Chapter 14

14

October 31, 1:05 a.m.

less than five hours until low tide

Rose switches off the piano and I’m glad. The sight of it playing all by itself with my father lying dead beneath it is an image I wish I could wipe from my memory forever. I notice that one of the piano keys has gone, like a missing tooth in a musical smile, almost as though the piano itself is laughing at us. The rain outside lashing against the glass windows serves as white noise while we stand and stare in silence.

“He must have done it,” Lily says quietly, as if scared he might hear her accusing him. “He must have killed Nana because he was so upset about her will. Then he drank himself to death because of the guilt. Didn’t he even joke last night that his preferred form of murder would be a sharp blow to the head? That’s exactly how she died!”

My dad is many things, but I’m certain that a murderer isn’t one of them.

“Why would he move Nana’s body?” I say. “And where is she now? And what do the note and the VHS tape in the kitchen mean?”

Conor steps forward. “This doesn’t look like suicide if you ask me.”

“Nobody did,” Lily replies. “Are you sure he’s…”

“Dead? Yes,” says Rose, closing my father’s eyes. She takes the empty whiskey glass from his hand and sniffs it, before doing the same with the empty decanter on top of the piano. It seems like an odd thing to do.

“Why would he tie his conducting baton to his own hand?” Conor asks, looking at the rest of us as though we might be dangerously stupid.

“Why did he do any of the daft things he did?” Nancy snaps, wiping a trickle of tears from her face with a pretty embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve. It has a letter B on it, and I presume it must be Nana’s, or Trixie’s, though nobody ever calls my niece Beatrice. “This all feels like a bad dream … it can’t be real,” my mother says, in a voice that sounds too small for her. “What are we going to do?”

“Why are you so upset?” Lily asks. “Just because you chose to share your bed with him last night—which is disgusting, by the way—have you forgotten everything else that Dad did? He abandoned you years ago. He abandoned us all.”

“How can you speak like that when the man is lying dead on the floor? He was your father and I loved him … Even when I didn’t like him, I still…”

“I’m not going to pretend he was ever dad of the year just because he is dead.”

“I didn’t raise you to behave like this, Lily.”

“You barely raised me at all, and he certainly didn’t have much to do with it. I was mostly brought up by strangers at boarding school. You dumped us here on Nana most holidays, while my so-called father spent his time with ‘musicians’ half his age.”

“The man is dead, show some respect.”

“For him?”

“For yourself,” Nancy says. My mother always has an argument under construction—sometimes several at once—and if I had a hard hat, I’d wear one. Lily wouldn’t dare answer back if she hadn’t had so much to drink tonight. Just when I think it might be over, Nancy throws another verbal brick. “He stayed as long as he was able.”

“Ha! That’s a good one. He didn’t have to have kids. We didn’t ask to be born. Plenty of people get pregnant by accident … I did!” Lily says.

“Well, I didn’t,” Nancy replies, and the room is even quieter than before. “I knew your father was going to choose music over me, even when we were students. I got pregnant on purpose so that he’d marry me. So that he’d have to stay.”

My sisters and I try to process this latest bombshell, but it’s all a bit much to take in: finding Nana dead in the kitchen earlier, now Dad in the music room. It’s like a messed-up family edition of Clue. But this isn’t a game; two people have died here tonight. I think part of me always suspected that Nancy deliberately got pregnant and tricked Dad into marrying her, but hearing her say it out loud is surreal. Half of me hates her for it, while the other half knows I never would have been born if she hadn’t.

“So he didn’t really want any of us?” asks Rose. “That explains a lot.”

“He loved all of you in his own way,” Nancy says. “I just can’t believe he would do this.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Conor says.

Nancy stares at him. “The door was locked, there is nobody else in the room…”

“The door could have been locked from the outside,” he replies calmly. “Either way, the police will have to be called now.”

Everyone looks scared for the first time, and I can’t help wondering why it took so long.

“Conor is right,” says Rose, always in control of her emotions. “We will have to involve the police when we can. It’s only five hours until low tide now. We’ll leave together in the morning and call for help. In the meantime, maybe we could all just try to be kind to each other? We should go back to the lounge. Trixie is on her own in there,” she adds, taking charge like before. “After everything that has happened here tonight, I’d feel a lot better knowing that we were all safe and together in one room.”

My eldest sister often took charge of situations when we were children, and the fact that she is doing so now feels like a relief. I pretend not to notice, but I see her tap Conor on the arm as we are all leaving the music room, and feel a stab of inexplicable hurt when he hangs back. They don’t speak until they think the rest of us have returned to the lounge, but unknown to them, I’m waiting quietly out in the hall. I have to strain to listen, and cover my mouth with my hand to stop myself making a sound when I hear what they say.

“You are right, we do need to call the police,” Rose whispers.

“Why do you agree with me all of a sudden?” Conor asks.

“No animal I know shares the human capacity for self-harm, but this wasn’t suicide.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Sadly, I often see poisoned pets in my line of work. People can be monsters. It’s one of the many reasons why I prefer animals. Dad is the only person in the family who drinks whiskey. When I smelled his glass, it didn’t just smell of alcohol. My father was poisoned. It was murder, I’m sure of it.”

I don’t say a word, but I do wonder why Rose would choose to confide in Conor and not the rest of us. And why neither of them wanted to share that information with me. The shadow of a thought lingers in my mind, and I can’t seem to shake it. Not that I’ll ever say anything to either of them about it. I only self-destruct in private.

