The Child Garden by Catriona McPherson Read Free Book Online Page B

belong there, and they left like a bat out of hell.”
    I waited. I could tell there was more.
    â€œBut the others said they hadn’t heard it.” He was agitated all of a sudden. He lifted Dorothy under her front legs and dropped her down onto the floor. “All of them, all eleven of them, said they hadn’t heard a thing, and that’s just not possible. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and you know what it’s like up here on a quiet night. You know what a car sounds like.”
    I nodded. The quiet at Rough House had saved my sanity. Except it wasn’t quiet at all: it was swifts and tits and wrens and sparrows and oystercatchers up from the Solway, and geese and ducks, bees and owls, a thrush some lucky summers. It was the wind streaming over the grass and making it whisper, shushing through the trees, moaning where it was caught in the dips and rises. Sometimes I thought I could hear the stars turning on in the evening and the sun sighing like an old lady when it set. Sometimes I thought I could hear the worms in the soil and the flower buds popping open. After the rain, I thought I could hear the roots of the trees pulling the water up their trunks and sending it out to the ends of their twigs. Sometimes up here I thought I could hear the slow grind of the earth turning.
    â€œNo way,” I said. “A car starting at Eden would be like a bomb going off.”
    â€œExactly,” said Stig. “So when April started texting me—” He stopped.
    April! We were sitting here in dry clothes in this warm kitchen, sipping whisky and she was there in that hole, cold and getting colder, her spilled blood drying.
    â€œGo on,” I said.
    â€œSo when she started texting me about needing to straighten things out. I thought, You and me both. I thought , At last .” He took a deep breath. “And then tonight she finally said it. ‘I heard the car.’”
    â€œShe texted it to you?” I said. “Or voicemail? Because one thing that occurred to me was—”
    â€œNeither,” said Stig. “And this is the thing I really need to tell you.”
    â€œA good thing or a bad thing?” I said, not even knowing what I meant, just needing to brace myself if there was going to be any more.
    â€œI don’t know,” said Stig. “I’ll show you what I found and you tell me.”

Six
    He left by the front door and it banged out of his hand like always with a bad north wind, slammed back against the porch wall and rattled. There was a deep gouge in the plaster there from all the years that door had been flung open. Over a hundred years of north winds and children in high spirits rushing in and out from the garden. Maybe even a young wife taking time to settle and flouncing off in her clogs and apron to fume out there in the open air, where the view could calm her. I liked to think that Rough House saw some life before Miss Drumm and then me.
    He was more careful on the way back in, and he locked it after him.
    â€œIt’s not letting up,” he said, using one of his hands like a window washer to scrape the rain from his forehead. He had a woman’s handbag in his other one.
    â€œI’ve started coming to see my mum and dad,” he said, sitting down again with the bag in his lap. “Trying to build bridges, you know. Tea at my mum’s every Monday, like a happy family. And Wee J’s there with the wife and kids, so that takes some of the pressure off. What I’m saying is, usually I’d have been here—or ten miles off—when the text came to meet her at Eden.”
    â€œBut?”
    â€œBut what with the weather, I’d decided to skip it. I was sitting in a sushi bar in the West End when it came. So I decided to go back to my flat, get wellies and Gore-Tex.”
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked, thinking about his thin dress shirt and suit trousers, his ruined leather shoes.
    â€œI found