Chapter Four

A couple of minutes later, Katie was back on the couch pulling her boots on, her fingers trembling slightly. Sam walked in from the kitchen and leaned against the doorframe.

"Who was that?"

"Just Mom."

"What did she want?"

"I'm not sure. Something to do with Chris. I'm heading over now."

A moment of silence.

"Is he dead?" Sam said.

Katie stopped and looked up. Her husband had his arms folded in a way that reminded her a little too much of Mrs. Field earlier. She looked down and knotted her laces too tightly.

Is he dead?

The last time she had seen Chris was more than two years ago. It had been on what should have been their father's birthday, except that Dad had died three years earlier, and what was left of their family had gathered at her mother's apartment in his memory. She and Sam arrived early with Siena to help her mother prepare a meal. Chris turned up later. He was allegedly no longer using, but there had been too many betrayals over the years, and Sam had been skeptical beforehand. His patience had always been thinner. Katie had looked at Chris carefully when he arrived. That was something she had become used to doing—trying to work out what stage he was at in the endless cycle of addiction—but that day she found him hard to read.

Regardless, her mother was overjoyed to see him. Katie remembered how she'd bustled around the kitchen, happily batting away the offers of help she and Sam tried to make while Chris played with Siena in the front room. But when Katie had taken the first of the dishes through for the table, she had found her daughter abandoned on the couch. Because her brother had already snuck out by then, along with the money he had found in her handbag.

And despite her mother's protestations, Katie had called the police.

And none of them had heard from him since. She and Sam had never spoken about it, but she imagined that, as time had passed, they had both made the same assumption: at some point there would be a body found in some shabby apartment, or an old tent, or facedown in the canal. It had always seemed the inevitable destination of her brother's life, and even if Sam had not quite wished for that outcome, she knew he had at least been relieved to have Chris gone from their lives.

She reminded herself now that was only because Sam cared about her. That it stemmed from what he'd tried to get her to accept over the years: that people choose their own paths, and however much you love them there comes a point when they have to take responsibility themselves for the journey they've embarked upon.

And that it's not your fault when they do.

Is he dead?

"I don't think so." Katie stood up. "But she didn't want to talk over the phone."

"What does that mean?"

Katie walked over and kissed him.

"It means I won't be long," she said.

He didn't reply.

It was growing dark as she drove onto her mother's street. She passed the point where Hyde had attacked Chris all those years ago without looking at it, and then parked just past a driveway flanked by two large stone pillars.

She locked the car, then made her way down the driveway in the gloom. From the outside, the building looked impressive—and perhaps it had been once. It remained a stern, imposing Victorian mansion with towering, soot-black stone walls and tall, austere windows. But at some point in the building's history, the interior had been clumsily converted into four apartments, each a single, drab corridor with a handful of rooms leading off to either side.

At the bottom of the drive, Katie stopped and looked to her left. There were four garages there, one for each apartment. Theirs was padlocked shut, the metal doors as brittle and fragile as old parchment. She remembered countless summer days, seeing her father sitting at a trestle table inside there, threading wick through a plastic container, then tacking it in place while wax heated in a cheap pan on the stove beside him. The ramshackle shelves around him were always filled with rainbow rows of candles. As a child, the bright colors had made her happy, but it had been a bittersweet feeling because she also knew they needed to sell those candles, not store them. The thing that made her saddest of all was when her father locked the garage on an evening and then walked slowly back to the house, as though he had a pain in his hip that got worse every day.

She made her way down a set of steps and let herself into her mother's apartment.

"It's me," she called.

After a moment, her mother's voice drifted down from the far end of the corridor.

"I'll be through in a minute."

"Okay."

The curtains were open in the front room, but the fading light from outside barely illuminated it. Katie stepped on the switch that turned on the standing lamp in the corner, bathing the old, familiar furnishings with dim light. Nothing had really changed in here over the years. The threadbare couch; her mother's worn old armchair with its coarse, itchy fabric; the alcoves lined with makeshift shelves, still filled with dusty books that had mostly been her father's and hadn't been slid out of place in years. There was the same ancient wooden table by the window, as solid and heavy as if it had grown up through the bare floorboards below.

Katie walked across.

A half-completed puzzle was laid out on the table. She tilted her head, squinting down at it, and then felt a jolt as she recognized the image. The puzzle must have been custom-made from a family photo. It showed her mother and father standing with their backs to a window full of rows of brightly colored candles, and Chris and Katie side by side in front of them. She remembered that day. There had been a brief period when her father's business had been successful enough to warrant renting a shop, and this picture had been taken when the four of them went to see it for the first time.

She stared down at her younger self standing beside her brother.

The two of them smiling.

"That was a nice day, wasn't it?"

Katie turned to see her mother standing in the doorway.

