The Game You Played (19 page)

Footsteps echoed from the floorboards in the hall.

Jessie—pigtailed hair tucked under a straw hat and school bag on her shoulder—poked her head around the sunroom door. Her face lit up when she saw Kate and me.

“Phoebe!” She circled around the ferns to hug her mother and then Kate and me.

I squeezed her small body. “How was school?”

“It was okay,” she answered.

Pria checked her watch. “You’re six minutes late.”

She turned to her mother. “I stopped to play with Mrs Wick’s cat. And then Bernice started talking to me.”

A frown crossed Pria’s forehead. “Don’t do that again. And don’t talk to Bernice either. She isn’t a very nice person.”

Pria, Kate, and I exchanged glances. We—along with Sass and Luke—knew things about Bernice Wick that no one else did. A faint queasiness rose in my stomach.

“She’s nice to
me
.” Jessie looked from her mother to me. “She told me she makes model ships with matchsticks and I could come in and see them, if I was allowed to.”

“You’re not allowed,” Pria said quickly.

Jessie nodded, though her eyes were dubious. I knew she wanted backup from Kate and me, but we had none to offer.

“Sweetie,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s someone you should be talking to. I’d listen to your mum.”

Kate screwed up her forehead. “She’s just
strange
.”

I snatched Jessie’s hat playfully from her head. “Anyway, tell me what you did at school today.”

Jessie let her bag slide from her shoulder. The thought niggled at me that she didn’t quite believe either of us about Bernice, but it was hard to tell with Jess. She often seemed secretive.

Dropping her bag next to one of the wicker chairs, Jessie wriggled back on the chair’s cushion and sat cross-legged. “We practised for our school play.”

“A play?” I raised my eyebrows. “Cool. I used to love those when I was at school. What’s this one about?”

“It’s from the book,
Little Women
.”

“And what are you doing in the play?” I asked.

She cast a sideways glance at her mother before looking back at me. “I’m Beth.”

“Beth?” Pria shook her head, setting her glass of wine down on the table. “You were supposed to be playing
Josephine
.”

“I know. But Bree wanted to play Josephine really, really bad. And the drama teacher agreed that she’d be better as her. So we swapped.”

“She knows just how to get around you, that Bree.” Pria was still shaking her head. “She’s a piece of work. She and her mother. All sweetness to your face and lemons behind your back. Well, you can march down there tomorrow and tell Bree you changed your mind.”

“I can’t change my mind. We already told Mrs Simmons.” Jessie drew her knees up to her chest, half-hiding her face.

“Mrs Simmons gave you the role of Josephine for a reason,” Pria snapped. “You’re perfect for the part. Are you now supposed to play a bit part just because Bree wants the spotlight?”

I watched the exchange between mother and daughter, surprised at Pria’s strident tone.

“I don’t want to talk about the play anymore.” Jessie’s voice grew small and tight. She left her chair, heading out of the room. “Going to get something to eat.”

Pria sighed loudly, throwing up her hands. “I don’t know what to do with her. She’s done two years of drama, and she’s excellent. She finally gets a role where she can show what she can do, and she lets Miss Bossy Boots Bree walk all over her.”

“Maybe you can talk to her teacher.” I tried to understand Pria’s tone with Jessie. The scene had been uncomfortable to watch.

A deeper part of me wondered how much further I could have gone if my mother had been like Pria. The kids who acted in movies had parents who were behind them every step of the way, if not pushing, at least encouraging them forward. I’d had none of that. My mother had been fearful of the world. In her eyes, the day wasn’t something to seize, it was something to survive.

“You betcha. I can’t believe Mrs Simmons just let this happen.” Pria squeezed her eyes closed then, giving a short laugh. “Okay, I’m not going to let this get to me. Jessie’s on her own journey. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to figure out that if you want something, you have to go for it. If you keep giving things away, you’ll end up with nothing but regret.”

Kate shrugged at me. “Well, I know one thing about my twins. They’re not going to be models. I already tried them out for catalogue work. Within the first ten minutes, Orianthe informed me that she doesn’t like to do boring things and that modelling’s boring. And she’s not going to let her brother do boring things either.”

