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

‘Speak, girl.’

She stopped at the sideboard mirror, fixing the kirby grips in her hair, before looking down at the spade in her hand.

‘I know where to find the truth.’

19

The clock tower flashed, a pillar of light, then fell back into darkness. Weeds groped underfoot, rendering her shoes as waterlogged as her coat. The soaked hospital gown clung tight while her duffle flapped madly in the storm. The churchyard was a swamp out of which headstones leant drunkenly at every angle, its undergrowth reaching from below for sunlight that was not there. Rain battered the immutable scene, the graveyard as stoic as cliffs enduring the tide. She hunched forward and pushed through the storm, spade in hand.

Soon it would all be over.

As the truths gifted to her had stripped the weight from her father’s words, so had it dissolved her concern for him. Why had it been there at all? To honour her mother and the promise? No, it had been born of fear, she saw that now. Fear of a crippled old man. No matter, discovering for herself the reality of Quentin’s words was the only thing of importance now. Oblivion awaited, but she couldn’t meet it without knowing. Then she would end herself.

Renata’s eyes fixed on her mother’s grave, then moved to the diminutive white headstone by its side. She’d barely registered it previously, but the unmarked pebble of a thing now seemed indisputably linked to Sylvia Wakefield’s. If there was any truth to Quentin’s words, if the dreams were in fact remnants of an act committed a lifetime ago, buried deeper than the dead, this stone held the answer. He was right about one thing: she had to discover the truth on her own. No more lies, no more deceit. Could she really do this? She placed a hand against the slab and, for a moment, heard that laugh in the howling gale.

Ee-ee-eeee!

She knelt and planted the blade of the metal spade in the soaked soil. Whether or not the answers lay here, there would be no coming back from this. Not that she wanted to, or that the rope would let her. One final confirmation of the truth, then the noose would have its way.

She drove the spade.

The wet ground succumbed as she’d expected. Her tool met quicksand-like dirt, swallowing the steel. Lightning lit an audience of stone. Thunder rumbled over wailing wind. Her soaked coat weighed heavy, pulling her to the earth. The thin, pale blue cotton of her gown became a second skin, sealed with rain to her feeble body. She thrust the spade into sodden mud, her grunts barely audible through the screaming storm. The tower, her childhood friend, gazed down disapprovingly. She glared back at it. What would you have me do? The clock face stared, a vast eye wide in disbelief.

She felt the spade’s quality in its weight; he’d made sure this replica was extra sturdy and robust, reinforced for your corpse-digging pleasure. Still, the child-sized tool was making her task long and arduous, like tunnelling with a toothpick, and she eventually went to search the base chamber of the clock tower for a more effective implement. Sure enough, a full-sized shovel sat propped against the wall. She ran a finger along its edge, finding it to be almost razor sharp. This thing was brand new and prepped for the task at hand. She had a feeling she knew who’d left it here.

Returning to the site of her work, she found the mound of dirt by her side to grow with a greater pace under the influence of the new shovel. The pit deepened around her.

Hours passed. The pile, turned to mud by the pummelling rain, began slithering back into the hole. She threw her aching arms into the mound and pushed it back, screaming. She tried to shove aside the panic of her hair constantly coming undone from its mass of clips, running her hands over it, smearing it down with rain after every thrust so the water would keep it in place. Thunder bellowed far off in a world from which every plunge of the shovel was a step away. Her first step had been long ago on a road not far from here. Now, one plunge at a time, she would take her final steps.

She thrust.

The mound grew large, the pit deep.

She wiped away the hair.

Keep digging, the inscription on the boy’s spade had read.

Thrust.

Keep digging.

Wipe.

Now he was the worm, she the excavator. The walls of mud rose around her.

Show yourself, worm.

The moon drifted as the night wore on. Renata worked frantically in the deepening grave. Her blade began to blunt, blisters burst on her hands, cramp cracked in her arms, but still the shovel-loads of mud flew out of the pit. She was a woman possessed. The light at the end of the tunnel was somewhere in this grave.

Then, with the first distant hints of dawn, she struck something hard.

Vibrations rang up the shovel and through her arms, stopping her dead. Mahogany peered through a letterbox in the mud where the steel had made contact. The rain fell around the tiny window and worked the dirt back over as if trying to cover up a dirty secret. She fell to her knees and scraped the mud with the edge of the shovel. Steel grated against wood until the dark coffin lay bare before her.

It was small.

She dropped the shovel and began scratching at the walls of dirt until two small footholds formed on either side of the box, allowing her to step off the lid. She stood over the coffin, legs and arms akimbo as if mid-star jump, looking down at her treasure chest. Feet still anchored on either side, she bent over and curled her fingers around the lid, feeling