"Yes," Katie said. "It was. You'll strain your eyes in this light though."

"My eyes are just fine, Katie."

"Yes, Mom. I know."

Even so, she forced herself to look away as her mother made her way slowly over to the armchair, leaning on the stick she walked with. The sight of her always broke Katie's heart a little these days, but it was important never to show it. Her mother refused to acknowledge that her abilities were dimming and failing, even though it must have been as obvious to her as it was to Katie. She had always been so strong. While Katie's father had sometimes struggled to make a living, her mother had worked at a care home, taking on long, backbreaking shifts. Her whole life, she had been someone other people relied on. The reversal of that was intolerable to her.

Which only reminded Katie of how shaken she'd sounded on the phone.

She waited until her mother had eased herself carefully down into the chair and then went and perched on the arm of the couch, her hands clasped between her knees.

"What's going on, Mom?" she said quietly. "What's happened with Chris?"

"He's gone missing."

"I know that. He went missing two years ago."

"No, he came back, Katie." Her mother blinked and looked at her helplessly. "He came back to me," she said. "And now he's in danger."

It had started about three months ago, Katie's mother told her, with a knock at the door. It had taken her some time to open it, but when she had, Chris had been standing on the doorstep. He had been an addict for much of his adult life, and borderline homeless for most of that, but she told Katie he had been dressed in neat clothes and looked healthy and well.

"I'm not making this up," she said.

"I didn't think you were."

"I mean about him being well."

Katie said nothing to that. While she was prepared to believe her brother had reappeared, she was far more skeptical about him no longer using. But her mother had never given up on Chris, even though Katie had watched her heart break a hundred times over the years. She was a proud woman, and always seemed inured to it when the inevitable occurred—when Chris relapsed and then drifted out of contact until the next time he needed something. Katie was worried for her sake that this was going to be another example of history repeating itself. However proud you might be, there are only so many times a heart can break and mend.

"It was properly him," her mother said. "He seemed so happy and together. Not like he used to be. Like he was meant to be."

"Where had he been all this time?" Katie said.

"He didn't want to talk about it. I respected that."

"Okay, then. What did he want?"

"Just to see me. Is that so hard to believe?"

"No," Katie lied. "What happened next?"

"He kept calling round."

Twice a week, her mother told her, and always at the same times, which Chris had claimed fitted in with his work schedule. Which was new. As far as Katie was aware, her brother had never held down a legitimate job for any length of time, but the details of his employment were another mystery her mother had respected. Regardless, Chris hadn't asked her for money and didn't seem to want anything beyond reconnecting with her. The puzzle on the table had been a present from him, she said. There had been one day he'd wanted to look through some old photographs, and he'd had it made afterward from photos she'd let him take away.

"Why didn't you tell me he was back?"

Her mother hesitated, and Katie leaned forward.

"Mom?"

"Because he didn't want you to know."

She was gracious enough to allow Katie a moment of silence then, and not to mention that the last time she'd seen Chris had been when she called the police on him. But Katie thought about that anyway, and the sadness of it all ran through her. Had Chris hidden from her out of shame because of what he'd done? Was he angry with her for reporting him to the police? Or had he simply assumed it was she who wouldn't want to see him, and had decided to spare himself the pain of facing that?

Regardless, it hurt badly that the two of them had come to this. There had been so much love between them once.

Katie took a deep breath.

"Okay," she said. "What makes you think he's in trouble?"

"He's gone missing again. He didn't turn up yesterday."

Katie's heart sank at that, but her mother put up her hand.

"I know what you're thinking. I know what a stupid and foolish old woman you think I am."

"Oh, Mom." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I really don't."

"Yes, you do—you do, Katie. And perhaps you're right. But it's different this time. He's not answering the number he gave me; I think his phone is switched off. And the last couple of weeks, he's been acting strangely."

"Strangely how?"

"Like he was looking over his shoulder the whole time. Like he was scared of something. Or someone."

That seemed likely to Katie. Even if she took her mother's word for it that Chris was no longer using in the present, he certainly had the kind of past from which people might emerge to haunt him.

"Yes." She sighed. "It's certainly possible he was scared of someone."

"Like him," her mother said. "That monster."

Katie looked at her.

Even after all this time, her mother couldn't bring herself to say the name Michael Hyde out loud. Nobody had been able to explain why Hyde had attacked Chris that day, beyond the fact he had a history of mental health issues and had been experiencing spiraling delusions in the days leading up to it. Hyde seemed to have been cruising the streets at random that afternoon. In a different universe, the victim might have been someone else. In this one, it had been Chris.

That monster.

A part of Katie wanted to tell her mother that Hyde was just a man. That it was all in the past now and he was no longer any kind of threat to Chris.

But her daughter's words from earlier began echoing in her head.

Red car, Mommy.

Red car.