I laughed.

The cries of the twins pealed down the hallway as they bounded inside and called Jessie’s name. They must have discovered she was home.

“Hey, where’s the pup?” I asked Pria. “Can I see him? Jessie said he’s growing big.”

Immediately, Pria rolled her eyes and made a low disparaging sound. “I sent Buster out with the dog walker as soon as I knew Kate was coming over with the kids. He’d knock them flying. Wish I’d never bought him, to tell you the truth. After the break-in, I wanted a watchdog, but I should have paid more attention to the breed. He’s damned strong—even though he’s only nine months old. And he snaps. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit scared of the mutt. I’m having a dog trainer try to rein him in, but if that doesn’t work, he’s gone.”

“What a shame,” I said. “Jess told me she’d like to walk the dog sometimes, but that’s not sounding good.”

“Nope. The only thing I got right about him is his name. Because Buster has busted everything from doors to shoes.” She shook her head, a sorry smile on her face.

The sound of the three children playing became too much. Tommy had once run through this house, too.

I stayed for a while longer then made an excuse to leave.

Tuesday night

STORM CLOUDS PUSHED INTO THE SKY, making the day darken a good hour before the incoming night. The heavy atmosphere pressed down on me. I opened the window of my bedroom upstairs at Nan’s house, letting the chill air stream in.

I could only just catch a glimpse of the water from here. An enormous cruise liner dominated the harbour, staining the water red and blue with its lights.

Maybe my small step in seeing Pria and Kate earlier had helped my frame of mind, but I didn’t feel it yet. I was back at square one. I began pacing the room, feeling unhinged. Things were all so
in between
.

Dr Moran hadn’t succeeded in jogging my memory about the letters. She’d said she didn’t think it was possible to do all that I’d done in sleepwalking sessions and so the memory should still be in my mind somewhere. True sleepwalkers rarely remembered their dreams.

Not remembering any of it was the most disturbing thing of all.

It wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten things. With the binge drinking and the trauma of losing Tommy, there were gaps in my memory. But not a
fucking chasm
. And forgetting the writing of three notes and delivering them was a fucking chasm.

Nan called me for dinner, and we ate the pumpkin soup together. I’d tried watching one of her sitcoms with her after that, but I gave up halfway through. I headed back upstairs. Surprisingly, I was tired enough to sleep. I crawled into bed and let myself drift off.

I woke just before four thirty in the morning. The temperature had plummeted—I guessed it was below ten degrees.

I’d been dreaming. The dream had been of the last day that Sass, Luke, Pria, Kate, and I had ever been to house number 29. I used to have nightmares about it all the time. But not since I was a teenager.

I’d spent my life blocking out that memory.

The only adults who knew about the terrible thing that Bernice did that day were Luke and Bernice’s mothers. They’d told us it was best for everyone to just let it go. And so we’d let it go.

But you couldn’t really fully ever let go of something that had hold of you.

There were two things that Bernice did—when she was fourteen and when she was nineteen. The first thing was not so bad. But the second was something only God could forgive.

I could almost smell the dust and slight odour of mould and the old musky aftershave in the bedrooms of that house.

That was our place back then. No one ever came there but us.

We started coming to number 29 when Kate, Pria, Luke, and I were ten and Sass was eleven and Bernice was thirteen. We made the abandoned house our own. Each of us either brought something there or changed things in order to put our individual stamp on the house.

Sass decorated it with signs that she’d pilfered. She was hugely into signage.

Pria drew rude things on the prints hanging on the walls.

Kate rescued some sad-looking pot plants from the courtyard and nursed them back to life then arranged them in the living room—to clean the foul air, she’d said. She glued together a large, broken dollhouse she’d found in an upstairs room, and then she posed rat skeletons on the furniture. Kate used to be weird like that.

Luke painted the living room walls red with the same paint he’d once stolen from his parents’ garage (to paint our billycarts, back when we were eight).

My contribution was to set up the living room like a murder scene on a film set. I dragged in a mannequin that a fashion store had thrown out in a Dumpster, and I dressed it in a vintage suit from an upstairs closet. I positioned the dummy on a chair like he were dead, a whiskey bottle taped to his hand and a cigar hanging from his mouth—and a knife in his back.

