The Underneath Read online

  THE UNDERNEATH

  Melanie Finn

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  About The Underneath

  Ex-journalist Kay and her family are spending the summer in a rented farmhouse in Vermont. Kay is haunted by her traumatic past in Africa, and is struggling with her troubled marriage and the constraints of motherhood. Then her husband is called away unexpectedly on business and Kay finds herself alone with the children, obsessed by the idea that something terrible has happened to the owners of the house. The locals are reticent when she asks about their whereabouts; and she finds disturbing writing scrawled across one of the walls.

  As she starts to investigate she becomes involved with a local man, Ben, whose life is complicated by his own violent past, his involvement in a drug-trafficking operation, and his desire to adopt an abused child. Their two stories collide and intertwine, heading towards a dramatic denouement. The Underneath is a tense, intelligent, beautifully written thriller which is also a considered exploration of violence, both personal and national, and whether it can ever be justified.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Underneath

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Acknowledgments

  About Melanie Finn

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  For Molly and Pearl

  my bright star, my deep sea

  1

  Very quickly, the thick bush obscured the town, vanished it like a magic trick behind a curtain of green. Seldom is the disconnection so sudden. We were used to the slow fade: you can drive out of such African towns for several miles as bean plots and shabby huts fritter into wilderness. But fear kept Kitgum tightly contained, people cordoned inside the perimeter. They had abandoned their shambas and their homes and their ancestral graves, and within one rainy season, Uganda’s voracious herbage had taken repossession. It was very green and very quiet and you’d never guess how families had so recently toiled upon the land. There was no trace, not even a path.

  For 30 minutes, we just drove, hypnotized by the flat, straight road, the simmering green. The horizontal banality of the landscape became hypnotic, almost reassuring. It lulled us. And then: a government roadblock, so sudden, Marco slammed on the brakes. The soldiers demanded our passports, scrutinized Marco. In the photo he looked like Carlos the Jackal; you’d never want to let him into your country.

  “This is you, Marco Morals.”

  I bit my lip to suppress an ill-timed snicker.

  “Moral-es,” Marco corrected.

  A young soldier stepped in, examining the name for himself. “Why is the E not silent?”

  “It’s Spanish,” Marco explained. “The ‘-es’ in Spanish is pronounced. Frijol-es—beans. Not holes, like English.”

  The soldier nodded, “I see.” Then flipped open my passport, “And you are Kay Norton.”

  I nodded.

  “Kay is a name? I have never heard this name. It is a letter, yes? An initial? What is your real name?”

  “Kay. That’s it. K-A-Y.”

  “Perhaps your passport is false.”

  Marco brought forth a couple of packs of Rothmans to change the subject. “Would you lads like a smoke?” The soldiers began arguing about how to divvy up the smokes. So I handed them two six-packs of Coke. As there were five of them, an intense negotiation began. Was one Coke worth three cigarettes or two?

  When you travel to such places, with such intentions as ours, you must be prepared. You will need not just water, food, insect repellent and extra fuel; but cigarettes, matches, sodas, snacks, money in small bills, phone vouchers. Mostly, you will need your wit. You will need to be funny and friendly because these boys in uniform teeter between boredom and fear, and they are heavily armed, and they want the comfort of your good humor.

  At first, they refused to let us pass. They told us it was too dangerous, some other journalists had disappeared the week before. But we promised them more cigarettes on the way back, so they let us through. Marco’s contact had told us to continue on to a village 15 miles past the roadblock, to wait there for an escort.

  The village was, of course, ruined and deserted. All the metal roofing, furniture, and doors had been scavenged. I had in mind the Beatrix Potter story, The Tale of Two Bad Mice. I imagined General Christmas’s soldiers, like Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, carrying off the wooden benches from the school and the plastic table cloths from the small café and prying off the roof from the shacks. I had the impression of mischief: children let loose to undo the adult world. Because they were children, these merchants of horror, some as young as nine. We journalists jokingly called them The Elves.

  Marco and I wandered together as he took photographs. I doubted he would ever use any of the images, but we were fidgety, we had only our professional habits. It was hot, we didn’t know how long we’d be waiting for contact. An hour passed. Marco finally stopped photographing and fiddled with the settings on his Nikon. We sat in the shade of a charred wall and sweated. Another hour, and another. The sun down-shifted and time felt gappy—ill-fitting, itchy. I started not to care anymore. What did we want with General Christmas anyway? Whatever we printed simply fed his hunger for publicity. He had no insight, he had no grand plan, no sense of justice. He was just another asshole with a big gun.

  I got up and walked off for a pee—not far, just the other side of the wall, what must have been a pen for goats. The fencing had been pilfered—probably for firewood, but the holes for the posts remained. Sockets in the earth. The word socket rolled around my head, one of those perfectly innocent words. A hole once filled with something necessary. A dark space, emptied out.

