Mercy (5 page)

If Miss Fellows suddenly went up in a puffball of sulphurous smoke I’d hardly be surprised, but I’m only 47

listening to her rant with half an ear. Something that Tiffany said before is bothering me and I’m chasing it down the unreliable pathways of Carmen’s brain. Hey, I have to work with what I’ve got.

Miss Dustin puts a steadying hand on Miss Fellows’

arm and cuts her off midstream. I’m seeing classic Good Cop, Bad Cop 101
being played out right here. No prizes for working out who’s who.

‘Is anything …
the matter
, Carmen?’ Miss Dustin says gravely from under her ridiculous bob. ‘You’ve been quite …
out of sorts
lately. I can
help
.’

I have to stifle a burst of laughter that emerges as a fit of unconvincing coughing. From Carmen’s point of view, there’s not a lot that’s going right at the moment, but it would be too hard to explain to Laurel and Hardy here. I shrug, when I probably should be cowering, which just sets Miss Fellows off again.

‘You’ve been acting like a flake since we got here, Zappacosta. Tomorrow’s your last chance or Tiffany takes over, and you know where we’re taking this piece, so consider it fair warning! Stuff this up and you’ll never sing a solo with this choir again. It will ruin your chances for performing arts college, and I don’t care how “talented” people think you are …’ She lets that 48

one drift, but the implication is clear enough.

For a moment, I feel a twinge of discomfort, like a pulled muscle. Carmen?

‘Tiffany was always my first choice,’ Miss Fellows says sourly to her colleague knowing full well I am still listening.

‘Her voice doesn’t have the brightness and tone of Carmen’s, Fiona, and you know it,’ Miss Dustin murmurs in reply. ‘Carmen’s not as mature a performer, but you have to admit she’s really outstanding.’

Miss Fellows snorts. ‘
If
she ever gets going! I shouldn’t have let you talk me into it, Ellen. She didn’t even try to sing. It’s like she’s had a personality bypass since we got here, and she didn’t have that much to begin with …’

There’s that internal twitch again.
Don’t worry,
Carmen, I think I hate her, too
.

The music directors of the other schools file out behind Miss Dustin and Miss Fellows, talking quietly among themselves.

‘Two weeks!’ growls the old man. He shoots me an accusing look over his shoulder, as if the general lack of ability of the combined student bodies of Paradise, Port Marie and Little Falls is somehow my personal fault.

49

‘Less,’ replies Mr Masson glumly. He doesn’t look at me. I am just one more malfunction in a morning of malfunctions. ‘It’s right on track to be a fiasco this time.’

‘Lauren Daley would have been able to sing that part,’ murmurs the good-looking, young male teacher, who seems to have forgotten that I’m there.

Mr Masson nods. ‘A phenomenon. A once-in-a-lifetime voice. She could have carried them all single-handedly. People would have paid just to hear her sing, never mind the others. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of that girl.’

What was it that Tiffany said again? It won’t come clear.

‘Lauren Daley is dead!’ the elderly man exclaims, bringing my attention flying back to them.

All three reach the threshold of the hall. Somehow I can still hear them clearly, as if they are standing just beside me. Are the acoustics that good in here?

‘You don’t know that,’ Mr Masson replies stoutly.

‘Well, if she’s not, she’s as good as,’ the older man mutters as the group turns the corner, leaving me sitting alone in a sea of battered chairs.

What was it that Tiffany said?
And it suddenly hits me in that dusty, echoing room. Lauren Daley was a 50

soprano, a standout, a star. Like Tiffany thinks she is; like Carmen is supposed to be. That’s what I was trying to remember all along.

I have to find Ryan Daley. If he hasn’t made the connection already, someone has to tell him.

Maybe I’ve evolved, maybe I used to be some kind of impossible princess back when we first met, but Luc doesn’t know me well enough now if he thinks I’ll just sit around on my borrowed ass and do nothing. If you’ve got a surfeit of time and you need it to fly, you’ve gotta keep busy. Rule
numero uno
, my friends. Worked out the hard way. Take it from me.

