Semi-Sweet (27 page)

“I’ve invited my mother for lunch on Sunday,” Leah said. “I couldn’t leave her on her own at Easter.”

“Fine,” Patrick answered, thinking about the way his PA’s fingers trailed across the skin of her throat as she spoke on the
phone. Back and forth, back and forth, across that smooth, polished-looking skin.

“Will you pick up some antacid tablets on your way home?” Leah asked him. “The original ones, not flavored.”

“No problem.”

He bet she wore stockings, the ones with lacy tops that Leah used to wear. An inch or so of tanned, bare skin above them,
before the other lace began.

“What time will you be home?” Leah asked.

“Around six, I’d say. Maybe a bit later.”

He wondered if she’d had a job done on her breasts. He wondered if you’d be able to tell by touching them. She certainly took
every opportunity to show them off. Not that he was complaining. He’d always been a breast man. It had been the first thing
he’d noticed about Hannah—and the only positive effect Leah’s pregnancy was having on her body was that her breasts were fuller
and more sensitive to his touch.

“I’m doing lasagna,” Leah said.

“Lovely.”

After he’d hung up, Patrick sat for a few minutes behind his walnut desk. Then he pressed the intercom and said, “Can you
come in?”

There was always a letter that needed to be written, if you thought about it for long enough.

It took Alice less than fifteen minutes to drive from Glass Slipper to Springwood. She pulled in to the curb on the first
road of the estate—Springwood Park—and opened the Mass card she’d bought and wrote
“Jason O’Brien”
on the empty line and
“Alice”
in the space for her name. She slipped the card back into its envelope before getting out of the car.

Springwood was a mix of terraced and semidetached houses with low iron railings separating their narrow front lawns. Some
residents had replaced the grass with cement or paving to create a driveway, while others had bordered the lawn with flower
beds. A few were terribly neglected—rented, probably—but most were fairly well cared for.

“I’m looking for the O’Briens,” she told a woman with long blond hair who turned out of a gate and came toward her, but the
woman shook her head.

“They’re in Springwood Gardens,” Alice said. “David O’Brien.”

But the woman said, “Sorry,” in a foreign accent and walked on.

“The O’Briens,” she said to a man walking a small black-and-white dog. “Springwood Gardens.” The dog sniffed at her shoes,
his tail wagging.

“Dave and Claire, the ones who lost their little boy?”

Alice nodded, heart thudding. “I have a Mass card,” she said, but he’d already turned away to gesture up the road.

“Second next left is Springwood Gardens,” he told her. “They’re on the right, about halfway down.”

“You wouldn’t know the number?”

He shook his head. “Anyone will tell you,” he said. “Ask anyone up there.”

But when she took the second left turn, there was no one to ask, except two small boys around seven or eight, sitting on the
edge of the path eating crisps, a grubby white football trapped between the feet of one.

“Do you know where the O’Briens live?” Alice asked, and they stared at her, still crunching. She didn’t want to say,
Where the little boy was killed.
“Dave and Claire O’Brien?”

One of the boys took his hand out of his crisps packet and pointed. “That house,” he said, “with the flowers,” and Alice followed
his finger and saw the red bunch of wilting roses tied to the gatepost with a faded white ribbon.

“Thank you,” she said, crossing the road, feeling their eyes on her as she approached the gate. There was a plastic-covered note attached to the bouquet. Alice bent and read
“To Jason, all our love forever, from the McCarthys”
in a child’s careful script.

She straightened and regarded the house. It looked much like its neighbors, the middle one in a terrace of five. The lawn
was neatly mowed, the flower bed studded with hard-pruned rosebushes. The windows were bare except for an upstairs one whose
curtains were drawn. The front door was dark green with a brass 37 on it.

She walked up the cement path, pulling the Mass card from her pocket. She pushed it quickly through the letter slot and walked
away, out the gate and back onto the path, past the two boys who were still eating crisps.

When she returned to the shop, Geraldine told her she looked pale. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You had a long wait.”

“I did.”

“Did he give you a prescription? Did you get sleeping pills?”

“Yes…I’ll make us a cuppa.”

Alice filled the kettle, seeing the wilted roses tied to the gate, the carefully pruned rosebushes in the garden, the green
door with 37 in brass screwed onto it. She’d felt resistance as she’d pushed the card through, a draft excluder on the other
side. She hadn’t heard the card falling onto the floor.

She thought about the mother picking it up, taking out the card, and reading
“Alice.”
Showing it to the father, who’d shake his head when she asked if he knew anyone by that name.

