Chapter 21

21

October 31, 2:25 a.m.

less than four hours until low tide

Conor snatches the flashlight from Rose’s hand and rushes out into the hallway. None of us are far behind, and when we catch up, we see the source of the sound.

Poppins is scratching at the cupboard under the stairs, and she starts to whimper.

Lily steps forward and tries to open the door, but it’s locked.

“Trixie?” she calls, banging her fist against it. “Are you in there?”

There is no answer. Lily bangs on the door again, louder this time, and the wooden door rattles on its elderly hinges. She shakes the handle in frustration.

“Let me try,” says Conor, giving the flashlight back to Rose. But he can’t open the door either.

“Where is the key for this bloody cupboard?” Lily asks, but I suspect none of us know.

The dog barks and scratches at the door again.

“Be quiet, Poppins!” Lily shouts.

“She has the key,” Rose whispers.

“What?”

“Poppins has the key.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“It’s attached to her collar. Look!” Rose says, shining the flashlight down at the dog.

We seem to stare at Poppins for a long time before anyone says anything else. She blinks back in our direction, peering out from behind the two little plaits that keep her hair away from her eyes. Looking a smidgen guilty, if I’m honest. But it doesn’t seem rational—even to my irrational family—that an Old English sheepdog could be behind everything that has happened here tonight. Rose bends down to remove the key from the collar. It’s hard to see anything in the dim light, and it takes her a while to untie it.

“Hurry up!” says Lily.

“I’m trying my best,” Rose replies calmly. When she finally removes the key, she slots it into the locked door and we hold our breath. We were all afraid of this cupboard as children. We knew that there were mice and cobwebs in there. I used to imagine a family of giant spiders living in the shadows, waiting to feed on anyone foolish enough to enter.

Rose turns the key, and the door creaks as she slowly pulls it open.

It’s too dark to see inside. There was never a light.

The rest of us peer over her shoulder from the imagined safety of the hallway as Rose steps forward, shining the flashlight.

The first thing I register is the smell; bad things happen when people die. The first thing I see is Nana. She’s sitting on the floor of the cupboard, leaning against the exposed brick wall in the gloom. She would look like someone taking a nap—in a cupboard—if it weren’t for the gray coloring of her skin, the giant bloody gash on her head, and the blood that has spilled all down her cheek and onto the shoulder of her white cotton nightdress. The piece of chalk she was holding when we first found her has been replaced with a pen and paintbrush, tied to her hand with a red ribbon. My father’s body has been moved in here too, with his broken conductor’s baton still tied to his right hand the same way. It hovers in midair, presumably thanks to rigor mortis, as if he is conducting an invisible orchestra in the cupboard under the stairs. The surreal image creates a flashback in my mind, one I would rather not picture. I think it must have been early 1983. The third time I died was the first time I lied about it.

My dad had a series of ornamental girlfriends after my parents parted company. They were almost always the same person in my memory: someone pretty and half his age who played in his orchestra. Men are infinitely more predictable than women, and the way my father behaved before and after the divorce was borderline clichéd. But there is really no telling what an angry woman will do. My mother stored up her anger until it was as much a part of her as we were.

I don’t think my sisters or Nancy took any of Dad’s “relationships” with his musicians—mostly violinists, whom I’ve always been suspicious of ever since—seriously. They never lasted more than a few months. Until Rebecca. She. Was. Beautiful. And funny, and clever, and kind. Even now I can still picture her long blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, perhaps because she looked so different from all of us with our Darker family features. Rebecca encouraged Dad to spend more time with his daughters, taking us on trips to Thorpe Park and Madame Tussauds on school holidays. She took us to McDonald’s for Happy Meals—which I confess did make us happy—and she plaited our hair in ways we’d never seen before. We adored Rebecca. My mother did not. I can only imagine how awful it must have been when we came home beaming and full of stories about how wonderful Dad’s new girlfriend was. Children can be so indiscreet.

