The Last House on Needless Street Catriona Ward (classic book list .txt) 📖

stops. The cold trickles of bloody lake water keep coming down the backs of her legs, and she is panting. She thinks she might faint so she stops for a moment. She leans against a broken stump, silvered and dead with age. All she can see at her feet are snakes. Stop, she commands her body and mind. Stop. No snakes here. She has to think.

A new little voice speaks in her mind. At least Lulu can’t tell Mom and Dad on you now. She sobs. How can she even think such a horrible thing?

Gnats swarm greedily at the blood on her. She tries to scrub it off. But she is shaking and it has stained her shorts. Instead she ties her sweater round her waist to hide it as best she can. Blood, blood, Dee thinks in a fog. Fresh threads of blood. The next thought shines out, knifes through her hard and quick. Lulu was still bleeding. Dee has watched enough TV to know what that means. She is not dead.

Dee turns and runs hard, back towards Lulu. Her lungs are bursting with effort and the scalding air. How could she have left her like that? But Dee will make it right, she swears. She will stay by Lulu’s side and scream until someone comes. It is not too late. Events are not yet final. But she has to be fast.

Dee feels like she has been running and climbing and stumbling back towards her sister for her whole life. But eventually the undergrowth thins and the canoe-shaped rock comes into view. Dee goes even faster, taking long hare-like leaps over the shore debris. She falls more than once, skinning palms and knees and elbows. She does not notice, pushes herself up and runs on. When she comes to the rock she stops for a moment, too frightened to set foot on the rock.

‘Come on, Dee Dee,’ she mutters. ‘You baby.’ She climbs over the canoe rock.

In its shadow, where Lulu should be lying, there is nothing. Water laps cold at the granite. Gnats buzz above the water, grey punctuation marks. No Lulu, alive or dead.

Maybe this isn’t the right place, Dee tells herself. But it is. On the rock she can see a slender thread of drying blood. In the water, one white flip-flop bobs. Then Dee sees that there is a footprint at the muddy edge. The heel is already filling with brown lake water. The footprint is big, much too large to be Lulu’s, or Dee’s. It could be the boy’s, maybe. But somehow Dee knows it’s not.

From nearby there comes a familiar, homely sound – it takes Dee a moment to place it in this nightmare. A car engine starts, then idles. A door slams closed.

Dee runs across the clearing where, what seems like a lifetime ago, she fooled around with the boy. She pushes through a stand of brush, and falls out onto a dirt road. Dust billows and dances in the air as if recently kicked up by tyres. Dee thinks she glimpses a car bumper vanishing down the track. The roaring in Dee’s ears almost drowns the engine, her ragged screams for the driver to stop, stop, and let her sister go. But the car is gone. At Dee’s feet, in the dust, lies a deep green stone; a perfect oval shot through with veins of white.

A short distance away through the scrub, sun gleams on ranks of chrome and glass. Dee wants to shriek with laughter. They thought they were so far from everything, but they were right by the parking lot.

In the bathroom, the women look at her, disapproving. She leans against the white-tiled wall. Over the roar of the hand dryers, she tries to understand what has happened. It is impossible. She retches briefly into a basin, and earns herself more disapproval from the line. I have to tell someone, she thinks, and the thought is cold and numbing.

She pictures the expression her mother’s face will wear as she tells her parents. Tries to imagine the tone of her father’s voice as he tries to forgive her.

The little voice says, If you tell, there will be no Pacific ballet school. Even through her fear for Lulu, Dee feels the molten creep of fury. They have always loved Lulu best, ever since she was born. Dee has always known it. It is so unfair. She didn’t do anything wrong, not really. This is real life, not one of those old books where a girl makes out with a boy and then someone has to die because it’s so sinful. She knows, deep down, that making out with the boy wasn’t what she did wrong.

What can she tell them, anyway? Dee does not have any real information. She couldn’t even see the car through the dust. Was there a car? She is not sure, now. Maybe Lulu’s body floated away in the lake. Or it was taken away by an animal. Like, a bear. Maybe Lulu woke up and went back to Mom and Dad. Yes, Dee thinks with a rush of relief. That’s it. Dee will go back to her family and Lulu will be sitting on the blanket playing with pebbles. She will greet Dee with an affronted look, because Dee left her alone, to do boring big-kid stuff. But Dee will tickle her and Lulu will forgive her in the end. So there really is no point in telling.

A fresh snail of watery blood crawls out of Dee’s shorts, down her leg. ‘Does anyone have a sanitary towel?’ Dee tries to sound pissed off instead of scared, which she is. She takes her shorts off in the bathroom in front of all the women and rinses them at the basin. She makes a big deal out of it, so they will remember her later. Dee was here, and nowhere else. She doesn’t ask herself why this is necessary, if Lulu is waiting with Mom and Dad. The word