She lets go of the keys, covers her face with her hands and tries to cover her ears, too. She doesn’t want to see him or hear him, but she does hear the gravel crunch as another car pulls onto the driveway behind her.
“Mum,” she says and feels as if her heart might burst with relief.
When I arrive at Edie’s house, I see Toby’s beaten-up old Honda in front, and I feel as if I might explode with anger.
I’d intended to track him down and deal with him later, yethere he is, on Edie’s driveway, waving at me and walking toward my car. No sign of Imogen. She should be drugged, safely inside. Hopefully she hasn’t opened the door. Thank goodness I protected her from him.
I park halfway across the entrance to the driveway. There’s no room for my car to fit on it completely.
It’s very dusky now. Everything bathed in a strange gray pinky light that holds just enough brightness for me to make out Toby’s asinine smile as he approaches me. His monstrous smile.
It was fun when we were younger, to have a friend so staggeringly unjudgmental, so prepared to disguise his intellect and play the clown—he ached to be liked—but it’s worn on me as we’ve aged. And now I wonder, did I miss something? Was he hiding a more sinister version of himself?
I know he loved Edie as hard as the rest of us did. He wasn’t as guarded about his feelings as Paul and I. He wept when Rob won her.
No wonder he chose the line of work he did, drawn into a painted world where he found meaning everywhere, but none of it was real. It electrified him, though. His concerns were minute (brushstrokes, pentimenti, the price of a particular shade of blue in sixteenth-century Florence) and also vast (love, death, history, mythology, religion, philosophy). He approached each one of them passionately and along the way he must have lost touch with reality completely.
He will never go near my daughter again.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
“What are you doing here?”
“Mate,” he says, “you sound like my wife.” He loves to say that sort of thing. He thinks talking in a faux cockney accent makes him witty. I note that his laugh sounds forced.
I know who you are, I want to say. I have heard Ruth’s concerns and I listened closely to what Emily told the police abouthow he turned on her inexplicably when she wanted to call them, how she fought like the alley cat we all know she is.
She did a good job. Now that he’s beside me, I see scratches on his cheek that you might describe as gouges. They look angry.
But I say nothing because I want the advantage of surprise.
“Imogen’s in my car,” he says, strangely, as if this is something that has happened by unfortunate accident.
My heart almost stops. I look. He’s right and, inexplicably, she’s in the driver’s seat. Why isn’t she sleeping like a baby after I dosed her? She must have been in there for a while because the interior light has gone off. Her back is to us, but I bet she’s watching in the rearview mirror. I make the effort to hold back any signs of my mounting anger.
“Why? What’s going on?”
He throws up his hands. “I have no idea. She took my keys and got in. I think she was embarrassed because I caught her stealing money from my coat pocket.” His mouth makes exaggerated, foolish shapes. He wants me to laugh at Imogen or raise an eyebrow at her “antics.” His incompetence as an adult astounds me.
But this makes no sense. Why would she get in his car? Unless she’s trying to escape him. What has really happened? What has he done to her?
I try to open the car door. She flinches when I rattle the handle. She’s locked herself in. I rap on the window. “Sweetie,” I say. “Imogen. It’s me. Can you unlock and hand me the car keys? I don’t think you’re experienced enough to be driving. Especially not in the dark. What will Mum think if she finds out?”
She tries to start the car. I hammer on the window. “Stop!” I shout. She’s only a learner driver. This isn’t safe.
She gives up. Tries again. I bang on the window some more. I’m afraid she’s going to do something reckless.
“You’re parked in anyway,” I call through the window. It’s notstrictly true. You could get around my car if you had a bit of experience, but she doesn’t, and she probably can’t even see that there’s a safe angle from where she’s sitting.
I rap on the window hard. Behind me, Toby has realized this looks bad for him. He’s blathering excuses as to why she’s locked herself away from him that I don’t even bother to listen to. My anger is burning hot now.
She gives up on trying to start the car. But she won’t look at me.
“I’m not moving until you give me the keys,” I tell her.
Eventually, reluctantly, she unlocks the car, and as soon as she does, I open the door swiftly, reach in and snatch the keys from the ignition.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get you inside.”
