“Nah,” he says finally. “She didn’t keep in touch with anyone. Didn’t have many friends here either.” His eyes turn hard, and I nervously inhale a lungful of smoke, waiting. “Not that you can make friends in Beacon,” he says bitterly. “Think they’re too good for everyone.”
I raise an eyebrow, nod in agreement, but he’s not looking at me. “People like that”—he shakes his head, smokes moodily—“they make their own rules.”
“Tell me about it,” I mutter, stubbing the cigarette out on the window frame.
He turns to me, elbow on the armrest. “She hated that house, you know.” His mouth purses, and it looks like he’s dying to spit. “Hated that fucking town.”
“Did she own the house?”
He inhales deeply, sucking it in and nodding at the same time. “Yeah, she bought it for cheap and was gonna renovate it. She started with the kitchen, but something went wrong.”
My ears prick up. I think of the plumber who tried to fix the shower, holding his bloodied skull and muttering,I knew I shouldn’ta come to this house.
“By the end, she was counting down the days till she was out.” He stares off into the darkness. “ ’Course, it was too late by then.”
The distant echo of drunken laughter seems to set him on edge. He finishes his cigarette, flicks it out the window, and immediately lights another. He speaks in short, clipped sentences now. “Nobody wanted her in Black Wood House. She had problems the minute she moved in.”He inhales rapidly, starts bobbing his leg up and down. There’s a tattoo of a skull on the kneecap, and as his leg shakes, the skull looks like it’s laughing.
“The neighbors?”
“Yeah.” His lip curls. “All of ’em. I offered to go round and sort ’em out.” He shakes his head ruefully, puffs on the cigarette like he’s mad at it. “She wouldn’t let me.”
I ask the question I’ve been putting off.
“What did she look like?”
He goes still for a second. Slowly, he brings the cigarette back to his lips and inhales. Without looking at me he says, “She looked like you.”
He pulls out a battered iPhone, and the cracked screen shows a picture of a golden retriever. The same one from his Insta profile. He smokes quietly, flipping through the phone before turning it to face me.
I squint at the picture in the semi-dark.
My God. Shedoeslook like me.
The young woman in the photo leans against the trunk of a blackwood tree. She’s barefaced, freckled, and flushed with exercise. Her soft brown hair is tied in a high pony, and she’s smiling uncomfortably in that “hurry up and take the picture already” way. Her arms are crossed protectively over her chest, and there’s something in her eyes that makes me feel like she wouldn’t want me looking. She seems like the sort of person who’d look down to avoid your eyes, and if you called out hello, she’d give a tight, reluctant smile.
A black Labrador sits adoringly at her feet, pink tongue lolling out its mouth. “That’s Winter,” Darren says with obvious fondness. “We used to take our dogs to Black Wood Forest.” He clicks the screen off. “They loved it there.”
“Did she ever take you to Black Wood House?”
“No.” He frowns, takes a quick drag. “Not that I wanted to go.” He turns to me then as if the thought just occurred to him. “You don’t live there alone, do you?”
I have to think about this for a second. My husband’s vanishingfrom my life inch by passive inch. He didn’t stay at the house last night again. I wind the window down farther, let the cold air blast me in the face. “No,” I say. “My husband lives there too.”
“And he’s home at night?”
I hesitate, thrown by the question. It’s one thing to ask if I live alone. Another to ask when and what times. I nod carefully, eyes stinging from the cold wind.
He’s silent again except for a slow exhale of the cigarette. It strikes me again that this is a bad idea. What do I know about the man in my car? Nothing, that’s what. I flick the butt of my smoke with my thumb and try to make my voice as casual as possible. “Do you live in Beacon?”
I glance at him from the corner of my eye, try to gauge if he’s wary of the question. But he’s staring straight ahead at the pub, his green eyes glowing like an angry cat’s. “Nah,” he says bitterly. “I live in Red Hill with the rest of the bogans.”
He shifts in his seat. “Plus…I can’t go back to Beacon.”
I stop breathing. “Why?”
“One of Amanda’s neighbors,” he says and puffs away angrily. “The Johnson guy who lives in the first house on the street.”
I exhale loudly, throat burning, and Darren hesitates. “He took a restraining order out against me.”
