“I—I—I’m sure everything’s fine.” But the constable had already gone inside and was waiting impatiently for her. “Jem! Bring Mandy inside and take her up to the playroom, will you?” She couldn’t bear to leave the kids outside by themselves, exposed. She could scarcely bear to have them out of her sight. But the very last thing she needed was to have Mandy tagging helpfully along, chatting to Constable Laughlin about Mr. Rob in the priest’s hole. Leaving the door open, she hurried after the WPC.
“The phone’s in there,” she said, catching up with Constable Laughlin in the hall and gesturing toward Roger’s study. “There’s an extension in the kitchen. I’ll go and check that and see to the back door.” Not waiting for an answer, she strode down the hall and nearly threw herself through the swinging door that led to the kitchen.
She didn’t pause to check anything but jerked open the junk drawer and snatched up a big rubber-covered flashlight. Meant to assist farmers lambing at night or searching for lost stock, the thing was a foot long and weighed nearly two pounds.
The .22 rifle was in the mudroom, and for an instant, as she walked through the house, she debated killing him, in a dispassionate way that would probably scare her if she had time to think about it. She had Jem back, after all—but no. Constable Laughlin would certainly recognize the sound of a shot, in spite of the muffling green baize on the kitchen door. And there was apparently more she needed to learn from Rob Cameron. She’d knock him unconscious and tape his mouth.
She stepped into the mudroom and quietly closed the kitchen door behind her. There was a deadbolt, but she couldn’t lock it from this side without the key, and her keys were on the table in the foyer, where Constable Laughlin had left them. Instead, she dragged the heavy bench over and jammed it catty-corner between the door and the wall, concentrating on the logistics. Where was the best place to hit someone on the head so as to render them unconscious without fracturing their skull? She had a vague memory of her mother mentioning that once . . . the occiput?
She’d expected an outcry from Cameron at the sound of her entry, but he didn’t peep. She could hear footsteps above, the confident stride of an adult going down the hall. Constable Laughlin on her tour of inspection, no doubt checking the first-floor windows, ladder-bearing burglars in mind. She closed her eyes for an instant, envisioning the constable sticking her head into the playroom just as Mandy was regaling her brother with the details of her own adventures the night before.
Nothing to be done about that. She took a deep breath, lifted the grate over the priest’s hole, and shone the light down into the shadows. The empty shadows.
For a few moments she went on looking, swinging the torch beam from one side of the priest’s hole to the other, then back, then back again . . . her mind simply refusing to believe her eyes.
The light caught the dull gleam of duct tape—two or three discarded wads, flung into a corner. There was a cold feeling at the back of her neck, and she jerked round, flashlight raised—but it was no more than apprehension; no one was there. The outer door was locked, the mudroom windows secure.
The door was locked. She made a small, frightened sound and clapped her hand hard over her mouth. Like the door between mudroom and kitchen, the mudroom’s outer door locked with a deadbolt—from the inside. If someone had gone out that way and left the door locked behind him—he had a key to the house. And her rifle was gone.
THEY’RE TOO LITTLE, she kept thinking. They shouldn’t know about things like this; they shouldn’t know it’s possible. Her hands were shaking; it took three tries to open the sticky drawer in Mandy’s dresser, and after the third failure, she pounded it in fury with the side of her fist, whispering through gritted teeth, “You goddamned f**king bloody buggering thing! Don’t you dare get in my way!” She crashed her fist on top of the dresser, raised her foot, and smashed the sole of her sneaker into the thing so hard that it rocked back and thumped into the wall with a bang.
She grabbed the drawer pulls and yanked. The terrorized drawer shot out, and she snatched the whole thing free and flung it into the opposite wall, where it struck and exploded in a rainbow spray of underpants and tiny striped T-shirts.
She walked over and looked down at the battered drawer, lying upside down on the floor.
“So there,” she said calmly. “Teach you to get in my way when I have things to think about.”
“Like what, Mam?” said a cautious voice from the doorway. She looked up to see Jemmy hovering there, eyes flicking from her to the mistreated drawer and back.
“Oh.” She thought of trying to explain the drawer but instead cleared her throat and sat down on the bed, holding out a hand to him. “Come here, a bhalaich.”
His ginger brows flicked up at the Gaelic endearment, but he came willingly, cuddling into her arm. He hugged her hard, burying his head in her shoulder, and she held him as tightly as she could, rocking back and forth and making the sorts of soft noises she’d made to him when he was tiny.
“It’ll be all right, baby,” she whispered to him. “It will.”
She heard him swallow and felt his small, square back move under her hand.
“Yeah.” His voice quivered a little and he sniffed hard, then tried again. “Yeah. But what’s going to be all right, Mam? What’s going on?” He drew away a little then, looking up at her with eyes that held more questions and more knowledge than any nine-year-old should reasonably have.
“Mandy says you put Mr. Cameron in the priest’s hole. But he’s not there now—I looked.”