Is that what you think of me?” Darcie demanded once we were out of earshot of the living area. “That I’m an evil, vengeful bitch who kept you all away from Bea on purpose?”
No longer in the grip of rage, and conscious I couldn’t alienate her if I wanted any semblance of truth, I rubbed my face with one hand. “I just wanted a chance to say goodbye, Darcie. Part of me can’t forgive you for taking that away from me. From us. We loved her, too.”
A long silence as she led me into a bedroom in which lay a mattress without sheets. We pulled it off to the floor and managed to get it out the door by dragging it sideways.
“I’m sorry.” Quiet words from Darcie, who was at the far end of the mattress while I’d taken the front. “I wasn’t thinking at the time. I just wanted it to go away. Like if I pretended it wasn’t happening, if I got rid of her body, then she wouldn’t be dead.”
A shaky breath. “Such a stupid, childish instinct and I hate myself for giving in to it. Because now, I can’t visit with Bea like I do with my parents, and I’m so ashamed, Luna. All the time. The shame eats at me. That’s why I was hateful to you. Each and every day, I drown in regret for what I did to my baby sister, to the girl I spent my life protecting.”
I stopped, my heart breaking. Of all the things Darcie had ever said about Bea’s death, this struck me as the most real. Darcie had become a child in her grief, hiding from the horror by putting her fingers in front of her eyes.
If true, it was something I could forgive.
My throat hurt, my eyes so gritty it felt as if they had tiny stones within.
I lowered the mattress to the floor. Darcie let go of her end at the same time. It landed on the floor with a soft thud.
“I’m sorry, too.” Crossing the distance between us, I wrapped her up in my arms.
She folded against me like a reed bending in the wind. “I’m sorry,” she said again, her breath hot against the shell of my ear. “I wish every day and every night that I’d buried her in the cemetery behind this house. With my parents. So she wouldn’t be alone.” Hot wet soaked my shoulder. “I did that, I made her alone, when Bea was never alone.”
“Grief can make us do terrible things.” I rocked her, but couldn’t make myself take the next step and tell her it was all right that Bea didn’t have a gravestone, that we didn’t need it to remember her.
The latter was true for me.
But I’d be gone one day, and so would Darcie. Who would remember Bea then?
Even as I comforted her, I couldn’t help but note that she’d said my parents rather than our parents. A simple slip of the tongue? Or an indication of the psychological war she’d begun to wage the day of Beatrice’s birth? The day on which Darcie had gone from being the apple of her parents’ eye to being eldest sister to a new baby who’d enchanted everyone.
“None of that now,” I said when she began to hyperventilate. “You have to take deep breaths, relax.” I almost said that being overwrought wasn’t good for the baby, remembered just in time that I wasn’t supposed to know about the embryo in her womb.
Ash’s DNA intermingled with hers.
If this had been a war, Darcie had won.
“Hold my hands,” I said even as the cold thought passed through my mind. “Follow my breaths.”
She did as I asked, and as I looked into her eyes—wet and ringed with red, broken blood vessels fragile rivers in the white—I felt like the worst person in the world.
The snow continued to fall in the hours that followed, and it nudged us into higher gear in setting up camp in the living area. Since Darcie still hadn’t found her phone, I helped her look for it while we were moving things around, figuring it had most likely fallen into an odd spot like between the arm and seat cushion of one of the sofas.
“There’s still plenty of firewood,” Ash said at one point, but he was frowning.
A short discussion later, he and Aaron decided to fetch more from the barn in case the snow turned into a blizzard, and all our attention switched to them.
“We don’t know how long we’ll be stuck here,” Aaron said to Grace as he pulled on work gloves that Kaea had picked up from the barn during that first firewood run. “Better to overprepare than under.”
“Be careful.” Grace, her expression pinched, tugged his hood tight around his face.
Like her, I wasn’t sure about the two of them walking out into the snow, but they were right in saying that at least the precipitation was currently manageable. Even a small increase in intensity and it might turn into a deadly whiteout.
“Make sure you tie a rope line to the barn.” Grace lowered her eyebrows. “I mean it. Don’t think that you can’t get disoriented. I’ve lived in snow. I know what can happen.”
“Grace is right.” Darcie passed Ash his gloves. “I think there’s a bit of rope in the laundry. We use it as a temporary drying line when we come down in better weather.”
She was back with it within a couple of minutes.
Then, for the first time since I’d returned to the living room, I left Vansi and Kaea alone to go stand on the kitchen veranda with Grace and Darcie, all three of us focused on the men struggling against the snow and the wind.
I took a couple of snapshots and thought of how quickly we’d digressed to traditional gender roles. Then again, Aaron and Ash together were stronger than the three of us. But if it looked like they were beginning to get dangerously cold, I was going to make one of them stay in the kitchen to warm up, while I did a round, and then we’d swap.
I had a feeling Grace would back me on that; every muscle in her body was taut, her eyes narrowed as she fought to keep Aaron in sight in the low visibility. “I can’t see them anymore,” she said just then. “Darcie? Luna?”
I shook my head; I’d lost sight of them long before her.
“No, they’ve gone too far.” Darcie pointed at the bright pink rope tied to the veranda railing. “It’s taut. They’re still unrolling it as they go.”
Grace exhaled long and slow—and kept on glancing at the rope. Until too much time had passed, our cheeks burning with cold and our lips chapped. “Why aren’t they back yet?” she demanded.
“Let me check the rope.” But when I tugged on the roughness of it, it was to a sense of laxity. No tension. Either they were stacking firewood onto the wide wooden cart that Ash had told us Jim kept in the barn for that purpose, or something had gone wrong.
