“We have to get in,” she orders. “Go see if there are any windows that will work.”
Margot and Elsie split and circle the house. Beverley steps into the flower bed as she did before, to peer in through the living room window.
Now she can see things that she missed in her rush, things her brain discounted because they didn’t fit the narrative of which she had convinced herself. Firstly, there is a mug on the coffee table, and beside it an ashtray full of the gray detritus of cigarettes. A plate holds the remains of an apple, the core so wizened and brown that it must have been there for a couple of weeks at least. Some of the shelves of the bookcase at the back of the room, she can see, have been disturbed. A few books lie, disinterred, at the foot of it.
Beverley hears Margot call out, so she rushes to the back of the house. Margot stands before a slim ground-floor window, gesturing with her bat. “We’ll just have to smash it. Someone can climb in, then open the front door.”
“Smash it?” Elsie asks, a note of hesitation in her voice.
“Yes, Elsie—smash it,” says Margot. “If you’re worried about getting into trouble for that, you might want to consider the trespassing, interfering with police business, impersonating figures of authority and general lawbreaking we’ve been indulging in over the past couple of months. Smashing a window is going the be the least of our—”
Elsie snatches the bat from Margot’s hand and takes a swing. The glass shatters, trickling to the floor inside. The women wait, their breath held.
Only the unnerving wail of music comes through the gap.
“Who wants to do the honors?” Elsie turns to them both, her chest heaving.
“I’ll do it.” Beverley inspects the shards of glass that jut up in triangles from the window frame. She takes the bat from Elsie, knocks it against the fragments, clearing them as best she can, then tosses it aside.
“Here.” Margot loops her fingers together and holds out her hands.
“Wait.” Elsie joins her hands with Margot’s. They all look nervously up at the window.
Beverley kicks off her shoes, places her right foot on the women’s palms, grabs their shoulders and pushes herself upward. She gets traction but falls with her belly flat on the window frame. There’s a sharp, hot scratch near her pelvis. She ignores it and pushes herself in through the gap, wiggling, her hands landing on some sort of cabinet inside.
Slowly, she worms herself in. The skin of her thighs drags along tiny glass teeth, but she doesn’t care. She’s in. She looks around her.
The air smells warm and cottony sweet, with a secondary scent of something sour. She’s in a utility room, and what she’s standing on, in an animallike crouch, is not a cabinet but a laundry machine. A wash basket stands in a corner, filled, from what she can see, with men’s clothing. She recognizes the crumpled shirts, and a chill spears through her when she considers what Roger might have been doing when he was last wearing them. If she picks them up, inspects them, might she find blood on their cuffs? An unsuspecting victim’s stray hair caught in the folds of the collar?
“What are you seeing?” Margot calls from outside.
“It’s a laundry room. Nothing in here.” She wonders if Roger so lazily left those clothes in the basket because there’s been no woman around to wash them for him.
“Let us in!”
Beverley swings her legs around to drop down to the tiles. Themovement sets alight a sharp pain just below her abdomen. She puts her hands to her stomach and runs them downward, feeling damp material. She glances down. Her pink dress has darkened to red, the fabric torn right through.
There is a hot, throbbing pain below her stomach. Tentatively, she lifts her dress, winces. A wound snarls just above her right hip bone. It looks deep. She can see a slight protrusion of tissue. It’s bleeding heavily, but Beverley cannot let it stop her. She grabs a dustrag from a shelf, folds it quickly and holds it against the blood.
“Are you okay in there?” Margot calls, and her voice sounds warped.
“I’m fine,” Beverley lies, tucking the dustrag into the elastic of her underwear and pulling her dress back over the top. “I’ll come let you in.”
She makes her way out of the laundry room, ignoring the sway of dizziness. It’s cool inside the house, and strangely still, like a museum after hours.
The wailing music is still playing, the same haunting song on a loop.
“Enid!” Beverley calls as she moves through the hallway toward the front door. “Are you here? Enid? We’re here to help you.”
The women are waiting, eager, when she finally opens the door. Margot lets Duke off the leash and he slopes in, sniffing the floorboards, tucking his nose into the corners.
“Any sign?” asks Elsie.
Beverley shakes her head, holding her hand against her stomach, hoping they won’t see the blood or the sweat on her skin.
She calls out for Enid again and puts her head into each room as they search. She makes a mental list: a small downstairs bathroom; the living room, with the coffee mug and the disturbed books; a kitchen where dishes lie, unwashed and caked in days-old food, in the sink. Asingle bluebottle drones through the thick, stale air, knocking itself again and again against a windowpane.
“Where is that music coming from?” Margot asks, her face scrunched in distaste. They pause, listening as the man’s wail bleeds through the hallway.“I wish I were glass,”he drawls,“so you could see through…”