  Beside one of the holes—the sockets—there was a pile of rags in th
e dust. I splayed the rags open with my foot. It was a woman’s dress, ripped open from the neck down the back. Possibly, she’d worn it over another dress or wrap, the way very poor people layer clothes because they only have pieces and if they put the pieces together they can make something whole.

  But, when I knelt down to examine the fabric, I could see the rusty patina, thick and dried and flaking. There was no other evidence of what had happened here: no smears of blood, no grooves of desperate fingernails in the dust. The crumbling walls were deaf to the screams or sobs of the woman who had died here, the sparrows had turned away and refused to witness. Why watch when you can’t help, when you can’t understand the human purpose of knives and guns, of inflicting pain just for the hell of it?

  Deliberately, I put my hand on the fabric. I needed to be sure of its reality, the congregation of molecules. It was all that remained of a woman, maybe just a girl, who’d walked barefoot every day to collect water. Her bones, her body were buried or scattered, consecrated by jackals, hyenas and maggots and scarabs. Selfishly, I felt my own fear of obliteration. Like a climber losing a foothold, I felt the need to grab on, cling tight, but what to? The air, the dust, the still, indifferent afternoon.

  General Christmas’s contact never came, and as evening leaned in, Marco “Morals” and I drove back to Kitgum. We drank too much cheap Ugandan beer, we had obligatory sex in the bed that was too small, and when we were finished, he immediately fell asleep, and I could not stand the feel of his body, the smell of him, the shabby whiteness of his skin like the underbelly of a fish. But mostly, it was his gender. Somewhere inside his brain, I was sure, the place he dreamed or pocketed his masturbatory fantasies, lurked that enduring and atavistic hatred of women.

  2

  Ten years later Kay felt the weight of the hammer in her hand.

  She imagined the heavy tow of gravity as she lifted it back and up, the beginning of the swing, then the arcing of her hand through the air. Up, up, above the back of his head. And she imagined the tipping point, where cause irrevocably becomes effect.

  My husband, she thought. He’s my husband.

  Michael stepped forward, out of reach, and Kay dropped the hammer back down to her side. She was amazed to find how she’d committed to the swing, her hand all the way back and up, shoulder height.

  She exhaled.

  “Maybe this is where they hid the bodies,” Michael joked. He was moving straight ahead of her, poking about in the dark with the flashlight. Something was banging in the far corner of the cellar. The wind started up last night and then this incessant, insistent bang, bang-bang, bang, bang-bang.

  Waving the flashlight back and forth, Michael scanned for the light switch. There was one at the top of the stairs but when he’d flipped it, nothing had happened. At last, he saw the empty socket hanging from a naked wire.

  “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled, batting it out of the way. “The wiring is from the ’50s. I bet the whole house is like this. Behind the walls.”

  Wires tangled and twisted behind the walls, Kay imagined, the danger unseen. The wrong wires touch, the house burns down. Obviously, with such imminent danger, they should move out, right away; they should abandon their summer plans, run from this pretty white farmhouse, so lonely and serene and picturesque among the green hills.

  But Michael kept going, and she followed. They were battle-hardened, after all.

  The flashlight illuminated a neat and sparse sub terrain: white walls, a clean workbench, a stack of sturdy wooden cabinets and drawers labeled “Wrenches,” “Screwdrivers,” “Saws”; a tier of metal shelves stacked with two large grey plastic Walmart tubs, “Quilts” and “Union Bank 2009–2016.” She noted that the floor, too, was white.

  If we had a basement, Kay thought, it would contain heaps and piles, willy-nilly, what we don’t really want anymore but can’t quite throw away: Freya’s baby clothes, Michael’s early scripts, my journals, Tom’s Thomas the Tank Engine collection. But we don’t have a basement, no one does in London. We have a storage unit in Luton that we never visit.

  Then she thought about the hammer. Already, she felt vaguely cartoonish—she hadn’t meant it. But there was a residue on her tongue, a metallic taste.

  “Look.” Michael aimed the light into the darkness.

  A doorway through the cement wall, utter blackness beyond and the distinct bang, bang-bang. There was a horror-movie feeling to this and Kay almost reached out to touch Michael and make a creepy noise. Oooooo-oooooo. Almost.

  He was ahead of her, poking about with the flashlight. He was saying something something I-think-it’s-alive something something but she was wondering: What if he’d turned and seen me wielding the hammer, and shouted, “Crazy bitch!” and caught my arm and held me at bay, his eyes on mine?

  No one would believe him, not really. It would be a funny story he’d tell at parties, with other couples, oh, the time Kay got so mad she tried to hit me with a hammer, ha, ha, ha. But we’d know, Kay thought, Michael and I, we’d know—finally—where we stand. It would be a relief, such honesty.

