Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dawn was just beginning to break over the Quarter when the six of us went our separate ways. We stood around the kitchen table with our packed bags and reviewed the next stage of the plan.

“Alright,” I began, “today we’re taking the first real step towards making this happen. If anybody wants out, this is the time. After we walk out that door,” I said, gesturing vaguely towards the street, “we’re all in.”

I looked around the table at each of them in turn. Helen’s face was cool, remote. Natalie was fairly vibrating with excitement, and Mary Alice’s jaw was set. Akiko and Minka each nodded, and even Kevin looked committed—although that may have just been the kitty Valium Akiko had forced down his throat.

I gave Minka a sign. “Since we’re traveling separately, Minka has gotten everybody phones. They’re preloaded with contact info for each of us so we can get in touch.”

Mary Alice was the first to power up her phone. She clicked into the contacts list and frowned. “The address book is empty.”

“Not there,” Minka said, scrolling through the apps until she came to a gaudy pink cartoon kitten wearing a big yellow bow and waving a paw.

Helen peered at the screen. “Is that one of those Japanese lucky cats?”

“A maneki-neko!” Natalie said, pulling up the same icon on her phone. She looked at the caption and did a double take. “You have got to be joking.”

Below the waving kitten was the word “Menopaws!” in a font that looked hand-lettered. Natalie touched the cat and it meowed and twitched its ears.

“What in the name of hormonal hell is this?” Mary Alice demanded. She opened the app and scrolled through the features. “Hot flash tracker? Last menstrual period? Vaginal dryness log?”

Helen let out a little moan of protest, and Minka reared back as if she’d been slapped. “I worked many hours on this!”

“I can tell,” Helen said, making an effort to smile.

“There’s a sex chart,” Natalie said. She hit the button to open that page and the kitten threw back its head to yowl, sending Kevin diving under the table. Soon everyone’s phone was meowing, purring, hissing, and generally making more noise than a herd of howler monkeys.

“It’s awful,” Helen said, hands clamped over her ears. I picked up her phone and closed the app, cutting the kitten off mid-screech.

“It’s perfect,” Mary Alice said, demonstrating the direct message feature. “Look here, we can communicate with each other without texting or emailing. Minka has set us each up with a profile and we’re connected already.”

She flashed her screen where the pink kitten was strolling past a blue postbox, its tail swishing as it pointed to the letters stuffed in the box.

“Oh, that is smart,” Natalie said. “Look, I made my kitten striped. It looks like a tiny ocelot now.”

“I added personalization feature,” Minka said sulkily. “Kittens can be made to look different.”

“It’s very clever, Minka,” Akiko said. She’d made her kitten white and gave it a pair of glasses.

“It’s exactly what we needed,” Mary Alice said, closing the screen on her calico and its tiny top hat.

“What about you?” Helen asked me as she added a sparkly necklace to her Siamese.

I sighed and hit a button. My kitten turned coal black with green eyes. “There. It’s a plain black cat. Now, this is how we will communicate and this is the only way we will communicate,” I said, giving Akiko and Mary Alice a long look. “If you need to talk, buy a burner and send the number via direct message on the app—and that is strictly for emergencies. Got it?”

Everybody made noises of agreement with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

“How in the hell did you develop something this complicated in two days?” Mary Alice asked.

“Minka is an app developer,” I told her. “She’s been working this up for months, and I asked her to let us have the prototype with a few tweaks.”

“It does work, though?” Helen asked, an anxious line etched between her brows.

“Oh yes,” Minka assured her. “But the STD warning is buggy and makes everything crash, so do not open.”

“Why a menopause app?” Akiko asked.

“Because security people are men,” Minka told her coolly.

“Most often,” I agreed. “And most men are terrified of periods.” I couldn’t count the number of times we’d stashed weapons in maxipads, douches, or vaginal itch creams. “We’re all traveling under false papers, and there is always a chance one of us could get stopped. If that happens, make sure the app is open, preferably to something like your flow rate or how many days it’s been since you last menstruated.”

“Every day without a period, the kitten gets bigger,” Minka added helpfully.

Natalie eyed Minka’s clear, unwrinkled skin and pert boobs. “No one is going to believe you need a menopause tracker app.”

