Mercy

‘She’s incredible!’ someone shouts behind me.

I see the music teachers of four schools single out Tiffany approvingly with their eyes as she preens a little and amps up the volume even more.

Poor Carmen. If this is some kind of contest, we are losing it together. I don’t remember how to sing, or even if I can. Silently, I turn the pages with trembling fingers and wonder what else I’ve forgotten about myself.

Mr Masson continues doggedly beating time, while the local girls telegraph clearly that we’re all dead meat and the boys place lively bets among themselves about which of us will get laid the fastest. I shrink down further in my chair and keep turning the pages of my score a microsecond after Tiffany does.

The music changes as I listen intently. I hear bells, flutes, horns, falls of plucked strings. There is a quiet sense of urgency, of building.

‘What’s wrong?’ mouths one of our teachers on the sidelines as Tiffany shoots me a surprised look before glancing sharply down at her own music then back at me.

A shaky tenor seated somewhere in the chilly hall launches into a quavery solo and there is a smattering of laughter, like a reluctant studio audience being warmed up by the second-rate comedy guy. Moments later, Tiffany lifts her bell-like voice in counterpoint and I marvel afresh. When she sings, she sounds the opposite of the way she usually comes across, and that has to be a good thing.

On opposite sides of our row, two St Joseph’s girls frown at me fiercely before hurriedly joining their voices to Tiffany’s. Two more male voices wobble gamely into the fray. Together, they sing:

Imple superna gratia

quae tu creasti pectora.

Fill with grace from on high

the hearts which Thou didst create.

The words fill me with an abrupt sadness I cannot name. It is several pages before I realise that the grey-haired, hatchet-faced teacher from the bus, who is pacing the sidelines and waggling her fists furiously, is trying to catch my eye. People all over the room have begun to notice her jerky, spider-like movements and they crane their necks to look. Chatter begins to build below the surface of the incredible music.

‘Carmen!’ the woman roars suddenly over the backing tape, unable to hold back her fury any longer.

I realise with horror that I have missed some kind of cue, and that it can’t have been the first.

I shake my head at the woman—Miss Fellows, I think her name is—and raise my hands in confusion. She responds like a cartoon character, jumping up and down on the spot and tearing at her short, grey hair so that it stands on end like the quills of some deadly animal.

Mr Masson silences the pre-recorded orchestra. ‘Is there a problem?’ he says with raised eyebrows.

The teachers from the other schools—a grimfaced, white-haired elderly man in a dusty black suit and a lean, handsome young man who doesn’t look old enough to be teaching yet—look my way interestedly. All the St Joseph’s girls are staring at me, too, and talking out of the sides of their mouths. It’s nothing new for Carmen, I suppose. Others in the room point and whisper. There she is, there’s the problem.

I am once more the still point at the centre of a spinning world and Carmen’s face grows hot with sudden blood. I can’t help that. I hate making mistakes.

‘No, no problem,’ Miss Fellows barks. ‘Tiffany, you take Carmen’s part. Rachel, step in for Tiffany. Carmen! Sit this one out for now. Take it from the top of Figure 7.’

Tiffany shoots me a look of immense satisfaction and takes flight after Mr Masson reanimates the orchestra. Frantically reading left to right from Figure 7, I realise belatedly that Tiffany must be one of the soloists.

Shit, I think suddenly. I suppose Carmen must be, too.

The freakin’ lead soloist. When she’s at home.

CHAPTER 6

I sit there mutely for what feels like forever before the bell rings for first period and students stampede gratefully for the doors. The other St Joseph’s girls are borne away on a wave of male admirers, which has to be something new for most of them. Miss Fellows and the other St Joseph’s teacher, Miss Dustin, steam over in righteous convoy and prevent me from leaving, from even rising out of my chair.

‘Not only did you embarrass yourself,’ spits Miss Fellows without preamble, ‘but you completely ruined it for everyone else! Delia looks to you for cues and what do you do?’

If Miss Fellows suddenly went up in a puffball of sulphurous smoke I’d hardly be surprised, but I’m only listening to her rant with half an ear. Something that Tiffany said before is bothering me and I’m chasing it down the unreliable pathways of Carmen’s brain. Hey, I have to work with what I’ve got.

Miss Dustin puts a steadying hand on Miss Fellows’ arm and cuts her off midstream. I’m seeing classic Good Cop, Bad Cop 101 being played out right here. No prizes for working out who’s who.

‘Is anything … the matter, Carmen?’ Miss Dustin says gravely from under her ridiculous bob. ‘You’ve been quite … out of sorts lately. I can help.’

I have to stifle a burst of laughter that emerges as a fit of unconvincing coughing. From Carmen’s point of view, there’s not a lot that’s going right at the moment, but it would be too hard to explain to Laurel and Hardy here. I shrug, when I probably should be cowering, which just sets Miss Fellows off again.

‘You’ve been acting like a flake since we got here, Zappacosta. Tomorrow’s your last chance or Tiffany takes over, and you know where we’re taking this piece, so consider it fair warning! Stuff this up and you’ll never sing a solo with this choir again. It will ruin your chances for performing arts college, and I don’t care how “talented” people think you are …’

She lets that one drift, but the implication is clear enough.

For a moment, I feel a twinge of discomfort, like a pulled muscle. Carmen?

‘Tiffany was always my first choice,’ Miss Fellows says sourly to her colleague knowing full well I am still listening.

‘Her voice doesn’t have the brightness and tone of Carmen’s, Fiona, and you know it,’ Miss Dustin murmurs in reply. ‘Carmen’s not as mature a performer, but you have to admit she’s really outstanding.’

Miss Fellows snorts. ‘If she ever gets going! I shouldn’t have let you talk me into it, Ellen. She didn’t even try to sing. It’s like she’s had a personality bypass since we got here, and she didn’t have that much to begin with …’

There’s that internal twitch again. Don’t worry, Carmen, I think I hate her, too.

The music directors of the other schools file out behind Miss Dustin and Miss Fellows, talking quietly among themselves.

‘Two weeks!’ growls the old man. He shoots me an accusing look over his shoulder, as if the general lack of ability of the combined student bodies of Paradise, Port Marie and Little Falls is somehow my personal fault.

‘Less,’ replies Mr Masson glumly. He doesn’t look at me. I am just one more malfunction in a morning of malfunctions. ‘It’s right on track to be a fiasco this time.’

‘Lauren Daley would have been able to sing that part,’ murmurs the good-looking, young male teacher, who seems to have forgotten that I’m there.

Mr Masson nods. ‘A phenomenon. A once-in-a-lifetime voice. She could have carried them all single-handedly. People would have paid just to hear her sing, never mind the others. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of that girl.’

What was it that Tiffany said again? It won’t come clear.

‘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 dogs. 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.

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