Dee can’t see; there’s something in front of her eyes like a cloud of flies or a hurricane. She tries to blink it away but she can’t so she slows, and then stops. The cold trickles of bloody lake water keep coming down the backs of her legs, and she is panting. She thinks she might faint so she stops for a moment. She leans against a broken stump, silvered and dead with age. All she can see at her feet are snakes.Stop, she commands her body and mind.Stop. No snakes here.She has to think.
A new little voice speaks in her mind.At least Lulu can’t tell Mom and Dad on you now.She sobs. How can she even think such a horrible thing?
Gnats swarm greedily at the blood on her. She tries to scrub it off. But she is shaking and it has stained her shorts. Instead she ties her sweater round her waist to hide it as best she can.Blood, blood, Dee thinks in a fog. Fresh threads of blood. The next thought shinesout, knifes through her hard and quick. Lulu was still bleeding. Dee has watched enough TV to know what that means. She is not dead.
Dee turns and runs hard, back towards Lulu. Her lungs are bursting with effort and the scalding air. How could she have left her like that? But Dee will make it right, she swears. She will stay by Lulu’s side and scream until someone comes. It is not too late. Events are not yet final. But she has to be fast.
Dee feels like she has been running and climbing and stumbling back towards her sister for her whole life. But eventually the undergrowth thins and the canoe-shaped rock comes into view. Dee goes even faster, taking long hare-like leaps over the shore debris. She falls more than once, skinning palms and knees and elbows. She does not notice, pushes herself up and runs on. When she comes to the rock she stops for a moment, too frightened to set foot on the rock.
‘Come on, Dee Dee,’ she mutters. ‘You baby.’ She climbs over the canoe rock.
In its shadow, where Lulu should be lying, there is nothing. Water laps cold at the granite. Gnats buzz above the water, grey punctuation marks. No Lulu, alive or dead.
Maybe this isn’t the right place, Dee tells herself. But it is. On the rock she can see a slender thread of drying blood. In the water, one white flip-flop bobs. Then Dee sees that there is a footprint at the muddy edge. The heel is already filling with brown lake water. The footprint is big, much too large to be Lulu’s, or Dee’s. It could be the boy’s, maybe. But somehow Dee knows it’s not.
From nearby there comes a familiar, homely sound – it takes Dee a moment to place it in this nightmare. A car engine starts, then idles. A door slams closed.
Dee runs across the clearing where, what seems like a lifetime ago, she fooled around with the boy. She pushes through a stand of brush, and falls out onto a dirt road. Dust billows and dances inthe air as if recently kicked up by tyres. Dee thinks she glimpses a car bumper vanishing down the track. The roaring in Dee’s ears almost drowns the engine, her ragged screams for the driver to stop, stop, and let her sister go. But the car is gone. At Dee’s feet, in the dust, lies a deep green stone; a perfect oval shot through with veins of white.
A short distance away through the scrub, sun gleams on ranks of chrome and glass. Dee wants to shriek with laughter. They thought they were so far from everything, but they were right by the parking lot.
In the bathroom, the women look at her, disapproving. She leans against the white-tiled wall. Over the roar of the hand dryers, she tries to understand what has happened. It is impossible. She retches briefly into a basin, and earns herself more disapproval from the line.I have to tell someone, she thinks, and the thought is cold and numbing.
She pictures the expression her mother’s face will wear as she tells her parents. Tries to imagine the tone of her father’s voice as he tries to forgive her.
The little voice says,If you tell, there will be no Pacific ballet school. Even through her fear for Lulu, Dee feels the molten creep of fury. They have always loved Lulu best, ever since she was born. Dee has always known it. It is so unfair. She didn’t do anything wrong, not really. This is real life, not one of those old books where a girl makes out with a boy and then someone has todiebecause it’s sosinful. She knows, deep down, that making out with the boy wasn’t what she did wrong.
