I felt tears rushing up towards my eyes. A sob came out of me and I put my face in my hands, not wanting to see my father's tight face, still grey with shock from all that had happened over the past twenty four hours.
"Maudie..." He sat beside me, hesitated, and pulled me close. For a second, the fear rose to a peak that was almost unbearable; I thought I was going to choke. I put my face against the wall, the plaster cool against my cheek. I must have made a noise or flinched or something, because I felt Angus move back from me and the fear receded a little.
"Angus-" My voice came slowly and thickened so I couldn't say more for a moment. I tried again. "Dad-"
He didn't say anything. He sat unmoving and silent. I told him everything.
Chapter Eighteen
That was the first night I had the dream. In the nightmare, I saw the stones and the black figure and Jessica disappearing into darkness. I lay there in the dark with the blankets tangled about my legs and stared upwards. The nights here were so dark, lit only by the moon and the stars. When Jessica had been next door, I hadn't been able to hear her breathing or moving around - the walls were too thick, the distance between our rooms too great. But the silence in my room now seemed somehow deeper and more awful.
Today had been the worst day of my life. I thought that quite dispassionately, staring into darkness. I thought back, unwillingly, to the scene in the kitchen; to Mrs. McGaskill’s furious anger.
Her face was a dull red, her eyes glittered and her teeth were bared. For one terrifying second, I had thought she was going to bite me. "You wicked, wicked girl! You little cow! How dare you tell us you didn't know where she was!"
Flecks of saliva from her mouth landed on my face. I was too frozen with horror to move. I saw her raise a hand to slap me and flinched.
Angus was there immediately, pulling her back. She whipped round and her outstretched hand caught him on the cheek. I heard him give an ‘oof’ of protest and watched his eyes squeeze shut as her rigid fingers slapped against his face. For a moment, the whole room seemed to rock. Mrs. McGaskill and Angus were frozen in a tableau of upraised arms and flying hair. My vision shimmered.
After a moment of stillness, sound and movement came rushing back. She was shrieking, Angus was shouting, Mr. McGaskill was hurrying forward, his face creased. I put my hands up to cover my ears but I couldn't stop my mouth from opening and the screams emerging. I shut my eyes to block out the chaos going on before me and screamed and screamed.
It worked, for a moment. I couldn't hear the shouts of the adults, or see them and their twisted up faces. For a moment, all I could hear was myself screaming, wordlessly at first and then repeating 'stop it, stop it, stop it!' over and over again. Eventually I ran out of breath and opened my eyes, gasping.
Angus had moved to put his hand on my shoulder - I hadn't even noticed. I was barely aware of Mr. McGaskill. It was Jessica’s mother who drew my eye. She was standing rigid, in the middle of the kitchen floor, her arms held stiffly by her sides. On her face was an expression of such loathing, I flinched at the sight of it.
"That's right, cry," she said, her voice vibrating. "You go ahead and cry. If we've lost her, because of what you've done, if she's gone because of you, I'll-"
She shut her mouth with a snap. Then she wheeled round, as stiffly as a soldier on parade, and marched from the kitchen.
"Come on, Maudie," Angus said. "Let's leave her for now."
I think that was when we started losing hope. Before there had been shock and confusion, and, on her parents side, a roiling, bubbling anger. But the thought of Jessica gone forever had been too big to grasp.
The search parties went out again, as soon as the sun came up. Again, I sat in my window seat, watching the blue uniforms of the police, and the holiday clothes of the tourists and the sunlight reflecting off of the cameras of the journalists that had gathered to report on the search. Sometimes they rang the doorbell of the cottage and I cringed back against the curtains, hoping they wouldn't spot my anxious face peering from my bedroom window. I stayed there for most of the day, biting my nails, watching and waiting. I kept imagining Jessica coming up the lane, a miracle, her blonde hair tossed about by the sea breeze, smiling and shouting up to me bet you can’t guess where I've been, Maudie....
After that dreadful scene in the kitchen, Mrs. McGaskill never spoke to me again. If I came into the room, she would walk out of it, keeping her face turned away, as if I exuded a stench too disgusting for her to bear. Every time, I would feel my stomach drop and twist, as if a heavy weight were falling through me. I stopped crying, though. If I felt tears prick my eyes, I would hear her voice saying cry, that's right cry, and that somehow stopped me. At night, I would pinch myself under the covers, just to have a different focus of pain. Somehow, physical pain was easier to deal with.
After two weeks, the search parties stopped. The tourists drifted away, the journalists dwindled to one or two from the local papers, desperate for news. The national dailies all had other stories to occupy their front pages. The photograph of Jessica that had smiled at us from every front page gradually disappeared. She dissolved before our eyes.
I watched her parents set out every morning to roam the fields and hills and comb the beaches, endlessly searching, refusing to give up. The original police search had found only one thing; one of Jessica's hair clips, on the path to the Men-an-Tol.
Before Jessica vanished, we'd all lived in one another's cottages, having breakfast in one kitchen one day and in the other the next, sharing the sunshine in the one big garden, running in and out of front doors without stopping to think whether it was one house or the other. Once Jessica was gone, and her mother had turned against me, that all stopped. It was two houses standing separate; two families living apart. One wasn't even a family anymore, they were just two people who happened to be married. The four of us left were now firmly split into two groups. We ate separately. The doors to the cottages remained firmly closed.
After two more weeks, Angus and I returned home.
Mr. McGaskill came to the doorway of the cottage to wave us off. Mrs. McGaskill didn't. I caught a glimpse of the pale oval of her face at one of the downstairs windows and then she was gone. We drove away, bumping slowly over the pitted surface of the lane, past the stony track that led up to the stones. I stared desperately up at the hillside, looking in vain for Jessica once more. In our fairy stories she would have been there, a little figure on the hillside, suddenly restored to us whole and sound and healthy. But of course, there was nothing there, nothing except the blue arc of sky and the mass of green that made up the hills. We drove on, out of the village, out of the county, out of Cornwall.
Chapter Nineteen
It was in the village shop that I first noticed the glances. Little fluttering sideways glances, from the two girls standing near me with their mothers. Their mothers were looking too, less obviously. I looked back over my shoulder, wondering what was drawing their attention. There was nothing more interesting there than a shelf full of sweets and chocolate bars and newspapers. Then I realised they were looking at me.
I heard the word 'Jessica' and then I knew for certain. The air in the shop seemed to darken and grow thick. I could feel my face burning and this made it worse because I was sure that they would see and think I was ashamed. I forgot why I'd come into the shop, what I'd planned to buy. My only thought was to get out of there. I managed to get my legs to move, to walk me across the endless acres of floor and out the shop door, all of the time feeling their gazes boring into my back, shearing through the flimsy protection of my cotton t-shirt and burning into the vulnerable flesh of my spine.