Ryan Daley had a reputation as a troublemaker and I like troublemakers. Always have. Provided they don’t hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt, I’m all for them.

But Ryan Daley refused to be found all that day. I went from class to class on the fringes of the St Joseph’s crowd, keeping a lookout for six foot five of total knockout, vigilante, gun-toting loner, and all I got was more gossip, conjecture and fantasy.

‘He’s like the Phantom,’ sniggered one of the gangly, amateur tenors who’d attached himself to Tiffany like 51

an adoring limpet. He was good looking in a wet, severe-side-part kind of way, if you didn’t focus on the obvious crater marks on his cheeks from recurrent acne.

‘If it weren’t for the Lauren thing, he’d have been canned ages ago.’

‘She was hot,’ added a towering bass called Tod, who had a footballer’s build now but would some day run to fat. ‘Pity.’

If he’d just come right out and said something tasteless like the world had enough ugly chicks in it without someone making off with one of the good ones, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was what he meant anyway. Like he’d ever had a chance.

‘There was always something weird about those two,’ sniped a delicate, pretty redhead I recognised from a photo on Lauren’s dresser. Both girls with their arms twined around each other’s necks in a
Forever Friends
photo frame. ‘It went way deeper than the twin thing.

They shoulda looked at him a lot harder than they did.’

‘And you should know, Brenda,’ added the spotty boy. ‘I mean, she’s his ex and everything.’ He licked his lips as he addressed this last remark to us, the interlopers without the necessary backstory.

I zeroed in on Brenda for a second and wondered 52

what Ryan had seen in her. She was pretty, I supposed.

In a high-maintenance, high-fashion, don’t-touch-me kind of way.

Tiffany, Delia and Co exchanged satisfied glances as the home crowd bore us towards the school canteen for further updates on the Lauren Daley abduction and subsequent fallout. All day, I listened quietly in my guise as Carmen the stuff-up, Carmen the public disgrace and non-entity, and quietly grew angrier as the day progressed. Who says people don’t speak ill of the dead?

Lauren deserved to be found just to shut these phoneys up.

When the home-time bell rang and I prepared to walk back through town to the Daleys’ residence, I was no nearer to finding Ryan than I was his sister.

As I passed faded front-window displays that universally declared
Shop here for heavenly savings!
—

every pun intended — it occurred to me that maybe, just this once, I really was supposed to sit on my hands and do nothing. The problem was nearly two years old, the girl had to be beyond salvation, and better minds than mine had already poured everything they had into it. Surely, the trail had to be cold. Only no one had managed to convince Ryan Daley of that.

53

I finally spot him crossing his street from the north end — coming from the opposite direction to me —

towards his front gates, shouldering a heavy rucksack.

He frowns as soon as our eyes meet and stops moving.

I wave, which is a stupid, girly thing to do, but I’m no good at acting natural.

We begin converging warily towards each other again. But then the Dobermans start up with their weird howling.

By the time he and I meet up in front of the fence, they’re growling and shaking as if they’ve developed advanced rabies, slobbering and clawing at me through the pickets. Ryan’s timing couldn’t be more perfect.

What would I do if he wasn’t here to let me in? Scream for help at the periphery? Just
fly
over to the front door?

‘Dogs don’t like me,’ I say lamely, by way of a greeting.

‘No kidding!’ Ryan says incredulously, looking at my five feet of nothing and wondering how it’s possible.

‘Just wait here.’

Like his dad did on that first day, he hauls them by force, one by one, behind the side fence and padlocks them in. The dogs don’t let up for a second.

Ryan reshoulders his pack and heads for the front 54

door without a word. Not exactly friendly. But he did call off the hounds from hell.

So I yell out loudly, ‘Hey, I’d like to help you. Find her, I mean.’

And it’s enough to make him look at me, really focus for a second. He frowns again and I just want to take his face in my hands and smooth away the lines that shouldn’t be there. They make him look older, careworn.

Boys his age should be making out and getting falling down drunk, right?

‘What makes you think you can help me?’ he says quietly. There is no anger in his voice. Just an old despair.

