If We Were Villains: A Novel

I woke up alone in Filippa’s room. After James disappeared into the Tower with Wren, I’d spent the night wandering the Castle in a daze, wondering where Meredith had gone and more worried than I would confess to anyone. By the time the place emptied and everyone else was in bed, I came to the unnerving conclusion that she wasn’t coming back. At half past three I knocked on Filippa’s door. She opened it wearing an oversized flannel shirt and wool socks pulled halfway up her calves.

“I can’t go up to the Tower,” I told her. “Meredith’s gone. I don’t want to sleep alone.” Finally I understood the feeling.

She opened the door, tucked me into bed, and curled up in a ball beside me, all without saying a word. When I shivered she shifted closer, draped one arm over my side, and fell asleep with her chin perched on my shoulder. I listened to her breath and felt her heart beat against my back and tricked myself into thinking that maybe, when we woke up, everything would be back to normal. But what kind of normal did we have to go back to?

In the morning, everyone was gone. I didn’t know where, but they’d be expecting to come home to a Castle cleaned and scoured, all evidence of the party washed away. I needed distraction like a drug, something to occupy and exhaust my mind, to keep it from wandering back into the memory labyrinth of the previous night. So I spent hours on my hands and knees, dizzy from the smell of bleach, my hands raw from scrubbing. It seemed to me that the Castle hadn’t been cleaned properly in years, and I attacked the grime that had settled into the grooves between the floorboards, possessed by the idea that I could purge the place, baptize it, absolve it of its sins and make it new again.

From the kitchen I moved through the downstairs bathroom, the dining room, the foyer. There was nothing I could do about the broken mirror—I’d have to contact the custodial staff at the Hall—but I wiped away the red smear of James’s blood, the black slash of Meredith’s mascara. The tube was still on the floor. I picked it up, pocketed it, wondering when I’d have the chance to return it to her.

I crawled up the stairs, rag and polish in hand, and by the time I reached the second floor, my knees were aching. I couldn’t fix the burn mark on the library carpet, so I left it as it was. I cleaned the bathroom, mopped the floor in the hall, wiped down bedroom windows, and tidied where I could without disturbing anyone’s things. I made the bed in Filippa’s room. The sight of Wren’s bed, smooth and unslept in, made my stomach wind up in a tight little knot. I closed her door, didn’t venture in. Alexander’s room was such a mess that I couldn’t do much. I glanced under his bed and through his drawers, checking for drug paraphernalia, but didn’t find anything. (He’d learned his lesson, I hoped.) Meredith’s room looked exactly as we’d last left it, cluttered but not chaotic: books piled on the desk, empty wineglasses on the nightstand, clothes thrown across the foot of the bed. I didn’t see her dress from the night before.

When I emerged again, Richard’s door seemed to be watching me from the end of the hall. Someone had closed it after he died, and as far as I knew none of us had opened it since. I blinked, unable to even really remember what his room looked like. Without realizing I had made the decision to move, I found myself walking down the hall, turning the handle. The door opened without protest, without so much as a squeak. Early evening light, touched with the pink of sunset, streamed in through the window and lay decadently across the bed. The rest of the room stood in quiet gray-blue shade, patiently waiting for night to fall. So many of his things were still there; hardback books, naked without their dust jackets, were stacked on the shelf above the bed, and his watch (I knew without wanting to know that Meredith had given it to him for his birthday, third year) lay discarded on the desk. A pair of brown leather boxing gloves hung over one corner of the closet door, and inside I could see a row of hangers, the white undershirts he’d liked so much hung up beside button-downs that might actually wrinkle. An old, forgotten affection stirred and I looked away, searching for something to remind me why I’d be a fool to regret for one minute that he was gone. A collection of wooden chess pieces stood like a row of soldiers awaiting orders on the windowsill. They were all upright except the white horsemen, one of which had fallen sideways. The other was missing from the place where it should have stood. Wondering if it might have toppled off the ledge, I crouched down to peer underneath the bed, and felt the tiny muffled voice of my conscience cry out. A pair of shoes lay crookedly where he’d last kicked them off, laces plucked at and tangled. I knew him well enough to know he never would have left them that way if he’d thought he wasn’t coming back.

Grief seized me so suddenly I thought I might black out. He was there, in that room where we’d tried to lock him up, shut him out of sight, with all our deadly sins to keep him company. I staggered to my feet, blundered into the hall, and slammed the door.

I climbed the stairs to the Tower, unsure of what I would find but desperate to put as much distance between myself and Richard’s room as possible. At first glance, it looked like it always did, and for a moment I stood swaying in the doorway, hoping to find comfort in its tame familiarity. Our little attic room, with its two beds, two bookshelves, two wardrobes. When my legs felt steady enough, I wandered in. My own messy bed I made with meticulous care, delaying the inevitable cross to James’s side of the room. When I could find nothing else to straighten, nothing to fold, nothing to hide in a drawer or tuck out of sight in the wardrobe, I moved from my corner into his.

I straightened the books, shook the dust from the curtains, picked up a pencil that had rolled off a shelf and onto the floor. James was unfailingly neat, always had been, and there wasn’t much to keep me occupied. Finally, I reached for the bedspread, pulled it and the sheet beneath it flat against the mattress, trying not to think of him and Wren and how each wrinkle and crease had been pressed into place.

A corner of the sheet was hanging out from under the mattress. I crouched down to fix it, but paused when I felt something unexpectedly soft between my fingers. As I lifted my hand a tuft of white floated away from my palm and settled on the floor again. I tugged the corner of James’s bedspread loose and found another little cluster of cotton tufts gathered around one leg of the bedframe, as if they’d been gradually swept there by careless passing feet. I folded the blanket farther back. If there were bedbugs, or a spring was poking through, I’d need to add a new mattress to my list of requests for the real custodial staff.

I pulled the fitted sheet up off the foot of the bed. There was a jagged rip in the end of the mattress, like a grinning mouth six inches long. I checked the footboard for a nail, a protuberant splinter, but didn’t find anything that could have torn through the fabric. The split gaped, laughed at me, and I didn’t realize I was leaning closer until I saw the narrow red smudge on the edge of the tear, like a dash of lipstick. I sat staring at the mattress for a moment like I’d been fused to the spot. Then I reached in through the hole.

I groped through a tangle of springs and cotton and foam until I felt something severely, indisputably solid. It didn’t come easily—something at the end kept catching—but with one good yank I wrenched it free and let it clatter to the floor. It looked alarmingly wrong lying there—anachronistic, almost Gothic, stolen out of time from a darker age. In the back of my brain I knew what it was, really: an old boat hook, curved at one end like a claw, snatched from the long-forgotten rack of tools at the back of the boathouse. The talon and pole had been hastily wiped clean, but blood still clung to the crevices, cracked and flaking away like rust.

My lungs struggled for air. I grabbed the boat hook off the floor and fled the room, one hand clapped over my mouth, afraid I might vomit my heart out onto the floor.