I’ve been practicing what to say all afternoon, but now the time’s come I’m going to have to wing it. It’s so cold in here, I’ve got brain freeze. I know my lips are lilac again. I bite them as we approach the reception desk so that I don’t startle the lad too much by looking dead.
Beside me, Priyanka is rocking on her feet as though we’re on a boat. It’s not exactly stabilizing, yet I’m glad she showed up. Stephanie hasn’t appeared, but I have faith that she will. She’s on our side; she just doesn’t know it yet.
I glance at his name badge, checking I’ve got the right person. “Hi, Lewis? I’m Jess and this is Priyanka. We were wondering if we could talk to you about Holly Waite. Apparently, you knew her fairly well?”
Lewis, who has beautiful brown eyes, framed by a Superdry tuque, looks at me cautiously. “Yeah, I knew Holly.”
It’s not the best conversation opener. His tone is flat, mistrustful. He begins to crack his knuckles, one by one, staring at his computer screen.
I’m not sure what to say next.
I’m relieved when Priyanka jumps in. “We were friends of hers too,” she says warmly, her Midlands accent more marked. Maybe she switches it on when needed. “We’re trying to find out what happened to her.”
“Friends?” Lewis turns down his mouth. “Where were you last week, then?”
Priyanka looks up at me. It’s a decent enough question. We’d never even heard of Holly last week.
“Thought so.” He looks back at his screen.
Damn it.
I nudge Priyanka subtly, trying to prompt her to do something. She deals with young males like him every day; he can’t be much older than twenty.
“How long had you known her for, Lewis? And just to be clear...” She raises her hand as though swearing an oath. “...You don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to. Only if you’re comfortable.”
We wait to see if he is.
“Not long.” He adjusts his tuque, scratching his forehead. “About a year. Just after I started working here. She’d already been here a while, I think.”
“And how did you get to know her?”
“She kinda stood out.”
“Oh. Why was that?”
He blushes, nudging his tuque again.
“She was pretty?” Priyanka offers.
“Yeah.” His blush deepens. Then he stares at her. “But why don’t you already know that, if you were friends?” He does air quotes around the word friends and everything goes quiet.
She opens her mouth, then stalls.
I attempt to sidestep the issue by appealing to his hormones. “Did you date her, Lewis?”
“Nah.” Thankfully, he smiles, swiveling back and forth in his revolving chair. “I didn’t get the feeling she was, like, available. I asked her once if she was with anyone, and she said she couldn’t see herself being in a relationship because of her lifestyle. I mean, she was an artist and that.”
He says this as though it’s completely out there—the wackiest job known to man.
“Artists, eh?” I say, trying to bond. But it comes out clumsy, forced, and I fall silent again.
“So, did you, what, just hang out here, chatting?” Priyanka says, tucking her pink hair behind her ears. She’s wearing her usual parka, the ashen fur of the hood mingling with her hair like strange extensions.
There’s a noise behind us, and I glance over my shoulder as Stephanie appears. She’s twenty minutes late and looks pleased about it—probably waited in a turnout down the road.
“Yeah, mostly,” Lewis replies. “She wasn’t always here when I was. Sometimes she stayed in her unit overnight.” He lowers his voice. “I didn’t tell the boss. They’d have kicked her out. It’s against policy.”
“Did she sleep here often?” Priyanka’s voice changes direction as she turns to look at Stephanie, smiling at her in welcome.
“I reckon.”
“So, she was homeless?”
“Think so, yeah... I did try to help. I didn’t know what to do, though.”
“Of course.” She manages somehow, in those two words, to sound compassionate, maternal.
Lewis looks at her uncertainly, tapping a pen on his palm. “I knew she was an alcoholic. She didn’t talk about it, but it was obvious. I could always smell, like, booze on her and she was up and down, depending on whether she was sober or not.”
“Did she work? How did she afford the rent here?”
He shrugs. “Dunno. It’s not expensive, though, is it, compared to a flat. She never mentioned it, but I got the feeling she did odd jobs—painting, cleaning and that. And she scrounged and probably nicked stuff too. She never fell behind on payments, so management let her get on with it.”
“Did she...well, did she have any friends?” Priyanka asks.
“Other than you?” He smiles wonkily. “Don’t think so. She didn’t have any support, from what I could see.” He tosses the pen aside, sits up straight, folding his arms. “But then people like her don’t, do they? No one wants to know them.”
