PART 1 — BARNABY
Vaughn and I had eight. Five girls and three boys.
Ruan was fourteen. Teddy was eleven. Mack had just turned eight.
They went up to his family’s old place at Kessock Ridge on the second weekend of November, which is a thing they had done about forty times, and a storm came through that evening, and none of the four of them came back.
The finding was that he lost it on the bend coming down and went off the edge. Excessive speed for the conditions, poor visibility.
Austen Dale sat in my front room eleven days later and said: “There was nothing anybody could have done, Rhona.”
He had known Vaughn since they were seven.
And it did not sit right with me, not then and not since, because that man checked a forecast like other people check a kettle, and he had those three in the truck.
But I had four daughters in that house under sixteen and I was not able to think about anything, and so I let it go. That is the honest description. I did not accept it. I let it go, which is different and which takes five years.
Austen stayed close.
He did the forms. He did the boiler twice and the fence. He sat on the stairs with Pip at three in the morning more times than I can count, the year the nightmares were at their worst.
And about three years in it turned into something else, and I had not expected to want that again and I did, and by last spring we were talking about him selling his place.
Pip was six when it happened. She is eleven now and she has never stopped asking.
Not in a sad way, which is what people expect. In a methodical way. She wants facts and she has always wanted facts and she has been collecting them since she was about eight.
And on a Tuesday night in the September, at about twenty past midnight, she came and stood by my bed with Barnaby under her arm.
That bear is older than she is. Vaughn got it for her before she was born.
“Mum. There’s something in him.”
I put the lamp on.
The seam under his left arm had gone — not cut, gone, the way they do — and down inside the stuffing there was a small clear sleeve, the kind you put a card in.
She had not opened it. That is my daughter. She had found it at about eleven and she had sat in her room for an hour and twenty minutes with it unopened because she had decided it was mine.
I got it out and unfolded it.
Vaughn’s handwriting, which I had not seen since 2020 and which does something to you.
Rhona. If you’re reading this, something’s happened before I got to explain what I’ve found. Don’t take the first report as the end of it. Ask questions.
I had to put it down on the duvet.
There’s a blue survey marker at the north bend on the Kessock road. Go and look behind it.
And then the one that took the floor out.
Austen knows where that marker is. Be careful what you tell him until you know why.
I read it three times with my daughter sitting on the end of my bed.
Austen Dale had been on that investigation. He had told me the speed. He had sat in my front room for five years and talked me out of going back to it about nine times, kindly, every time, because it would only open it all up again for the girls.
And my husband had put a note inside a teddy bear.
Pip said: “Mum. Did Dad know something was going to happen?”
And I said I did not know, and that I was going to find out, and that she was going to let me do it.
She said all right.
She has not let me do it on my own for one day since, but she said all right.
And then she stood in my bedroom doorway on the way out and said one more thing, which I did not understand for about a fortnight.
She said: “Are you going to tell Austen?”
Eleven years old. I had read that note out loud to her about a minute earlier, including his name in it, and she had gone straight past the mystery and landed on the only operational question in the room.
I said I didn’t know.
And Pip said: “Don’t yet.”
I have thought about that a great deal. My eleven-year-old gave me better advice than I would have given myself, in a doorway, at half past midnight, in pyjamas.
I asked her in the November why she had said it, expecting something about the note.
And she said: “Because he’d have gone and sorted it.”
Which is the kindest possible description of Austen Dale and also the whole of what is wrong with him, out of a child’s mouth, meaning nothing by it.
PART 2 — THE NORTH BEND
I went up on the Thursday after the girls had gone.
Five years. I had not been on that road since the week after, and I had to stop twice on the way up, and the second time was in a lay-by about two miles short and I sat there for eleven minutes.
I found the north bend just before twelve.
There is a barrier there now. That is the first thing I noticed and I did not understand why I had noticed it, and it took me until the following Monday to work out that I had noticed it because it is new.
Beyond it the ground drops away toward a stream. It is not a cliff. It is a steep slope with rock in it and that is somehow worse.
I will say what that drive was, because people assume it was dramatic and it was not.
It is fifty-one minutes from our door. I used to do it twice a month.
What I had not reckoned with is that the road up there has not changed, and so every single bit of it arrived in order, in the order my children would have seen it.
The garage at Caddon Vale where they always stopped. The field with the aerial. The bit where it goes to one lane.
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