The letter falls from Emily’s hand and floats to the floor. Her scream is loud enough to be heard outside. She steps away from the parcel, fearful of what’s in it, her eyes locked onto it until footfalls prompt her to turn to the door. Her face is a picture of shock and fear.
“What’s wrong?” Jayne is first into the room, first to retrieve the letter. Ruth reads it over her shoulder.
“What is this?” Ruth says. “This is horrible.” Her voice rises in pitch. “Is this from Edie?”
They all know that it is.
The edge of the paper crumples beneath Jayne’s fingertips. She lays the letter down on the table. Emily hands her the envelope. “It came in this.”
They look at it, then contemplate the parcel. They can almost imagine it has a pulse, that it might start to throb.
Ruth feels fear gathering in her gut as if something inevitable is coming or has come to a head. Could Toby be in danger? The letter implies murder. There’s no doubt about it. She pictures him. He would be so surprised to be killed, she thinks, because he’s so affable. He’s the good guy, the friendly art history professor.
She tells herself off for even having this thought. Who thinks such a thing in such a moment? Why has her mind gone so far, so fast? And yet, for some reason, it also feels horribly plausible to her.
And if Toby is in danger, or dead, what about Alfie? She pins her lips together, afraid that she might retch, afraid that she’s been right to catastrophize since she had Alfie, even when everyone else minimizes her concerns, because now something unthinkable has possibly happened to her family. Is that why her mother didn’t answer any texts this afternoon? Ruth’s legs threaten to give way.
Emily is sitting at the table. Ruth leans heavily on the back of Emily’s chair, puts a hand on her shoulder. Emily dips free of Ruth’s touch and leans forward.
This needs to be read carefully, Jayne thinks. Think before you react. Assess. She studies the letter. The words are typewritten and therefore bland and normal in one way, but also undeniably vile. As she rereads them, she experiences the same sort of internal shudder that occurs when she sees nasty online trolling.
Use your training, she tells herself. But it’s been years since she and Mark worked together as army intelligence analysts. Both rose to the rank of captain, and worked on identifying counterterrorism threats, both in the UK and abroad. They monitored enemy communications to inform decisions made at commander level, sometimes providing real-time warnings to troops on the ground. It was intense, high-stakes work, no day was the same. Lives were at stake. Often, they watched the outcome of their intelligenceadvice play out via live feed. It was always hard, and sometimes, they got it wrong.
But Jayne’s skills as a soldier and as an analyst are rusty, and this is personal.
She tries to force her mind to clear itself up after the shock, to give logic space to kick in and to ask the right questions.
“Why would Edie write this?” Jayne asks.
Emily’s eyes brim with challenge, with a flight response, specifically the desire to separate herself from this place and these two women, as if they’re personally responsible for this situation. Her phone is already in her hand. “I’m going out to find a signal. I need to talk to Paul.”
If she wasn’t here trying to force a friendship because Paul put pressure on her, this wouldn’t have happened, she thinks. She was right to steer clear of these people.
“Wait,” Jayne says. “Let’s think about this before we panic.”
“No.”
Jayne glances at the kitchen window. It faces the steep hillside behind the barn. Tufts of grass shiver in the wind. The light is a heavy gray.
Emily is halfway down the hall when her confidence ebbs and she stops. She’s afraid of setting off outdoors alone and doesn’t know which direction she would take. She might get lost, or stuck. Maggie Elliott warned them about bogs and ravines and told them that if they went out, they should be sure to stick to the walking routes recommended in the notes left at the barn. But Emily is hopeless at map reading.
She knows that she can definitely get intermittent cell reception at the farm, so perhaps it’s better to go back down there, though she didn’t pay attention to the route as they drove up here, didn’t note where there were forks in the track, or landmarks, because she was giggling with Ruth.
As she lingers, she hears the others.
“It’s a hoax,” Jayne says. “Why would Edie sign it otherwise?”
Unseen in the shadowy hall, Emily can observe that Jayne and Ruth are looking at one other, communicating something Emily can’t interpret, something from a shared history she has almost no knowledge of.
Ruth’s shoulders sag. She rakes her fingers through her springy hair as if she needs to stimulate blood flow to her scalp. “A hoax,” she repeats. “Yes.” But she doesn’t sound as convinced as Jayne.
Emily steps back into the room. “How do you know it’s a hoax?”
Jayne turns to her and hesitates. This is something she knows better than to say in front of Mark or the other husbands because they’ve known Edie since they were at school together, when Mark, Rob, and Toby were pupils and Paul their rugby coach. The bond between them all has been intimate and close since then. At times, it has seemed to Jayne to be almost impenetrable.
But why not say what she truly thinks of Edie now?
“There are two sides to Edie. She’s fun and lovely a lot of the time, fiercely loyal to her friends, as Paul might have told you, but she also has a mean streak. What I’m trying to say is that this sort of thing is typical of Edie. She’s done it before.”