I videoed vignettes of us every time we were there at number 29. Like a recorded history of who we were. Sometimes, I made everyone act in skits, and I videotaped those too.

Bernice did pretty much nothing but just hang around on the fringes, sometimes helping with exploits to get signs or things for the house. She was a thin, gangly girl then, on the cusp of becoming a teenager.

A year after we started coming to number 29, we discovered that the knives were missing from the kitchen. There had been six pearl-handled knives sitting in a knife block on the narrow, dirty bench top. We used them sometimes to scratch messages into the wall. Someone else had been in the house, and they’d taken our knives.

We were rattled about the knives for a week or two, until we forgot all about them.

Then came the day we found out that Bernice had chosen to do something in secret to make the house her own, something we didn’t find until the day Sass decided we should all play dress ups with the old clothing in an upstairs bedroom. When we pulled the clothing out, we found that the back of the wardrobe had been hacked away with a saw, exposing the wall. On the wall, all our names were written in capital letters. All six. Embedded in each of our names was a pearl-handled knife. Except for Bernice’s name. That solved the mystery of what had happened to the kitchen knives.

Bernice put on the waterworks after the discovery and said that she hadn’t meant anything bad. She told us she’d been feeling left out of the group.

Kate and Pria were the first to forgive her. Sass and Luke and I were not so merciful. We held a meeting and decided that Bernice was out. Three against two. Luke declared that the knives should stay in place as a reminder of what he called Bernice’s
traitorous treachery
.

Bernice started hanging around the local boys after that.

When Bernice turned eighteen, she suddenly became useful to us again—she was old enough to buy the alcohol that we couldn’t. She got invited back to number 29.

A few months later, after she’d turned nineteen, she did the thing that made all of us stop going there.

It was late afternoon, almost sunset. Number 29 was dim as always, thin slashes of light spearing through broken blinds, the smell of cigarettes and pot and bourbon dominating the mustiness of the old timber and furniture. Sass had sourced the pot. Bernice had bought the cigarettes and booze. The house stunk of cat piss too—Pria often brought her rescue cats there. Sometimes, we dressed the (indignant) cats up in doll’s clothing and laughed at them like drunken idiots (which we often were).

We were lounging on the broken, propped-up furniture, already drunk and stoned. I stumbled out to the kitchen to pour myself another shot of bourbon.

Luke came up behind me and kissed my ear then turned me around to kiss me fully. He’d asked me to be his girlfriend the month before—I hadn’t been sure if I wanted that. But it was the year of experimentation, and I told him we’d try it out and see what happens. And so he and I had been going upstairs to make out over the past weeks. Even Kate and I had decided to kiss one drunken night three months back—we’d both decided that we liked it but didn’t want it to go further. Kids’ stuff, I guess.

Luke took my hand and led me upstairs. I didn’t know why it was always like that, why I never took his hand and led him upstairs. Maybe, with him taking the lead, I never had to take responsibility. This thing between us, whatever it was, could remain Luke’s idea and I didn’t have to think about it or consider whether it was a good thing or not.

We went to the largest bedroom, because it was the only room with a bed. And we kissed more and rolled around on the bed together and made the old springs protest and squeak.

A sharp noise rang out from the bedroom at the end of the hall. An alarm clock. Luke and I ran together down the hall to check it out.

Luke pushed the bedroom door open.

Immediately, a coppery stench hit me in the face. I recoiled, gagging.

A single clock sat on the middle of the bedroom floor.

Around the clock, five large rats—black and grey—were sprawled on the floor around the clock, eviscerated. A kitchen knife was stuck in the belly of each of them.

The broken wardrobe was open, and we could see the names that Bernice had drawn on the wall there years ago. But the knives were missing. The knives were now in the bodies of the rats. Pearl-handled knives.

Luke yanked out one of the knives, his face darkening as he roared with anger. He ran from the room.

With vomit swilling from my stomach, I stumbled backwards, needing to get back downstairs and away from that sight and smell. Luke followed, the knife in his fist.

