“The previous owner of Heatherbrae was an analytical chemist with a specialty in biological toxins, and this was his personal”—she stopped, clearly too pissed off with the whole situation even to find words—“his personal testing ground, I suppose. Every single plant in that garden is toxic in some degree—some of them extremely toxic. And many of them you don’t need to ingest, brushing past them or touching the leaves is enough.”
Oh. My hand went up to the blistering rash on my forehead, which made a sudden kind of sense.
“We’re trying to find the best way to deal with it, but the bloody thing has heritage status or something. In the meantime we keep it firmly locked up, and I must say, it never occurred to me that you would take the children for a stroll—”
It was my turn to butt in now.
“Sandra.” I made my voice level, and calmer, and more reasonable than I really felt. “I apologize unreservedly for not paying sufficient attention to that page in the binder. That is one hundred percent on me, and I’ll rectify that immediately. But you should know, it wasn’t my idea to go in there. Maddie and Ellie suggested it, and they know how to open the lock without a key—there’s some kind of override on the inside, and Ellie can reach it. They’ve clearly been in there before.”
That shut Sandra up. There was silence on the other end of the phone while I waited for her response. I could hear her breathing, and I wondered for a minute if I had made a bad strategic mistake in bringing up the fact that she clearly had no idea where her children had been roaming. Then she coughed.
“Well. We’ll say no more about it for the moment. Can you put me back on to Maddie, please?”
And that was it. No, “thanks for bringing it to my attention.” No admission that she herself wasn’t exactly winning parenting golds. But perhaps that would have been too much to hope for.
I passed the phone back to Maddie, who gave me a little smile as I handed it over, her dark eyes full of malice.
She took it back through to the media room, Ellie padding after her, hoping for another turn, and as Maddie’s end of the conversation grew fainter, I picked up the tablet that was lying on the kitchen counter and opened Google. Then I typed in Achlys.
A series of terrifying images popped up across the top of the screen—a variety of white, skull-like female faces in different states of decomposition, some pale and beautiful, with ravaged cheeks, others rotting and putrefying, with a stench of death coming from their rictus mouths.
Beneath them were various search entries, and I clicked one at random.
“Achlys—(pronounced ACK-liss)—Greek goddess of death, misery, and poison,” it read.
I shut the screen down. Well, binder or no binder, I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned. It had been right there, written on the base of the statue in the center of the garden. I just hadn’t understood the message.
“I’m done.” Maddie’s voice came from the media room, and, pushing down my irritation, I walked back through to where the girls were crouched on the sofa, plainly waiting for me with some trepidation. I said nothing as Maddie handed me back the phone, just unpaused the film, and sat down on the far end of the sofa to continue watching, though their eyes kept flicking across to me, very different emotions on each face. Ellie’s was anxious . . . waiting to be told off. She had known that they were not supposed to go into that garden, and she had allowed herself to be tempted—to show her cleverness in opening the gate and letting us in. Maddie’s expression was very different, and harder to read, but I thought I could tell what it was. Triumph.
She had wanted me to get into trouble, and I had.
* * *
It was much later, over supper, as I wiped tomato sauce from Petra’s cheek, and swallowed my own mouthful of Alphabetti Spaghetti, that I said, casually, “Girls, did you know that the plants in that garden were dangerous?”
Ellie’s eyes flicked to Maddie, who seemed to be wavering.
“What garden,” Maddie said at last, though her tone didn’t hold a question mark. She was buying herself more time, I thought. I gave her my sweetest smile and shot her a look that said, Don’t fuck with me, dear.
“The poison garden,” I said. “The one with the statue. Your mum said we weren’t supposed to go in there. Did you know?”
“We’re not allowed in without a grown-up,” Maddie said evasively.
“Ellie, did you know?” I turned to her, but she refused to meet my eyes, and at last I took her chin, forcing her to look at me.
“Ow!”
“Ellie, look at me, did you know those plants were dangerous?”
She said nothing, just tried to twist her chin away.
“Did you know?”
“Yes,” she whispered at last. “Another girl died.”
It was not the answer I had been expecting, and I stopped, letting her chin go in my surprise.
“What did you say?”
“There was another little girl,” Ellie repeated, still not meeting my eyes. “She died. Jean told us.”
“Jesus!” The word slipped out without my realizing, and I saw from Maddie’s smirk that that too would be stored up to repeat to Sandra next time she called.
“What happened? When?”
“A long time ago,” Maddie said. It was plain that, unlike Ellie, she did not mind talking about the subject. In fact there was even a kind of relish in her tone. “Before we were born. She was the little girl of the man who lived here before us. It’s why he went saft.”
For a moment I didn’t understand the last word, but then it came to me. She was saying the word soft but with a Scottish accent, repeating whatever Jean McKenzie had said to her.
“He went soft? Soft in the head you mean?”
“Yes, he had to be put away. Not straightaway, but after a while. Living here with her ghost,” Maddie said, matter-of-factly. “She used to wake him in the middle of the night with her crying. After she was gone. Jean told us. So after a while he stopped sleeping. He just used to pace backwards and forward all night long. Then he went mad. People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough. They go mad, and then they die.”
Pacing. The word gave me a sharp jolt, and for a second I didn’t know what to say. Then I remembered something else.
“Maddie.” I swallowed, trying to figure out how to phrase my question. “Maddie . . . is . . . is that what you meant? Before? When you said, the ghosts wouldn’t like it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Her face was stiff and expressionless, and she had pushed her plate away.
“When you hugged me, that day I first came. You said the ghosts wouldn’t like it.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said stonily. “I didn’t hug you. I don’t hug people.” But she had overreached herself with that last remark. I might have believed that she hadn’t said what I thought I’d heard, but there was no way I could forget that stiff, desperate little hug. She had hugged me. And the knowledge suddenly made me sure of what I’d heard too. I shook my head.
“You know there’s no such thing as ghosts, right? No matter what Jean has told you—it’s just rubbish, Maddie, it’s just people who are sad about other people who have died, and wish they could see them again, so they make up stories, and they imagine they see them. But it’s all nonsense.”