If I had to describe the feeling when I smelt the smoke curling through the window, I would have said it was nothing more than exhaustion.
At that point, it felt as though the world had fully turned against me, shifted its gaze on to ruining my life and taking any shred of hope that I might have had left and wringing it dry. Up until then, hope still pulsed in my veins; maybe, just maybe, I could make something of this. Maybe there was a chance that she was still alive, unharmed, ready to run back into my arms and forget that all of this happened in the first place. If I could just find her...
I stayed up late at nights, no Mona to keep me on a decent pattern now that she had retreated back to her apartment. I couldn’t say I blamed her; I didn’t want to be around me. I just had no choice. If I could have torn my brain from my head and found some way to convince myself that none of this was really happening, I would have done it. In fact, when the nights seemed to tighten like vines around my throat, choking me, I wondered if there was a way out. I would eye the knives in the drawer, pull them out and let the blue moonlight bounce off the blades. I knew I couldn’t do it—not while Ella might still be out there, at least—but I took some comfort in the thought.
I hadn’t heard from Mona since she’d left, and frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I had pushed her firmly away from me, convincing both her and myself that the only way to get Ella back was to obsess to a dangerous degree. The cops tried to assure me they were doing all they could, but that couldn’t be true, otherwise they’d have answers for me by now. I saw her face behind my lids when I closed my eyes, and ached to hold her again. I cried a lot, not even knowing that I was doing it—as though my body had started mourning before my brain had. I did my best to pay it no attention, and focused instead on wracking my brains for what to do next.
I was asleep on the coach when the scent came wafting through my door—I recognized it at once, and snapped upright in an instant. My eyes were still bleary with sleep, but my brain was wide-awake, in full panic mode, blood whooshing loudly around my head. My first thought was of Ella, and getting her out of that burning building before anything happened to her—but once that instinct dissipated painfully, I knew I had to investigate. I leapt to my feet and ran over to the cooker. It wasn’t as though I’d used it much in the last week, but still—and nothing; it was off. I couldn’t find the source of the smoke anywhere, until I heard a loud smash from next door.
I hurried outside, and found myself confronted with it. The smoke was choking now, getting in my eyes, filling my lungs, obscuring my vision—but I could still see it through the thick black fog. Mary and Paul’s house. Burning.
I sprinted towards the building without a second thought, heart pounding—where they still in there? I had no idea what time it was, but if they were asleep in their beds—
“Jazz,” I heard a tired voice come from beside me, and turned to find myself faced with Mary. She was wrapped in a threadbare robe, her face drawn. “We’re fine.”
“What happened?” I put my hand on her shoulder, half-comforting and half-panicked—Ian had been in there, what if Ella had somehow got caught up in all of this?
“We don’t know,” she replied. Her voice was soft, as though she couldn’t quite register what had happened as reality. And who could blame her? Paul stood to the side of Mary, a few paces behind her, dumbfounded. I wondered how long they’d both been out here—I could see some curtains twitching, and a few other neighbors began to emerge from their houses. Before long, the place was swarming with them, offering Mary and Paul tea and comfort and food and a place to stay. It would have been a heartwarming display of community if it hadn’t been brought on by something as hideous as this.
I stood in front of the burning building for longer than I could recall, staring into the flames. Eventually, they became almost soothing in their repetition—it wasn’t until the firemen turned up and roughly jerked me away from the house that I snapped out of my reverie. I watched as they doused it with water, as the flames fizzled into nothing—and revealed the hollowed-out shell of the house beneath. There was nothing left but the skeleton of the place, the furniture and carpets and everything else eaten up by the fire. I had never seen anything like it before in my life, and I couldn’t drag my eyes away from it. How did something like this just…happen?
It didn’t.
The words flickered through my brain before I had a chance to get a hold of them, but I knew at once that they were true. I didn’t want to have to consider the possibility, but there was no way something like this happened out of chance. Someone did this—torched this house, let it hollow out from the inside. Maybe Paul and Mary were pulling some kind of insurance scam or something like that? But no—the look of blank shock on both of their faces couldn’t have been faked, no matter how fantastic at acting the both of them were.
They might not have been involved with this, but someone was. Shit like this didn’t just happen in the suburbs. Everyone was too careful. Too considerate. No, this felt like the work of someone who was trying to cover something up. Ian? Addison? Whoever else was involved with their hideous plan?
I strode back towards my house, the smell of smoke thick on my clothes as I stepped back inside. I let out a sigh—was this my fault, somehow? I had climbed into the attic and found that scrap of paper, maybe that had been enough to set whoever it was off into doing something like this. But…why now? Why not when we had first closed in on him back more than a month ago?
A knock at the door took me by surprise; I jumped, and turned to answer it. Probably one of the neighbors asking for help with the Paul and Mary situation. I pulled back the door, and found myself faced, instead, with Mona.
“Uh, hi,” she murmured. It had been four days since I’d last seen her, and I had to fight the urge to reach out and draw her against me, to feel her small form against my own. But I knew she’d left for a reason, and I didn’t want to push my luck.
“Come in.” I stepped aside, making way for her, and she brushed by me—close enough that the smell of her filled my nose. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to get my head together. She wasn’t here for that. She probably heard about the fire somehow and came down to make sure that everything was okay.
