The Bones of You (4 page)

6

D
eath casts its shadow, leaving our hearts sad and tainting our world with fear. Have I reached that point in life where from here on it will always be there, lurking, just out of sight, but waiting in the background for its next victim?

And while our questions go unanswered, life goes on, the sun rising over grass sparkling with dew and the dawn chorus as loud and sweet as any morning, just as Ella, my neighbor, walks past with her black Labrador and the post arrives and Angus goes to work. He has an important meeting with the head of an American company, who’s flown over from Boston just to see him.

Early morning, with the sun rising through the trees, is a time of day I love. Not just the quiet, but the low, clear light, which gives color depth, each petal and leaf freshened by the cool of the night and the dew. But this morning, I don’t see the rose that’s bursting into bloom, just as I breathe the lavender without savoring its warm fragrance and pick the last of the raspberries without tasting them.

Yesterday I’d have called Jo—to see if she’d heard anything. But in this changed world, I don’t. It feels too intrusive. Instead, my thoughts turn to Grace and her friends, reeling from the realization that even this close to home, no one’s invincible.

“I should have done something, Mummy. . . . I should have been nicer, been her friend. . . .”

Her childhood name for me, her hysteria—partly tiredness but heartfelt—is completely understandable. But not her guilt.

“It’s not your fault, Grace. Even if you’d been friends, it doesn’t mean you could have stopped it.”

“She doesn’t deserve this, Mum. . . . She never did anything wrong. . . .” Past and present are muddled as she navigates unfamiliar territory.

“I know she didn’t.”

All I can do is hold my daughter’s sobbing body, grateful with every fiber of my being that I still have her, can still touch her, hear her voice. That it wasn’t Grace who disappeared, that I’m not Jo, whose world has been decimated.

“I have to go to the funeral . . . even if it means missing class, Mum. I can’t not go.”

“I understand, Grace. We’ll work something out. It’s okay.”

“Everyone says they’re going,” she says. Her eyes are bloodshot; her face is stained with tears. “I know we weren’t best friends, but it doesn’t mean we can’t, does it?”

 

I discover, too, that grief is different things to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.

I leave it several days longer than I planned before I call round to see Jo, expecting drawn curtains, locked doors, and no one to answer. It would be easier, too, because I can leave the flowers I’ve picked from the garden in the shade of her porch. Post Grace’s card. Not have to look at her and see from the pain in her eyes how real this is.

As I pull up outside, there are several parked cars on a road that is usually empty. The press? But though I feel eyes watching, they don’t approach me, even as I raise my hand to knock and the door opens.

“Jo . . .” I look at her, then hold out my arms, suddenly unable to speak. For all the time I’ve spent thinking about this, prepared what I’d say if I actually saw her, there are no words.

She lets me hold her, and I think,
She’s still Rosie’s mother. She’ll always be Rosie’s mother. Nothing and no one can change that.

“I’m so sorry, Jo. I didn’t want to disturb you. I just wanted to leave these.”

“Oh. They’re lovely. . . .” She barely looks at the flowers I hand her. Her eyes are glassy; her words thick with medically induced evenness. “Will you come in?”

“I won’t, Jo. I don’t want to intrude.” I step back.

“Please . . .” There’s a pleading note in her voice as she glances up the road to see who’s watching her. “Please come and have a cup of tea.”

I follow her inside, awkward, because I don’t know her well enough to be here, dimly recalling how tea and grief are as synonymous as fish and chips. Then, as we pass from the hallway into her sitting room, I stop to gaze in astonishment. There are flowers and cards covering every surface, so many and so beautiful, it’s almost wrong.

She doesn’t pause, just walks down the steps into the huge live-in kitchen. I can’t help thinking that if we were closer, I’d gently bully her into sitting down while I made the tea, perhaps sneak a drop of medicinal brandy into it. But we’re not close. And Jo’s private—if not about the shops she buys her designer clothes from, or the gala balls and charity events she and Neal go to, then about the real stuff. The nuts and bolts, the nitty-gritty of cherished hopes and dreams, and how her family, like anyone’s, is everything to her.

Today even the kettle looks too heavy for Jo. She’s so thin, so brittle, ethereal in her grief, with huge eyes and pale skin. I notice her hair, the same shade as Rosie’s, only fractionally shorter, so that from behind, you could almost—but not quite—mistake them.

“Is Neal here?”

“He’s with the police. . . .” The mug in her hand shakes. “I should have gone.... Couldn’t face it.... They’re tracing calls to her phone. . . .” Her voice wobbles.

“Can I do anything? Anything at all?” I ask quietly.

She shakes her head, then gathers herself and pours boiling water into the mugs, while I look around at the spotless white and steel units, the massive range-style oven. Immaculately clean and tidy.
And expensive,
I can’t help thinking, hating that I even notice.

She brings the mugs over and pulls out a chair opposite me.

“It’s nice of you to come, Kate. I appreciate it. People send things.... They don’t come here. It’s like it’s contagious.”

Her voice is flat, her eyes bright with unshed tears, as incredibly, she maintains her composure. I shiver inwardly at the thought that you can catch death like a virus.

“They probably don’t want to disturb you,” I say gently. “That’s all, Jo.”

“So many cards,” she says, sounding blank. “I can’t believe how many. Even from people we don’t know.”

Does it help? Is it in any small way a comfort to know you’re in the thoughts of so many people? It prompts me to pull Grace’s card from my pocket and place it on the table.

“Grace asked me to give you this.”

She reaches out slowly and takes it. I wonder if she’s thinking the unthinkable as she thinks of Grace, knowing I would be if it were my most precious, most loved person whom someone had taken from me.

“Can you tell her . . . thank you?”

