How many times over the past few years had I come here to calm down? Whenever I’d woken in the early hours and been unable to get back to sleep. Whenever me and Beth argued. On the day Beth got her diagnosis, when I’d realised I couldn’t cope. I had come here. Looking for something that could root me to the ground.
On those occasions, when nothing in the real world made sense, I would stand with my palms on the cool stone wall, and whisper to the ghost of the skeleton I’d found.
It’d started when I was still young, maybe three or four months after I found the skeleton. No one else would listen to me. Beth went to a different school, so I only ever saw her outside term time, and I missed her support desperately. It felt like the only person who might possibly know what I was going through was the person who’d got lost and died out there in the wetlands. When it got too much for me, I would beg my dad to let me stay with Mum for a few days, and then I would come down to the end of her garden like this.
I’d often imagined who the person in the curraghs had been. They’d had a life, a name. In the absence of the truth, I’d invented details. I pictured a girl my own age, wild and windblown, barefoot, running through the curraghs. I’d even given her a secret name: Bogbean, like the tiny white flowers that had blossomed in abundance around the gravesite. Sometimes I’d whisper the name aloud, into the silence of the evening air, but I’d never told it to anyone.
Good thing too. Otherwise it’d be on that stupid website right now.
My mouth twisted. Bogbean, the lost girl in the wetlands, had always belonged just to me. For fifteen years, whenever I needed to ground myself, I would speak my fears, aloud or inside my head, to Bogbean. Sometimes I imagined I heard the whisper of her answer.
‘Simone,’ I murmured now. ‘Is that your real name?’
There was no answer except the wind in the trees.
Everything had become so weird and so different, in the space of an evening. All of a sudden, Bogbean had a possible name, a possible life, family, friends. She was no longer a figment of my imagination.
‘Who are you?’ I murmured. If I half-closed my eyes, I could imagine Bogbean at my side, just beyond my peripheral vision, leaning her bare forearms on the top of the wall. But she said nothing, not even a whisper or a faint shrug. Right now, no one had any answers.
I heard the back door open as someone else came outside, but I didn’t turn around. I shut my eyes and breathed the cool air.
‘Hey,’ Dallin said from behind me. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure. Why not?’ I sighed, then turned to face him. I had a moment of disconnect, because I remembered him as a gangly teenager charging around this garden, leaping the flowerbeds like they were hurdles in his way. Now he looked awkward and out of place in what should’ve been his home. He kept his shoulders hunched, and avoided looking at the twisted trees beyond the back wall of the garden.
‘I’m sorry.’ Dallin lifted his hands in a shrug. ‘I thought you got my email. I didn’t mean to rock up here without warning. I know you don’t like that sort of shit.’
‘I just … I don’t understand why you’re here.’ I gave him a shrug of my own. ‘How did Cora even find you?’
‘We met on the forum. I stumbled onto it a while ago, and, y’know, obviously I was interested, because there was at least one person on there who remembered,’ Dallin flapped a hand at the curraghs, still without looking in that direction, ‘all this. I ended up chatting to some of the folks. That’s how I met Cora.’ He came to stand next to me, turning so he could lean his back against the wall, facing the house. ‘I told her I knew about the curraghs legend first-hand. I mean, obviously, that wasn’t something I should’ve done. There’s a lot of crazy people on forums like that. And when Cora told me her story …’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I had to take it with a pinch of salt, you know? I was okay with messaging her and hearing her story, but I was ready to bail if it turned out she was one of the crazies.’
‘What convinced you she wasn’t?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt Cora’s story. But then, I always thought the best of people. Yet another thing that had consistently driven Beth nuts.
‘She understands it’s a longshot,’ Dallin said. ‘She’s not coming here with a burning sense of surety that this time she’ll definitely find Simone. This has been going on for a lot of years. She says she began looking seriously about three years ago, and she’s not let up since.’
Why then? I wondered. What had kickstarted her search after so many years, rather than when she was much younger?
‘What she’s doing here is following one more possible lead,’ Dallin said. ‘She understands, completely understands this might come to nothing. And she’s prepared for that.’
‘So, if I went back in and told Cora I didn’t see anything in the wetlands that day, that I’d made the whole thing up, she’d be okay with it?’
Dallin laughed. He leaned his head back so he could look at the dusky sky. ‘C’mon, Rose-petal. We all know you didn’t make it up. You invented some daft stories in your time, but you didn’t have that morbid sort of imagination.’
It was a backhanded compliment at best. ‘You shouldn’t have brought Cora here,’ I muttered. ‘All you’ve done is give her false hope.’
‘It’s not false hope. There’s a chance she’ll find something.’
‘No, there’s not.’ I turned so I was facing him. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve walked the curraghs? I’ve searched every inch of that place. If there was anything to find, don’t you think I would’ve found it?’
Dallin gave me a lop-sided smile that was so familiar I had to stop myself smiling in return. ‘Not necessarily. I’m not doubting you. I’m just saying there’s an outside chance you’re wrong.’
My expression hardened. ‘If you won’t tell her she’s wasting her time, I will.’
Dallin laughed again and gestured at the house. ‘Go ahead. Let me know if she listens to you, because she sure as hell didn’t listen to me when I told her the exact same thing.’ As I walked away towards the house, he added, ‘I should probably mention, she’s come prepared. Very prepared.’
Cora’s bag was a green satchel, decorated with applique owls. From inside the satchel, she produced a wodge of folded papers, which she spread out on the table.
‘There aren’t a lot of maps available online, would you believe that?’ Cora said. ‘But I got what I could and I cross-indexed it with a bunch of aerial photos, so I think we’ve got as accurate a picture of the land as we’re going to get.’
Dallin put the kettle back on. It looked like he was starting to feel more at home. I ignored another pang of distress. Everything about this situation was distressing. When was the last time there were this many people in my kitchen? My eyes watered from trying to look at both Dallin and Cora at once.
‘The main paths run through here and here,’ Cora said. She drew a finger along a pale line that meandered from one corner of an A3 photo to the middle. Her nail polish was a delicate pink, chipped at the tips. ‘As I understand it, there are dozens of other paths that lead