  He was saying: “I think there’s something alive back in there.”

  In there, through the dark room, at the far end, a fluttering of feathery grey light. They entered the other room, this without a door, the door off its hinges, propped against the wall. Louder, the banging kept up. There was a smell, earthy, muddy, moldy—more mineral than vegetable, more vegetable than animal.

  Michael tripped and dropped the flashlight. The narrow beam rolled across the floor. Kay retrieved it, she scoured the floor—there, the culprit: a loose brick. Michael gave it a peevish kick and it clinked against a stack of white paint cans.

  “Can I have the flashlight back?” he said.

  She handed him the hammer instead. He looked at it. He sighed. He sighed so much these days, his silent sighing, his loud sighing, his infinite patience, it meant so much to him to be patient with her.

  The object ahead of them shifted back and forth in the beam of light. It was a cat, she could now see. Caught somehow. Caught in a trap. The trap had jammed against the window frame. And the banging was the animal’s ceaseless attempt to escape through the window. The cat’s front left leg was in the trap and the leg was already sheering off, exposed bone and flesh. In not too much time the cat would succeed in pulling its leg off. It hissed, a withered, whispered protest.

  *

  An hour later they were waiting in the vet’s, the cat mewing and spitting and scratching but safe inside a Walmart tub. Kay had dumped out the quilts, using one of them—quite lovely, handmade—to throw over the cat and wrangle it and the trap into the tub.

  “The doctor is with another patient,” the receptionist said, and Kay thought this quaint, a dog or cat as a patient. Did they wear little gowns that flapped open at the back; did they sit for chilly hours on a paper-covered table with year-old People magazines?

  Loud droning from the lumber yard next door periodically piqued into a high squeal as the blade cut loose another log. Kay could see a light fog of sawdust, and how, if the window were opened, this would enter and lay like a fine dust on the surface of everything. Michael was on his iPhone, scrolling through his many important messages, so she picked up a loose copy of a newspaper, the local Caledonian-Record.

  She always read the local papers, old habit. In Nairobi, she’d spent hours scanning the obituary pages, the faces of those “Promoted to Glory.” The obituaries were in a kind of code: “sudden death” usually meant a car crash or violent mugging; in a young person, “long illness” meant AIDS. There were often multiple obituaries for the same day, which suggested a large accident, a bus or multiple collision.

  The Caledonian-Record’s pages were dominated by drugs, domestic violence, child abuse, ATV accidents, and minor fraud cases. There was a new drugs task force, a town clerk was facing charges of obstruction of justice for refusing to turn over property tax collection records, a local high school teacher had successfully scaled Mt. McKinley,
“The biggest challenge of my life!”

  On page two, above the police blotter:

  Rescued Toddler Lived in Home with Moldy Food and Dog Feces

  Mother Charged, Ordered To Clean Up Before Seeing Child

  BY BRADY WILTON Staff Writer

  SHEFFIELD—A toddler found wandering nearly naked on Potter Road Monday in freezing weather lived in filthy conditions, surrounded by dog feces, and had curdled milk to drink, Vermont Police say.

  The boy, two and a half years old, was rescued by Sheffield Selectman Bill Morris and his wife and another passerby, Feller Morgan, and then police and the state stepped in to find the child’s mother and take the child into state custody. The boy, dressed only in a dirty diaper, was found after 11 a.m. on Potter Road when the temperature on a state police cruiser was 26 degrees, Trooper Denise Polito said in her report. The boy was shivering and his lips were blue.

  According to Polito, the child’s mother, Michelle Whitehead, 23, of Sheffield, didn’t know that her boy had gotten out of her trailer and walked away.

  Whitehead told police she had just checked on the boy 15 minutes prior to when police knocked on her door in an attempt to identify the child. Trooper Polito said the boy had been gone from the trailer an hour and a half by the time they talked to the boy’s mother.

  Whitehead pleaded not guilty this week in Orleans Superior Court—Criminal Division to reckless endangerment and providing false information to police.

  Whitehead told police she was taking prescription drugs, including a painkiller called hydrocodone, Lorazepam for anxiety and Cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxer. Syringes and a small amount of heroin were also discovered on the premises.

  Judge Henry Van der Linde ordered Whitehead to clean up moldy and rotting food on the counters and scattered around the trailer and to clean up the dog feces in an indoor kennel where she was keeping a dog before being allowed to see her son in her home.

  Why were they always smiling, Kay wondered, the children in abuse cases? No matter what was being done, what horror visited upon them day after day, these children still smiled for the camera. She looked closer at the boy. She could not detect fear. Perhaps compliance? Smile for Mommy.