Page 52 of The Perfect Guests
“Perhaps you could tell me exactly whoyouare, first.”
Joe looks startled, but he gives her a small apologetic nod. “Yes, of course. I’m Jonas Blake. I grew up in the village. My mum still runs the B and B there. I used to be friends with—” His gaze slides toward the lake, as if the rest of his sentence has been sucked away across the black water.
She waits for a couple of seconds. “Friends with who?”
“There were two girls who used to live here. Nina and Beth.”
Sadie’s heart is a drum. Is she finally going to hear the story her mother would never tell her?
“What happened to them?” she whispers.
He eyes her warily. “Surely you’d know that if you’re Beth’s daughter?”
She shakes her head. “Mum never told me anything about her childhood. Seriously, virtually nothing. I mean, I know she had a brother, Ricky, and he and her parents were killed in a road accident, but apart from that...”
Joe’s pupils are enormous in the torchlight. “You didn’t know she lived here?”
“No. How old was she then?”
“Fourteen, fifteen. Didn’t she mention the family, even? Leonora and Markus and Nina?”
“No, I told you. I wasn’t allowed to ask her anything. Little things could set her off. If she was reminded of the past, she’d withdraw from everything, shut herself away, didn’t want to talk about it. So in the end, I stopped asking.”
Joe looks horrified. “I tried to find her, afterward, but she literally”—he swings the torch in a helpless gesture—“disappeared.”
Sadie thinks of the charity her mother always insisted on supporting. “She was homeless for a while. I don’t know much more than that. She lived on the streets ’til she got pregnant with me, and then she got some support, and things got a bit better.”
“Good grief.” Joe shakes his head heavily. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just tell me what happened here. Please.”
“It was an accident,” he says slowly. “There was a fire, in the house. And while they were waiting for help to arrive, Beth and Nina went out onto the frozen lake, and they—”
“What?” Sadie says.
“The ice broke. They fell through. Into the water...”
Sadie hugs herself, thinking of all the times she complained of her mother’s heating being turned up too high, and her mother saying it was what her cold bones needed.
“The fire brigade had just got here,” Joe continues. “They managed to pull both girls out, but—”
Sadie remembers the line from the ramblers’ group blog:“Raven Hall has beenabandoned and uncared for since a tragedy befell a local family in the late 1980s.”She takes a step backward and glances at the gentle glow from the drawing room window, no longer wanting to hear the rest of the story. What if her mother was responsible for the other girl’s death? Is that what happened? Beth and Nina went out onto the ice, but only Beth came back?
Joe catches at her sleeve, and his voice cracks. “It was my fault; that’s the trouble. I promised Beth I’d meet her on the island, but I wasn’t there—I was still at home. I hadn’t even set off. If I’d been here...” He gives Sadie a pleading look. “Where is she now? I’d love to see her again, to explain...”
Sadie gives a short laugh. “That’ll be tricky.”
“Why?” His eyes widen. “She’s not—”
“Dead?” Sadie pulls a face. “No, but she’s not exactly easy to get hold of. She quit her job a few months ago, gave away all her stuff, left me to sort out the tedious bits while she went off to join some cult in the wilderness.”
“Cult?” Joe says.
“Well, they call it a retreat. It’s in the Scottish Highlands. They do talking therapies, that kind of thing, and she’s convinced it’ll help her, but they’re really strict. No phones allowed, no visitors for the first six months, only one letter a month, things like that. She just went and joined them. I couldn’t talk her out of it.”
“It does sound a bit cultish.”
“That’s what I told her.” Beth drops her gaze, and she sighs. “But she thought I’d be better off if she left for a while. She thought I was too dependent on her, that because we saw each other all the time, she was stopping me from taking responsibility for myself...”
