Page 13 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Twelve

Rachel

I t took them a week of cleaning before they were ready to tackle the second floor.

Still, they kept their air mattresses blown up in the living room.

It wasn’t bad, sleeping together in the open space.

It felt like camping, Lucy said. To Rachel, it felt like starting over; she remembered sleeping on an air mattress for most of her first year of graduate school in an apartment cohabited by four other students.

Upstairs they wandered the empty rooms, observing the claw-foot tub in one bathroom, making note of the paneled doors and the strange decorative flourishes particular to Victorian houses.

The walls were covered with graffiti. Mostly kid stuff.

Penises and curse words, nothing too bad.

And in one room, painted huge and in red: RIP Nina.

Rachel traced the letters with her fingers, thinking of smooth highways that led to nowhere.

Thinking of a girl, evaporated like paint fumes sometime after school.

They bought paint. They bought painter’s tape. They sheeted plastic across the floors. Lucy thought every room should be a different color. She picked out lemons and limes, eggshell blues, rosy pinks. Happy colors. Rachel thought it was a good sign.

They changed into old clothing and armed themselves with rollers and foam brushes. Lucy consulted instructional videos on YouTube, sitting cross-legged on the plastic, while Rachel poured out the paint in a shallow pan.

“This says we should start with the ceiling,” Lucy said.

“We’ll do the ceiling last,” Rachel said.

“Okaaaayyyyy,” Lucy said, dragging the word out into a question. “But YouTube never lies.”

“If only that were true,” Rachel said. “Open the window, will you? We need some ventilation in here.”

Lucy stood up in one fluid motion while Rachel tested the ladder. She made an experimental stroke on the wall and felt a thrill as the color unfurled.

Lucy made a sound. “There’s someone out there again,” she said.

Rachel glanced over her shoulder. From this height, she had a clear view of the service road through the window. “Same guy?” Lucy had reported someone hanging out there earlier that morning. Another lurker, she’d said. Every day there seemed to be a few more of them.

“Or girl. I can’t tell. They’re wearing a hat. But I recognize the bike.” Then, “Oh my God. Now they’re taking pictures . Does this mean we’re famous?”

Rachel carefully backed down the ladder to switch from a roller to a brush. She glanced out the window just in time to see a figure in a baseball hat pocket a phone and push off on a green bicycle.

“The house is famous,” Rachel said. “We’re just adventurers.” She went back up the ladder again. Lucy returned, leaning an elbow on one of the treads to stabilize Rachel’s weight.

“Have you started writing yet?” Lucy asked after a bit.

Rachel chuffed. “When would I have started writing? Yesterday I spent four hours on the shower grout.”

“You’re procrastinating,” Lucy said in a knowing tone. “Because you don’t know what the book wants to be.”

“I don’t even know if it is a book,” Rachel said. “It’s just a feeling.”

Lucy thought about this. “I bet if we look hard enough, we’ll turn up clues in the house,” she said. “Secret cupboards. Something tucked beneath the floorboards. That’s how it would go in a movie. We’d find Nina Faraday’s diary, with the name of her killer written in it.”

“So far I’ve mostly found mouse droppings and dead ladybugs,” Rachel said.

She didn’t want to admit that she, too, had fantasized about discovering some remnant evidence of Nina and her mother in the house.

Not a diary necessarily. But little details: glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, like the ones Lucy was so fond of; pencil marks in the doorframe where Nina might have stood to measure her growth.

Details that might help Rachel draw closer to the girl and her mother at the center of so much gossip and speculation, a furious storm of language that had by now almost completely occluded the truth.

“But let me know if you turn up a smoking gun.”

“I think she ran away,” Lucy said. “I think Nina’s mom was driving her crazy, and she just packed up and started over somewhere. That’s what I would do.”

Rachel turned around to give her daughter a look. “Except that your mom never drives you crazy,” she said. “She’s absolutely perfect. Right?”

Lucy grinned. “Obviously.” Rachel drifted back to the window, running her fingernail around the flaking paint, chunking it to the floor. “I wonder what he thinks,” Lucy said, gesturing to the stranger still wheeling his bike slowly just beyond the back gate.

“Well, maybe you should go out and ask him,” Rachel said, only half joking. She was curious to know, actually, what locals thought about the Faradays now, all these years later.

All these years later, without a word from Nina Faraday.

“Yeah, right,” Lucy said. She stuck out her tongue, made a gruesome face through the window, and waved.