The Girl Below(16)

Mum led me to the kitchen, where she took a box of pineapple juice out of the fridge, left over from last night’s punch. “By the way,” she said, pouring me a glass, “have you seen my locket? It isn’t in my jewelry box, and I know that’s where I left it.”

She had taken me by surprise—wasn’t I still being comforted?—and I guiltily put my hand to my neck, but the locket wasn’t there. The last time I remembered wearing it was down in the bunker. What if someone made me go down there again to look for it? “No,” I said, quickly. “I haven’t seen it.”

Mum stopped what she was doing. “Are you sure?”

“I haven’t seen it since last night.”

She fished around in the pocket of her jeans and held something out in the palm of her hand. “That’s odd,” she said, “because this morning I found this.” She showed me a tiny nugget of silver, the broken catch.

“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. “It’s broken.”

“Yes, it is.” Mum paused. “I found it in your room, Suki. Next to the carving knife.”

Blood surged through my head, deafening me. Then, over the noise, squeaked a voice that didn’t sound like mine, “It was Esther.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mum.

“Esther did it. We played with your jewelry box when you were asleep.”

Mum eyeballed me for a long time, and I stood in front of her, dumbstruck by my audacity.

“And you don’t know where the rest of it is?”

I shook my head.

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken it off,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Even with the other necklace on, I looked nothing like Mae West.”

We went to join the others on the lawn of the big garden, and I was given a sandwich but couldn’t do more than nibble at it. The adults around me were unusually animated, running over the highlights of last night’s party and laughing loudly. Two men who lived across the garden had joined us and it was they who confessed to closing the air-raid-shelter hatch while we were down there. The men had been at the party too, and shutting it had been a hangover prank. It was only once the hatch was shut, they explained through tears of laughter, that they realized what a devil of a time they’d have getting it open. Jean Luc, Henri, and my father hooted at the prank, but my mother, in a private glance, made sure to let my father know just how unfunny she thought it was.

While the adults talked, I sat rigid on the blanket with a tumbler of juice in my hand. I couldn’t drink it, nor eat any of the black forest gateau—my favorite—that was handed round at routine intervals, the slices getting smaller and the cream curdling as the afternoon wore on. Every so often, Mum would lean over and stroke the hair out of my eyes or ask if I was okay, and I would nod or smile to mask what was really going on.

Not very far away, in the middle of the patio, the bunker hatch was open, and the magnetic pull of that square black hole made me think I was going to throw up.

I would have run into the flat, but I didn’t want to leave my parents’ side, even though the later it got, the less often they looked at me, and my mother stopped asking how I was. When night fell, Dad dragged the stereo speakers out through the French doors and someone arrived with fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. They had not long been eaten when a neighbor leaned out of his window and told us off for making a ruckus, and the adults staggered inside with the picnic rug and laid it out on the floor of the living room. I tried to tell Mum and Dad they had left the hatch open and that my Wendy tent was still out on the lawn, but they said to stop fussing and that it was high time I went to bed.

I was sent to my room, where I put on my pajamas. By the window, the clothes I had changed out of earlier were soaking in a bucket, and I peered in at the stained pattern of my strawberry dress. Something was bobbing on the surface of the water, what looked to me like treasure, two pretty white pearls, and I fished them out and in the palm of my hand examined them. Only on closer inspection they turned out to be not pearls, but teeth—a small pair, perfectly formed, very clean. Staring at them, I tasted iron, and a stab of pain echoed in my jaw—the same sensation I’d felt in the bunker, after the fall. I reached for my mouth, frightened to think what I might find, but my teeth, all of them, were still in place.

I began to shake anyway, and the teeth fell out of my hand. One landed in the bucket, where it floated lazily on a fold of the strawberry dress, but the other tooth flew off in a wild direction and disappeared. I half-heartedly looked for it on the floor and under the bed but soon gave up because it wasn’t something I really wanted to find.