My mouth grew dry. “How long should we wait?”
Darcie responded first, her answer pragmatic but her gaze trained in the direction of the barn. “The snow’s deeper than it looked from the inside. They’re probably having trouble pulling the cart through it. The wheels aren’t designed to navigate snow and it’ll be heavy weighed down with firewood.”
She had a point.
But Grace was a shivering, wild-eyed mess nonetheless. She began to gnaw on her fingernails. “Sorry.” She hid her hands behind her back when she saw me glance at her. “Bad habit. Can’t stop when I’m nervous.”
“I get it.”
Aaron’s voice emerged from the white at the same moment.
We called back in unison, and as soon as they got in sight, we bounded out to help them pull the heavily laden cart as close to the kitchen steps as possible. Then all five of us pitched in to carry the wood inside and to one corner of the kitchen. It’d be easy enough to take logs into the living area as needed.
The guys did two more runs before we decided we had enough to get us through the next two or three days.
My bones ached from the cold from just standing on the veranda and the quick exposure to the snow when I’d helped unload, and I didn’t begrudge Ash and Aaron their prime positions in front of the fire as they tried to thaw themselves out in the aftermath.
Grace plied both men with mugs of coffee while fussing over Aaron.
“We’re such city folk,” Ash muttered after he’d stopped shivering. “Jim would take one look at the lot of us and be ashamed at the youth of today.” He glanced up at the array of dead stag heads. “We haven’t even added a single animal head to the walls. Disgraceful.”
“No stuffed small creatures, either,” Darcie inserted, her tone as dry as the pelts of the unfortunate animals in this space. “Especially after I committed the cardinal sin of throwing out a pair of moth-eaten stuffed possums with green marble eyes.”
Aaron folded his arms. “You’re making that up.”
“Scout’s honor. One of my ancestors took up taxidermy for a hobby—only he wasn’t that good. The possums kept falling over because he stuffed them lopsided.”
Laughter, the rest of us teasing Darcie about her trophy-hunting-obsessed ancestors, and teasing one another about our descent into soft adulthood . . . until suddenly it was as if we remembered what had happened, that one of us was dead.
The silence that fell was so big it crushed.
We separated without discussion, each claiming an area of the living room as our own. Mine was against the right wall not far from the fire, the space defined by a double mattress that Grace had dressed with a floral bedspread.
A pile of spare blankets sat on an unused armchair.
We weren’t in danger from the cold here, but the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the house. Place would be an icebox. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the toilet, and hoped I could hold it off as I sat cross-legged on the mattress, my eyes on my laptop . . . and another page of Clara’s clandestine journal, the words hidden among the images throwing me back in time.
It has been a season of beauty. I should not dismiss that. This land, it takes my breath away when the grass becomes a sea of gold, the morning frost the prettiest lacework in all the land. I have spent many a dawn chasing my children through that frost, their laughter as bright as the song of the bird that lives near the orange grove.
The locals call it a tui. Its plumage is blue-black with a rainbow shine and it has a little white ruff at its neck. Mattie says the bird looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo and he wonders whether it’s off to a party.
Such a lively imagination he has, my son.
A tiny drawing of a tui sat at the end of the line, the image a decoration on a bowl that spilled over with grapes.
I’d never met Clara, would never meet her, and yet I felt a deep well of joy that she’d known some happiness in this cold and inhospitable land so far from her home. But not enough, I thought as I took a break to check on Vansi and Kaea.
No change.
Telling myself that was good news even as their stillness gnawed at me, I returned to my spot and to Clara’s diary.
Blake is . . . lost to me. I have attempted to hold on to hope through the years, have attempted to be the wife he needs in the belief that it would draw him back. He was never the young lover I dreamed of in my girlish days, but, on our wedding day, he was a man proud and intelligent.
When I entered the estate house, he showed me to a salon he’d had created just for me, with furniture he’d had shipped from England. Furniture like that in my parents’ home. So that I would have a piece of England in this land on the edge of the world.
I could’ve loved that man.
But he is gone and the one who lives in Blake’s skin now is a creature disturbing. I would not worry so if it was only my life, but our children, our precious children, how can I protect them against the spreading taint of his madness?
Already, Elizabeth talks to herself when she thinks I am not looking. And she does not talk as children do, to friends created out of air. No, she talks in a way secret and dark, and even more troubling, she looks at her siblings with contempt. They adore her, wish to emulate her, and she wants nothing to do with them.
My Lizzie, my firstborn, she breaks my heart.
“Elizabeth,” I mouthed, finally putting a name to that smirking survivor. And though my bladder had begun to protest, I didn’t stop reading. Couldn’t. My heart was tight, my pulse too fast.
Lizzie hurt Diana today. My baby girl is so small and so much in love with her big sister, and Lizzie burned her. She says it was an accident and that Diana stumbled into her while she was making a candle as she likes to do, but I fear I do not believe her.
The circular burn on Diana’s soft little palm is too perfect, too precise. As if something was held to it until it seared the flesh through and through. I wish my wee babe could speak to me of it, but she does not have the words yet. She just holds up her hand and cries and I cry with her.
It is a terrible thing to write . . . but I am scared of Lizzie. No mother should ever say that, but I cannot squelch the fear inside me. When I look at her, all I see is her father’s madness—but where Blake cannot hide it, is a creature possessed of rages and whispers, Lizzie has a cunning to her that chills my blood.
I will never again leave her alone with her brother and sisters.
I couldn’t help looking over at where Darcie sat curled up in an armchair with a book. Elizabeth’s direct descendent. Linked by a bond of blood to a woman I was now certain had murdered her mother and siblings.