I knocked hard into someone behind me. I spun around to see a woman of about sixty. A bag lady. Dressed in dirty, worn clothing. The door of the middle bedroom was now open, and I could see a large handbag and an empty bottle of alcohol and gear on the floor. The homeless woman must have been drunk and sleeping it off in there. I guessed the alarm clock had woken her.

Her hooded eyes filled with raw fear as she glanced from me to Luke, her eyes fixing on the bloodied knife.

She rushed ahead of us to the stairs.

A loud cracking sound rang out. She shrieked as the stairs gave way.

The middle of the staircase just disappeared, crashing downward. The woman’s arms flew into the air as she fell into the dark space that had opened up, dust and dirt spraying as the stairs landed on the floor below.

Luke flung the knife down. He and I raced along the bottom edge of the staircase railing. Moths flew up from the huge gap in the destroyed stairs, fluttering manically all around us, their wings torn ragged by the falling wood.

Sass, Kate and Pria were already flinging open the door that led to the area underneath the stairs. Kate shone a light from her phone in the interior of the dusky space. Bernice moved up behind them, peering over their shoulders. She turned and ran from the house, slamming the door behind her.

Luke and I stopped midway on the stairs, shocked rigid at what we could see of the woman.

She was lying on her back, splayed over the broken stairs. Her head had hit something hard on the way down and had bent sideways at a macabre angle. The worst thing was her eyes. Her pale-blue eyes were open and staring up at us, as wild as the fluttering of the moths’ wings. But then her eyes glazed and dulled. Slowly, slowly, specks of dirt that were swirling in the air settled on her eyes and face.

We’d witnessed the last seconds of the woman’s life.

We didn’t know who she was or why she’d been there in the house, but she was dead.

We should have called the police straight away, but we didn’t.

The only person who could have done this was Bernice. But we were all here, too. And we were underage and drinking and smoking pot. Not to mention defacing a house that wasn’t ours.

Instead, we told Mrs Wick what her daughter had done. And Luke told his own mother. I didn’t dare tell my parents.

Luke’s mother commenced a clean-up operation, rushing to number 29 with gloves and a bucket. She was scarily efficient. Our alcohol, cigarettes, and pot were disposed of, except for a small amount of it that she placed beside the bag lady’s gear in the second bedroom. Our names were scrubbed off the wall behind the wardrobe. Even the rats were taken away and the blood cleaned. Only then did she call the police herself and tell them she’d heard a disturbance next door in the house that was supposed to be empty.

The police found that the stairs appeared to have been cut with an electric saw rather than just rotting away. The cuts were fresh underneath the old carpet runner. The stairs had been held up underneath by two A-frame ladders. The ladders had somehow collapsed right at the time the woman was running down the stairs. We guessed that Bernice had pushed them over right at the time that the lady was coming down the stairs. The police said they believed a broom had been used to tip the ladders over.

The police carried out a door knock on our street as part of their investigation. None of us told them anything about that day. Mrs Basko—Luke’s mother—didn’t let anything slip either.

We saw the bag lady in the newspaper a few days after her death. She was Grace Louelle Clark, aged forty-four. Not anywhere near sixty, as we’d thought. Plagued by an untreated mental illness, she’d been homeless for eleven years. She was known to the police for multiple counts of petty theft. The only photographs of her from the past fifteen years were mug shots, and the mug shots were what the newspapers printed.

The police, unable to discover what had happened in house number 29, eventually let the case drop. No friends or relatives of the woman came forward to demand that the police keep investigating.

Even Kate and Pria had no forgiveness for Bernice this time. Bernice swore she had nothing to do with the rats or the stairs. But it didn’t shock us that she didn’t admit to it. Who would admit to killing someone? She was over the age of eighteen and no longer a minor. She would have been tried as an adult in court.

We were sure she’d wanted to get us back for throwing her out of our group when she was fourteen. Maybe she didn’t think someone was going to die. Maybe she just wanted to scare us.

We’d never know for sure.

I sat up in bed, scenes of that incident from thirteen years ago still flashing through my mind.