Deviant (13 page)

“She also left us some money,” Abigail went on. “Twenty-five thousand pounds each.”

“Wait.
What
?”

“You have twenty-five thousand pounds, care of our
mother.” Abigail pushed the letter and the bundle of bills toward her sister.

Becky’s eyes widened.

“And a letter. Do you want me to leave you alone while you read it?”

Her sister’s forehead creased. She chewed a nail.

“Becky, I—”

“No, stay,” she insisted. “I want you here when I read this. I wouldn’t have known any of this if you hadn’t shown up.”

With trembling hands, Becky opened the envelope. Abigail hadn’t reread her mother’s letter since the day she received it, but she could almost remember it word for word. She tried to look at something other than Becky—the window, the bathroom, the walls—but couldn’t help returning to her sister’s eyes as they flitted from line to line. For a few seconds, Becky was expressionless. Then her lashes moistened. She was probably reading the part where her mother said she remembered her beautiful face.

Abigail hung her head, embarrassed.

Finally Becky let out a loud sigh. She folded the letter carefully. She chewed at her thumbnail again and whispered, “She knew.”

“What do you mean? She knew Grahame was rich—” Abigail stopped mid-sentence, ashamed.
She
might be focused on the money, but why would Becky care?

Snapping out of it, Becky smiled. Her lips twitched. She struggled to slide the letter back in the envelope. She was anxious all of a sudden, and in a hurry. “No. Not that. I meant to say, I
wish
she knew. I wish she knew us. You and me.”

Abigail nodded. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Becky stood. A thousand thoughts were obviously whizzing around behind those frantic eyes. She grabbed the fuzzy photocopy. “Can I take this? Sorry, but I think I do need to be alone, after all.”

Fair enough
. Abigail nodded again.

As if in a trance, Becky took the money, the letter, and the photo and walked toward the bedroom door.

“When you’re ready, I’m here,” Abigail called softly after her. “Just knock.”

But Becky was already gone.

Abigail hadn’t slept well since Nieve had died. Survival depended on keeping one eye open in the beds she’d been forced to use since. Anyone could come in. Anything could happen. Not that she felt unsafe here. (No intruder, no matter how clever, could possibly bypass Grahame Johnstone’s elaborate security system, with its buttons and codes at every point of entry.) But still she felt unsettled. Exhausted but not sleepy. To pass the hours as before, she tried to read.

The three books she’d brought from Glasgow annoyed her.
The Principles of Biochemistry:
too serious.
The Silence of the Lambs:
too dark.
Funny Physics:
not funny in the least. Anyway, she didn’t feel like laughing. She could smell Glasgow in the pages, something old, oozing, and rotten. It was a smell she wanted to forget. She tossed the books under the bed beside the discarded Scottish prints and tiptoed out into the hall.

Becky’s door was closed. The crack beneath was pitch black. No surprise. She’d have to wait until tomorrow to talk about the
letter. Abigail made her way down the stairs into the living room. She switched on the soft library lights and crept inside, closing the door behind her. It was an old-fashioned place, packed with leather-bound books that did not smell of Glasgow. She touched the spines of some limited edition classics: Mark Twain, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Dickens … She checked her fingertips with a secret smile. No dust.

The old vinyl seventy-eights in the corner were arranged neatly, their aged paper covers beautifully preserved. At first she’d been put off, but this was an okay hobby for a dad to have. Not quite cool, but nerdy and nice. She plucked one from the shelf and gazed at it. “Tonight I Am in Heaven.” She put it back in and flicked through some others—then stopped. Her fingers landed on a song that Nieve used to play all the time: “Stormy Weather.”

Before Abigail was even conscious of what she was doing, she took the record from the sleeve and set it on the gramophone. It had to be wound up, this machine, a proper antique. She rotated the gorgeous carved handle and placed the needle on the vinyl, cringing at the soft burst of noise. Was this even music? It sounded even worse than the stoned guitarists that used to sit around the commune campfire—fast one second and slow the next, never quite in tune, scratchy and awful. The version Nieve had played on her portable CD player wasn’t as bad as this. Abigail remembered loving the song at the time, even the words:

Abigail imagined Nieve sitting at the small bench in the van, swaying as she listened. She flipped the record over. There was an inscription on the back of the paper sleeve.

Abigail squinted at the words. S could stand for Sophie. Was this a present from her mother to her father? She tried to picture it.

Grahame and Sophie, sitting on a couch. No.

Grahame and Sophie, dancing on a porch. No.

On the other hand, “S” had missed Grahame, if he was “Gray.” They must have been apart a lot.
That
made sense. And if this was “their song,” it was a bloody depressing one. That made sense, too. Their relationship had been doomed from the beginning.

Abigail hurried back to her bedroom and shut the door.

S
HE WOKE TO A
man yelling. It was her dad, she realized. She threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs to see what the commotion was about. Becky was already a few steps ahead of her.

“What’s wrong?” Abigail asked.

Becky shrugged.

“Come here now!” The voice boomed from the library. “Now!”

Abigail felt queasy as she walked in behind her sister. Her dad was standing beside the gramophone, “Stormy Weather” in hand.

