you think it could have been him?’
‘He said Mum never returned to his place after she left with me. He said he never saw her again.’
‘I bet the police went easy on him,’ Mark said. ‘I bet they were told to. A rich guy like that. Lots of connections on the island.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. They questioned him several times. They searched his home more than once. They couldn’t find anything.’
‘But that’s not what I asked.’ David put his head on an angle, the fire casting ghoulish shadows across his face. ‘Do you think it was him?’
I thought back to that night, to the eight-year-old me standing in front of Edward Caine, mocking his dead wife, hungry to wound him. I remembered how I’d felt the next day when Dad had told me that Mum was missing, and I’d flashed back to that song, that weapon, and I knew – beyond all doubt, with a terrible certainty – that when I’d been standing before Mr Caine, leering those words at him, about mothers gone away , somehow, unintentionally, I’d cursed myself and cursed Mum. I thought of his awful yellow eyes, the vengeful spite in them, and I saw it then, saw that there were dark things in this world that I could never begin to explain – mysteries like the creepy unknowable touch I’d experienced that October night among the warped pines just a little way from where we were now.
‘Yes,’ I answered finally, with a voice that no longer sounded like my own. ‘I think he killed her. And somehow, I have to live with knowing that he got away with it.’
Chapter Ten
The first anniversary of Mum’s disappearance was one of the strangest days I’ve ever known. In truth, it was more like a non-day, a date that Dad and I had wordlessly agreed shouldn’t be allowed to exist inside the walls of our home. That was fine by me. If I’d had my way, it would have been erased from the calendar that was hanging on the back of our kitchen door altogether. Better still, it should have been removed from all calendars – a forbidden Thursday that simply ceased to exist.
We’d given it our best shot. Between us, we’d done all that we could to deny that Hop-tu-naa was happening. There’d be no costume-making this year. No carved turnips. No sweets or silliness.
By breakfast time, I was already sick with dread at what the evening might bring. Once darkness fell, groups of kids were bound to come to our house. They’d start singing that song, the song, and I didn’t know what I feared most: that Dad would open the door to them and pretend everything was normal; or that he’d ignore them altogether, no matter how loud their singing became.
Trick or treat. Mum had made it clear to me that it wasn’t a Manx tradition, but I’d heard kids at school talking about their plans. Some had said they’d throw eggs if anybody refused to answer the door. Others had talked about squirting Silly String through letterboxes. It wasn’t the mess that worried me. It was Dad’s reaction.
He hadn’t been himself since the night Mum vanished. He looked almost the same. Smelled the same. Wore the same clothes. But he never laughed any more. If he ever smiled, caught unawares by something stupid I said or did, it was with a fleeting, weary regret that made him look somehow reduced, as if he’d haplessly given me something he couldn’t afford to part with. His eyes were flat and lightless, his sockets sunken and heavily pouched. His voice had changed, too. There was a broken quality to it now, a wayward hitch in his throat that he seemed unable to control. He was harried, beaten down, his hair greying at the temples, the collars of his old shirts a size too big. Sometimes, I’d watch him blundering around me, grappling with the vacuum cleaner or cursing the oven for burning our dinner, and it felt as if I was living with an actor who’d been subtly miscast in the role of playing my father. Even at the age of nine, I knew that he’d stepped back from the
Caisey Quinn, Elizabeth Lee