Mercy m-1 Read online

  ‘Lauren Daley is dead!’ the elderly man exclaims, bringing my attention flying back to them.

  All three reach the threshold of the hall. Somehow I can still hear them clearly, as if they are standing just beside me. Are the acoustics that good in here?

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Mr Masson replies stoutly.

  ‘Well, if she’s not, she’s as good as,’ the older man mutters as the group turns the corner, leaving me sitting alone in a sea of battered chairs.

  What was it that Tiffany said? And it suddenly hits me in that dusty, echoing room. Lauren Daley was a soprano, a standout, a star. Like Tiffany thinks she is; like Carmen is supposed to be. That’s what I was trying to remember all along.

  I have to find Ryan Daley. If he hasn’t made the connection already, someone has to tell him.

  Maybe I’ve evolved, maybe I used to be some kind of impossible princess back when we first met, but Luc doesn’t know me well enough now if he thinks I’ll just sit around on my borrowed ass and do nothing. If you’ve got a surfeit of time and you need it to fly, you’ve gotta keep busy. Rule numero uno, my friends. Worked out the hard way. Take it from me.

  Ryan Daley had a reputation as a troublemaker and I like troublemakers. Always have. Provided they don’t hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt, I’m all for them.

  But Ryan Daley refused to be found all that day. I went from class to class on the fringes of the St Joseph’s crowd, keeping a lookout for six foot five of total knockout, vigilante, gun-toting loner, and all I got was more gossip, conjecture and fantasy.

  ‘He’s like the Phantom,’ sniggered one of the gangly, amateur tenors who’d attached himself to Tiffany like an adoring limpet. He was good looking in a wet, severe-side-part kind of way, if you didn’t focus on the obvious crater marks on his cheeks from recurrent acne.

  ‘If it weren’t for the Lauren thing, he’d have been canned ages ago.’

  ‘She was hot,’ added a towering bass called Tod, who had a footballer’s build now but would some day run to fat. ‘Pity.’ If he’d just come right out and said something tasteless like the world had enough ugly chicks in it without someone making off with one of the good ones, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was what he meant anyway. Like he’d ever had a chance.

  ‘There was always something weird about those two,’ sniped a delicate, pretty redhead I recognised from a photo on Lauren’s dresser. Both girls with their arms twined around each other’s necks in a Forever Friends photo frame. ‘It went way deeper than the twin thing.

  They shoulda looked at him a lot harder than they did.’

  ‘And you should know, Brenda,’ added the spotty boy. ‘I mean, she’s his ex and everything.’ He licked his lips as he addressed this last remark to us, the interlopers without the necessary backstory.

  I zeroed in on Brenda for a second and wondered what Ryan had seen in her. She was pretty, I supposed.

  In a high-maintenance, high-fashion, don’t-touch-me kind of way.

  Tiffany, Delia and Co exchanged satisfied glances as the home crowd bore us towards the school canteen for further updates on the Lauren Daley abduction and subsequent fallout. All day, I listened quietly in my guise as Carmen the stuff-up, Carmen the public disgrace and non-entity, and quietly grew angrier as the day progressed. Who says people don’t speak ill of the dead?

  Lauren deserved to be found just to shut these phoneys up.

  When the home-time bell rang and I prepared to walk back through town to the Daleys’ residence, I was no nearer to finding Ryan than I was his sister.

  As I passed faded front-window displays that universally declared Shop here for heavenly savings! — every pun intended — it occurred to me that maybe, just this once, I really was supposed to sit on my hands and do nothing. The problem was nearly two years old, the girl had to be beyond salvation, and better minds than mine had already poured everything they had into it. Surely, the trail had to be cold. Only no one had managed to convince Ryan Daley of that.

  I finally spot him crossing his street from the north end — coming from the opposite direction to me — towards his front gates, shouldering a heavy rucksack.

  He frowns as soon as our eyes meet and stops moving.

  I wave, which is a stupid, girly thing to do, but I’m no good at acting natural.

  We begin converging warily towards each other again. But then the Dobermans start up with their weird howling.

