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“The letter asked her to call a number at the exam board and talk to one of their examiners. So Emily rang up and from what she said, she was completely taken in at first, but then something tipped her off—I think she heard something on April’s end that made her twig that the caller was at the college, a bell chiming or something. And she realized. She said April didn’t even apologize, just laughed idiotically and said it was Emily’s fault for being so stuck up and pleased with her own intellect. And then she hung up.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Hannah puts her hand to her face. Suddenly so many things make sense. Sorry. Work. Of course Emily didn’t come to April’s after-party. She must have been sitting in her room fuming and trying to figure out what to do. What would she have done?
I will end her.
Go to the college authorities? Complain to a tutor?
Whatever it was, she didn’t have time to act. Unless…
The thought comes unbidden, rushing in like chill sea water racing up a beach to soak you unexpectedly.
Unless she did.
But Hannah pushes that away. It’s ridiculous. Emily might have had a grudge against April, but she wouldn’t kill her, would she?
“Why would April do that?” she says, now looking up at Hugh, almost pleading with him for answers. “Why would she do something so horrible to Emily?”
“Well…” Hugh says slowly. “I might be wrong but I’ve always wondered… I think perhaps April had given Ryan an ultimatum, and it didn’t go the way she thought it would.”
“You mean…”
“I don’t know,” Hugh says, very gently. He puts out his hand and takes Hannah’s. “But… the way you and Will felt about each other, towards the end it was… well, it wasn’t obvious exactly, but I don’t think you had to be Freud to see it. And April was nothing if not good at reading people.”
Hannah goes hot, and then cold.
“You mean you knew? April knew?”
“I don’t think she knew anything. But I think there was a hell of a lot of tension that last week. And I think maybe April had already decided to cut her losses with Will and move on. But Ryan…”
“But Ryan wouldn’t play ball,” Hannah says slowly. “Because although he’d been messing around with April, he loved Emily.”
“It’s the only reason I can think of,” Hugh says with a shrug. “Why she would have been so frankly horrible to Emily. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between them, but there wasn’t much actual animosity. But that last prank—that smacked of real hate.”
Hannah says nothing. She is sitting there, chewing on her lip, trying to count back. As far as she can recall, Emily was perfectly civil to April in the week running up to the party. Which means she probably didn’t get the letter until Saturday morning. If it was in her pigeonhole on the morning of the party, then April must have posted it the day before, and she must have taken a few days before that to write it and mock up the headed paper. Which means that on Monday, when they were all at the theater, supporting April for her first night, raising glasses and smiling and telling each other how awesome April was, April herself was probably already planning this.
Hannah is remembering. Remembering the tension between Ryan and April, the polite smiles, the teeth-gritted argument with Will. Had April known she was going to do this to Emily all along, even while she was smiling and sharing drinks and inviting her over for coffee? She must have done. There’s no other explanation.
For a moment Hannah feels quite sick.
Then something occurs to her. If April was angry at Emily, who had after all done nothing apart from being Ryan’s girlfriend, how furious must April have been with Ryan for rejecting her? Furious enough to fake a pregnancy test?
In which case, maybe April wasn’t pregnant when she died?
But then if she was pregnant, and she had just been rejected by the father of her unborn baby, then perhaps that would explain her vicious overreaction to Emily.
Oh God. She has to stop going back and forth like this, guessing and then second-guessing. She has to find someone who actually knows what April was thinking that week. She’s just not sure who that could be.
For the next hour they talk about other topics, as if by unspoken agreement. The baby. How Will is doing at work. Hugh tells her some funny anecdotes about his patients, and she counters with some of her more eccentric customers. It’s only later, when they’re leaving, paying their bill, and Hugh is helping her into her coat, that something else occurs to her about Hugh’s revelation. Something that makes her stomach twist with a strange mix of anxiety and guilt, and makes her stop, coat half-on, half-off, so that Hugh has to gently cough and remind her where she is.
If April was that angry with Emily—poor Emily, who had done nothing wrong at all—how angry must she have been with the girl Will was, maybe, falling for? How angry was she with Hannah?
AFTER
The next few days and weeks had the cadence of a waking nightmare, and afterwards Hannah could only remember that time in jolting, disordered snatches.
First the running feet, the porters and the college staff pushing her aside to climb to the stairs, Hugh standing in the hallway, saying in a cracked and desperate voice, “No one should touch her until the police get here, please, no one should touch anything in the room.”
Then the sound of sirens, uniformed police taping off the landing, the blue lights of the massed squad cars reflecting back from the building opposite on Pelham Street and flickering off the still, black waters of the river.
