Let his sister think that he was getting the house ready for rent. He'd get it ready, all right, but he'd tell her that the roof needed work, that some of the boards were too rotten to be safe. He'd say that he'd fix it when he could, maybe have it ready in time for next year.
And in the meantime, if Pete and Diane should return, the old place would be waiting.
A cool, musty smell hit him as he stepped inside. There was a stillness in the air that made any sound seem hollow and intrusive; the atmosphere was as empty as at four o'clock in the morning, here in the middle of this Spring afternoon. He felt as if he were standing in a doll's house. Doorways along the hall before him; a couple of bedrooms and a sitting room, a bathroom with an old castiron tub, the big kitchen at the back with the woodburning stove that didn't work and the electric ring that did. All of the doors leading off the hallway had been left open, except for one.
The door that had led to Alina's room.
He might as well start there, since he couldn't skip it; putting it off would only give his imagination the chance to get to work in a department that already had too much going on inside. Even so, he felt a strange kind of anticipation as he started to turn the doorknob. Would Pete and Diane have cleared everything out before they left? They must have. Surely one of them would have said something if they hadn't.
He opened the door, and stepped through.
With some relief, he saw that the room was bare. The bed had been stripped to the mattress and there was nothing on the walls, nothing on the dresser. He checked the drawers and they were empty, too. It was as if she'd never been here.
Which left another question, occurring to him as he gave a couple of tugs at the sash of the window which looked out onto the overgrown sidegarden. What had they done with Alina's stuff? He couldn't imagine either of them wanting to take it away.
He found the answer a short time later, when he came to work on the woodburning stove in the kitchen.
It was dimmer in here than in any other room in the cottage, because the trees around the back had been left to get so wild that their branches scratched against the windows in anything more than the mildest breeze. Some other time, he'd bring along a chainsaw and trim them back. Right now, the job was to clear out the stove.
But when he opened everything up to take a look, he found that it had already been done.
The flue had apparently been unblocked some time ago, and the stove had then been used. Pete had said nothing about it but there was the evidence, there in the cold ashes. Ted unhooked the iron poker from its nail on the wall alongside and gave them a stir around.
Whatever had been burned, it hadn't burned completely. He turned up hairpins, part of a melted comb. A piece of fabric with some of the pattern still discernible. And paper ash, lots of it. In amongst the ash there was the corner of a postcard or a photo. He tilted it to the light with the tip of the poker, but it showed no recognisable detail.
He raked the cold embers together in a mound and then, using deadwood that he found within a few yards of the house, he relit the stove and clamped everything down tight. This way it would burn hot, and it would burn until only the ashes of ashes remained. For Ted Hammond, even one surviving scrap of Alina Peterson would be one scrap too many.
He waited until he was sure. Then he turned to go.
Leaving the cottage and locking the door behind him, Ted found himself thinking of something that Diane had once said. That of those who'd known the truth, they were the only ones who had made it through. She hadn't exactly put it like that, but it was what she'd meant; that they were a survivors' club, whether they liked the idea or not.
He went down the porch steps to the van, climbed in, and started the engine. And then he sat for a few moments, letting it idle as he found himself looking at the faint line of the path that picked up from the track only a few yards ahead. It led on up through the woodland to the high rocks where he'd gone to look down on the flat expanse of the lake after the goodbyes.
It was a path that Alina had walked before him, many times.
Diane was wrong. The three of them weren't alone. Others knew what had happened, and how.
But they'd never speak out again.
PART ONE
We are familiar merely with the everyday,
apparent and current, and this only
insofar as it appears to us, whereas the
ends and the beginnings still constitute
to man a realm of the fantastic.
Everything must have a beginning…
and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.
ONE
But there's no clear point at which one could say, here it began.
Instead, there are many. Like the day that Pete McCarthy turned up at Ted Hammond's auto-marine with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and the hope of a season's maintenance work (a season that ran on into a year, and then into the next, and seemed set to run on indefinitely should nothing ever happen to break up their growing friendship), or perhaps the one some years before when a seven-year-old Russian girl named Alina Petrovna led a teenaged boy out into the marshlands near her village and came back alone. Or the day that Alina, now grown, gathered whatever possessions she could carry and made her first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border out of her Karelian homeland.
Or perhaps, getting closer to it, the night that Pete McCarthy set out from the valley to attend his mother's funeral, while Alina Petrovna, hardened if not chastened by her punishment, got most of those same possessions together and tried it again. As beginnings go, this one's probably better than most.
McCarthy first.
As the woman who was to change his life was boarding the train that would, indirectly, bring her to him, Pete McCarthy was doing his best to kick some life into his shabby old heap of a car.
But the shabby old heap simply didn't want to know; it sat under the workshop lights, mean and dark and uncooperative, its chromed grin shining dully and a spirit of mischief showing deep in its sixty-watt eyes. It was a black Zodiac, close to twenty years old and easily the ugliest car to be seen on the roads around Three Oaks Bay, and even if its colour was appropriate for a funeral it was going to be of no damn use at all to Pete if it didn't get him there.
This was all that he needed. This, after three hours of tweaking and tuning and a once-over with the Turtle Wax to make it look halfway presentable. He'd given it loving care, he'd given it attention. What more did it expect of him?
There was nothing else for it.
He took off his suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of the shirt that he'd changed into in the back washroom less than ten minutes before, and reached for the bonnet release.
He was still working at it when Ted Hammond called by after a late session in the auto-marine's office. "Having problems, Pete?" he said, and Pete made two fists, growled, and kicked the nearest wheel. The Zodiac's hubcap fell off and rolled into the grease pit. The two of them had the carburettor in pieces by the time that Wayne, Ted's sixteen-year-old boy, put in an appearance; Wayne spent no more than a few seconds contemplating the engine before saying that he knew exactly what was needed.