The Bones of You (5 page)

Then, when my eyes finally close, I’m back in the woods. At the same clearing where I fell off Zappa, hearing the leaves and the wind. This time, there is no rain, just birds singing and a sun that’s unnaturally bright, and as I look down, I see Rosie lying beside me, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Her hair, longer than I remember, is spread around her, a rippling carpet of pale silk. She reminds me of a beautiful painting, her body covered by an intricately woven blanket of green moss and golden leaves.

I try again and again to stir her.
Rosie. Rosie. Wake up. You must wake up. . . .

But she doesn’t move. Then the trees fall silent, and the woods darken. The fear is back.
I have to run.

I pull at Rosie’s arm. I can’t leave her here, but she won’t move. I pull harder, hear myself scream at her.

Wake up, Rosie
.
You have to run. . . .

Her eyes open, and for a moment, she looks at me. Then I’m losing her. Her mouth opens, but no sound comes from it.

The scream is mine.

I open my eyes, aware of my face wet with tears. I’m shaking and shaken to the core. The image of Rosie is still sharp, down to the sweep of her lashes against her cheeks and those pale eyes, riveted to mine, telling me something, I’m certain of it.

Beside me, Angus mutters something unintelligible as I slip out of bed, glancing at the illuminated hands of my small alarm clock, far too agitated to sleep. After fumbling on the back of the door for my dressing gown, I creep downstairs.

When I have a large design project, the night’s the best time to work, when the house is at its stillest, when the odd creak is comforting, the tick of the clock its heartbeat. But tonight is different. I’m on edge, seeing movements in every shadow, imprints of menacing faces outside pressed against the glass, silently watching me. Aware there’s a murderer who could be anywhere.

I fill the kettle to make tea, then draw the curtains, shutting out my demons, before sitting down at the table, the mug cradled in my hands.

The last time Rosie came over to see my horses, I think she’d been here a while, hiding, watching out for me, then appearing to just turn up, as if by chance. I hadn’t heard her open the gate; I’d just come out of the tack room, and there she was.

“Rosie! You made me jump!”

I watched uncertainty flicker over her face. She was like that. Never quite sure how to read me, just as she herself was unreadable.

“Sorry.” She hesitated, twisting a lock of her hair round one of her fingers. “It was just . . . I wondered if you needed any help today. Is it okay?”

“Of course it is! Catch Reba if you like. She needs grooming.” Semiretirement can sometimes be too quiet for her, and Reba enjoys being fussed over. I threw Rosie a head collar and watched the quiet way she moved among the horses, the gentle way they nuzzled her.

She always asked, always apologized. My answer was always the same.
Yes.
Like me, I guess she needed what only horses were able to give her.

One thing surprised me, though. Where Grace’s friends would bypass stable chores in their impatience to get on and ride, Rosie never once asked to. On the one occasion I got her up on Reba, from her smile you’d think she’d conquered Everest. She was a natural rider, with the kind of light hands you can’t teach and an innate feel for what the horse was thinking.

I wanted to teach her, but we never progressed further. When I offered to talk to Jo about giving her riding lessons, she looked worried.

“It would be better if you didn’t tell her. I just like coming here to help,” she said quite anxiously, repeating herself in that apologetic way she had. “Like now—if it’s okay?”

It remained an unspoken, slightly awkward secret between us. One I never mentioned to Jo, though I considered it once or twice, but there was never any reason why I should.

Rosie kept herself to herself, not mentioning friends to me, but she was a sweet, pretty girl, and I often wondered if there was a boy in her life. The last time I saw her, I commented on the jewel-colored necklace.

“That’s so pretty, Rosie.”

I watched the tinge of faint pink in her cheeks as her hand went to her neck, touching it.

“Thanks,” she said shyly. “It was a present.”

I wondered then, but as always, she didn’t say and I didn’t ask, “Who from?” Not understanding her secrecy. Was she hiding something?

Then my mind wanders back to that afternoon in the woods. Was I spooked by the storm, or had something else been there with me? Is it possible? Do I really believe that? Then, as I sit there in the silence of the night, I feel a hand on my shoulder and my heart stops.

I jump up, spinning round, my tea going everywhere. “
Jesus!
Angus! Don’t creep up on me like that.”

My husband’s bleary with sleep. “Who else would it have been?”

I shake my head at him. “I didn’t hear you. You frightened the life out of me.”

“I just wondered where you were. Come back to bed.” His hair is pointing all ways; his pajamas are hanging off his lanky frame. He yawns.

“Okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

I clear up my spilt tea but suddenly don’t want to be alone. After turning out the light, I follow him.

7

O
ver disorientating days that merge seamlessly, we learn more. First disbelief, then shock ripples through our village. It wasn’t an accident. Rosie was murdered.

Murder.
Until now unspoken, a word that out loud triggers an aftershock.

As it reaches Grace, she gasps; her hand goes to her mouth. “Rosie was murdered? Oh, Mum, it’s so horrible.” She’s in tears, her eighteen-year-old world tumbled sideways into an ugly parallel universe that’s sprung out of nowhere overnight.

A visceral, wrenching loss fills me then, not for what’s happened to Rosie, but for Grace and the safe, nurturing, loving world that she’s grown up in, so full of promise, holding her dreams and the stars, and that’s suddenly gone.

I put my arms around her and hold her close, hating what this is doing to us.

 

As facts slowly filter out, the first strands of a spiderweb of something sinister appear. It was as Jo told me: her body was discovered in the woods. There was evidence of a struggle, during which she suffered several blows to her head, before she was stabbed viciously a number of times. And then follows the part that I struggle with, because they found her in the same clearing where I fell off Zappa.

And I didn’t see her.

On Facebook, a public outpouring of grief is unleashed, unchecked and uncensored, spreading like wildfire, as buried amid the many tributes to Rosie are more sinister posts hinting at the reasons behind her murder.

Grace is horrified. “It’s sick, Mum. Most of them don’t even know her.” All traces of teenage bravado gone, using “sick” in the old-fashioned sense.

“I’m sure they’ll be removed, Gracie. And anyone who knew Rosie will ignore them.”

As if that’s not enough, the lowest echelons of the press show their true colors, too, with a front-page article on “acclaimed news reporter Neal Anderson and his wife” visiting the site where their daughter’s body was found and featuring an intrusive, devastating photo of the family taken several years ago. It’s followed by speculation about an unknown, unnamed boyfriend and hints at a secret life Rosie led, with another, more recent photo of her, those pale eyes seeming to look out of the pages into mine.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to do this.” Grace slams the paper on the table with the full force of her anger. “They’re evil. It’s so wrong, Mum, making up lies and printing her photo like that. She was just a normal girl. Her poor family . . .”

“I know, Gracie. It’s horrible. I feel the same.”

“
Why
do they have to put her picture on the front?” Grace stands there, all formidable five feet four inches of her bristling. “Isn’t just writing about it big enough for them? Isn’t it bad enough that she’s dead?”

“The trouble is, it’s always the most scandalous news that sells papers,” I say sadly. “And this is a big story.”

She shakes her head, tears rolling down her cheeks. “If it were the last job on earth, I wouldn’t work for them,” she says. “They’re lowlifes, the lot of them. Someone should sue them.”

I agree with her but leave it to rest uneasily in the background along with everything else, unresolved, as the search for the murderer begins.

And I call round to see Jo.

 

Ten of the worst days have passed since I last saw her. Jo was always thin, but now she’s skeletal, her chin a bony protrusion, her cheekbones defined far beyond the point of beauty. She’s wearing a soft cream tunic that swamps her tiny frame and a voluminous scarf round her neck.

“I was driving past,” I say, even though I wasn’t, and I’ve come round just so she knows I’m thinking about her. To reassure myself they’re somehow clinging on, inside their own private hell.

“Thank you, Kate. . . .” She looks haunted. I notice, too, that for the first time since I’ve known her, her roots need doing. That under the salon pale blond, she’s quite gray.

A man’s voice calls out, “Who is it, Joanna?”

A fleeting look crosses her face, and I’m reminded of Rosie’s when she was caught off guard.

“He keeps thinking it’s the press. They won’t leave us alone,” she says, then raises her voice. “It’s Kate, darling.”

“He’s working from home,” she says, glancing over her shoulder.

“That’s good,” I say, relieved she’s not alone. “For all of you.”

But before she can reply, Neal appears behind her.

Though I know his face from numerous TV appearances, I’ve met him only a handful of times, at local cocktail parties or parents’ evenings at school. In the flesh, he’s good-looking, a well-built man with a limp that’s the legacy of his job—a sniper bullet in Afghanistan, according to local gossip. Apparently, he was lucky it wasn’t worse.

He’s weathering this better than Jo is—at least on the outside—but even in their combined grief, they’re a striking couple, his healthy robustness contrasted with Jo’s frailty.