  By the time he and I meet up in front of the fence, they’re growling and shaking as if they’ve developed advanced rabies, slobbering and clawing at me through the pickets. Ryan’s timing couldn’t be more perfect.

  What would I do if he wasn’t here to let me in? Scream for help at the periphery? Just fly over to the front door?

  ‘Dogs don’t like me,’ I say lamely, by way of a greeting.

  ‘No kidding!’ Ryan says incredulously, looking at my five feet of nothing and wondering how it’s possible.

  ‘Just wait here.’ Like his dad did on that first day, he hauls them by force, one by one, behind the side fence and padlocks them in. The dogs don’t let up for a second.

  Ryan reshoulders his pack and heads for the front door without a word. Not exactly friendly. But he did call off the hounds from hell.

  So I yell out loudly, ‘Hey, I’d like to help you. Find her, I mean.’ And it’s enough to make him look at me, really focus for a second. He frowns again and I just want to take his face in my hands and smooth away the lines that shouldn’t be there. They make him look older, careworn.

  Boys his age should be making out and getting falling down drunk, right?

  ‘What makes you think you can help me?’ he says quietly. There is no anger in his voice. Just an old despair.

  I don’t blame him for saying it. I mean, I come up to somewhere just past his navel. As Carmen, I look kind of useless, even if I don’t feel it, not on the inside. And all I’m going on is a hunch. Is it worth me feeding his delusion?

  I don’t like doing it, but I move closer and steel myself before touching his bare wrist tentatively. I need to know if there’s anything in the rumours before I commit myself. Involvement is usually trouble and, boy, I should know.

  It begins as an ache in my left hand, building pressure behind my eyes. Then we flame into contact, but it isn’t as if I’m being immolated exactly, burnt alive, like when his parents laid their hands on me. Ryan’s pain, his grief, is different because he believes Lauren’s still alive somewhere. There’s hope there, and it tempers everything so that I don’t feel as if I’m standing at the heart of someone’s raging funeral pyre. It’s almost bearable. Like a dull ache; a pain present but subsumed.

  I’m not really certain what I’m looking for, or exactly how this works. I get more images of Lauren, and I’m not sure if they’re things I’ve seen for myself in her bedroom or that exist only inside her twin’s head.

  But I feel it, too. There’s something of her inside him that isn’t just random memories. It feels fresh, almost recent.

  It’s uncanny. Faint, like a faded graffiti writer’s tag that refuses to be washed away by the rain. A reaching out.

  A cry for help. A faint save me.

  The Latin comes to me unbidden: salva me.

  I see fragments of the things Ryan’s seen or done since Lauren’s disappearance; an avalanche of scenes and faces and pure emotion. A lot of fear. Like today, as he warily combed a deserted complex of buildings on his own, jumping at shadows, testing the ground with an ice pick, when he should have been in class. Layers of long-buried thoughts become clear — memories of fist fights, confrontations, the inside of a jail cell … the inside of a dark basement, with only the sound of someone’s shattered breathing to illuminate the absolute darkness.

  I don’t know how long we stand there, but Ryan finally breaks contact, shaking off my light touch angrily. The ghost world fades, replaced by the Daleys’ front yard, the faint tang of salt in the air, the hysterical cries of the dog
s. I am no longer deaf, dumb and blind to these things.

  ‘I don’t need your pity. Or your “help”.’ Ryan’s voice is rough. He tries to open the front door without looking at me again, prepared to shut me and an entire world of sceptics out if necessary. But what I say next draws his shocked gaze.

  ‘I know where you went today and I think you’re on the wrong track. You should be looking at the house next door. If you’re going to dig, dig there.’

  Chapter 7

  ‘How did you know?’ he demands in a low voice, pulling me through the front door and slamming it behind us roughly.

  He’s still gripping the sleeve of the denim jacket I’m wearing when his mother calls from the kitchen, ‘Ryan, is that you, honey? Carmen?’ Neither of us replies, each continuing to stare the other down.

  Footsteps come closer and he suddenly explodes into motion, pushing me ahead of him up the stairs. ‘Yeah!’ he shouts finally, from the upstairs landing, steering me away from Lauren’s closed bedroom door towards his, the room on the other side of Lauren’s bathroom.

