The Likeness

“-but Mackey just smiled this cynical little smirk and then left. As soon as I was sure he was actually gone-he’s the type who would hang around eavesdropping in shrubberies-I went in to Daniel and asked him what the fuck his problem was. He was still at the window, he hadn’t moved. He pushed his hair off his face-he was sweating-and he said, ‘There isn’t a problem. He’s lying, of course; I should have realized that immediately, but he caught me off guard.’ I just stared at him. I thought he had finally lost it.”

“Or you have,” Abby said crisply. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“You and Justin were busy dancing around hugging each other and making squeaky noises, like a pair of Teletubbies. Daniel gave me this irritated look and said, ‘Don’t be naďve, Rafe. If Mackey were telling the truth, do you honestly believe that would be unadulterated good news? Hasn’t it even occurred to you just how serious the consequences could have been?’ ”

He took a long swallow of his drink. “You tell me, Abby. Does that sound overjoyed to you?”

“Jesus Christ, Rafe,” Abby said. She was sitting up straight, eyes snapping: she was getting angry. “What are you babbling about? Are you losing your mind? Nobody wanted Lexie to die.”

“You didn’t, I didn’t, Justin didn’t. Maybe Daniel didn’t. All I’m saying is that I’ve got no way of knowing what he felt when he checked Lexie’s pulse; I wasn’t there. And I can’t swear I know what he’d have done if he realized she was alive. Can you, Abby? After these last few weeks, can you swear, hand on heart, that you’re absolutely positive what Daniel would have done?”

Something cold slipped across the back of my neck, riffled the curtains, spiraled off to nose delicately in corners. All Cooper and the Bureau had been able to tell us was that she had been moved after she died; not how long after. For at least twenty minutes they had been alone together in the cottage, Lexie and Daniel. I thought of her fists, clenched tight-extreme emotional stress, Cooper had said-and then of Daniel sitting quietly beside her, carefully tapping ash into his smoke packet, droplets of soft rain catching in his dark hair. If there had been anything more than that-a hand twitching, a gasp; wide brown eyes staring up at him, a whisper almost too faint to hear-no one would ever know.

Long night wind sweeping across the hillside, owl calls fading. The other thing Cooper had said: doctors could have saved her.

Daniel could have made Justin stay in the cottage, if he had really wanted to. It would have been the logical thing to do. The one who stayed had nothing to do, if Lexie was dead, except keep still and not touch anything; the one who went back to the house had to break the news to the others, find the wallet and the keys and the Maglite, stay calm and work fast. Daniel had sent Justin, who could barely stand up.

“Right up until the night before you came home,” Rafe told me, “he insisted you were dead. According to him, the cops were just bluffing, claiming you were alive so we’d think you were talking to them. He said all we had to do was keep our heads and they’d back down sooner or later, they’d come up with some story about how you’d relapsed and died in hospital. It wasn’t until Mackey phoned to ask if he could drop you off the next day, if we’d be home-that was when it hit Daniel that, duh, there might not actually be some huge conspiracy going on; this might actually be as simple as it looked. Lightbulb moment.”

He took another big swig of his drink. “Overjoyed, my shiny white arse. I’ll tell you what he was: he was petrified. All he could think about was whether Lexie had really lost her memory or whether she’d just said that to the cops, and what she might do about it once she got home.”

“So?” Abby demanded. “Big deal. We were all worried about that, if we’re honest. Why not? If she did remember, she’d have had every right to be raging with the lot of us. That evening you came home, Lex, we’d been like a bunch of cats on hot bricks all day. Once we realized you weren’t angry or anything, we were OK-but when you got out of that cop car… Jesus. I thought my head was going to explode.” For one last second, I saw them again the way I had that evening: a golden apparition on the front steps, shining and poised like young warriors stepped out of some lost myth, heads lifted, too bright to be real.