The Wildling Sisters by Eve Chase

Author:Eve Chase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

9

Not dead, dormant: Jessie stares at the bulb between her soil-hardened fingertips. A gusty November wind, smelling distinctly of the orchard’s rotting windfalls, pushes against her back. And she wonders. She wonders about the other thing lying dormant at Applecote, waiting for the right conditions to come alive.

The problem is she knows now. She wishes she didn’t. She wishes she’d let Audrey be.

But these last two and a half months, since Bella started school and Will his disorienting split Applecote/London life, Bella’s not stopped muttering about the “vanishing girl.” She particularly likes talking about it when Will is away during the week and it’s just the three of them alone in the house, surrounded by a darkness so absolute it is like tangible living matter. It started to spook Jessie a bit, so a couple of weeks ago she decided to prove the whole thing was nonsense, once and for all.

She was heartened by a quick search online that came up with nothing. But then, just to be sure, she’d gone on to chat with Sheila, the nice lady behind the till in the village shop—Sheila had been proudly saying she’d been born in the village, only visited London once, which was enough. Jessie casually asked if she knew anything about a young girl who had gone missing from Applecote in the fifties. She fully expected Sheila to laugh, ask her what on earth she was talking about.

“Never forgot the day my mammy told me,” Sheila muttered instead, stuffing noodles more vigorously into Jessie’s basket. “We weren’t allowed out to play for months that summer.” She shook her head. “That poor Mrs. Wilde.”

“But not the Mrs. Wilde who lived at Applecote before us?” Jessie clarified with a delayed smile.

She had to sit down on the bench by the village pond afterward, bury her face in Romy’s cloud of biscuity curls. That night she dreamed of the woman with the dogs again, and called out, “Audrey!” and the woman turned around, revealing no face inside the head scarf, just a smudge. She’s dreamed it every night since.

Jessie hasn’t told Bella what Sheila said, of course. Bella needs no more encouragement. Rather than growing bored with the story, she seems more obsessed than ever, layering the bare “facts” with her own details and suppositions, like one of those dark Internet memes Jessie’s read about. Jessie hopes the Audrey story is Bella’s way of getting herself noticed, trying to fit in, egged on by the other Squirrels girls. But Bella won’t leave the story at school.

Bella’s portrait of Audrey—a rather good collage of a girl with a toothpaste smile, a background of rolling newspaper print—is now stuck on their kitchen wall, next to Romy’s innocent finger paintings. And on Bella’s dressing table, that eerie memento mori keeps growing: the heart-shaped button, the paperweight from the desk in the old drawing room, those disintegrating newspapers from ’59, joined this week by a stubby pencil with the faintest A on its hexagonal side that Bella found wedged under the baseboard.

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