Page 35 of The Perfect Guests
I wanted to cry with frustration. But I couldn’t risk disobeying Nina. I could feel all my old insecurities returning, sliding along my skin, slipping into my pores, and creeping around my body. I stomped away down the spiral staircase and slammed my own bedroom door behind me. I loved Nina like a sister, but sometimes I hated her too. I couldn’t sneak out without her, in case she told Leonora. Despite my sometimes ambiguous feelings about Raven Hall, I still didn’t want to be sent away.
We didn’t go to the party.
***
I was still in a bad mood with Nina when Markus returned from his trip abroad. Nina and I stood side by side on the top step as Leonorahugged him on the gravel, and Markus laughed as he swung his suitcases from the car boot.
“These are twice as heavy as when I left; I’ve stuffed them with so many presents for you.”
But as Nina trotted down the steps and launched herself into his arms, his gaze slid over her head and landed on me, and his taken-aback expression made me feel acutely self-conscious. Had he forgotten I lived with them now? Or perhaps he hated my new look? I tucked my hair behind my ear and waited for Nina to let him go, and by the time he came up to greet me, his face was friendly again.
“How’re things, Beth?” he said. “You’ve both been growing up again, I see.”
I trailed after them—Leonora hanging on to one of his arms, and Nina on the other—and I knew they all noticed my quietness at the welcome-home dinner that Leonora had prepared for him. But I didn’t know how to hide this painful loneliness that gnawed at me in spite of the warm chatter around me, and as soon as I could, I slipped away and went to play my violin in my bedroom. I missed my parents and Ricky as if it were only three weeks they’d been gone instead of three years.
It was a sign of how much of an outsider I was feeling that I even began to look forward to Caroline’s dutiful Christmas visit. She might be cold and selfish, but at least she was my real family.
Sadie
January 2019
Where’s Genevieve?”Sadie says again, this time more loudly, as if she might somehow have missed a reply in the hush of the drawing room. But Zach merely shakes his head, one hand pressed against his abdomen, while a bleary-eyed Everett blinks at her from his armchair by the fire.
“What?” the old man mutters. “What’s the silly girl playing at?”
Joe joins Sadie at the window, and he, too, peers into the darkness.
“She was right there,” Sadie says. “She hasn’t come back in—we’d have heard her.”
“She might have her back to us,” Joe says. “Shielding her cigarette...” But he heads for the door, and Sadie hurries after him. “Let’s call her in.”
They grab a couple of coats from the cloakroom and go outside, down the stone steps, and across the gravel. Joe switches on his phone torch as he calls out Genevieve’s name, and Sadie curses her lack of pockets, which made her leave her own phone upstairs. It’sfreezing out here, and despite the lamps on either side of the front door, they’re plunged into darkness before they’re even halfway across the parking area. But Joe seems confident about his bearings, and, sure enough, after hurrying down a gentle slope of grass by the light of his phone, they reach a little dock, nestled in among the reeds. At its far end, the lake gleams oily black in the feeble torchlight, and a small rowing boat scrapes gently against a wooden post as if inviting them to climb in. There’s no sign of a young woman in a fur coat.
“Genevieve!” Sadie calls. And again, more frantically, “Genevie-e-eve!” She’s shivering, and she can hear the note of panic in her voice.
The only reply is the soft lapping of the lake water and the rustling of reeds.
Joe casts his thin beam of light around until it picks out a pale object on the wooden planks. A half-smoked cigarette, with bright crimson lipstick marks still on it. He swivels the light in every direction, but it doesn’t penetrate the darkness far enough to make out more than reeds and grass and the cold reflection of the water.
Sadie nudges the cigarette butt with her toe. “What shall we do?”
“Maybe,” Joe says slowly, “she did go back inside, and we just didn’t hear her.”
“Let’s go and check,” Sadie says. “I think I know which room she was given.” She tries to push away the memory of that unearthly cry from the other end of the corridor.
They dash back into the warmth of the house and try calling Genevieve from the hallway, with no success. Zach hovers in the drawing room doorway, looking concerned, but he has no helpful suggestions.
“Okay, I’ll check down here,” Joe says. “She might have come in the back door, maybe. Do you mind checking her bedroom?”
“Sure,” Sadie says, although she’s far from thrilled at the prospect of making her way up those stairs again by herself. “And what if she’s not there?”
Joe’s face creases with doubt. “Well, we’ll have to disturb Nazleen, I suppose. She’s the company’s representative, isn’t she? I still can’t believe they didn’t reconnect the phone line...”
Sadie tries to look more confident than she feels. “We’ll find her. Just—shout if you find her first, okay?”
Joe starts trying the doors on one side of the hall, and Sadie heads upstairs. The corridor is empty, as before; all the doors on either side are closed, except for one halfway down the smoke-damaged end. Before she can change her mind, she marches down to it and peers inside. It’s a junk room: boxes are stacked high on the floor and on the dark wooden furniture. The walls are painted a fresh cream, but Sadie’s fairly sure this is the room that had the blackening around its window in the photo, and when she sniffs the air, she’s sure she detects a faint scent of soot. For a second, she imagines someone, ducked down behind the boxes, breathing and watching her. She shakes her head and hurries out, closing the door behind her with a bang.
At the other end of the corridor, Genevieve’s room is unoccupied. The red dress still lies puddled on the rug, and the curtains are partly open. Sadie crosses to the window and peers down into Raven Hall’s walled back garden, but there’s little to be seen beyond the weak yellow light from the rear windows downstairs. Faintly, she hears Joe calling, “Genevie-e-eve!”
