Before cracking more eggs into the pan, I turn up the thermostat just in case.
To Emily, the barn looks even smaller and grimmer than yesterday. It has an obstinate hush about it, like the satisfied smirk of a bully.
William helps Emily down from the car and Maggie offers her an arm to lean on. They make slow progress up the path. John hangs back. The dog sniffs the air, turns, and makes a beeline for the hedge, disappearing beneath it, only her back end visible. Her underbelly contracts rhythmically as if she’s gulping something down.
John watches her.
Emily tries opening the door. It’s locked.
“Hey!” she calls and knocks. When nobody answers she hobblesa few steps around to the side of the house and shouts again, aiming her voice up at the bedroom windows. The curtains are shut.
She gets nothing in response. The windows reflect the sky, and the glass looks as solid as the stone walls.
Emily feels a surge of anger. What if she’d made it back here last night, to find the place locked up? Did Jayne and Ruth not think of that? She could have died out here. Of shock. Of exposure. It was one thing for them not to come after her, quite another to ensure that if she did get back, she was locked out.
William raps on the front door louder and for longer than Emily did.
“What’s Birdie into?” Maggie says.
“She’s fine,” John says.
“Birdie!”
“Leave her!”
Maggie looks at him, wondering why he snapped.
“Hello,” William knocks again. “Anybody up?”
“Do you have spare keys?” Emily asks. Maggie hands her a set.
Emily unlocks and limps into the barn. It’s cold inside, as if the storm seeped through the walls last night and chilled everything within.
“Hi,” she calls, though without confidence. She peers into the sitting room. The emptiness feels hostile. Down the end of the hallway, the kitchen is gloomy, shrouded in shadows that the tentative dawn hasn’t lifted.
It feels as if there’s no life here at all. Her heart starts to thump.
She makes her way toward the kitchen and stops in the doorway, taking in the broken window, the food, the shards of glass on the floor, the small patch of blood.
William is just behind her. He sees what she sees and starts toward her when she seems to buckle but she’s only reaching for the letter. A ragged blot of wine has dampened it but it’s legible.
She hands it to him and walks back past him, as if in a daze.
A phone, she thinks. I need a phone.
William reads the letter as Emily makes slow progress up the stairs, dragging her ankle.
Every bedroom door is shut.
“Hey!” she calls. Her voice sounds weak. “It’s me.” She clears her throat, tries again. “Hello! It’s Emily. I’m back.”
She knocks on Jayne’s bedroom door. Nothing. Knocks again, harder and with more urgency. Calls for both Jayne and Ruth. No answer.
Perhaps Ruth got so drunk that she passed out. But Jayne should be okay. The feeling that something is wrong is growing.
Footsteps behind her alert her to William, following her upstairs. His face is scrubbed out and gray in the uncertain light falling through the water-pocked glass of the skylights. He hovers at the end of the landing, watching Emily, afraid of barging up there himself in case the other women aren’t dressed.
The sheer nastiness of the letter shocked him on one level, but on another, it seemed petty and trivial, playground nonsense for the over twenties and thirties, for people who should know better. It makes him wonder, who exactly are these people?
