Say Her Name (19 page)

Chapter 28

‘Bobbie?’

She dared to open her eyes a fraction and came face-to-face with a leering skull at her side. She recoiled, only to remember that every inch of her body was battered and sore, like her bruises went all the way to her core. Her fingers brushed against something smooth and hard – bonelike. So bonelike, she realised it was, in fact, bone. More bones. She brushed it out of her hand, disgusted, as she became aware of someone leaning over her in the gloom.

Sitting up, she first saw Caine. He crouched by her side, helping her up. Her ankles throbbed – for now, she’d settle for sitting upright.

This had to be a mirage. If he weren’t so grimy and dirty, Caine could be an angel. He cradled her head in a strong hand and kissed her hard on the lips. They didn’t need words. There wasn’t a word big enough for how it felt, and she knew that he felt exactly the same. Perhaps this was the big reunion in heaven, although Bobbie liked to imagine that, in heaven, she wouldn’t ache quite so much. ‘You’re alive,’ Bobbie whispered.

‘Only just,’ said another familiar voice. Naya! Tears, the good kind, suddenly flooded the cavity behind her nose. Naya was alive. They were
all
alive. It was too good, more than she could have dared hope. Dizzy, Bobbie’s head spun, bits of silver glitter swirling in her peripheral vision.

Naya sat on some shallow stone steps that lead to an ornate metal door – a door Bobbie had seen before. Well, at least the other side of it. It was the forgotten mausoleum in the graveyard at St Paul’s. In Naya’s arms was Sadie, barely conscious. Oh how stupid they’d been. Two days ago they’d been metres from Sadie and left her there.

‘Oh my God,’ was all Bobbie could think to say. She tried to stand to get to her friend, but the pain in her ankles was too raw. ‘Naya … I … ’

Naya shook off the big, heartfelt reunion, there clearly wasn’t time. ‘She’s going to die, Bob. She’s been here for days.’ Sadie looked in a bad way, her usually outdoorsy face sunken and her eyes hollow.

Bobbie examined her surroundings. They were in a dank, mossy chamber, infused with green-tinged light where vines and trees had smothered the tomb. Rainwater drummed on the roof. There was a grand stone sarcophagus in the centre of the room with smaller caskets lined up the walls in beautifully carved alcoves.

‘When I got here and found Naya,’ Caine said, ‘I called for you … ’

‘I heard,’ Bobbie brushed a cobweb out of his hair. ‘I heard you say my name.’

Caine’s brown eyes glistened. ‘I thought you were lost in that … place.’

‘And I thought you were … ’

‘Ahem!’ Naya interrupted them. ‘This is super-cute, you guys, but what do we do?’

‘Do you have a phone?’ Caine asked Bobbie.

‘No, it’s still by my bed from this morning. I didn’t think to grab it.’

Caine nodded. ‘Mine’s up in your room too.’

Bobbie took a closer look at their tomb. The floor was strewn with bones. Human bones. Like some sort of hilarious mass grave, maybe half a dozen skulls grinned at each other, scattered around the floor like drunk students at a house party. Naya was wearing someone else’s clothes. An old-style Piper’s PE hoodie that hadn’t been regulation uniform for about ten years.

And it all made sense. ‘Help me up?’ Bobbie asked Caine. He offered her a hand, and even though it made her ankles, back and hips
blaze
with pain, she allowed him to heave her upright.

‘Are you okay?’

Bobbie ignored the pain and just said, ‘I’m okay, but we have to find Mary.’

Caine frowned. ‘What?’

Bobbie looked around the nightmarish space. It had the same awful, ghoulish feel as the catacombs in Paris where her mum had taken her on an ill-advised trip when she was about eight – the walls of skulls had given her nightmares for weeks. ‘She’s in here somewhere.’ When Caine continued to look at her blankly, she said, ‘Kenton Millar accidentally killed Mary and hid her body.’

‘No way,’ Naya chimed in.

‘Way. There’s a secret passage from Price’s study that leads here. It must do … that’s it!’ Bobbie scanned the floor of the crypt. ‘There!’ Sure enough, underneath a weeping Virgin Mary statue in the corner, there was a partially hidden metal grate – the very same one she’d almost escaped through.

There were so many light bulbs going off above her head, it was like a paparazzi moment. ‘Millar must have used the passage too – that’s why he and Mary always met here. The tunnel leads under the field to the church. It
was
a priest’s hole – or a priest’s passage anyway. It let the priests who were hiding out get between the school and the church without anyone seeing them.’

