Under the Harrow: Read Online Free PDF Page B

staring over the cliff. “Did you think someone was watching Rachel?”
    “No.”
    We look at the valley, and the stands of trees forming dark pools in the white snow. In daylight, a man would be invisibleup here, and at night he could move closer. I imagine him circling the house, putting his hands on the windows.
    A man in a forensic suit—the thin fabric stretched over his shoes and pulled taut over his head—comes up the path. Lewis asks him to bag the material, and we start down the ridge. Ahead of me Lewis leaves a trail of footprints on the snow. Off the far side of the ridge, the forest below is a series of crosshatches.
    We scramble down the rock and emerge behind the paddock. I follow Lewis to the road, my legs growing heavy as we trudge through the snow.
    “Are you hungry?” he asks.
     • • • 
    The Emerald Gate has plastic tables and photographs of the dishes backlit above the till. A young man in chef’s whites lifts a metal basket from a fryer and shakes it before letting it submerge again, and the smell of oil makes my mouth water. My last full meal was two days ago, at the pub in London.
    I watch the pearls of jasmine open in my tea, groggy and fascinated. My fists push my cheeks up to my eyes. Lewis slides his knees under the table, looking too large for his chair. I rub my thumb over my cheek, which was scratched by the thorn trees.
    Our food arrives on the counter. Lewis ordered moo shu pancakes, and I’m having the same, since I couldn’t face making a decision. The rhythm of it calms me, spooning the mixture onto a thin flour pancake, folding it into a triangle, dipping it into the plum sauce. We assemble and eat in silence as the snow drifts under the streetlamps.
    “Nora,” he says, “why did you go to the ridge?”
    “I told you, I wanted to see the house.”
    Behind the counter, the cook ladles wonton soup into a plastic container, and the salty smell of the broth drifts over to us.
    “Did Rachel ever say anything to make you think to look there?”
    “No.” I fold the edges of the pancake. Lewis has stopped eating and is watching me.
    “When did she get her dog?” he asks.
    “Five years ago, when she moved to Marlow. She was twenty-seven.” I dip the pancake into plum sauce.
    “Did anything else important happen that year?”
    “No.”
    “But she got a German shepherd.”
    “Lots of people do,” I say.
    “We found papers in her house. The dog was bred and trained by a security firm in Bristol.”
    I stop with a spoon halfway to my plate. “What?”
    “They sell dogs for protection.”
    I remember Rachel on the lawn, calling commands while Fenno raced around her. She said she had to train him so he wouldn’t be bored. “She told me she adopted him.”
    “Maybe she was scared,” says Lewis, “because of what happened in Snaith.”
    By the time he finished, she couldn’t walk. Every one of her fingernails was split from fighting him.
    “Do you think it was him?” I ask.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why would he wait fifteen years?”
    “Maybe he was looking for her.”

6
    W E WENT TO a party the night she was attacked. It was the first week in July and I had a job at the town pool as assistant junior lifeguard, which meant that if three people were drowning at opposite ends of the pool I could rescue the smallest one.
    The morning of the party was “a scorcher,” according to Radio Humberside. “Be careful out there,” the announcer said, which I thought was stretching it. The toast popped up, the electric kettle whistled. I wedged open the sliding door with my foot and ate my breakfast with my back against the glass.
    My feet were stretched on the patio stones, and our dad was at work on a building site in Sunderland, the driveway empty of his AMC Gremlin, the world’s smallest and ugliest car. Rachel said we were “latchkey children,” though technically we weren’t since the door was never locked. When I said that, she said, “Stop being