“Hello, Kate. Are you coming in?”

Even now, I notice that quiet assurance in spades, the kind of charisma he has, which men can’t learn but either have or don’t have.

“Hello, Neal. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you all. I just wanted to tell Jo . . . well, nothing really. Just, if I can do anything, she knows where I am. . . .” I trail off, leave it open-ended, because it sounds so lame and so inadequate, like offering a Band-Aid for third-degree burns or a broken neck.

He nods just once.

“I’ll see you soon.” I kiss Jo’s cheek, then glance at the clock on the wall behind her. “Sorry, I have to go. I’ve a meeting with a client. I’ve already postponed twice. . . .”

I babble the lie, but I don’t want to say I’m taking Grace to see a movie. It’s irrational, but such is my guilt that she’s here and Rosie isn’t that I can’t even mention my daughter’s name.

 

Is this how it is now? Are we all suspects? Behind the facade of constrained smiles and familiar exchanges, there’s a shift in our village. That we could have a murderer in our midst is a thought none of us can ignore.

“There were some boys camping in the woods. Friends of Sophie’s. . .” I fall silent, wondering if the police have been told, berating myself for not reminding Grace.

“What about the boyfriend the press keeps on about? He’s the obvious one to talk to, isn’t he? He’d know if anything funny had been going on. I’m surprised she didn’t mention him to you. . . .” Rachael sits at my kitchen table, stirring her coffee.

“I think all that’s just gossip. You know what the papers are like. Jo told me she didn’t have one. And Grace didn’t know anything.”

“Really? Bloody scandalous, isn’t it?”

I nod, feeling the lump in my throat. “She was so private, Rachael. And shy. And now she’s everyone’s business. . . .”

“I know. Awful, isn’t it? Talking of the press . . .” Rachael’s thoughtful. “Have you seen your friend at all?”

“You mean Laura? No. To tell you the truth, I’m avoiding her.”

“Why?” Rachael frowns. “I liked her. Did you look at her magazine? Only it’s not trashy. It’s intelligent. Did you know she’s a psychologist? She writes really well.”

“I’ll look. I just hate the idea of adding to all the gossip out there.”

“Kate, look at it this way. You could help her tell the actual true story—if you wanted to, that is. Fair enough if you don’t, though. I’m sure she won’t be short of offers.”

 

I keep coming back to Sophie’s friends, knowing I have to tackle Grace about them.

“Sweetie? Did you talk to Sophie? About going to the police?”

She shakes her head, her eyes wide and serious. “I have to, don’t I?”

“Yes.” I say it gently. “They may know nothing about Rosie.” I frown. “But what if they do? And I’ve never really understood why you’ve kept so quiet about them.”

Grace sighs; then the familiar defiant look is back. “If you really have to know, they’re not really Sophie’s friends. They were just these guys she got weed from, that’s all. I didn’t touch it, Mum. I never do. Just so you know.”

Knowing what my reaction will be, daring me to be furious with her, Grace stands her ground. Any other time, I probably would be, but while I wasn’t looking, while a murder took place, the rules shifted imperceptibly.

“Sophie know how stupid that is? Buying weed from just anyone like that?”

My mind racing, because yes, they’re probably harmless, but what if they’re not? What if Rosie somehow got caught up with them?

“Mum! It’s just weed!” Grace’s outraged cry breaks into my thoughts. “Everyone does it—except me, of course.” She says it resentfully, as if it’s somehow my fault that she’s missing out.

“Whatever, Grace. All that really matters is finding the murderer. I’m sorry, but Sophie talks to the police today, or I will.”

Knowing she’s in the wrong, Grace glowers at me, then turns and flounces away.

 

And then a thin veneer of normality filters in, sorely needed, as I busy myself with new clients’ gardens, finding peace as I always do in the music of the seasons. The drone of insects and the harmonies of the birds, pitched against the backdrop of the wind. Perfect fleeting moments, until the Everest-sized mountain that’s Grace’s university shopping list rears its ugly head.

“You can’t need all this!” I gasp in horror at her list. “You don’t need new bedding, Grace. We have plenty. Or towels . . . and plates and mugs . . . Come and have a look in the kitchen.”

And then we go shopping and buy new towels, new china, new bedding, and new everything else, diverting ourselves from recent events with frivolity, soft fabrics, and prettiness, as the closer she gets to leaving, the more time picks up speed, the more precious each minute suddenly becomes.