  ‘I was worried … the dogs,’ Mrs Daley says below us.

  I get a faint glimpse of her standing in a doorway, eyes turned upward trying to see what Ryan’s up to, but he’s a blur of motion. Always running away. Everyone in this house nursing their secrets, their wounds, in isolation.

  Ryan yells, ‘Everything’s fine, Mum. I have a paper needs working on. Late with it.’ Then I’m standing in the dimness of his bedroom, heart thudding, close enough to him to smell earth and sweat on his skin.

  It’s almost monastic, the room. Just a bed, a chair, a desk, two blank wardrobe doors that tell me nothing about the person that lives here. There’s no … stuff.

  Sports trophies, magazines, a stereo maybe, posters, smelly sneakers; things I would have expected in a guy’s room. It’s not so much a bedroom as a place to sleep, a kind of blank motel room tricked out in Louisa Daley’s signature spotless monotone shades. Only, there’s a giant picture of Lauren tacked above his bed-head, an impromptu shrine to his missing sister. She’s laughing into the camera, head slightly cocked, looking straight at us.

  I move closer to the portrait, study the wide mouth, the dark, lively eyes that are so like Ryan’s. But she’s a fine-boned ash blonde where Ryan’s hair is so dark it could almost be black. Physically, they couldn’t look less like twins.

  Maybe that girl was right. Maybe it did go deeper than the twin thing and I should just extricate myself now, say it was all a horrible mistake, sorry for sticking my oar in, what was I thinking? But I don’t. I like a challenge. Recognise it for a truth.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ I say.

  He lets go of my sleeve, throws down his rucksack, deliberately ignores the comment.

  ‘How did you know?’ he demands again harshly.

  ‘About today. Don’t bullshit me, choirgirl.’

  ‘I saw you,’ I say. He doesn’t need to know that it wasn’t with my eyes. Trust doesn’t need to come into this. ‘You were digging around.’ His gaze slides sideways to his abandoned pack, back to me.

  ‘Yeah?’ he sneers. ‘You followed me then. Did she put you up to this?’ He rolls his eyes in the direction of the stairs outside. ‘You my new little watchdog now?

  Got a crush on me, have you? That was quick work.

  You’ll get over it; plenty have.’ The look on his face is ugly, self-mocking.

  I meet his glare steadily. ‘It doesn’t matter how I got there. But the church is too obvious. No one would be able to hide someone who looks like Lauren in the Paradise First Presbyterian Church and get away with it!

  Especially if she’s some sort of live trophy. Think about how many people go in and out of that place in a week, use the church, the hall, the rec rooms, the outbuildings you were sniffing around today.’ Ryan’s eyes are unfocused for a moment before snapping back to mine.

  ‘Someone would hear something, see something,’ I say. ‘That place, that room you’re looking for? I don’t think it’s inside the church grounds.’ Ryan is so sunk in thought that he doesn’t realise what I’m saying. I know he isn’t looking for a body, but don’t ask me how it works, this knowledge. He’s looking for some kind of storeroom where a girl is being kept alive. I heard her, too, I almost tell him. She was breathing. It was dark. It has something to do with the fact she can sing like an angel.

  ‘But I’m getting evangelical music,’ Ryan insists quietly, no longer looking at me. ‘Hymns, snatches of a sermon. It’s got to be the church. It’s the only one in town. Because, funnily enough,’ there is no mirth in his voice, ‘the people of Paradise aren’t huge churchgoers.

  Contrary to what everyone else says and thinks — even my own parents — Lauren is not dead and she’s close.

  Close enough that I can sometimes pick up her dreams and her thoughts — the stuff of nightmares, Carmen.’ It’s the first time he’s said my name, and for a minute I’m not sure who he’s talking to. Then I remember who I’m supposed to be, and I shake my head. ‘The manse would be the better bet,’ I say quietly.

  He looks at me blindly, his gaze still so inward-focused that he doesn’t ask how it is that I know for sure that the living quarters of the church’s minister are located outside the church grounds. But I saw the place he went to today, if only in illogical fragments. And there was no house there.