What can she tell them, anyway? Dee does not have any real information. She couldn’t even see the car through the dust. Was there a car? She is not sure, now. Maybe Lulu’s body floated away in the lake. Or it was taken away by an animal. Like, abear. Maybe Lulu woke up and went back to Mom and Dad.Yes, Dee thinks with a rush of relief.That’s it.Dee will go back to her family and Lulu will be sitting on the blanket playing with pebbles. She will greet Dee with an affronted look, because Dee left her alone, to do boring big-kid stuff. But Dee will tickle her and Lulu will forgive her in the end. So there really is no point in telling.
A fresh snail of watery blood crawls out of Dee’s shorts, down her leg. ‘Does anyone have a sanitary towel?’ Dee tries to sound pissed off instead of scared, which she is. She takes her shorts off in the bathroom in front of all the women and rinses them at the basin. She makes a big deal out of it, so they will remember her later. Dee was here, and nowhere else. She doesn’t ask herself why this is necessary, if Lulu is waiting with Mom and Dad. The wordalibidrifts through her mind. She banishes it, firmly.
Her period, she tells herself over and over. That is where the blood comes from. It is like rehearsing a dance – putting a story into the steps. Can she make herself believe it? She constructs, carefully in her mind, a day where the yellow-haired boy stood her up for ice cream, where Lulu never followed her into the woods.
Once the decision is made, everything becomes simple. A tired-looking woman washes her hands at the neighbouring basin, while her three children jump up and grab her sleeves. At the woman’s feet is a wicker basket, from which spill tissues, granola bars, buckets, spades, toys and sunscreen. Dee takes the white flip-flop out of her pocket and slips it into the woman’s bag where it blends with the chaos. It will go home with the woman and she will assume she picked it up by accident with her kids’ stuff. It will never be connected with Lulu. Dee knows that if the shoe is found by the canoe-shaped rock, they will do police stuff, like forensics and they will know that Dee was there.
As she heads back towards her parents, she tosses the smooth green stone into the thick brush that hems the beach.
Dee wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and gets up. She seems to be in a different part of the forest, now. It is darker, denser. Groundsel and ivy are knee-deep. She must remember to keep blazing the trees. A giant fern brushes her face. She thrusts it away, impatient. Why does everything in this part of the world have to be so wild and scary?
She can hear feet ahead, frightened, uneven. A child running.
‘Lulu,’ she calls. ‘Stop!’
Lulu laughs. Dee smiles. It’s good that she’s having fun. Dee doesn’t mind playing tag for a while longer.
Later, when Dee had time to think, the horror of what she had not told settled into her like disease.It’s too late to tell now, the little voice said.They’ll send you to jail.After her mother left and her father died there was no point in Dee telling, because there was no one left to forgive her.
Dee realised what she had to do. She had to find the person who took Lulu. If she could do that, there was a chance she could be a good person again. It was something to cling to. But tired Karen kept clearing people of Lulu’s disappearance. And as the years went by the possibilities, the list of suspects, was whittled down and down. Dee grew desperate.
She had almost given up, until Ted.
Karen said that Ted had an alibi. Dee didn’t believe it. She suspected that Karen was trying to throw her off the scent, stop her repeating the Oregon incident. Dee knew she had to be careful. She would watch him. She would get proof before she acted, this time. Dee got a little ahead of herself, however. She may as well admit that.
It was the anniversary that pushed her over the edge. 10 July, every year, the day Lulu went missing; that day is always a black hole for Dee. It’s all she can do not to get sucked down into the dark. Sometimes she isn’t strong enough to resist. That was what happened in Oregon. Loss had Dee in its black grip and someone had to be punished.
She had been watching Ted for some days before she moved in. She saw his eyes in the hole in the plywood, every morning at first light, watching as the birds descended. She saw the care he took with the feeders, the water. There’s a lot Dee doesn’t know but she knows what love looks like. So she knew what to do.
She needed Ted to feel something of her savage grief. That was why she killed the birds. She didn’t like doing it. She retched as she put out the traps. But she couldn’t stop. She kept thinking,Eleven years today. Eleven years that Lulu never had.