I don’t blame him for saying it. I mean, I come up to somewhere just past his navel. As Carmen, I look kind of useless, even if I don’t feel it, not on the inside. And all I’m going on is a hunch. Is it worth me feeding his delusion?

I don’t like doing it, but I move closer and steel myself before touching his bare wrist tentatively. I need to know if there’s anything in the rumours before I commit myself. Involvement is usually trouble and, boy, I
should know.

It begins as an ache in my left hand, building pressure behind my eyes. Then we flame into contact, 55

but it isn’t as if I’m being
immolated
exactly, burnt alive, like when his parents laid their hands on me. Ryan’s pain, his grief, is different because he believes Lauren’s still alive somewhere. There’s hope there, and it tempers everything so that I don’t feel as if I’m standing at the heart of someone’s raging funeral pyre. It’s almost bearable. Like a dull ache; a pain present but subsumed.

I’m not really certain what I’m looking for, or exactly how this works. I get more images of Lauren, and I’m not sure if they’re things I’ve seen for myself in her bedroom or that exist only inside her twin’s head.

But I feel it, too. There’s something of
her
inside him that isn’t just random memories. It feels fresh, almost recent.

It’s uncanny. Faint, like a faded graffiti writer’s tag that refuses to be washed away by the rain. A reaching out.

A cry for help. A faint
save me
.

The Latin comes to me unbidden:
salva me
.

I see fragments of the things Ryan’s seen or done since Lauren’s disappearance; an avalanche of scenes and faces and pure emotion. A lot of fear. Like today, as he warily combed a deserted complex of buildings on his own, jumping at shadows, testing the ground with an ice pick, when he should have been in class. Layers of long-buried thoughts become clear — memories of fist fights, 56

confrontations, the inside of a jail cell …
the inside of
a dark basement, with only the sound of someone’s
shattered breathing to illuminate the absolute darkness
.

I don’t know how long we stand there, but Ryan finally breaks contact, shaking off my light touch angrily. The ghost world fades, replaced by the Daleys’

front yard, the faint tang of salt in the air, the hysterical cries of the dogs. I am no longer deaf, dumb and blind to these things.

‘I don’t need your pity. Or your “help”.’

Ryan’s voice is rough. He tries to open the front door without looking at me again, prepared to shut me and an entire world of sceptics out if necessary. But what I say next draws his shocked gaze.

‘I know where you went today and I think you’re on the wrong track. You should be looking at the house next door. If you’re going to dig, dig there.’

57

‘How did you know?’ he demands in a low voice, pulling me through the front door and slamming it behind us roughly.

He’s still gripping the sleeve of the denim jacket I’m wearing when his mother calls from the kitchen, ‘Ryan, is that you, honey? Carmen?’

Neither of us replies, each continuing to stare the other down.

Footsteps come closer and he suddenly explodes into motion, pushing me ahead of him up the stairs. ‘Yeah!’

he shouts finally, from the upstairs landing, steering me away from Lauren’s closed bedroom door towards his, the room on the other side of Lauren’s bathroom.

‘I was worried … the dogs,’ Mrs Daley says below 58

us.

I get a faint glimpse of her standing in a doorway, eyes turned upward trying to see what Ryan’s up to, but he’s a blur of motion. Always running away. Everyone in this house nursing their secrets, their wounds, in isolation.

Ryan yells, ‘Everything’s fine, Mum. I have a paper needs working on. Late with it.’

Then I’m standing in the dimness of his bedroom, heart thudding, close enough to him to smell earth and sweat on his skin.

It’s almost monastic, the room. Just a bed, a chair, a desk, two blank wardrobe doors that tell me nothing about the person that lives here. There’s no … stuff.

Sports trophies, magazines, a stereo maybe, posters, smelly sneakers; things I would have expected in a guy’s room. It’s not so much a bedroom as a place to sleep, a kind of blank motel room tricked out in Louisa Daley’s signature spotless monotone shades. Only, there’s a giant picture of Lauren tacked above his bed-head, an impromptu shrine to his missing sister. She’s laughing into the camera, head slightly cocked, looking straight at us.

I move closer to the portrait, study the wide mouth, 59