“Who touched this?” he demanded. He was impeccably dressed in a dark suit, and looked nearly the same as he had last night. Yet his face was almost unrecognizable—his cheeks flushed, his eyes blazing, his jaw set.

She wanted to own up. But the words didn’t come out.

“Do you know how valuable this is?” he snapped at Becky.

Abigail knew the accusation was aimed at both of them. Becky shot a quick glance at her. She could feel the blood draining from her face. She imagined that her skin now looked like the yellowed record sleeve.

“Well, do you? Tell me. Who’s been handling my collection? Becky? Or Abigail? I understand you’re new here, and perhaps where you grew up it’s acceptable to fiddle with other people’s precious things?”

Abigail swallowed, consumed with dread. It wouldn’t be customs that would send her home. It would be her dad’s rage.

Melanie appeared in an apron. “Honey, it’s not damaged, is it?” she asked Grahame calmly. “There’s nothing to be mad about, is there?”

Becky cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. A friend at the party last night wanted to hear what it sounded like.”

Grahame’s eyes bored into Becky. “A friend? You know no one touches these but me. No one! Especially this one.” With hands shaking, he put the record back on its shelf; Abigail saw now that she’d shoved it back in the wrong spot. “No allowance for a month,” he said to Becky, storming past them all.

Moments later, the door to his den slammed shut.

Melanie shook her head with an unreadable expression. Then she flashed an apologetic smile at Abigail. “Come and eat, girls. Your brunch will go cold.”

I
T WAS AN EFFORT
to force down the sickly eggs and hollandaise sauce. Abigail didn’t just feel ill; she felt
babyish
. The little adopted baby who might ruin everything with her lies and misbehavior. After Melanie finally left, Abigail followed her sister’s lead clearing the table.

“Thanks, for before,” she muttered, her face hot. “I’ll cover the allowance.”

Becky shook her head. “Don’t mention it. And no need for that.”

Was their father prone to wild outbursts about his record collection? That would be handy information to have. But Becky seemed particularly distant. Maybe she was pissed off.
Or maybe she was stoned again. The two weren’t mutually exclusive, Abigail supposed. Eventually, she gathered the courage to break the heavy silence: “What did you make of that letter then?”

Becky paused over the sink before answering. “I was wondering if we could just forget about it, for today. I want us to have some fun. Is that okay?”

It wasn’t really okay, but Abigail nodded anyway. Fun wasn’t her greatest skill at the most relaxed of times. Right now she was tenser than she’d ever been since Nieve had died. Her brain ticked over with information, trying to work out who was who, who liked whom, who hated whom, whom should she trust the least. But after Becky’s rescue operation with the seventy-eight record, she was starting to think she might trust her new sister. As for everyone else, she had no idea.

Fun, though: what was that again?

“C’mon,” Becky said, “let’s go for a swim.”

“I
HAVE A CONFESSION,”
Abigail said, hovering at the edge of the pool.

“You’re not really my sister?” Becky said, already submerged to her neck. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Sorry, bad joke.”

“I’m not a very good swimmer.”

“Don’t worry. The pool is shallower than it looks. Jump in,” Becky urged. “The water feels great.”

If this was a dare, fine. Abigail flung herself into the air, hit the water and sank down, down, down. Panic flashed through
her. Her feet finally touched the bottom and she sprung upward, breaking the surface with a sputter.

“You liar!” she gasped. All at once her arms were flailing about.

Becky was at her side in an instant, hauling her to pool’s edge. “Shit, sorry, I thought you were joking. You really can’t swim?”

“I really can’t!” Abigail coughed water out and lifted herself out of the pool.

Becky stifled a guilty laugh. “I’m so sorry. How can you not swim?”

“How can you not be an idjit?” Abigail reached down and pinched her sister on her flawless bicep, quite hard.

“Ow! God, that’ll bruise.” Becky rubbed the red spot. But she was smiling again. Her glistening eyes met Abigail’s. “Is this our first fight of the day?”

Abigail snorted. “If it is, you’re getting off easy.”

Eventually her breathing evened. Becky shoved a lilo across the water toward her, and she flopped into it, basking in the hard-hitting Californian sun. Becky’s navel ring glittered: a flash of what looked like two very tiny silver birds, one on top of the other. Abigail wondered about her own belly. She was certain her skin would burn a lobster red, but she’d worry about that later.

“For the record, I wasn’t trying to kill you or anything,” Becky said slyly. “Not yet.”

“I’m glad. If you had, you would’ve …” Abigail stopped mid-sentence. She was talking without thinking. She was about to reference Sophie.
You would’ve lost your sister, too
.

But Becky saw where she was going, anyway. “What was it like, seeing her dead?” she asked, climbing onto her own lilo and drifting beside her.

Abigail chewed her lip. “Well I can’t compare it to seeing her alive. The worst thing is I didn’t feel very much at all.”

“Were you angry at her?”

“Yeah. I mean, my life was great till I was nine but, yeah, yeah, I was. Am.”

“Me, too,” Becky said with a sigh. “But I bet she had her reasons.”

Abigail sat up. “What reasons could there be to abandon us and split us up? Did she ever try to look for you? Or me? I think she was just crazy, like your dad
—our
dad—said.”