Page 49 of The Perfect Guests
Sadie
January 2019
Sadie pauses at the top of the spiral staircase and listens outside the door for a moment.
“Genevieve?”
There’s no reply. She can hear Nazleen’s and Zach’s voices calling out the same name on the floor below, and it gives her a moderate amount of reassurance. Gently, she pushes open the door and feels around on the wall for a light switch; her fingers find it easily.
The room is circular—of course it is—and it must once have belonged to a child. There are children’s books mixed in with classics in the bookcase, and collections of dusty feathers and pinecones and bead necklaces scattered over a long, curved dressing table. Cobwebs drape from the high ceiling, and the air smells musty, but when Sadie studies the bed, she thinks it looks recently slept in. The pillow has a dent at its center, and the covers are thrown back, and there’s a glass of clear water on the bedside table.
Slowly, Sadie turns, and she almost screams when she sees awhole bank of glassy eyes staring back at her. Dusty carnivorous creatures wearing human clothing; their malevolent glares bore right through her skin. She presses her hand over her thudding heart.
“Genevieve?” she murmurs. “Where are you?” But the room remains silent, and there’s no obvious hiding place. Still feeling uneasy, she hurries back down the spiral staircase.
When she emerges in the corridor, she hears Zach and Nazleen talking on the floor below, so she goes down to join them in the hall. Joe is with them, swinging a heavy torch in one hand, and he gives Sadie a tight smile that holds no trace of amusement.
“You’ll come out with me, won’t you?” Joe says to Sadie. “Make sure I’m not seeing things.”
Zach grumbles at him. “I said I’d come, didn’t I? I just don’t feel very well...”
Nazleen tightens her dressing gown belt and waits for Sadie to answer.
“What have you found?” Sadie asks, but Joe merely indicates the front door. They leave Zach and Nazleen behind, and they make their way back out into the freezing darkness.
“Come on, what is it?” she says. They crunch across the gravel. Joe’s torch gives a much broader, brighter beam, but for some reason it makes Sadie feel more rather than less anxious.
Joe shakes his head. “You have a look first. See what you think.”
Her heart pounds as they approach the dock for a second time. The reeds are a ghostly silver, swaying and rustling, as if trying to escape the darkness behind them. The black surface of the lake rumples gently like oil. A sudden flurry to one side makes her cry out.
“Hey.” Joe touches her arm briefly. “It’s just a bird. We woke it up, that’s all.” He swings the torch beam away from the dock to thefrosty grass beside it, and he slides the light left and right. “What do you make of these?”
At first, Sadie can’t see anything but white-tinged grass. She peers closer. Actually, thereissomething—a faint trail of impressions—two different sizes of indentations in the frost, half of them round-cornered triangles and half of them small circles. She straightens slowly.
“You think they’re Genevieve’s footprints?”
Joe nods and swings the beam away in the direction of the driveway. “High heels, don’t you think? And they join the drive just over there. And there’re no other tracks next to them.”
“Except yours.” Sadie blinks at him. “Presumably? If you followed the trail...”
“Well, yes, I meant—”
Sadie turns toward the house and gazes at the yellow glow seeping around the drawing room and dining room curtains. She’s not sure she can trust anybody here. But sometimes you have to trust somebody.
“Mrs. Shrew thinks Genevieve was planning to walk to the village. To stay at the B and B instead.”
“Yeah, Zach told me.” Joe rubs his mouth. “I suppose that must be what she did, then.”
Sadie peers at him in the gloom. “Do you know her? Mrs. Shrew.”
He takes his time replying. “I used to, when I was young. I grew up round here.”
Sadie considers this. Mrs. Shrew said she’d traveled a long way to get here this evening, but it doesn’t surprise Sadie that she, too, used to be local—it fits, somehow, with her uptight behavior and reactions tonight.
“Do you trust her?” Sadie asks. “She just seems a bit...”
He frowns, as though trying to weigh up the evidence to give Sadie a fair answer. “I feel sorry for her, mainly. And I don’t trust her, particularly, no. But equally—I can’t see why she’d lie about this.”
