The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

05 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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The moment I heard Sukie's voice, I was captivated by her broad Yorkshire accent, and I'm not sure I've breathed properly for the last thirty minutes. When the first episode of the podcast comes to an end, I realise my fingertips are a blotchy mess of red and white from digging into the notches in the scratched tabletop, and there's a dull ache in my lungs like I've been using them all wrong.

I want to know more. I have to know more. My thumb hovers over the link to the second episode, until I realise I've been gone for more than an hour and while I'm not sure how much Elizabeth cares about me, I don't want to worry her.

The eerie piano intro lingers at the back of my mind, my fingers itching to play the piece I used to know without the need for sheet music. It's been a long time since I touched the keys, though, and I'm sure any talent I once had has rusted with age and disuse. And I know that the moment I play that piece again, it will make me weep. It was one of Mum's favourites. She loved Einaudi.

I rip out my earphones and loop them around my hand before stuffing them deep into my bag along with my phone, which I flick back onto airplane mode, and I hitch both straps of my bag over my hunched shoulders as I march outside. Regina isn't hanging around the desk, thankfully, so there's no awkward conversation to be made, no awkward smile to past on my face as I leave with my hood up to face the smattering of spitty rain.

The whole way back to Elizabeth's house, I turn Sukie's words over and over in my mind, trying some out loud to test her accent on myself. I try to remember the timeline, but the middle blurs into obscurity and all I can pick out is the witch hunt of 1619, and the last fifty years. I hear the pain in Sukie's voice when she talked about the brother she never knew, and it makes me think of my father.

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about him. Is there a rulebook about how to grieve for people you don't remember, in what regard to hold them in your memory? I have no recollection of my father. I was a toddler when he died. When he took me to his parents' farm for a few days while Mum was touring for Just Keep Swimming, and he wrote a note that Mum mentioned in the past but never repeated without sobbing, and he pulled the trigger of his father's hunting rifle.

Pushing the blurry image of him out of my mind – I can't even conjure up his face, a face that I have only seen in photographs from at least seventeen years ago – I try to focus on the pumping of my feet on the pedals, but it doesn't take long for my thoughts to be invaded by Sukie's questions, the hunger in her voice.

I screech to a halt when I realise, damn it, I should have checked for the book in the library. But I'm a third of the way back to the house, and the bike seat is beyond uncomfortable, and I'm already tired and sweaty. And if I don't go back now, it's a reason to get up in the morning.

A week ago, I knew nothing about this town. A few days ago, I had never been here. And now, after thirty minutes of listening to a girl with an entrancing voice, a girl whose words had me teetering on the edge of the stiff library seat, I'm engrossed in four hundred years of history. Never in my life have I cared about history, but I feel a pull towards it now.

There's an itching deep inside my bones, something that tells me I have to do this. Whatever this is. It's been nearly three years since Sukie and Oliver recorded the episode I just listened to – they'll be a year older than me now, by my maths. They could have left home; they could be anywhere in the world. They could have figured out who Mary S Nesbitt is. We're nearly four months into 2019; they could have lived through another tragedy already.

I certainly know I have.

My back and my legs ache by the time I reach the house and almost lose my balance dismounting the bike to stow it away in the shed. My bag's heavy on my back, two pints of milk weighing me down. My heart's heavy in my chest, my head heavy on my neck.