Chapter 92 Elin

92

Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

Maggie's voice catches. ‘Because that's what they're built from. The wilds that live inside us after we've hit the very bottom and can't see a way back up.'

‘The wilds,' Elin echoes, the hairs rising on the back of her arms.

‘Yes, that's what we call the feelings inside us that can't be tamed. Feelings that burn. Feelings that take you to the edge.' Maggie's face constricts. ‘All our women have feelings like that after what they've been through, and here, we take those feelings and we build with them.' Encasing Bridie's hand in hers, she smiles. ‘Because when you're building up, there's no chance to look down. No time to think about destruction.' Her voice is thick. ‘I built my first one when I was a child, the day my daddy went to jail. My mama and I went to the woods at the back of our house, and we built. The first time in our lives that something was being made instead of destroyed.' She pushes a loose strand of hair away from her eyes. ‘We let it sit for a few days, and then piece by piece, we took it down. A blank slate. '

Elin's heart is drumming as her thoughts shift to seeing Leah in the woods that day. ‘That's what Leah was doing the day we saw her in the forest. She was taking it down.'

‘I think so …' Maggie falters. ‘She wanted that blank slate so badly, but everything got too much. She started thinking that her ex had found her, that he was the one who blew up the van.'

‘And was he?'

‘We're not sure. Ned saw the spare gas canisters had gone up, in the debris, but it's hard to say if it started there or somewhere else. An electrical fault, maybe.'

‘Ned is Maggie's brother,' Bridie says. ‘He'd do anything for her. Saved her life after he found her in her apartment, beat up by her ex. He's a big part of what we do here, especially in terms of helping the women feel secure. They obviously need to be ok with him being around, but we make that clear before anyone joins us.'

She continues to talk, but the sound of her voice briefly drops away as Elin catches on something at the very edge of her vision: the clothes hung on the line strung between Maggie's and Ned's vans, flapping in the breeze.

Her thoughts slip back to the very first time they'd entered the camp.

Different clothes, obviously, but the same insistent breeze.

Though she can sense Maggie's and Bridie's eyes on her, Elin watches for a moment, left with the same feeling that she's had every time she's come down here – that she's missed something.

Trying to block out everything else around her, she replays the last few times she was at the clearing, layering the memories one on top of another, and on this moment too.

She's got no idea what she's seen or where exactly, but it's something here , something in or around Maggie's van, near to where she's strung up the clothes.

It's as the breeze pulls a shirt sideways, wraps the arms around themselves, that she glimpses it.

An anomaly.

Not with the van itself, but the colour.

White, yes, but around the very edges of the window frame, there are glimpses of another colour.

Blue.

It's been painted over , she thinks, staring, and it looks like whoever sprayed it hadn't quite got all of the area around the window frame.

Still examining it, it's as if that idea has opened the door to the fine, fragile thread of another. She looks and then looks again, the idea she's clinging to casting new light and shade on every part of the van.

Not just modern, as she'd first thought when she looked inside that night at the camp, it's all new , she thinks, growing cold all over. Too new , at odds not just with Maggie's van in the woods, but the others here.

New and a bit slapdash. Brush marks visible, the lino not quite fitting.

Hastily done.

Again, Elin pictures the photograph Isaac showed her of Kier's van. Maggie's.

It had been staring them in the face the whole time, she thinks. The ending to this.

Kier and Zeph … they hadn't just disappeared into thin air.

The final part of the story – it played out here.