The previous evening Alice had found two empty whiskey bottles pushed to the bottom of the bin. She’d pulled them out and
brought them to the recycling station.

She’d lied to Geraldine about going to the doctor. It was the first time she’d lied to Geraldine.

Adam typed
“clarinet”
and pressed “search.” After a few seconds, the screen changed, and he read
“2,234 results.”
He scrolled slowly through clarinet mouthpieces and sheet music for clarinets and clarinet cases and the odd actual clarinet.
He went back to the home page and typed
“clarinet instrument”
and searched again, and this time eleven results showed up.

He studied an ebony clarinet that was being sold by George4234. The price quoted was forty pounds, which was considerably lower than the ones he’d seen scrawled on the tags attached to
clarinets in Clongarvin’s one and only musical-instrument store, which also sold sound systems, TVs, and DVDs. George4234
was in the United Kingdom, which seemed close enough. There was a bid of forty-two pounds on the clarinet. Adam typed in a
bid of forty-four and pressed “enter.”

NOT AN EBAY MEMBER YET?
the screen asked.
REGISTER HERE.
Adam chose a user ID and a password and filled in all the boxes with the information required for him to get his hands on
a clarinet for forty-four pounds.

However shy she was, a music teacher could hardly refuse a would-be eager pupil. If she said she was fully booked, Adam would
ask to be put on a waiting list. He’d tell her that he’d just bought a clarinet and he was desperate to play it and that she’d
been recommended to him. It wasn’t a complete lie—John Wyatt had called her a beautifully sensitive player, which was surely
a recommendation. He’d also said she was as timid as a deer, which Adam liked.

He’d be patient. He’d be gentle and nonthreatening, and he’d gain her trust, however long it took.

And who knew? He might even learn to play the clarinet.

In number 37 Springwood Gardens, a woman sits on a single bed, on top of a Spider-Man duvet. The curtains in the room are
drawn, although it’s still early afternoon. Enough light filters through the unlined fabric—zoo animals on a yellow background—to
pick out the small white wardrobe and matching chest of drawers, the red wooden toy chest, the shelf full of Mr. Men and Dr.
Seuss and Thomas the Tank Engine books. The row of small footwear—his white runners, his red wellies, his blue slippers—underneath.

The woman sees none of these. She sees him soaring on a swing, shouting
Higher! Higher!
and laughing delightedly as she pushes him. She sees him squatting on a beach, filling a bucket with sand as the tip of his
tongue pokes from his mouth, his blue trunks slipping down in the back to show an inch of his bottom.

She sees his cheeks puff as he blows out four candles on a blue-and-white cake, a dribble of saliva plopping onto the icing.

She feels his hand slipping out of hers as he runs onto the road because he’s just seen his friend Paul on the other side.
She feels the terror, she sees the car, she hears the scream bursting out of her as he flies into the air.

Higher! Higher!

He is all she sees now.

Adam handed her a boxed chocolate egg. “Happy Easter.”

“Oh, yummy—thanks very much.” Hannah produced a similar box. “And for you, the usual.”

“Ta.”

They made coffee and settled at the kitchen table. “So,” she said, peeling the gold paper from her egg, “when are you off?”

Adam and Nora were traveling the fifty miles to their parents’ house for Easter Sunday lunch.

“I’m collecting Nora in an hour.” He broke a curved slab from his egg. “I suppose I should be working up an appetite.”

“Me, too.” Hannah dipped a shard into her coffee mug. “We’ll just have half now.”

“Listen,” he said then, his mouth full of chocolate, “guess what I did the other day.”

“What?”

He licked the tips of his fingers one by one. “I bought a clarinet.”

Hannah turned to him, the melting chocolate halfway to her mouth. “What?”

“I said—”

“A real clarinet that you play?”

He grinned. “Yes, a real clarinet. I bought it on eBay. It should be arriving in the next few days.”

Hannah stared. “I don’t believe it. You were serious the other night, about wanting to play? But you’re about as musical as
an elephant.”

“Thank you.” He crunched chocolate loudly. “I’ll have you know I intend to take lessons.”

Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Not from the woman in the bar?”

“Well,” he said, dipping another shard into his coffee, preoccupied all at once with the task at hand, “since she’s the only
one I know who teaches, I thought I may as well ask her.” Raising and lowering the softening piece of chocolate into the steaming
coffee, head bent. “Of course, there’s no guarantee that she’ll agree.”

Hannah put down her mug. “Look at me,” she demanded.

Adam turned an innocent face toward her. “What?”