“What’s going on out there?” She gestured to Paul and Mary’s house, to the thick clouds of smoke and steam that had settled over our shared lawn. I furrowed my brow.
“I thought you knew?”
“Nope.” She shook her head. “I came to see you, and when I got here…”
She trailed off and looked towards the house, and I could tell that she was thinking about Ella, wondering, somehow, if this was connected to her. But we couldn’t linger on shit like that when we had no reason to believe it.
“I don’t think they know yet.” I shrugged. “I went round there when I smelled the smoke, and the two of them were already outside. And then the firemen turned up, and rest of the neighbors came out to help, so I got out of the way.”
“Jesus, that’s so horrible.” She shook her head and reached for the counter, as though steadying herself. She placed a hand briefly on her stomach, an odd gesture—but I didn’t have any time to linger on it as the door went again.
“I’ll get it,” I muttered, forgetting in that instant that Mona didn’t live here anymore. She followed me with her eyes as I paced across the floor in front of her, and I knew something was going unsaid between us—I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
When I opened the door, I found myself faced with two firemen, flanking Mary. She had tears streaming down her face; I supposed that what had just happened was beginning to sink in for her. I gave her a sympathetic nod, and reached out to pat her arm.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked earnestly. I might not always have got on great with Paul, but Mary was a sweet woman and she didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.
“Jazz, it’s…” She trailed off and I felt my heart leap into my throat. What the fuck was this? I stepped aside, and gestured for them to come in. The firemen exchanged a look, but did as they were told—and it was only then that I noticed what they were holding between them.
A mangled sheet of plastic—that’s what it looked like at first glance. The fire had mutilated it, whatever it was, and I squinted at it, trying to figure out what they were doing with it in my house. Mona squeezed Mary’s shoulder as she approached, but she seemed distracted and shrugged her off without thinking.
“They found this, in the attic.” Mary’s voice cracked, and that’s when it sunk in. I grasped for the counter to hold myself up as the firemen laid the object out in front of me.
Now that I could get a better look at it, in the light, I could see what it was, or what it used to be. A few brand logos, a couple of discernible cartoon faces—children’s toys. And not just any child. Ella’s.
My head began to spin as it registered to me what this really meant. No. It couldn’t be. Of course it couldn’t be, because then…then she’d have been up there too. And I saw that house—it was hollowed out, completely and utterly. Nothing was making it out of there alive.
I gasped for air, and a sob bubbled up out of my chest and seemed to stick in my throat like a shard of bone. Mona led Mary and the firemen back to the door, thanked them, and sent them on their way; I could hardly register what she was doing as my eyes blurred and the room swam in front of me.
“Jazz,” Mona murmured, her hand on my back. “Jazz, look at me.”
I didn’t move, knowing that if I made eye contact with her, then all of this would suddenly be real. If I met her sympathetic gaze, I would have to acknowledge that this was really happening. I stared at the ground, and, in a snap decision, pulled myself upright and made for the garage.
“Jazz!” Mona called after me. “Jazz, come back!”
She hurried after me but I was pretending she wasn’t there, pretending none of this was happening. Ella. Ella had been there. There was no body yet, but did there really need to be one when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was up there when it happened?
The knowledge she had been so close was the worst part. That I could have practically reached out and touched her—maybe she even watched me, distraught, going in and out of the house. How did they get her toys? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to—maybe they’d replaced them for her, or they’d snuck in and grabbed them when I wasn’t paying attention. Both options made me want to throw up. A wave of nausea passed over me, and I did my best to ignore it as I opened the door to the garage and reached for my bike.
“Jazz, where are you going?” Mona called from behind me. I ignored her, but she wasn’t going to let me get away that easily. She pushed herself in between me and the bike and glared into my eyes.
“Jazz.”
Her voice was firm and centering, and for a moment all of it hit me. A tidal wave was too soft a description for the feelings that cascaded down over me in that second—grief, anger, fear, a tiny flicker of hope that somehow I was wrong and none of this was really happening. I wanted to collapse into her arms and try to forget all of this, but I knew that wasn’t how it worked. I needed to get away from her, get away from all of this—from the reminders of my daughter, from anyone who knew her. I’d start again somewhere else, break up the Marauders and be done with the whole thing. I had tunnel vision, my only thought on getting away from here, as though putting some space between myself and this house would be enough for me to forget her.
“I’m going,” I informed her firmly. I reached around her and climbed on to the bike. “I need to get away.”
“Jazz, we don’t even know what happened to her,” Mona pointed out desperately. “Please. Come on. Please.”
Her voice was imploring but I didn’t want to hear it; I was done, out, over, ready to move on. I kicked the bike a couple of times, trying to get it started up, but it wasn’t co-operating. I was being too rough, my brain too frazzled to do much else.
“Jazz, I need to tell you something.” She grabbed my arm, but I refused to look up. Anything that could come out of her mouth—it wasn’t enough to change my mind. She must have known that. She scanned my face for a reaction, any reaction, and I gave her none. The bike finally roared into action beneath me, and Mona stepped away at once. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but I could barely see them.
“Listen to me!” she yelled over the sound of the engine, but I was already gone. She was backed against the wall of the garage, hand on her stomach once again, as I glanced over at her—and burned her face onto my mind one last time. I wasn’t coming back. Not for her, not for anyone. I pulled out of the garage and on to the street, and past the smoldering remains of the house that had once contained my daughter.