Page 53 of Breaking the Dark

“Please don’t be sorry. I’m always happy to see a new face. It’s lonely being stuck out here.”

“Don’t you live with someone? A family?”

“Well, sort of. I have an in loco parentis type of arrangement. My parents live abroad. I’m at boarding school, I come back for holidays.”

“Is it a holiday now?”

Belle looks momentarily nonplussed. “No,” she says, finally. “No, it’s not.”

“So how come you’re here?”

Her nose wrinkles slightly. “I suppose it must be exeat.”

“Exe—?”

“It’s like a mini-holiday. I don’t usually come back, but I must have been missing the dogs. And now I’m sort of wishing I was back at school? It’s always just like…there’s never a place I really want to be.”

Jessica eyes her gently. There is a blankness about the girl. A sadness. Jessica looks beyond the girl, her gaze scanning the grounds.

“Is there anyone else here?” she asks.

“No, just me and Debra. My guardian.”

Debra, Jessica clocks. Not Miranda. “Is she here?”

“Yes, she is. She’s in the house. Making lunch.”

Jessica nods. “I don’t suppose…” she begins. “I mean, tell me to take a hike, obviously, but since I’m here, maybe I could just take a look at the grounds, for my novel?”

Belle’s eyes narrow, she turns to look over her shoulder, and then she shrugs. “I guess. Why not?”

The dogs, now placid as poodles, follow them eagerly as they walk, panting and sniffing at the grass.

“How’d you do that?” Jessica asks Belle. “How’d you get them to calm down like that?”

Belle throws her a sweet smile. “Tricks of the trade,” she says. “Debra taught me. Clicks. And treats.” As she says this Jessica notices her pass one of them a tiny scrap of dried meat from her coat pocket. “You always have to have something they want,” she says, and then she turns away again.

Slowly as they walk, a house begins to reveal itself through the unkempt landscape. It’s a brick farmhouse. Scruffy. Rambling. It has a moss-laden glass lean-to attached to one side, a tumbledown garage attached to the other, a rusty car in the driveway. A large barn slouches on the other side of the driveway, two metal storage containers covered with ivy nearby. Everything is overgrown and wild, with an air of slight abandonment.

“How long have you lived in this place, Belle?”

“Not sure really. All my life, I suppose. Want to come in?”

“Er, yeah. Sure. Thank you.”

“Great!”

She follows the girl through a mud-splattered back door and directly into a terra-cotta-floored kitchen with peeling mint-green cabinetry. A middle-aged woman stands in the kitchen prodding at a piece of cooked meat in a baking tin.

“Oh!” she says when she looks up and sees Jessica. “Hello!”

“Jessica, this is Debra. Debra is the custodian of the Old Farmhouse.”

Jessica sees a look of alarm pass across Debra’s face, which she quickly covers with a warm and welcoming smile.

“Custodian,” she says, disparagingly, wiping down her hands on a tea towel. “Makes me sound like a hundred-year-old man with a limp. I prefer housekeeper. Nice to meet you, Jessica.”

Jessica takes the proffered hand and notices dry skin and a firm grip. “Nice to meet you too.”