Large, ornate gate posts rose in front of them, well over twenty feet high. Beyond them, the road, flanked by lush flower beds, snaked to a huge house that must at one time have been a stately home.
The gates were open, and Sara and Caleb approached the house, their feet crunching on the gravel, the fragrance of roses perfuming the air around them.
The Centre could not have been more different from the public home in Bromley. Everything about it was elite. Three large people carriers were in the car park, identical to the one Stanley had shown Sara.
Sara tried to open the front door. It shook in its frame but remained closed. She was about to pull her tools out of her bag when Caleb stepped forward.
‘Can I try?’ he asked.
‘Help yourself,’ replied Sara, standing back to give him room.
She watched him as he pulled out his wallet and crouched next to the lock. The apparition of him falling to his death had alarmed her. They had only met the previous night, but there was some easy connection between them that she had not experienced before. There was no one in her world she could trust, but she immediately felt at ease with Caleb. However, the sight of the impossible surroundings – ice-oceans and ice-mountains – felt so tenuously connected with their world that it lessened the threat. She resolved to tell Caleb about it once their search was over.
He pulled the handle, and it popped open.
‘Do you make a habit of breaking into old people’s homes?’ said Sara, pushing through the door into the lobby, a gleaming cave of ivory and marble.
‘One day I’ll need to learn to break out of one,’ replied Caleb, looking around in awe. ‘Though maybe not this one.’
It looked more like the lobby of a five-star hotel than a retirement home. Unseen air-conditioning units controlled the room temperature, bringing it to the perfect level, and soft classical music played just on the verge of perception.
A plate of frosted glass was mounted on one of the walls, on which was etched a list of residents with their room numbers.
Sara saw her mother’s name immediately.
Monaco wing, room 5.
A map on the opposing side of the glass indicated its location.
No one challenged them as they wandered through the dim corridors, lit through recessed lighting. The Monaco wing was adjacent to the lobby and the rooms were sequentially numbered.
1. 2. 3. 4.
Sara stopped in front of the room, struggling for breath. This was the end of her journey.
She knocked once and stepped in.
But the room was empty.
There was also little or no furniture in it. No pictures, no framed photos, no keepsakes or mementoes. Just a bed, a side table and some medicine bottles.
‘This can’t be her room,’ said Sara in confusion. ‘It looks like it’s unoccupied.’
Caleb walked over to the medicine bottles and checked the labels. He looked back at her and nodded. They were in the right room.
It seemed like her mother had forgotten her as cleanly as Sara had forgotten Phoebe. Although in Phoebe’s case, it didn’t require any brainwashing.
Sara didn’t know what she was expecting to find, but it wasn’t this. She was no longer wanted or needed. An orphan in an adult’s body. First, her mother had disappeared from the location she had given Sara and now it looked as if she had expunged her daughter from her mind.
A thought occurred to Sara, and she walked to the side table and placed her palm flat on it, waiting for a connection.
But when her hand made contact with the table, the only thing she experienced was a static hiss, like the sound a free diver hears underwater. Sara walked to the bed and sat on it, letting her palms rest on the bedspread, simulating the same experience, pressing her fingertips in, inhaling the trace aroma released by the bedding.
Again, nothing other than an atmospheric hiss.
‘It’s strange,’ said Sara. ‘I can’t get any sense of her here.’
‘Let’s try the common areas,’ said Caleb, walking to the door.
They followed the corridor to the back veranda of the house, which looked out on to a huge landscaped garden. Along one side of the manicured lawn, two box hedgerows ran in a line to a gap in the garden wall, over which hung a bowery laced with bougainvillea.
Sara and Caleb found a fire exit and walked down the gravel path through the gap. They were in a tiny garden from which headstones jutted out from the carefully trimmed grass, like empty seat backs in an auditorium.
Standing by one particular grave was a tall man in an elegant suit.
It was Charles Salt.