I shuffle my feet awkwardly. Priyanka is looking up at me for help, appealing to me to say something. She’s wearing hazel contact lenses today.
“She collapsed right there, where you are,” he says, pointing, and we turn to look at Stephanie, who gazes at the ceiling, tote on wrist.
“If it hadn’t happened here, I wouldn’t have known anything about it. Even then, it was impossible to find out anything. I had to lie to the hospital about being related, so I could, like, see her. But I was too late. By the time I’d got there, she was already dead.”
He looks at me with an expression I can’t read. Is he angry with us?
“She died all alone. There were nurses and that, but no friends or family. She didn’t have a single soul in the world to comfort her. No one should die like that. Not even a dog.”
I stare at him numbly. He’s right, yet I don’t seem to be able to tell him so.
“What did she die of?” Priyanka asks softly.
“Heart failure. Dilated cardio something. The doctor said she was the right age group for it—late twenties—and that it was alcohol that had done the damage.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, swivels back and forth again in the chair. “I wish I could’ve done more for her. She was a good person.”
There’s a swishing noise as the double doors open and a woman about my age leaves the units, eyes straight ahead, grim-faced. Makes you wonder what goes on here—what people store, and why.
I wait for her to pass through the main entrance before speaking. “Do you have a photo of her, by any chance?”
“What?” he says, as though miles away. “Uh. No. She wasn’t like that. Didn’t even have a phone that I knew of.”
I try to look at him sympathetically, gratefully, but I’m not sure I pull it off. I’m too dismayed. “Well, we won’t take up any more of—”
“There’s a self-portrait of her in there.” He gestures with his thumb in the direction of the units. “It’s a good likeness. She did it a few months ago, showed me when it was done. I think she was pretty proud of it.”
“In her storage space?” I ask, my face flushing. “There’s a—”
“Yep.” He nods.
“How will we...well, how will we know which one is her?”
I wait for his response, filling in the gaps.
She had green eyes.
She looked like Eva.
She was Max’s daughter.
“She always wore white,” he says. “Said it made her invisible.”
I don’t know how I manage to move my legs away from that desk, away from that boy with his accusing looks, but somehow, I do.
Priyanka’s breath is fast, shallow, as I fiddle with the keys, kicking the base of the door to open it. I’m not aware of Stephanie, until suddenly she’s there, inside the unit. I close the space between us, touching her hand, and to my surprise, she doesn’t wriggle free.
And that’s what we’re doing when we find her—forming a straggly line, scared to move.
“There, look,” Priyanka says.
She’s hanging above the mattress where she slept, a canvas of a young woman in white. The painting is so pale, transparent, it’s almost vanishing into the background like a water mark or damp stain. Maybe that’s significant. It’s the portrait of someone who scrounged, lived off the grid, died alone.
She was pretty; somehow you can tell that, even with the distorted features. And now that we know it’s her, it seems obvious that the other paintings are of her mother, Nicola.
I lean against the wall, pressing a finger to my temple, which is throbbing. I’ve looked into what would have happened to Holly. The town council would be organizing a pauper’s funeral; still called that, so Victorian-sounding, and not as rare as you might think. Our local council alone handles about four thousand a year. It’s more than likely that she would have an unmarked grave or resting place. We would never be able to find her. A fitting outcome for someone who lived life as a shadow.
I wish I could have done something to help her. Yet even now, it’s impossible. I can’t contact the council and offer to pay for a personalized grave, claiming a biological link, when nothing about any of that is certain. Nor can I implicate Max.
I may be standing here, sickened, ashamed, but I’m not ready to turn my husband in. Not without proof.
“This is horrible.” I kick an empty paint can. “This was no way to live.”
Priyanka is making her way across the cardboard floor to the canvas, tiptoeing as though scared she’ll disturb rats. “I can’t see Andy in her. Can you? I mean...can you see a likeness to either of your husbands?”
I can’t see Max, no. And from what I know of their husbands, I can’t see them either. But how can you tell from such a strange painting?
My gaze settles on the nearest canvas, taking in Nicola’s melancholy features. She was probably a beauty, but Holly didn’t want to depict her like that. Instead, she wanted us to see, what—squalor, anonymity?
