Page 47 of Rock Paper Scissors
She’s good at waiting. Practice can make a person good at anything, and at least she isn’t alone this time. The snow has stopped falling but it is still cold. Robin would rather get back to the cottage, but there is no point rushing something this important. She has been careful to step in the visitors’ earlier footprints, but trying to go unnoticed isn’t always easy. That’s the problem with following in someone else’s footsteps; if you leave a bigger mark than they did they tend to get upset. Robin learned the hard way that it’s always best to take her time, and late is better than never. Sometimes the early bird eats too many worms and dies.
Stained-glass windows are beautiful, but they let the cold in and the sound out, which is why she is listening outside the one in thestudy. She unlocked the secret door and left it open deliberately, so that the visitors could find it for themselves. Once the penny drops things shouldn’t take too much longer.
Listening tothemin the place wheresheused to live, and laugh, and dream, is such a strange and surreal experience. A bit like food poisoning. She feels sick and feverish, but already knows she’ll feel better again once she gets whatever was rotten out of her system. She wants the visitors out of the chapel, but not yet. There is still too much to say and do before this unpleasant chapter in her life can come to an end.
“Everything will be okay, you’ll see,” she says to her companion, but he doesn’t reply. He just stares back at her, looking as sad and cold as she is starting to feel.
Whenever her life has taken a wrong turn in the past, Robin has tried to pinpoint the exact moment she got lost. There always is one. If you are prepared to open your eyes, and look far enough back, you can normally see the instant you made a poor choice, said something you shouldn’t, or did something you lived to regret. One bad decision often leads to another and then, before you know it, there is no way back to where you were.
But everyone makes mistakes.
Sometimes, the most innocent-seeming people turn out to be guilty of horrific things. Sometimes, the people who do bad things, are just bad people. But there isalwaysa reason why a person behaves the way that they do. The woman at the local store was a good example of someone with a much darker past than you’d expect. Patty, the unfriendly shopkeeper, with her red face, beady eyes, bad breath, and a habit of shortchanging strangers, had a list of convictions longer than the Bible she kept behind the counter. From aggravated assault to driving when over the limit. Everyone in town knew, but they had to get their supplies from somewhere. Few people are genuinely capable of forgiveness, and nobody ever really forgets. Sometimes you just know a person is bad news as soon as you meet them, because they’re rotten, inside and out, and instinct tells you to stay away.
Lives carry on regardless of whether the people they belong to do. Robin wanted to move on, she tried so hard to put her own mistakes behind her, and not be consumed by regrets. But our secrets have a habit of finding us, and everything she tried to run away from caught up with her eventually. Covering her present with the dust of her past.
Her companion starts to fidget.
“Shh,” she whispers. “Just wait a little longer.”
He still looks unimpressed but does what she says, just like always.
AMELIA
Time freezes when Adam says he knows who the chapel belongs to.
I look around the secret study, thinking it might reveal the answer before he does, but all I can see are more dusty books, an old desk, and my husband. His handsome features have twisted into a disappointed frown and ugly scowl. He looks more angry than afraid. As if this is all somehowmyfault.
I think when you feel abandoned by your own parents, it’s impossible not to spend the rest of your life suspecting people of plotting to leave you. It’s something I always feel anxious about with everyone, even Adam, despite how long we’ve been together. Whenever I get close to someone—partners, friends, colleagues—there inevitably comes a point when I have to back away. I rebuild barriers, higher than before, to make myself feel safe. A constant fear of abandonment makes it impossible to trust anyone, even my husband.
I’d managed to calm my breathing when I found him in here, but this new anxiety is pressing on my chest.
“Writers are a peculiar breed of human being,” Adam says, still staring at the antique desk as though he is talking to it, not me. It’sso cold in this room that I can see his breath. “There are people I’ve worked with over the years—people Itrusted—who turned out to be nothing more than…”
The light from the stained-glass windows casts shattered fragments of color on the parquet floor, and he seems too distracted by them to finish his thought. I try to think of anyone he has fallen out with since I’ve known him, but there aren’t many. He’s had the same agent since the beginning. Everyone loves Adam, even the people who don’t.
“Do you remember the filmGremlins?” he asks. I’m glad he doesn’t wait for a reply because I don’t know what to say or see how this is relevant. “There were three rules: don’t get them wet, don’t expose them to bright lights, and don’t feed them after midnight. Otherwise bad shit happens. Authors are like Gremlins. They all start off like Gizmo—these individual and interesting creatures that are fun to have around—but if you break the rules: if they don’t like the adaptation of their book, or they think you changed too much of the original story, authors turn into bigger monsters than the ones they write about.”
“What are you talking about, Adam? Who owns this property?”
“Henry Winter.”
I freeze. I’ve always been afraid of Henry, and not just because of the dark and twisted books he writes. The thing that scared me the most the first time I saw him, were his eyes. They’re too blue, and too piercing, almost as though he could look inside a person, not just at them. See things he shouldn’t be able to see. Know things he shouldn’t know. My breathing starts to get a little out of control again.
“Are you all right? Where’s your inhaler?” Adam asks.
“I’m fine,” I insist, grabbing the back of the chair.
“TheDaily Mailwanted to do a feature on where Henry wrote his novels when the last film came out. He wouldn’t let them send a journalist or, heaven forbid, a photographer—he always hated those. I’d known him for years by then, but he wouldn’t even tellme where he lived when not in London—always obsessively worried about privacy for reasons I could never fully understand. I only ever saw one picture of him in his study—which the newspaper said was ‘supplied by the author.’ This is it. The room where he writes. I remember the picture of him sitting at this desk,” Adam says, touching the dark wooden table. It’s a peculiar old thing on wheels, with lots of little drawers. “It once belonged to Agatha Christie, and Henry paid a small fortune for it at some charity auction years ago. He became quite superstitious about it; once told me that he didn’t think he could write another novel anywhere else.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Look at the shelves in this room.”
I turn and do as he says, but the bookcases that line the back wall of the study look exactly the same as the ones in the lounge. Then I notice the spines of the books, and I see that they are all written by Henry Winter. There must be hundreds of them, including translations and special editions. It’s a giant vanity wall and exactly what I would expect from a man like him.
“So, what is this? A prank? A bad joke?” I ask. “Why would Henry send an email from a fake account, telling me that I’ve won a weekend at his secret Scottish hideaway? Why is everything covered in dust? Where is he? And where is Bob?”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Adam asks. “Your breathing sounds—”