I sip my tea, but Jo’s remains untouched. Then a quiet sound from behind makes me turn round.

Perhaps because Jo rarely mentions her, I always forget Delphine. I know from the way Rosie talked, the way her face would light up when she mentioned her sister’s name, they were close. As she stands there, I take in the same pale hair, the familiar look of uncertainty. So like Rosie—until I notice her eyes. In place of Rosie’s quiet friendliness, her watchful look unnerves me.

“Hello. I’m Kate, Grace’s mum,” I tell her, remembering too late that because they’re school years apart, she may not even know Grace.

“Hello.” Her voice is quiet, but like her sister, she is well spoken. “Mummy, please may I have lunch?”

“In a minute, Delphine. When Kate has gone. Why don’t you go and watch the television?”

Delphine goes without a murmur, but I take it as my cue. Swallowing the last of my tea, I get up. “Really, I should be getting back.”

Jo doesn’t protest, just puts her undrunk mug down and leads the way to the door. Then, as she opens it, raising pain-filled eyes to meet mine, she says quietly, “They found her in the woods.”

Suddenly, I can’t move, my mind struggling for words of comfort that don’t exist, but Jo goes on.

“She was buried . . . under leaves and moss. Someone saw her hair. . . .”

Her voice is suddenly high-pitched, jogging my mind back to the present; then, as she says “hair,” it cracks, and she crumples, sobbing in my arms.

Two hours later, hours in which I do my best to console her, knowing that nothing I do can ease her loss, I make lunch for her and Delphine, lunch that Jo doesn’t touch and Delphine only picks at.

“You’ve been ages,” Grace says when at last I get home. “Did you see them?”

“Yes. It was awful, Gracie. Just so, so sad. For all of them. I saw Delphine, too. And the press was hanging around.” I’m exhausted. The weight of grief—even someone else’s—is exacting, draining.

From the look on Grace’s face, I know she feels it, too, that she’s trying on Delphine’s shoes for size, as I have Jo’s.

“Some of us want to go to the woods later. To take flowers . . .” Grace looks at me, half seeking my approval, though if she’s made up her mind, she’ll do it, anyway.

“You may not be able to, sweetie. The police are probably all over the place, searching for any clues as to what happened.”

She looks aghast. “It’s a public place, isn’t it? They can’t really stop us.”

“They probably can. Until they know how Rosie died.” I pause. “Gracie? Why not leave it—just for now? Wait till the police have finished up there. Why don’t you ask Sophie round instead?”

“I’m not staying in, Mum. We’re all meeting up. It’s already organized. Anyway, nothing else is going to happen, is it?”

Her question hangs there, daring me to tell her otherwise, as we look at each other, as I stifle my inner voice, which is shouting silently,
We don’t know that. We can’t be sure about anything.

“Is it, Mum? Not with the police everywhere.” Repeating the question, eyes bright with tears, asking me to tell her nothing will happen to her, to make it all right. And I can’t, because with Rosie dead, I don’t know how to.

“Of course not.” There’s nothing else I can say. “But I really think you should put off going—just until the police have finished, that’s all.”

 

“I was in those woods,” I tell Angus, as we lie in bed later that night.

His presence is reassuringly normal. It’s late—he had a dinner that dragged on—but he’s taken tomorrow off. That he didn’t know Rosie means he’s more detached than I am.

“When I had that fall, I didn’t tell you, but the weirdest thing happened.”

Now I think about it, and in the light of everything I’ve found out since, it isn’t just weird, it’s creepy.

“I’m not mad, Angus, but it was like I could feel that something terrible had happened there. I’ve never known anything like it. Zappa felt it, too, I’m sure. It’s why he bolted.”

He glances at me over the top of his glasses.

“Sorry. I don’t know what I mean.”

I hedge then, because Angus likes his world scientifically verifiable, and much as I adore my husband, his total inflexibility and pigheadedness, which can be strengths elsewhere, have caused many a heated row between us. So much so I wonder why I’ve even mentioned this.

But for once, wisely, he doesn’t push me.

“How was Jo?” he asks instead.

I shrug. “Fragile. Devastated. I didn’t see Neal. He was with the police.”

Angus shakes his head. “God. You read about these things happening to someone else, somewhere else. Not to someone you know on your own doorstep.”

“I know.”

“I suppose they’ll do a postmortem.”

“I suppose they’ll have to.” I sit up. “She could have been murdered, Angus.”

“Unlikely,” he says. “It was probably just an accident. I’m sure the police will get to the bottom of it.”

“But it’s not like she fell off a horse, is it? How can a young, healthy person just have an accident that kills them?” I persist, unconvinced. “In the woods, of all places? And Jo said she was covered with leaves.”

Dozens of us walk, run, ride our horses through there every day—the worst that ever happens is a bruised knee or sprained ankle.

Angus puts down his book. “Anything could have happened, Kate. She might have fallen or even had a heart attack. It’s rare but not impossible. It can happen. To anyone, whatever their age.”

Maybe I’m wrong and he’s right. He carries on reading, but my head fills with unwanted images. Of Rosie, alone in the dark. Rosie in the woods. Rosie with an unseen, unknown person who wishes her harm. In a morgue. Only now it isn’t Rosie anymore; it’s just her gray, empty body, with the pale hair that someone spotted in the leaves. Her ghost still out there, haunting the woods. And what if the police don’t get to the bottom of it? If there’s a murderer loose in our village? What if it happens to someone else?

I’m awake for hours that night, eventually dozing off in Angus’s arms, but not before I’ve made a pact with God, or whoever’s out there, that I’ll do anything, absolutely anything, to keep my family safe. I don’t care what happens to me.