Joanna stared out at the weather through the bedroom window and fiddled with a loose-fitting milk tooth. She pressed her cheek to the cool of the windowpane, as rain thrashed the roof and the wind shook out the trees against the glass. Nothing was visible beyond the patio with its table and chairs and sodden cushions. As with the rest of the village, Pillowell’s garden had been nibbled away by the sallow light. Hard to imagine only days ago they were basking in a hot, high sun, but that, along with so many things, had been snuffed out since Ellie, and she doubted it would ever shine again.
Watching a row of silver birch being blown inside out, the metallic backs of their leaves close enough to touch, Joanna didn’t think she could be any sadder until she dredged up what Caroline said she saw Dean doing to Ellie. One thing bothered her, though: Joanna, more than most, knew how much her sister liked inventing stories, liked an audience if she could get one. But not about this? Caroline had never said things like this before, this was serious; it had got Dean into big trouble and made everyone turn against him so badly he was forced to leave Witchwood. To leave Amy.
Joanna’s mind twisted to the little bruises she saw on Ellie’s upper arms in the boat the afternoon they talked about pain – or Ellie’s horror of it. The bruises Ellie hadn’t wanted them to see. Did Dean give her them? She supposed if Caroline said he hurt Ellie, then he must have done. The police seemed to think so, for a little while anyway; why else did they lock him up for two whole nights? But then they let him go, and this was where it got confusing – maybe he was cleverer than he looked at hiding what he’d done. Didn’t her teachers tell her that bullies were clever, that they could disguise their nasty side from those they didn’t want to see it by only hurting you in invisible places; like Ellie was hurt in invisible places?
But Joanna knew she, too, was far from perfect. What about the lie she told Caroline about Dean wanting her to be his girlfriend? She should have kept her mouth shut, even if her intentions were good and she wanted to make her sister happy. She should come clean, tell her it wasn’t Dean’s fault. He wasn’t the one who tricked her, it was Joanna, and she was sorry. If she had kept her mouth shut, it’s possible Caroline would simply have carried on loving Dean from afar, expecting nothing; never building her hopes up for something that wasn’t ever going to happen. Joanna knows her lie made her sister’s discovery of him and Amy all the more crushing; it would have seemed to Caroline – believing it was her that Dean wanted – like the ultimate betrayal.
She watched the rain, anxious that all traces of Ellie would be washed away. She didn’t know much, but she knew Ellie’s death wasn’t an accident like her daddy’s was – reading in the Cinderglade Echo words like raped and stabbed and left for dead … before the newspaper was whipped out of reach, to the accompanying cry of: ‘You’re too young; it’s far too awful for little eyes.’
‘But I’m almost the same age as Ellie,’ she’d tried to reason. ‘And no one stopped those awful things happening to her because she was too young.’
With temperatures dipping to record summer lows and the rain showing no signs of stopping, Dora had to concede to firing up the boiler. What it meant was a continuous supply of piping-hot water and, taking advantage, in a chin-deep bath of bubbles, the fear Caroline had about the lies she’d told to the police, to the newspaper, to Liz and others in the village – lies that meant Dean had been driven out of Witchwood forever – burned in her mouth. She positioned a flannel at the nape of her neck to make a pillow and eased her head back against the rim of the bath. Loops of vapour coiled over the water. Scribbles in the steam, she thought, breathing through them, trying to decipher what the scribbles meant. Probably a list of her wrongdoings, she thought miserably. Her wrongdoings were polluting both her dreams and her daylight hours; they were making her as unrecognisable to herself as a visitant from another planet. But had she been so very wrong? Dean did say he wanted to be her boyfriend, he’d told Joanna. Was it really her fault she’d built her world around his promise, that she’d pinned her life on a belief she was going to be close to him? To then have it thrown in her face by him taking up with that Amy cow. Dean had to take some responsibility for the part he played, for what she’d been driven to do.
Woken early by the insistent drum of rain, Caroline was already packed for the London train the following morning. With the rest of the day to herself, knowing the unlikelihood of ever coming back here, she had planned to say a proper farewell to Witchwood and collect her steals from the lakeside. But, too afraid to go down to Drake’s Pike, the snow globe, the gold ring she took from the pub, and the red-stoned brooch she found in St Oswald’s were all she was going to be able to take home; it was a shame, but the other trinkets would have to stay here.
The translucency of her skin, so alabaster-white, always had the facility to frighten her. But locked inside Dora’s bathroom seeing its blue-veined intersection mapped across her body frightened her more. She traced it, searching, but couldn’t find a clear route out of the mess she’d got herself into because there simply wasn’t one. She knew what she had done to Dean was wrong, and how much worse she’d made things for him with his family, with the villagers, but despite being sorry about this, what plagued her too was a billowing unease about the Polaroid of Ellie. The one she found at the pub and deliberately planted between the last plate and hardback cover of the Book of the Dead for her to find that day. It was wicked of Caroline to want to show Ellie that the world she lived in was as nasty as hers and Joanna’s, and that no one, no matter how special they were, or how much their family loved them, could get off that lightly. Regretting it now, it was horrible of her to taunt and scare their friend that way, because now their friend was dead.
While thinking of her badness it was as if a cold moth landed lightly on her heart. And, despite the hot water she was immersed in, where its icy dorsal tufts touched, she was left with goose bumps. There would be consequences, she told herself; she would be made to pay for what she had done. It mattered little that by this time tomorrow she and Joanna would be on a train heading back to London. Caroline knew she would never be allowed to forget what she did to Dean, to Ellie, regardless of the distance she put between herself and Witchwood, or however long she lived. One day she would be punished. One day she would pay. It was all she deserved.