Back in the lounge, Trixie has fallen asleep on the large window seat in the far corner of the room. It’s one of my niece’s favorite spots in the house, and she can often be found curled up there with a blanket and a book. Poppins the dog is stretched out on the floor beside her, gently snoring. It breaks my heart that such a kind child could have been born into such a cruel family. I’m glad she’s sleeping now. Hopefully she’ll stay that way until we can all leave.

I think that Rose is looking at her too, but it turns out she was looking at the dog.

“Poppins is taking all of this very well, poor old girl,” she says, to nobody in particular.

On hearing her name, Poppins comes to sit next to Rose.

“That’s a good point. What will happen to the dog now that Nana is dead?” Lily asks.

“I’ll take her with me,” Rose replies without hesitation.

“You said that as if you’d already thought it through.”

We sit in silence for a while—I don’t think any of us know what to say. I look at each of their faces and see a mix of fear, shock, and sorrow on every one. Rose strokes the dog and stares at the flames in the fire, with an expression I’ve never seen her face wear. Conor stares at Rose. Despite throwing another log on the fire, Nancy can’t seem to stop shivering. Lily goes to sit next to her and they hold hands. They have one of those mother-daughter relationships where they squabble all the time but never stay cross with each other for long. It’s another thing that I’ve always been jealous of.

“Are you all right?” Nancy asks her favorite daughter.

Lily shakes her head. “No, of course not. It’s just so awful. I think I’m in shock, we all must be.”

“I meant you look pale. Are you feeling okay?”

“I can’t find my diabetic kit, but don’t worry. Missing one shot of insulin won’t kill me.”

Lily wasn’t diagnosed as diabetic until her early twenties. She injects twice a day now and makes sure that everyone knows it. I’ve spent a lot of time with diabetics at the care home where I volunteer, and I feel for them, I really do. It isn’t an easy disease to live with at any age. But Lily doesn’t take her condition as seriously as she should, and her sweet tooth and habit of overindulgence was demonstrated again at dinner. My sister rarely worries about the things that she should.

“Look how peaceful Trixie looks,” Lily says, staring at her daughter. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her what has happened. First Nana, then Dad…”

“Maybe you don’t have to tell her? Let her sleep for now?” Nancy suggests.

Lily nods, and I watch her quietly place a blanket over Trixie with unusual care and compassion. For a moment, I feel guilty about the bad thoughts I so often have about my sister. Maybe she is capable of loving someone more than she loves herself. Lily gently kisses her daughter on the forehead and strokes her hair, in a rare display of maternal affection.

“What do we do with this?” asks Conor.

He’s holding the VHS tape from the kitchen with the words WATCH ME on the front. We all stare at it and him as though he’s holding a grenade and has suggested pulling out the pin.

“Throw it on the fire?” suggests Lily.

“Why would someone leave that there for us to find?” I ask.

“Who put it there is the question we should all be asking,” says Conor. “And what if it explains what is happening here tonight?”

“It just looks like another Darker family home movie,” Rose replies, as Conor removes the tape from its cover. We can all see the white sticky label on the side of it. SEAGLASS—1980 written in Nana’s swirly handwriting. Rose takes the tape from Conor’s hands.

“Should we watch it?” asks my mother. The rest of us exchange glances. “What else are we going to do for five hours? Sitting here in silence while we wait for the tide to go out will only make the hours pass more slowly, and things surely can’t get any worse. Personally, I’d welcome any distraction to take my mind off what has happened here tonight, and it might be nice for all of us to remember happier times?”

“What about Trixie?” Conor asks, looking at the sleeping teenager in the corner of the room. “Shall I turn the volume down?”

“Don’t worry, nothing wakes her when she’s like this. She’ll be out for the count until morning,” Lily replies.

“Is that normal for a teenager?”

“It is when I’ve given her a strong sedative.”

“You did what?”

Conor looks genuinely shocked, but the rest of us barely react. All families have their own version of normal, and I confess that ours is a little different from most.

Lily shrugs. “I asked Nancy to crush one of her pills and put it in Trixie’s tea earlier—”

“I used to secretly give my daughters sleeping pills all the time when they were kids,” Nancy interrupts, as though proud of the fact.

“And we turned out just fine!” says Lily, with a large dose of irony. She smiles before turning to our mother. “I remember catching you putting the pills inside gummy bears, so we thought it was a bedtime treat before brushing our teeth. Mine were hidden inside green bears, Rose got the red ones, Daisy’s were always gold. We never questioned it, just did as we were told. Trixie wouldn’t stop crying after finding Nana. Hopefully she’ll just sleep now until the tide goes out and we can leave.”

Lily opens a new packet of cigarettes, her fingers shaking with impatience while she lights one. Any guilt I felt regarding my feelings about her evaporates. Nobody says anything about Lily smoking, or the fact that she drugged her own daughter to stop her from crying. We all have bad habits, some we let the world see, some we only reveal with family, and some we’re too ashamed to share with anyone except ourselves. She lights up and instantly looks calmer, appearing to breathe out her unease with a puff of smoke.

Conor shakes his head, but Lily ignores him. Rose—I think sensing that a distraction might be good for the whole family—switches on Nana’s old TV set. It slowly comes to life, displaying fuzzy gray and white pixels.

“The tape says WATCH ME, so let’s see what happens when we do,” she says, sliding the video into the VHS machine, which swallows the tape whole. An image fills the screen, and it feels like the past is coming back to haunt us all.