“Mr. Grant, can we have a word with you?”
“Why did the police want to speak to you?”
“How do you feel about Margaret Mully being out of the picture?”
“Do you still intend to go ahead with the book?”
Oddly enough, all Alan could think of at that moment was that anyone watching the news was going to see him standing here on the steps of the Crowsea Precinct with his arm around Marisa Banning, a married woman who wasn’t his wife. Her husband George could see it. Or Isabelle. Anyone at all. And he didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.
“No comment,” he said over and over again as they made their way through the crowd.
He held on to Marisa’s hand until they managed to flag down a cab and he didn’t let go of it the whole way home.
VI
Nobody could run as fast as her, that was for sure, Cosette thought as she sped away from the Newford Children’s Foundation. Nobody at all. Maybe that was what happened when you had a red crow beating its wings inside your chest. Maybe it slowed you down. People like her new friend Rolanda and Isabelle never seemed to want to run and dance and skip and simply toss themselves about for the sheer fun of it. The whole body could make a music that they so seldom played. Handclap, the stampa-stamp of feet on a wooden floor. Click and clack, whistle up a wind, cheeks puffed out, expelled air tickling the lips. Or the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of Paddyjack playing wooden fingers against his wooden limbs.
She paused in her headlong flight to think about that. Up she perched on a low wall and watched the slow parade of pedestrians go by. The day was perfect, perfect, perfect, but so few of them were smiling. Maybe having a red crow inside you took too much energy and you didn’t have enough left over for fun. Maybe it made you so tired that you couldn’t even see how perfect a day it was and how much it deserved a smile and a laugh and a dance in return for the gift of it.
And dreams, too. Did you have to think them up, or did they just come to you? How much energy did they take?
But being real was important—not just the real that Rosalind claimed they were, but the kind of real that made everyone you happened to bump into pay attention to you, the kind of real that said, yes, you had a red crow beating its wings inside of you, too. Most people only saw her when she wanted them to.
Otherwise she was no more than a vague flicker of movement caught out of the corner of an eye, something that seemed more likely to be a flutter of leaves or debris tossed up by the wind.
Sometimes she liked the surprise of popping up out of nowhere and the silly looks on people’s faces when they couldn’t help but notice her. Like back at Rolanda’s house, where her gateway hung. That had been fun. It didn’t matter where she was in all this world, it took only a thought and she could find herself standing in front of it. Usually she was careful that no one saw her—Rosalind was always saying, be careful, be careful, be careful, so Cosette was. But not always. She didn’t endanger her gateway, but she liked to pop in there from the island and then make her way back home, secreting her way, peeping into houses, listening to the lives lived by those who could dream and bleed, appearing and disappearing right in front of people’s eyes and then didn’t they look foolish.
But sometimes she would stand for hours in front of her painting and wonder if the gateway opened both ways. Could she go back through it into the before the way she’d come across? Nobody knew.
Not Rosalind or Paddyjack or Annie Nin. Not even Solemn John, who was the cleverest of them all, even more clever than Rosalind, though much too serious, that was for sure. Nobody knew and nobody wanted to try. Nobody dared. It was probably so awful—why else would they have come across the way they all had instead of staying there?
But still and still, she had to ask, her curiosity an itch that simply had to be scratched. What had it been like, truly? Why couldn’t they remember what it had been like? And always it came back so unsatisfactorily: because it must’ve been bad. Which made perfect sense, Cosette supposed. Nobody liked to remember bad things. She never had. She’d learned how to forget the bad things from when she used to watch the dead girl. And from Isabelle.
Like the night of the fire ...
Cosette shivered and hugged herself. No, no, no. That had never happened.
Except it had, it had, and everybody had died. Almost everybody. Died and gone away forever. But where? When you had a red crow in your chest, it took you up and away when you died, up into the sky into an even better place. But if you didn’t, if you weren’t real, there was nothing left of you when you died. Nothing left at all.
She watched the passersby, but no one paid the least bit of attention to her. No one saw her because she wasn’t concentrating on letting them see her. Because she wasn’t real.
Don’t be sad, she told herself. Everything’s going to change, you’ll see.
Isabelle would paint the fairy and she’d do the good deeds and then the fairy would make her real, very and truly real, just the way Rolanda had promised.
Casette brightened up at the thought of that. She kicked her heels against the wall she was sitting on and tried to think of just what sort of good deeds would be required. Rosalind would know. And so would Solemn John. But she didn’t want to ask them. She wanted to do this on her own, to show everyone that she, too, could be clever and wise. She grinned to think of the looks of surprise that they’d wear when they realized that she had a red crow beating its wings inside her. They would look at her and know that she was filled with red blood and dreams and then she would tell them how they could become real, too, and everyone would have to remark on just how clever she really was, even Solemn John, and then ...
Her thoughts trailed off as an uneasy prickling sensation crept up the back of her neck. Someone, she realized, was watching her. Which was impossible because she hadn’t chosen to be seen. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.
She looked about herself, pretending a disinterest that she didn’t really feel, her gaze traveling from one end of the street to the other. When she finally did notice the girl leaning by the door of a shop across the street, she couldn’t figure out how she could ever have missed spotting her straightaway since she seemed more like a black-and-white cutout that had been propped up in the doorway than a real person: alabaster skin, short black hair, midnight eyes ringed with dark smudges, black lipstick. Black leather vest, black jeans torn at the knees, black motorcycle boots. There was no color to her at all.
How can she see me when I don’t want to be seen? Cosette wondered. But she already knew. The black-and-white girl must have crossed over from the before just as she had herself. Someone had brought her over. Only who? Not Isabelle. There was only one other person Cosette could think of and she didn’t like the idea of that at all.
At that moment, the girl smiled, but it wasn’t so much a pleasant expression as spiteful—feral and hungry. When she saw that she had Cosette’s attention, the black-and-white girl slowly drew a finger across her throat. Then she pushed herself away from the doorway and sauntered off down the street.
Cosette sat frozen on her perch on the wall, unable to do anything but watch her go.
I’m not scared of her, she lied to herself. I’m not scared at all.
But she was unable to stop shivering. Long after the stranger had disappeared from sight, all she could do was hug her knees and wish she were back on the island, or in Solemn John’s company, or anywhere at all that might be safe. She remembered what Rosalind had said to her just before she left the island.