In the Night Wood

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“I understand, ma’am,” Mrs. Ramsden said. She nodded, slipped back into the kitchen.

Erin reached into her pocket for another Xanax, swallowed it with a sip of coffee, waited for it to unspool in her bloodstream. She stared at the blank page. After a time — she couldn’t say how long, the minutes had slipped away on the Xanax tide — she picked up her pencil and began to draw. She didn’t think, simply let her hand follow its own imperative. She might have been drawing in her sleep.

She supposed she’d gotten just what she wanted. She’d never felt so alone.

7 (#ulink_6ed15421-0f98-51a0-9876-eb0bc7527a70)

Plainclothes detectives came out from Ripon two stormy days later. Charles met them in the entrance hall, where they stood closing their umbrellas: McGavick, a burly man in his late fifties, his unruly hair sprinkled with gray, and Collier, close-shorn, younger by a decade and a half, compact and fit, his face prominently boned.

They talked in the library.

“I can remember coming out here as a boy,” McGavick said. “Mr. Hollow used to hold garden parties in the summer. Music, and lights in the trees at nightfall. And games: toad in the hole and football on the lawn. Before that wall went up and you had to come scrambling over the stile just to get near the place.” He shook his head. “The old man turned queer in the end, he did.” He looked up. “I trust you and your wife are finding the place to your liking.”