Behind me, Stephanie gives a little cough before speaking. “Did you talk to your husband, Priyanka?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Oh. Didn’t it help?”
“No.” She’s squatting underneath the trestle table, pulling a cardboard box toward her. “He said it was a lie.”
“And do you believe him?”
“I don’t know, which is why I’m doing this.” I watch as she tries to unpick the brown tape on the box lid. “This is very tightly sealed. If I was going to hide something, it would be in here.”
I catch sight of two paintings then that I hadn’t noticed before, in the shadows of a mini-fridge. “I wonder who they are?” I say, pointing. “I don’t think that’s Nicola or Holly, is it?”
Priyanka glances up. “No, it’s not. Look at the eyes.”
One of them has dark hair and a big gap between her teeth, with angry black holes for eyes. The other one is blond, pasty, and again, the eye color’s not right. The blue is piercing.
“Creeps me out.” I lower my chin into the funnel neck of my puffer jacket, shrinking.
“Me too, especially when you consider that she must have known we’d be here like this, looking at her stuff.”
“So maybe it’s an act—performance art?” I suggest. “One of my artists is into that, making himself part of the art, a sort of living painting. Maybe everything was placed intentionally for us to find, and the chaos is a ruse.”
“It all sounds highly unlikely,” Stephanie says, killing the idea.
Priyanka looks about her for something to cut the tape, finding a plastic knife on the floor. Then she turns to look at us somberly. “So, ladies, are we ready for this?”
I’m making my way across the mess to join her, when Stephanie says, “No. Please don’t.”
I stop, straddling an electric sandwich maker that’s missing a plug. “You don’t want us to open it?”
She shakes her head, adjusting her tote on her shoulder. “It’s like Pandora’s box. Whatever we find, it’ll do us no good.”
“But you agree that we need to know what happened?”
Her nostrils flare ever so slightly. “No. I still think we should leave it alone.”
“But you saw the photo that I sent you, right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because it looks as though they were close friends after all.”
“You don’t know that.” She stares at me, her pupils shrinking.
“We don’t know anything. Which is why we’re here.” I place my hands on my hips. “We can’t keep having this same conversation, Stephanie. At some point, we’re going to have to agree.”
“I’ll never agree.”
Something gives way inside me then—the feeble thread that was holding my emotions in check. “For God’s sake!” I snap. “Stop being such a bloody housewife!”
I don’t know why I said that. It was the first thing that came to mind.
“Housewife? I’ll have you know I’ve worked my whole life.” She blinks, offended, pulling her gloves from her pockets. “I knew I shouldn’t have come here.”
She’s heading for the door. I sense that I should apologize. I can feel Priyanka looking at me with her teacher face.
“Look, I didn’t mean to say that. It was rude, ignorant. Please stay, Stephanie. We need you. We can’t—”
“Oh my!” Priyanka cries out.
We both turn to look at her. She’s kneeling on that dirty floor in front of the open box, holding a book. “I don’t believe it...”
“What is it?”
She looks at me and it seems in that moment that she’s a little girl, with her furry hood framing her face, her Doc Martens tucked beneath her. “A diary.”
I have to ask.
“Which year?”
“You know which year—1990.”
“Put it back,” Stephanie says hastily. “We’ve no right to be snooping.”
Priyanka complies, dropping the book back into the cardboard box, where it lies tantalizingly on top in plain view.
“Snooping?” I retort. “She gave us the key!”
“But the box was sealed for a reason,” Stephanie says. “Maybe she didn’t want us to pry.”
“So why write to us, then? Why grant us free access to her belongings? I’ll tell you why—because she wanted us to do this, that’s why!”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t know anything, remember? I told you that two minutes ago. That’s why we’re here!”
“I can’t do this right now. It’s too much.” Priyanka is scrabbling to her feet, knocking over a broken lamp in her hurry to get away. “I’m sorry.” She puts her head down and her hood up as she makes for the door.
“Priyanka! What are you doing? Wait!” I try to reach her, but she’s already through the door and gone. I frown at Stephanie. “This is because you keep arguing! She doesn’t know which way to turn. You’ve driven her away.”
“Me? You’re the one calling me names!”
I look away from her in irritation, my gaze falling on the cardboard box. There’s something up with that. Something’s missing. I can’t think what.
And then I realize: the diary is gone.