I was happy with the whole arrangement until the night my father was asked to conduct a special evening of music at the Royal Albert Hall. It was his life’s ambition, and all of us—including Nana and Nancy—were invited to witness the momentous occasion. We had our own box to watch the performance of a lifetime, and were allowed in early to have a tour of the concert hall before anyone else arrived. Lily hated the whole thing, she thought it was boring, and I always remember what she said that day. It was one of the only times I can recall my sister being genuinely funny, and the memory still makes me smile now:

“I’d rather he was a bus conductor, at least then we could get free rides.”

When Dad came to meet us, an hour or so before the show was due to start, he walked into the box with Rebecca. She was smiling and appeared to glow with happiness, and I noticed—despite being only seven—how her presence seemed to make my mother shrink into the shadows.

“We have some news!” My father beamed at his first family.

Rebecca held out her hand for us all to see, and I didn’t understand the significance until she spoke. “Your dad has asked me to marry him, and I’ve said yes.”

I stared at the ring on her hand; then I turned to my mother, who looked as though she had been punched. Her face was pinched tight, as if every muscle was working its hardest to hold her smile in place. Nana’s mouth formed a perfect O—I had never seen what she looked like when surprised before. My sisters and I shuffled closer together, as though instinct told us our pack was under threat. Sometimes the thinnest of threads can tether people to one another, and that was always true in my family.

Thoughts collided inside my head, bad ones, causing a series of small explosions. Until that moment, I think I always thought that my parents would get back together one day. We had all agreed that Rebecca was wonderful, but our opinion of her changed in a heartbeat. Now she was an awful, hateful witch of a woman—who I had adored only a few minutes earlier—because she was trying to destroy my family.

I can remember my sisters spinning me round and round as a child, on the beach or in the garden, then telling me to try to walk in a straight line. It was impossible and for some reason very funny to be that dizzy. We would laugh as I staggered and swayed all over the place, before collapsing in a heap. But when I thought my dad was going to marry someone who wasn’t my mum, I felt a very bad kind of dizzy. Then I felt sick. Then I fainted.

I’m sure that’s all it was. The Albert Hall was extremely hot, the box we were in was very high up, and the idea of my father remarrying caught me off guard. I just fainted. But Nancy was convinced my heart had stopped again, having literally been broken by Dad’s news. An ambulance was called, and I was rushed away to hospital, along with the rest of the Darker family women. My dad stayed with his orchestra and his fiancée. We never got to see him live his dream onstage at the Albert Hall, and we never got to see him marry Rebecca. She broke it off two weeks later, saying that she couldn’t be with someone who put his career before his child, even when they had been rushed to hospital.

It was all my fault, and my heart didn’t really stop that day, not that I ever told anyone. It was the first time I understood that withholding the truth was almost, but not quite, the same as lying. And although I felt guilty about everything that happened as a result, I never confessed. You can get away with murder when everyone thinks you are dying.

I turn to see where my sister is looking at the very back of the cupboard under the stairs and spot my niece curled up on the floor in the shadows. Her pink pajamas are covered in dust and dirt, there are cobwebs in her hair, her eyes are closed, and her skin is so white she looks like a ghost. She doesn’t move, even when Lily screams her name a second time.

Trixie

Daisy Darker’s niece was a precocious little child.

Like all abandoned ducklings, she would not fare well in the wild.

Aged fifteen (going on thirty) Trixie Darker was clever and kind,

But she asked too many questions, and some truths are hard to find.

The child was unexpectedly chosen to inherit her grandmother’s estate.

A decision which caused much unhappiness, and jealousy, and hate.

Her own mother felt angry and cheated; most of the family felt the same.

The child’s father might have been happy for her, but nobody knew his name.

Despite her endless questions, the child most wanted an answer to one:

Who was her dad, did he know she existed, or would she only ever have a mum?

When the time came, no one knew who to blame when she was found under the stairs.

It’s hard to know who to trust when a child is left for dead in the dust, wondering if anyone really cares.