Page 59 of Beautiful Ugly

I pull into Sandy and Midge’s driveway, wishing I’d driven more slowly. I’m running out of time. None of this makes sense. Perhaps Abby has a brain injury and that is why she can’t remember who I am or who she was a year ago, or some form of amnesia maybe. She opens the car door, and I clamber out to help her get the bike from the trunk.

“I could come in? If there is anything I can do to—”

“No, no. You’ve already done more than enough,” she says. “If we don’t meet again, good luck with the book!”

If we don’t meet again.

She offers her hand and I stare at it.

Then, for lack of a better idea, I shake hands with my wife as though we are strangers. Midge appears in the doorway and looks as though she hasn’t stopped crying since the last time I saw her. She’s still wearing an old pink dressing gown. “Is that you, Grady?” she calls.

“Hi, Midge.”

“Did you go to Darkside Cave earlier? Did you see Sandy? Her truck is still parked near there on the other side of the island, but there is no sign of her. The tide is in and I’m so worried that...” Midge starts to cry and Abby rushes over to her.

“Didyou see Sandy?” my wife asks, and they both stare at me.

I shake my head.

“No. I was on my way there when I bumped into you. I haven’t seen Sandy since yesterday,” I lie.

The walkie-talkie Abby left on the car seat crackles.

WISE FOOL

Midge is a mess. I help get her back inside and then stand there like a spare part while my wife rushes around knowing exactly what to do. Just like old times. Abby is clearly very at home in Sandy and Midge’s house. She puts the kettle on, doesn’t need to ask where the mugs are kept—mugs she made from the look of it—and doesn’t need to ask how Midge likes her tea. She listens patiently to the older woman about how long Sandy has been gone and how worried she is.

I do my best not to get in the way, and pretend to be distracted by looking at some framed photographs on the wall. I don’t remember them being here when I was invited to dinner a few weeks ago, but maybe I just didn’t notice them. I see them now, and can’t stop staring. Some are very old—black-and-white images of relatives I presume, and a faded picture of Sandy and Midge holding a baby outside Saint Lucy’s Church. A christening perhaps. But my attention is focused on a photo of Abby as a child. I’m almost certain that is what I am looking at. The picture shows a birthday cake with the number ten written on it in icing. Abby is sitting next to a blond little girl who looks the same age, and their cheeks are filled with air, preparing to blow out thecandles. A younger Sandy and Midge are standing behind them with big smiles on their faces. I wonder if the blond girl is the daughter Sandy lost, which would make her Midge’s niece. I’msurethe dark-haired child is Abby. I gawp at the photo, trying to put together pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I had to solve, my brain working overtime.

I never met Abby’s parents—they were both dead when we got together. I only met Kitty, her godmother. Abby lived in London with Kitty since she was... ten or eleven, I think? She never mentioned the Isle of Amberly, not once, I would have remembered. I didn’t know she’d evenbeento Scotland, let alone lived here. I’d suggested us visiting the Highlands so many times, but she always said it was somewhere she had never been and never wanted to go. So why is there a picture of her here as a child with Sandy and Midge?

There is another picture of Abby on the wall, a more recent one.

It’s of my wife on her wedding day.

Not ours.

She is standing with a group of women I recognize from the island: Sandy, Midge, Cora Christie from the corner shop, Mary and Alex the butchers, Arabella from The Stumble Inn, and the Reverend Melody Bates. There are a few faces I don’t recognize, but it looks as though they were all there when Abby married someone else last year. The wholecommunity. She’s still married to me; how can she have married someone else? Confusion and anger pollute every thought inside my head. I could wait, or I could confront them both now. Ask the questions that I want to ask and demand the answers I need. But then Midge starts to cry again and I decide this isn’t the time or place. I feel like an outsider intruding on their grief.

“Sandy is a wise fool. I suspect she knew better than to drive back from the cave when she’d had too much to drink and iswalking home. She’ll probably come through the front door any minute. Try not to worry,” Abby says to Midge.

“Would you mind if I used the bathroom?” I ask.

Both women stare at me as though they had forgotten I was here, but it’s Midge who answers. “Of course, you know where it is.”

I leave the kitchen, pass the downstairs bathroom, and creep up the staircase to the first floor instead. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I hurry down the corridor anyway, quietly opening doors and seeing what is behind them. Bedrooms mostly, until I reach what looks like an office. The thing that makes me stop and stare is that one of the walls is covered in newspaper clippings. There are hundreds of them.

I don’t understand what this means.

Before I get a chance to see if the articles were written by Abby, I hear a quiet but unfamiliar sound on the other side of the wall.

Bang, rattle, whoosh. Bang, rattle, whoosh. Bang, rattle, whoosh.

I creep back out onto the landing and follow the sound to a closed door. I slowly lean down until I can peer through the keyhole, and then I see her. The woman I met in the cemetery dressed head to toe in tweed. The one who said I should leave before it was too late. She must be Morag, Sandy’s mother, the woman who kept banging her walking stick on the ceiling when I was here for dinner. She is sitting behind some kind of enormous loom; I think she’s weaving. I stand and try the door handle but it’s locked. Morag knows something, I’m sure she does. If only I could speak to her I might be able to find out what. I lean down again, and this time when I peer through the keyhole there is an eye staring right at me. I leap back.

“You shouldn’t be here. You mustleave,” she hisses. Then she starts banging her walking stick against the back of the door.

I quietly hurry down the stairs and to the kitchen.