‘This is where we were dreaming about?’ Caine said as Bobbie started to kick through the bones.

‘Yeah. The forest was their place, I guess. He must have taken her body down the tunnel and hidden it here. Mary didn’t want to kill us! I knew it! I knew she just wanted help. On the fifth day she brings you to where she was hidden. Here!’ One touch from Mary and you were transported to her final resting place.

Naya scanned the human remains. ‘But they all died, Bob.’

‘I don’t think she can help it – it’s not like
she
sealed the tomb, is it? And the other girls didn’t know what they were looking for. We do.’

Caine shook his head. ‘So all that time … all the girls that went missing. They’ve just been in here the whole time?’

Bobbie sighed, weary from the tunnel – almost too tired to go on. Still she tried to understand. ‘Yeah. Think about it. Abigail and Taylor vanished from miles and miles away. Maybe the others did too. Why would the police think to search the graveyard? And you saw it. It’s been derelict for years. Who ever comes here other than kids?’ The more she thought about it the more it made sense. ‘We know that Millar brought Mary here to make out … I guess he had access to a key – there’d have to be one for the priests, right? Does that make sense? And Naya … you dreamed that Mary was in a dark place. What’s darker than a coffin?’ Looking around, Bobbie wondered which skeleton was Taylor Keane’s, which belonged to Abigail Hanson and whose clothes Naya had borrowed. ‘Come on, Mary
has
to be in here somewhere.’

Caine threw his hands up. ‘Bobbie, any one of these could be her! And we’re locked in. Even if we do find her … ’

‘No!’ Bobbie snapped, refusing to back down. ‘This is all about laying her to rest.’ She looked at the skeletons. ‘There’s no way he’d have left her lying around. He would have wanted to hide her in case anybody came looking. Check in the coffins. I bet anything one of them has two bodies in. Naya, help us.’

Naya rested Sadie’s gaunt-looking head on the stairs. She’d been in here for three days with no food and only whatever rainwater trickled in. How long can you survive without food and drink? Bobbie guessed, from the look of her, not much longer. With little ceremony, Bobbie dragged the nearest coffin out of its alcove and it smashed to the stone floor. It was heavy, but the wood was rotten and old. Initial panic at seeing the coffin lid was nailed on turned to relief as she realised the nails would slide out of the sodden wood. Bobbie shook the lid off and let it fall. Only one grinning inhabitant lay within.

On the other side of the crypt, Caine and Naya pulled open their own coffins. ‘Anything?’

‘No!’ Naya called, her hand over her mouth. ‘God, this is sick!’

‘Keep looking.’

‘I can’t get the lid off this one,’ Caine moaned.

‘Well, then neither could Millar,’ Bobbie said, and then stopped. ‘Wait. We’d be able to see if he’d tampered with one of the coffins, right?’

Caine and Naya stopped searching. ‘Yeah.’ Caine wiped dust on his thighs. ‘I guess.’

‘Well, that means … ’ All eyes fell on the grandiose sarcophagus in the centre of the room.

‘No nails in that one,’ Caine said, which was precisely what she was thinking.

‘Help me.’ Bobbie knew, just
knew
that this was it. She could see it now: sweating, panicking and desperate, Kenton Millar had carried Mary’s body through the tunnel. He’d somehow got her up the ladder and into the mausoleum. Rather than risk taking her outside to bury her where he might be seen, he’d put her in the most secure of the graves – the most ancient.

Caine and Naya hurried to her side of the stone coffin. ‘After three,’ Caine suggested, reminding her of the last time they’d counted down as a group. It had been in front of a bathroom mirror five days ago. ‘One, two … ’ They all pushed together. It was heavy, but not as heavy as Bobbie might have feared. There was a lip to the slab, so they had to lift and slide.

There was nothing on her body that didn’t hurt. Bobbie had to let Caine and Naya do most of the lifting, but the slab came loose. ‘Push!’ she cried and they slid the granite lid all the way off the tomb.

Bobbie’s hand flew to her mouth. Naya screamed and jumped back.

Mary lay in the sarcophagus, perfectly preserved. Still flesh, still covered in blood. Eyes closed, she looked almost peaceful. She could so easily be sleeping. Alongside Mary, looking somewhat cramped, was the original occupant – mere bones.

Mary’s eyes snapped open and now Bobbie yelped, clinging to Caine’s arm just as he clung to hers. Mary raised a hand towards them.
No
, Bobbie thought,
it’s over now!
A sigh passed Mary’s lips and her eyes closed, her hand falling. A certain serenity fell over her. Relief and release.