Minka smiled and opened her phone. “Mine is Period Poodle.” An animated French poodle with a tiny beret trotted across the screen. “Bonjour! You are on day 14. Bienvenue to ovulation!”

“Oh my god,” Helen said faintly.

“I will put it on the App Store when it is finished,” Minka told her. “It will be a very big success. You will see.”

We said our good-byes inside the house before slipping out in pairs. We had learned through experience that anything more than two women traveling together attracted attention, and it seemed easier just to split up rather than sort out a group disguise for all six of us. Akiko and Minka left first, taking a cab to the airport with Kevin for their flight to Toronto, changing for London Gatwick, where they would pick up a rental car and follow Helen’s directions to Benscombe. Helen and Natalie left next, flying to Newark and on to London Heathrow. Mary Alice and I sat on opposite sides of the departure lounge before catching our flight to Boston en route to London Heathrow. We staggered off the plane at seven in the morning, pretending we were traveling solo until Mary Alice collected the rental car and I met her at the curb. Helen and Nat took a train as far as Basingstoke, where we nipped off the M3 long enough to grab them. We were bleary-eyed from spending the night slumped in coach seats, and the weather was predictably awful for January in England—cold and grey and pissing with rain.

But in spite of our fatigue and the weather, we were almost giddy with excitement. Mary Alice checked her tracker messages and Akiko had confirmed their arrival at Gatwick. She tapped a message back and flipped on the satellite radio, punching buttons until she found a ’70s station with ABBA. She banged out the piano part of “Waterloo” on the steering wheel while we sang the chorus at the tops of our voices. Helen mapped our route although we’d been there before. It had been a lifetime ago, I realized, and much had changed—mostly us. We weren’t the same girls who had been driven down this highway in 1979.

There were no motorway services where we were going, but we found places to stop twice to pee and get cups of tea and thick bacon sandwiches slathered with brown sauce. We kept the car pointed southwest, eventually looping around Southampton and changing from the big motorway to smaller highways and finally to country lanes. We were deep into Dorset, following the signs for Swanage and eventually the Purbeck coast. Finally, we turned off near Worth Matravers, a village whose name sounded like the perfect place for Miss Marple to find a murdered vicar.

“Turn here!” Natalie yelled suddenly, and Mary Alice stomped on the brake, yanking the wheel to the left. The gate was open, each side hanging from a tall brick pillar topped with a stone finial. Thick ropes of ivy wove between the bars of the gates, anchoring them in place. One pillar still held a bronze plaque that was discreetly lettered. benscombe house. The drive was washed almost clean of gravel, leaving a wide swath of mud and puddles for Mary Alice to navigate as she edged the car in towards the house.

It was late Victorian, modeled, we had been told, after Thomas Hardy’s house of Max Gate. The red brick had been homey and welcoming once. Now it was austere and grim, the roof just a little too peaked, the chimneys just a bit too ominous.

Mary Alice stopped the car in front of the house and we stepped out, making various noises as we stretched out our sore backs and rubbed feeling back into our sleeping legs.

“Don’t we need a key?” Mary Alice asked.

Helen stood on the doorstep, looking around helplessly. “I didn’t think of that.”

I tried not to remember how good Helen used to be at details in the old days. A small matter like how we were getting into the house would never have slipped her mind then. But age and grief are both blunt weapons and they’d worked her over pretty well. I turned to Natalie. “You want to take care of the lock?”

“Sure.” She picked up a stone from the driveway and tossed it through a window.

“I meant pick it, but okay,” I told her. She grinned as she wrapped her hand in her sleeve and reached through the broken pane, feeling for the lock. She flipped it and slid the window open. “I’ll come around and open the door,” she told us, disappearing into the shadowy interior.

When she opened the front door, it gave way with a shriek of the hinges that scared the birds out of the overgrown laurel bushes next to the front steps. Helen took a deep breath and followed Natalie inside, but Mary Alice hung back, grabbing my sleeve. She pointed to the dark windows, the trim paint peeling off in long fingers. Through the grimy glass I could just make out the shapes of furniture shrouded under white dust sheets.

“Doesn’t it look haunted to you?” she demanded.

I took a deep breath and smelled the odor of damp decay and long neglect from inside the house. And something else, much fainter, but still there—the familiar note of beeswax and lavender.

I shrugged. “Well, if it is, at least we know the ghost.”