For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

the house, the creaky staircase, the clock tower, the fields and the night and the town and everything in it. She drives them all into the wet gravel. Weak. Her whole life, weak. Not now. In this moment she is strong.

She holds the spade in front of her, her own shadow shielding it from the red glow of the still-idling car’s tail lights. The boy’s blood weeps from the steel, blood cast jet-black from the moonlight, sappy oil issuing forth over hands that will remain forever unclean. She raises the spade back into the sky, then delivers it home.

Thirteen

 

Renata awoke.

16

 

Grant unto us, Almighty God, in all time of sore distress, the comfort of the forgiveness of our sins.

Something was different. She recalled none of the usual pain throughout the dream. It had felt real, like a memory pulling itself together after an eternity. Her parents leaving them in the house alone, Noah running into the fields, driving her father’s car through the night in search of the boy, the yellow raincoat stretching to fill the windscreen…

In time of darkness give us blessed hope, in time of sickness of body give us quiet courage; and when the—

No, no more praying.

Her mind groped for order in the confusion. The last thing she remembered before the black, before the dream swallowed her, had been…Quentin? He was the vortex of a tornado around which the chaos of her memories spiralled. He’d taken her to…the film set. The aircraft hangar. There had been…a car?

A Ford Cortina.

The spade. Thirteen times he’d smashed it into the concrete. Thirteen, just like the dreams. And Noah, the boy’s image superimposed over the road projected on the screen.

Midnight, midnight…

Towns like Millbury Peak weren’t meant to harbour such insanity, such madness. Why had she come back? Why? Honouring a promise made when she was just a damned girl. What had she been thinking? It had only landed her here, wherever here was, with this pain in the back of her hand… What was that?

No, she wouldn’t have come back if she’d known what had been in store for her. Why had she come back, and why had she stayed? Those were the questions she kept asking herself, weren’t they? Was it really honouring that promise, or was it something else? Maybe the answer lay in another question: why had Mother stayed?

Fear.

Nothing’s more important than family. That was the official line, the words drilled into her during every Sunday school class. But she’d come to see that this grand importance of family was all relative. They’d lived under a reign of terror in that house, every day being presented new levels of tension and dread. Was her mother’s endurance of that hell, in itself, why Renata had stayed with her father this long? Maybe she’d remained because her mother had remained. She could tell herself that she was honouring the promise, or even staying to see Sylvia’s killer brought to justice. But no matter how dark this endless black was, it was still able to light the simple truth that she’d left her island, forced herself to dive back into the world, postponed her plans of suicide, remained through all this madness with the tyrant that was Thomas Wakefield, all for the same reason Sylvia had kept on keeping on through those years: fear.

On the other hand, meeting a girl like Sandie Rye, you could believe those words from Sunday school. She’d painted a picture of such love, and it was easy to see that family really was the most important thing to Sandie and her parents Quentin what had he done what why who he’d lied about everything what HOW COULD

But none of that mattered anymore, because Renata was dead.

Darkness engulfed her. Were her eyes open or closed? She could not tell. The endless black was indifferent to such trivialities. She probably had no eyes, no hands, no body – only a dim awareness of this barren purgatory where she was destined to float for eternity. Except she did have hands, or at least one. She knew this because of that damned ache, not dissimilar to when Father had dragged her into the larder. Her wrist had turned black and blue after that episode, with the bruising creeping gradually down over her hand. It had been weeks before she’d stopped worrying that it was permanently damaged. No, this pain was not dissimilar to that, but more…sharp. Upon straining with every scrap of strength she could muster, she reached her other hand over and ran her fingers down her forearm, over her wrist, and towards where the pain seemed to emanate from. She felt the skin of her hand under her fingertips as the pain drew nearer, until flesh turned to plastic as her touch met with thin tubing. With horror, she followed the tube as it ran under strips of surgical tape and met with rigid, harder plastic. She probed further as it ducked under more tape, before her finger touched lightly upon the intravenous needle lodged in her skin.

She yanked her probing hand away from the drip as the sound of a striking match leapt from the darkness. She finally managed to peel open her eyes, feeling immediate contentment upon discovering she was in the bed of a hospital room. Had she never left those white corridors, after all? Had these weeks of madness in Millbury Peak been just another nightmare? Relief swept over her, a kind of relief that, if she’d been honest with herself, she would have known was temporary. Reality was waiting; she knew this. But for these few seconds, she could be back in those corridors, those sweet, serene corridors. So white, so—

‘Morning, Renata.’ Quentin sat on the other side of the room, legs crossed. A cloud of cigarette smoke mushroomed between them.

Through half-shut venetian blinds a dampened sun provided the only