Page 32 of The House Guest

‘Thanks. So ... ?’

‘Your questions. Okay. Yes, the car was trying to hit you on purpose. And yes, I do know Eden – or at least, I know of her – but no, I don’t know where she and your girlfriend are.’

He took a long swallow from his own pint, and rapped his knuckles on the table then dragged them across the wood. A gesture of frustration.

‘I should have stayed outside the house. But I was tired and it was raining again. I thought the three of you were staying put for the night.’

I stared at him. ‘You were out there on Friday night? Watching us?’

‘Until the storm started, yes.’

‘Who the hell are you?’

He picked up his beer mat and tore it in half. ‘I’m a man who’s lost his daughter.’

I waited.

‘What did Eden tell you about herself?’ he asked.

‘Not much. She said she’s from a place called Bakersfield, that she’s been living in Los Angeles, that she recently broke up with her boyfriend. A musician.’ She had told me more, hadn’t she, during that drunken last night, but I could only remember small scraps of the story. Living in a roach-infested apartment. A friend she let down. Something about her mother and drugs? It was like trying to read a message through a full pint glass. ‘She told me she knows Jack and Mona – the owners of the house where we’ve been staying – but they deny it. For all I know, everything she told me was a lie.’

‘That’s right. You can’t trust her. But a couple of the details are true. She is from Bakersfield, as far as I know. And she has been living in LA. The part about the musician, though. That’s bullshit.’

Our burgers appeared and Callum took a huge bite, wiping a dribble of ketchup from his beard.

‘You said you’d lost your daughter?’ I said, prompting him to continue.

‘Yeah. Sinead. Eden took her from me.’

‘What do you mean?’

He chewed more of his burger and seemed to stare down a gloomy but vivid memory lane. ‘I thought everything was fine. Sinead’s mother, my wife, died when she was sixteen. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was tough. Tough.’ He swallowed. ‘But Sinead grew up, went to college, had boyfriends, moved into a shared place in the city. She had some problems holding down a job, seemed to flit from one thing to another, but I thought,She’s still young. She’ll figure out what she wants to do. She still came home for lunch every Sunday. Still had time for her old man. And then she told me she’d made a new friend.’

‘Eden?’

‘Met her at some convention. Some hippy-dippy thing, out in the desert. A spiritual festival, she called it. Discovering your true inner self. Building inner strength through meditation. Vegan food and yoga.’ He laughed. ‘I thought it was an excuse to sit around and smoke pot and listen to, shit, I don’t even know. In my day it was the Grateful Dead.’

He looked at me like I would know what kind of music modern-day hippies listened to. When I didn’t respond, he went on: ‘I should have known it was more than that. Ever since her mom passed away, Sinead has been looking for something. Meaning, I guess. I wasn’t much help there. I’m a lapsed Catholic myself and we weren’t a religious household. Maybe it would have been easier if we had been. She could have gone to church. I would have been cool with that. Instead, she spent years searching for something to make her feel better. One week it was politics, the next she was getting into tarot cards. She even called herself a witch for a little while, when she was in high school. She and her friends formed their own coven. But no matter how much she searched, she could never settle.’

‘That sounds familiar.’

He cocked an eyebrow at that.

‘That’s Ruth, too.’

He nodded. ‘And then she met Eden. She came round for dinner after she’d been to this convention, and the way she was talking about her I thought maybe she was a girlfriend or something. You young people, you’re all bisexual or pansexual, fluid this and fluid that.’

I smiled.

‘Anyway, that didn’t bother me at all. I’m not one of these bigots. But Sinead assured me they were just friends. Best friends. It was cool. I met Eden at Sinead’s apartment and I liked her. She seemed a little intense, a little full of herself. But she had something about her. A spark. I could understand why my daughter was so besotted.’

I knew what he meant about that spark.

‘And then I stopped hearing from Sinead so often. She called but she sounded distracted. She started talking about all this weird shit.’

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