The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

22 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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After three hours and another latte, I figure it's time to leave the café. I've stolen enough of Sukie's attention already, in those moments when she sidles over to me between customers and throws out a question or a comment, something that gets a conversation rolling until she's pulled away to do her job.

I'm sure I'll see her again today. As much as I crave connection with Elizabeth, desperate to find a crack in her icy shell and chip away until I find something soft and real underneath, I don't know how good it is for me to be around her right now. It's not the book or the podcast that worsens the ache in my chest – it's her.

The chances of her being up in the attic when I get home are pretty high, seeing as that's where she spends the majority of every day, and that's exactly where I need her.

I need to find that damn book.

I cycle home as quickly as I can, until my thighs burn as much as my lungs and I almost collapse when I reach the house, and I climb the stairs as though I'm going to my bedroom. I can hear the radio coming from the door that Elizabeth disappears behind when she goes upstairs, and over the noise of an old song, I hear her humming.

God knows how long I have, but there's no time like the present and I can't shake the urge to find something. Anything. Some tiny particle of a clue that will set me on the way to unlocking this mystery that Sukie's been grappling with for almost three years. I feel like we're so close to something, dangling our feet over the lip of a development, but I don't know which way to turn. All I know is that I don't trust my aunt; I don't trust this house, and I don't trust Mary.

This place is so fucking quiet, and yet every sound I make sounds so fucking loud. The pounding of my heart drowns out the tick of the clock in the upstairs hallway; the heave of my breath is deafening; the sigh of an old floorboard between my room and Elizabeth's is more like a scream when I don't want her to hear.

I have never been in her room before. It feels wrong to reach out and turn the handle and push open the door, praying it won't whine on its hinges, until I remind myself that she's hiding everything from me. It's only natural that I go looking. My hands flex with the urge to close around that beaten copy of The Key to Anchor Lake, and I steel myself before I step into Elizabeth's room.

It's ordinary. Eerily ordinary for someone who has lived here for nearly twenty years. There are no photographs on the walls, no frames on her bedside table; there is one shelf beside her window, filled with books, but they're all fiction. Mostly the kind of heavy, literary stuff that I can't bear, sprinkled with a smattering of romances and a couple of thrillers. Nothing that looks like the one I'm after.

Her bed is unmade, but not scruffily so. One pillow is slightly askew – I hold my breath as I lift it up, in case she has hidden the book beneath it – and her duvet is creased on one side. It's too big for the bed, hanging over the side and almost skimming the floor. I crouch down and lift one corner, but there's nothing under there. No boxes, no books, not even a lost pen lid.

This is wrong you're wrong you're a terrible person, what the fuck are you doing?

I know that; I don't need reminders from my own bloody conscience. This isn't about right or wrong anymore. It's about answers. I need them. I need anything I can find, starting with that bloody book.

The radio's still on upstairs. I hear creaking above me as she crosses the floor, but she doesn't go near the door. My lungs are tight with stress, my heart a slippery fish out of water, but I can't stop. Not until I find something.