  ‘You know, the preacher’s private residence,’ I go on as his dark eyes finally settle once more on me. ‘It should be close to the church. That’s how it usually works. It’s likely to be less scrutinised, less frequented, but near enough to the church for you to hear the kinds of things you say you’ve heard.’ I don’t elaborate that I’ve heard them, too, through him, through his skin. Voices raised in vigorous Protestant song. An organ. Bible thumping. But the sound was too distant, too faint, not immediate. I perceived snatches of brilliant sunlight, too, falling slantwise down a flight of stairs, blinding when it came. One door. Two. More stairs. The feeling of one room flowing into another. A clock ticking. The sounds of cars leaving a nearby car park in convoy after service, horns tooting. Ordinary things. But then that feeling of terror. With light came misery. The light brought pain and shame and a feeling of wanting to die. I was sure — don’t ask me how — that Lauren found the darkness almost more bearable than the light.

  The sensation was fleeting, and to Ryan probably indistinguishable from his own nightmares. But in that strange way I have of seeing too much all at once, I saw it and I know that he is right. She is still alive and he still has some kind of faint, open connection to her. And he believes she’s there, at that church. So, it’s a starting point, of sorts. And it seems a good enough reason for me to be here, gives me something else to focus on other than myself. Self-pity wears you down, eventually. You know?

  And admit it, niggles that small voice inside, it gives you an excuse to spend more time with the guy.

  ‘Tonight,’ I say firmly, telling that inner voice to go to hell, ‘we go back after everyone’s asleep and we try the manse.’ Ryan looks like he’s about to protest but then his shoulders slump. ‘I can’t understand why you’d believe me, why you’d want to help, when we’re total strangers.’ Not to me, I think. There’s something about you so familiar I feel the pull of it in my soul.

  ‘She was a soprano like I am,’ I say. ‘She was a singer.

  She should be with us …’ There’s no need to say any more, for Ryan’s face is bleak and he closes his eyes, swallows convulsively.

  Maybe he understands more, remembers more, of his night terrors than I give him credit for.

  We promise to meet downstairs by the front door after his parents have gone to sleep.

  I head back down the hallway to Lauren’s room, slough off Carmen’s clothing like dead skin and stand under the jets of the shower, head bowed. No thought, no action for a while, just sensation.

  When I get out, there’s one thing I have to do for Carmen. This is her gig, after all. And I’m tra
shing it.

  I need her to know that I’m looking out for her. I also need to know what my limits are, whether I have any limits.

  Wrapped once again in a pristine white towel, I take a cracked CD case off the top of a pile of Carmen’s things and slip it into Lauren’s sound system.

  When the music starts up, though I never feel sick and I never feel cold, I cannot stop shivering.

  Chapter 8

  It is past midnight and I thought the Daleys would never go to bed. Finally, I hear them tossing and turning in their private hells, which is what sleep has become for them, I suppose.

  On the stairs, I freeze momentarily when Mrs Daley cries out, ‘Give her to me!’ in a voice unlike her own. As if she is locked in a contest of wills with the Devil and the Devil is winning.

  Ryan is already waiting near the front door, the loaded rucksack at his feet, lumpy and misshapen.

  ‘Thought you weren’t coming,’ he growls, hand on the latch.

  ‘Wait!’ I whisper. ‘The dogs.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, frowning. ‘It’ll wake them for sure. We’ll have to go through the Charltons’ place.’ We head down the hallway back towards the kitchen and Ryan stares hard at me for a moment as I cross into a patch of moonlight.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Nothing.’ He shakes his head and opens the back door quietly. ‘Up and over. Quickly.’ Ryan vaults the paling fence between the Daleys and the Charltons, who keep no dogs, catching me easily on the way down. Before anyone can see us go, we are already out onto the street and heading north.

  ‘Church is this way,’ says Ryan curtly. I can see he’s already regretting this. ‘Try and keep up.’ He doesn’t look back again as we cross block after block. Though the streetlights are dim, it’s not hard for me to keep him in sight. The streets are deserted, the night chilly enough to keep even the most hardy, indoors.

  There’s nothing and no one to check our progress and suddenly we’re standing in front of a waist-high wire fence that separates the First Presbyterian Church of Paradise from the street.