s done it to other people. Mary. Tyra, I think. Anyone he could.’ A cliché comes to mind then, everything is about sex, except sex – sex is about power. ‘You?’
‘No,’ Jake replies immediately, looking sick. ‘I don’t think he... No.’
He looks as though he’s struggling with something else he wants to say, but pauses, glancing over his shoulder back towards the house. A second later, I hear it. Raised voices, one of them unmistakably Barb’s.
‘Come on,’ Jake urges, and I follow him back through the woods, back towards whatever is waiting. I’m calm now, and this no longer feels like a nightmare in which I’ve killed someone and am trying to evade being found out. I will tell the police that I killed Don, that it was self-defence, and whatever comes next is out of my control. I rehearse the words in my head as we walk, trying to imagine how to describe any of this, how to say that I believe I’ve been drugged without sounding paranoid. Maybe they can test my blood and know for sure.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jake says, when we’re almost through the woods. ‘That I didn’t take you with me. Everyone was watching you, is the thing, but I never would have left you here if I’d...’
He trails off, and I let him. This isn’t a conversation I can have right now, not with everything else pressing in on us.
‘What did you tell the police?’ I ask, but before he has time to answer we’re through the trees and I’m trying to comprehend the scene there.
Tyra, Dale, Sean, Abby and Otis are lined up on the porch, stiff and small-looking, motionless at least from a distance. A uniformed officer stands next to them, not talking to them but staring outwards across the lawn, his arms crossed as though waiting for instructions, and his presence seems impossible. An unfamiliar face, in a place where I’ve known only the same ten day in, day out. Fewer days than I thought, because I know that I arrived here in July, soon after the Independence Day weekend, and now it’s October. It took only three months for me to get this far from myself.
‘Jake Rush?’
We both turn as another officer emerges from the woods behind us, Ruth and Barb both trailing him with placid smiles.
‘Yes, sir,’ Jake responds.
‘I’m Officer McGillivray, with the Monticello PD. You were the one who called this in? Asked for us to take a look around the place?’
‘Yes, sir. I made a statement to Officer Morrow at the station.’
The officer nods, squinting against the rain.
‘In your statement, you didn’t make any reference to a new body.’
I look at Jake out of the corner of my eye. He’s impassive.
‘Body?’
‘We found a freshly turned dirt hole, just out there in the clearing. Mostly filled in, won’t be touched until we can get forensics here, but it looks to me like a grave.’
‘Officer, with all due respect, this is absurd,’ says Ruth. ‘We grow all of our own vegetables here, the earth is regularly turned—’
‘Ma’am, Mr Rush has given us reason to believe that you all have buried bodies off the books before,’ McGillivray replies. ‘You are aware that it’s illegal to dispose of a body without registering the death with the county coroner? You need a burial permit, you need a death certificate. You can’t just be burying your people out in the woods with no oversight.’
‘Of course not. I used to work as a nurse, I’m aware of the requirements in case of a death, but I can assure you that nobody has been buried here.’
‘Yes, they have,’ Jake interrupts.
‘Jake, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ Ruth replies sharply, her eyes fixed on McGillivray. ‘This young man is unwell, he has a history of paranoia, anger management issues. Whatever he told you about us, all that has ever happened here is people trying to help each other. We’re a family.’
‘Blood family?’ asks the second officer, who’s moved over to join his colleague, everyone else trailing behind him. Tyra is holding onto Dale as though her own legs won’t hold her, one arm outstretched aimlessly at her side.
‘What’s going on?’ Abby asks quietly. ‘Where’s Don?’
‘No,’ Barb says, addressing the officer. ‘Not blood family. Better than. Everybody here came of their own free will, came to make a better life for themselves than the ones they were handed by birth.’
‘Some of these kids barely look old enough to vote,’ McGillivray says, writing something brief in a crumpled notebook. The second officer murmurs something to him, their conversation inaudible for a minute or two, and I avoid looking at Tyra or Dale or any of the others as I finally find my voice.
‘There is a body in that hole. In the woods. You need to dig it up. His name was Don, I never knew his last name, and he was in charge here. Or I thought he was. He’s dead.’
I hear Tyra crying but it’s a blur to me, they’re all a blur as I try to keep talking, try to make sense. ‘Bad things have happened here, not just that. It’s been bad, for a long time. But he is dead, Don, and it was me.’
‘Caitlin, wait.’
I turn in surprise to look at Jake.
‘Stop protecting me,’ he tells me, pressing a hand into my shoulder as he steps forward towards McGillivray. ‘I need to take responsibility for this. It wasn’t her. I killed him. The murder weapon was my knife, it has my initials on it, you can check.’
‘Jake—’ I start, but he talks right over me.
‘I came back here last night, like I told you I was going to, and I went right to Don’s cabin by the lake, the place where he holds the therapy sessions that I talked about in my statement. I expected to find him there alone, but Caitlin was there with him, unconscious, half-dressed, and he was...’ Jake trails off for a second, shaking his head. ‘And I had the knife. And that was it. He fought me, and I had the knife, and I killed him. I didn’t mean to, but that’s what happened.’
McGillivray looks at me expectantly.
‘Is this true? That you were assaulted?’
My vocal cords feel frozen, and I wish Jake would look at me.
‘He tried to,’ I say eventually. ‘Yes. I was out of it, but I... yes.’
‘And then I buried him, and they helped me do it,’ Jake says, gesturing to Ruth and Barb. ‘They wanted him gone, so they could be in charge. I think maybe they’d always wanted that.’
Ruth is shaking her head in silence, exchanging a glance with Barb who is also silent. They know better than to say more now. Jake finally turns to look at me properly, his eyes boring into me like he’s daring me to contradict his story, and if I were a braver and a better person, a person less desperate to see my home again, I probably would.
The downpour is still coming, all around us like gossamer curtains. It rained last night, so hard, long before Don was put in the ground. Hard enough to wash his body clean, blood and skin and DNA all rinsed slowly into the earth until, now, there is not a shred of me left on him.