“Out again.”
“Without the dog?”
She doesn’t reply.
William removes a notebook from his pocket and lays it on the table, placing his pen parallel to it. The sound of his throat clearing makes Birdie open an eye.
He gazes out into the yard. After a few moments, his dad emerges from the barn and walks around the back of it, glancing at William’s car as he does. It’s unlike him not to come in and say hello.
John looks unkempt, William thinks, definitely more so than when he was last up here, which was only a few weeks ago. He feels his stomach knot. You might not notice the change that’s happened to John over the past year if you didn’t know him, because you wouldn’t know how dapper he was. How he took pride in his own appearance as much as his farm’s.
And now, neither the farm nor his father is what they used to be, no matter how hard Mum tries to paper over the cracks. Something will have to be done, and quickly, there’s no avoiding it, though none of them want to face up to it. He wishes his parents had talked to him and sought medical help sooner. They’ve let things go too far. Maggie has taken too much weight onto her shoulders.
“Hello.” Her voice is small, and she is slight, drowned in what he recognizes as his mother’s clothes. Most of her face is obscured by her hair but what he can see of it is puffy and pale. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She’s favoring her ankle.
“Hi,” he says. He stands, reaches to shake her hand. Her grasp is weak. “I’m Police Constable William Elliott. My parents own this place and the barn. Mum called me and told me about your—”he doesn’t want to say “fears” in case it sounds patronizing, so he opts for “situation.”
“I need to talk to my husband,” she says. No introduction, nothing.
He encourages her to sit. She takes the chair at the end of the table, beside his, and reaches out a slender hand as if to grip his arm but thinks better of the impulse and retracts it, her fingers curling into a fragile fist as she does.
“Help me?” she asks.
“Imogen!”
She dreams her dad is calling her, at first. She knows he’s dead in the dream, but even so she floats toward the sound of his voice on a gentle wave of hope until her brain registers that the voice is wrong, the tone is wrong, that the man calling her name is not Dad.
It’s him.
She stirs, waking in a confused state, heartbreak from the dream wreaking havoc on her mood even before she opens her eyes and an unsettling feeling that she is being watched making her skin crawl.
She blinks, her eyelids feeling sticky and heavy, and lifts herself onto her elbows to peer at her surroundings, which emerge slowly out of the dark morning.
She’s in his spare room. The one he says is really her room. But she can’t remember anything about yesterday evening or going to bed. She feels terrible. Groggy and exhausted. Confused.
The door is cracked open. Perhaps that’s why she felt watched. A hand appears suddenly in the gap between door and frame. She pulls the duvet over her mouth to mute a scream but the hand only reaches for the switch and the overhead light snaps on, its brightness disorienting her more and the door swings open all in the same moment.
“Morning, sleepyhead!” he says.
He places a mug on the bedside table. “Tea for you!” He’s smiling like a goon.
“What time is it?”
“It’s just after nine.”
“Thank you. What time did I go to bed?” Why doesn’t she remember?
“About twelve hours ago. You said you wanted an early night.”
She lifts the covers up a little and sees that she’s fully dressed.
“I slept in my clothes?”
He shrugs. “I guess you really were tired!”
“I’ve never done that before.”
“How would pancakes for breakfast suit you?”