Sixty years finally caught up with Mary and, like one of those time-lapse cameras on nature programmes, her face thinned, cheekbones jutting, the skin tightening around her bones, darkening like leather. Her lips peeled back into a perpetual smile and her eyes turned to hollows, skin rotting to nothing. The black hair fell and withered about her skull like a halo.

Mary Worthington was now at rest.

‘Bobbie, your face.’ Caine held her cheeks in both hands. ‘The scars are all gone.’

Bobbie buried herself in Caine’s chest. They’d done it. They’d actually done it. She was never, ever letting go of him, or Naya for that matter, ever again. She squeezed Naya’s hand to let her know.

‘Bobbie, look.’ Caine prised her off.

‘What?’

‘Look inside the coffin.’

‘Oh my God.’

Naya tentatively approached. ‘What is it?’

Bobbie pointed inside the sarcophagus and things got just that little bit worse. There was literally writing on the wall. Near Mary’s skeletal fingers was an engagement ring, presumably from her cellmate, which she’d used to carve letters into the side of the tomb.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Naya turned away, pale with sickness. ‘That means … ’

Bobbie finished the sentence, gripping Caine’s forearm with white knuckles. ‘She wasn’t dead when he put her in there.’

‘That’s awful.’ Caine’s lips were a horrid grey. ‘How long do you think she was in there … without food or water? How long would you survive?’

There was no way Mary would have been able to get the lid off alone, injured as she was. Bobbie closed her eyes to hold back the tears as the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. ‘I don’t know, but at a guess … I’d say about five days.’

Five days. Five days to die. Five days to find her before it was too late.

Bobbie traced the letters she’d carved in her dying days. The last testament of Mary Worthington. She’d written in a frantic, jangled mess of letters:

no one BeLiEvED me i just wanted people to LIKE ME

Bobbie wished there was some way of letting her know that, even if she was ignored in life, after her death, people
did
believe in her. People all over the world said her name in front of a mirror, half expecting her to appear. Thousands and thousands of people
believed
.

As fanciful as they were, Bobbie recalled Judy’s tales of ‘gypsy curses’, which she’d brushed off without a second thought, but maybe, just maybe, poor Mary
was
cursed. Maybe it was the freakish circumstances in which she died or maybe, like Judy said, she was simply born
different
. Whatever the reason, every time someone at Piper’s Hall called her name she’d been a slave to their song, unable to prevent the awful side effect of the summoning. Saying her name was like winding a clock: once wound it would inevitably tick out to the conclusion.

And now the cycle was broken.

Once they’d managed to shift the statue – which wasn’t easy – the grate under the Madonna lifted easily enough, revealing the ladder and tunnel. Bobbie could only think that Millar had concealed the passage in case Mary’s body was one day found – the last thing he’d want was the police knowing there was a direct tunnel to his staffroom. It was lucky for her he hadn’t bricked it up entirely.

The irony that Abigail, Taylor and the others had a hidden escape route metres from where they’d perished wasn’t lost on Bobbie, but she put the sad thought out of her head. They had to rouse Sadie enough to get her to cling to Caine’s back so he could piggyback her down the ladder. The top rung was already destroyed, but the crumbling ladder just managed to take their combined weight.

Naya went next, leaving Bobbie alone in the crypt. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Bobbie told Mary. ‘Everyone’s going to know the truth and we’re going to get you a proper grave, I promise.’ Bobbie lowered herself through the trapdoor.

Her head was about to vanish into the tunnel when brilliant white light flooded the room. The main doors creaked open and sunlight blinded her. Had they been gone so long that morning had arrived? Dr Price must have come to and organised a search party. Bobbie squinted into the aurora, daring to take one hand off the ladder to shield her eyes. There was no one racing in to save them, however – someone was leaving.

Mary stood in the threshold and she was beautiful. All the blood was gone and her uniform was smart and clean. A gentle breeze blew her loose black hair off her face, highlighting the incredible cheekbones and sky-blue eyes. She turned and looked at Bobbie, who was frozen to the ladder. What she was seeing
couldn’t
be real.

In that moment it became clear that the window into Mary’s world could be seen through on both sides. Mary had been watching, listening, learning, and they
knew
each other now. Looking as she did now, just a girl, Bobbie wondered whether, if they’d lived in the same time, they’d have been friends. Mary hadn’t
haunted
her, she’d reached out to her. Two little Piper’s Hall misfits separated by decades.