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“Come on, Roddy,” Emily says, leading him back toward the stairs. Roddy goes with her docilely. “She needs some time to think about it.”

“Yes. But not too much.”

“No, not too much. She must be terribly thirsty.”

They go up the stairs as carefully as they went down them. Fall, Holly urges. Fall! Stumble and fall and break your fracking necks!

But neither of them falls. The door between the world upstairs and this basement dungeon closes. Holly is left alone with her throbbing head, her other aches, and her thirst.

8

It’s busy, that nine o’clock hour, both on Ridge Road and several other places. It’s the nine o’clock hour when Emily calls Roddy in from the porch to talk to Holly in the basement. It’s the hour when Penny Dahl speaks to Shauna and Pete Huntley, then leaves voicemails on the phones of Jerome and Barbara Robinson.

It’s also the nine o’clock hour when Barbara comes downstairs from the guest room in Olivia’s house, where she’s spent the night. She’s wearing shorts and a top loaned to her by Marie Duchamp. They’re not quite the same size, but close enough. Barbara can’t remember the last time she slept so late. She’s not hungover, possibly because Marie told her to take two Tylenol before going to bed—a sure cure, she said, unless you really took a bath in the stuff—but possibly because she switched to sparkling water when a bunch of them, led by department head Rosalyn Burkhart, went to the Green Door Pub. Which, Rosalyn said, had been Olivia’s watering hole of choice before giving up booze in her seventies, after her first bout of a-fib.

Like most teenagers, the first thing Barbara does is make a beeline for her phone. She sees it’s down to 26 per cent power, and she left her charger at home. She also sees she has a missed call and a voicemail that must have come in just as she was dressing. She thinks it will be one of those nuisance VMs telling her she can update her car’s warranty (as if she had one), but it’s not. It’s from Penny Dahl, Holly’s client.

Barbara listens to it with growing concern. Her first thought is an accident. Her friend lives alone, and accidents sometimes happen to such people. They can slip in the shower or on the stairs. They can fall asleep with a lit cigarette (Barbara has known for some time that Holly’s smoking again). Or they can be assaulted in a parking garage, like the one under Holly’s building. Only robbed if lucky, beaten or raped if not.

As Marie comes downstairs—more slowly, because Marie did not switch to sparkling water last night—Barbara calls Holly. She gets a recorded message telling her Holly’s mailbox is full.

Barbara doesn’t like that.

“I have to go and check on someone,” she tells Marie. “A friend.”

Marie, still wearing last night’s clothes and suffering a bad case of bed head, asks if she’d like a cup of coffee first.

“Maybe later,” Barbara says. She likes this less and less. It isn’t just accidents she’s thinking about now, it’s Holly’s current case. She grabs her bag, drops her phone into it, and leaves in her mother’s car.

9

Roddy on the porch again. Emily joins him. He’s staring vacantly into the street. He comes and goes, Emily thinks. One day he’ll go and not come back.

She has no doubt that Gibney would eventually tell them what they want—need—to know, but Em doesn’t think they can afford to wait. That means she has to think for both of them. She doesn’t want to swallow cyanide, although she will if she has to; better suicide than seeing their names spattered across every newspaper and cable news outlet, not just in America but around the world. Her reputation, built up so carefully over the years, will fall to ruins. Roddy’s, too. The College Cannibals, she thinks. That’s what they’ll call us.

Better cyanide than that. Absolutely. But if there’s a chance, she wants to take it. And if they have to stop what they’ve been doing, would that really be so terrible? More and more she wonders if they’ve just been fooling themselves all along. She knows a two-word phrase from her own reading on the subject of nutrition and miracle cures. It’s a phrase that’s already occurred to the battered and thirsty woman in their basement.

Meanwhile, time is ticking, and maybe—just maybe—they won’t have to wait for Gibney to talk.

“Roddy.”

“Mmm?” Looking out at the street.

“Roddy, look at me.” She snaps her fingers in front of his eyes. “Pay attention.”

He turns to her. “How is your back, dear one?”

“Better. A little bit.” It’s true. Probably a six on the universal pain scale today. “I have to do something. You need to stay here, but don’t go downstairs. If the police come and they don’t have a search warrant, send them away and call me. Are you following this?”

“Yes.” He looks like he is, but she doesn’t trust that.

“Repeat it back to me.”

He does. Perfectly.

“If they do have a warrant, let them in. Then call me and take one of those pills. Do you remember where you put them?”

“Of course.” He gives her an impatient look. “They are in my pocket.”