I look nothing like him. I never did.

“No.”

She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until she heard Nikki call out from the living room.

“Hev? Are you ever getting that bottle or what?”

Reluctantly, her eyes were drawn back to the picture of Michael Reave. He was young here, even handsome, his face as yet free of the lines that would be etched there by his time in prison. She couldn’t help noticing his dark hair, the particular shape of his cheekbones, the line of his nose.

“Hev?”

Nikki’s voice was closer, as though she was standing in the little hall that led to the bedroom.

“Coming, sorry, just got distracted!”

She looked around the room, but nothing else seemed out of place. The window was shut and locked, as she’d left it, and the little dressing table was littered with the usual junk she took out of her pockets every night—receipts, loose change, sweet wrappers. Everything was normal, except …

She turned back to the bed, a cold hand walking down her back. The bed was made, the covers pulled up neatly to the pillow, which was itself straight and freshly plumped up. The only time Heather ever made the bed was just before she got into it herself, and then it was really only a case of tucking in the under sheet again, or retrieving a pillow. Whoever had left the photo had also made her bed.

For a horrible, suffocating second she thought she was going to laugh. And then she heard Nikki’s footsteps going back to the kitchen and the compulsion passed. Instead, she slipped the photo into her pocket, snatched up the bottle of wine, and closed the door firmly behind her.

CHAPTER

39

BEFORE

HE REMEMBERED WHERE each of them was so clearly that often he felt like he could almost see them. Women sitting on the edge of the stream with their feet in the water, or women up in the trees, their souls taken up in the roots and spreading through the leaves. He could almost hear them sighing as he walked through the woods, and the gentle thrum of their hearts was ever present. Their bodies were far away, arranged with precision and care in distant green places, but they were here really, with him, in Fiddler’s Wood. They all wore red coats.

It was raining on the day he lost Colleen, and although it was only around six in the evening the woods were rushing eagerly toward darkness. Michael moved through the shadows contentedly, listening to the graves and the patter of raindrops against leaves and mud, when he heard a sudden, piercing scream. He stopped and held himself very still, the hair raising on the backs of his arms. Screaming held no terrors for him—how could it?—And he was by now used to the noise generated by the commune, but this was a noise out of place, a noise that shouldn’t have been there. A few seconds passed, and there was another scream, somehow more desperate and then abruptly cut off.