Breakfast

Breakfast

I began my breakfast as I did any other day. I cracked two eggs into the cast iron pan. They hit the oil with a sizzle, and the whites began to puff up and fry, forming tiny lace-like holes. The smell of the smoking olive oil hit my nose, and Rosie lifted her black and white head from my feet and licked her chops. Her breakfast would be in the barn today.

The toast popped and the tea kettle on the stove whistled. I took my breakfast and settled at the table, across from where Detectives Alvarez and Simpson sat two months before. That was one week after the funeral, when they’d told me that the one person of interest they’d had in Marianne’s disappearance had somehow slipped through their fingers. Alvarez was patient, he took two cups of tea while we sat and talked about the case. He’d kept in touch since the case’s quiet descent in priority, and we were getting dinner tomorrow night. His age and experience on the force assured him that even a case which had attracted as much attention as Marianne’s was pointless stressing over without a suspect, let alone a body to examine. His sense of finality was comforting.

Simpson was younger and hadn’t yet given up hope. Her eyes still scanned every inch of our family’s house for photos of Marianne (of which there were plenty, something Marianne herself disliked) and made useless observations which I’m sure she hoped would catch me out in some lie. Her pestering continued as she left her tea untouched, and she didn’t stop until Alvarez snapped at her to fall back in line. She didn’t bother to check the rest of the property after that.

I already told them everything I knew from before Marianne’s disappearance. I told them about how I heard the barn owl shriek early that morning. I reasoned that a fox or a hawk had gotten too close to the owl’s nest, or was stalking some small prey too close to the house. I told them that the cry lasted for only a minute, that it was enough to pull me from my sleep but not wake me totally. The scream worked its way into my dream, and I kept sleeping soundly as my sister vanished.

What I’d never told them was that after the funeral and wake, waiting for me on the doorstep was a small brown package tied tightly with red string. Inside were two of Marianne’s fingernails and a shorn clump of her auburn hair.

I burned it. It was the first time I’d lit the fireplace since our parents had passed in August. And when the fire burnt out, I swept out the ashes and scattered them in the woods across the road.

Marianne’s insistence on total privacy hindered the police’s investigation. She didn’t keep a diary, and what social media accounts she did have were sparse. Her friends from University only knew that her family home was a small farm, miles away from the town centre and sheltered amongst tall trees that rang with the cries of owls at night, and kept the old house and barn suspended in a limbo of solitude. But I knew my sister. Her nightly walks lengthened, and she routinely came back from town empty-handed after insisting on going shopping alone. His name on her phone was all I could offer to the detectives at the inception of the case: Shane Graham. And now Shane Graham was gone.

Rosie stirred, shifting from my feet to sit by my side growing ever more impatient with my long breakfast. I offered her the crust of my toast, which she took fervently from my fingers. I cleared my dish into the silver bowl on the bench; my breakfast had chilled and I’d lost my appetite. Rosie followed my every move—Marianne’s absence hit her hard, and now the dog I never initially wanted had become my closest friend and protector.

I knew the detectives suspected Shane Graham. He was a new arrival in town, and newcomers in a town as small as ours attracted attention. Especially a newcomer as attractive and charming as he was. Even now, most townspeople refused to suspect him, and wrote off his leaving as a change of business plans.

I’d seen him in the days leading up to the funeral when I was on one of my rare visits to the town centre getting things ready for the wake. If he knew who I was he didn’t let on as we passed each other in the supermarket. He wore a shirt and cleanly pressed trousers, and I followed him as he swanned through the aisles, greeting other shoppers with every bit of confidence someone with his looks is expected to have. It wasn’t until I was behind him at the checkout that his shirt sleeve shifted, and I saw a series of freshly healed shiny pink scars. Dog’s teeth.

I took more of an interest in him after that. So much of an interest in fact, that when I woke one night to the sound of the barn owl screeching and found him roaming the barn, I invited him in for tea.

“So, how did you know her?” I asked him, stirring his tea at the counter and bringing it into the sitting room.

“oh, she came into the clinic where I worked a few times. I’m sorry, I didn’t know she had a sister” he said, taking his first sip.

“I’m sorry you weren’t invited to the funeral” I replied, “I had no idea you even existed until today”, a lie, of course.

“It’s fine. I visited a few times but you were never home” He smiled. We were both lying now. Marianne obviously hadn’t let on that her older sister had suffered a severe breakdown after the passing of her parents. She must not have told him much at all. Maybe that’s why he didn’t know about the dog.

When his head started to drop and he tried to crawl from the chair I bound his ankles and wrists and dragged him to the barn. The sleeping pills which calmed my night terrors were useful in more ways than I initially thought.

When he came to I started asking my questions. The heavy chains and vice grips that had remained untouched in the barn were dust free and slick with red after I was done with my interrogation.

I just wanted to know where she was. I wanted to bring her home, to reunite her with our parents on the property where we grew up. I failed to protect her, but I could give her a proper burial.

I remember he laughed. Above me the barn owl screeched, at my side, Rosie snarled and bared her teeth, and he broke out in fits of laughter. She was gone, he told me.

“Gone where?” I asked, wrapping the end of the chain around my wrist, ready to swing again.

“She’s gone in me. Lost in me. She’s me now, I have her in me with all the others.” His eyes were wide, a blue which had been so attractive was now maniacal under the harsh fluorescent bulb in the barn. The blood from the beating of the chain stained his teeth red, and I understood. There would be no burial, because there was nothing left of her to bury. That brown package, whose contents were now ash scattered in the woods, was all that he left, all that he couldn’t digest.

And so now, I stepped into the barn with Rosie at my side. I strode towards the small pen at the back which kept Shane. After removing most of his legs to give to Rosie and the owl above us, I’d had to fashion a collar to keep him chained to the barn. I threw his food bowl down and readied a knife at the barn’s wooden work bench to prepare some more for Rosie and the owl. Today I’d begin on the arms.

Smiling, I looked at the faithful border collie who sat so patiently at my side.

“Ready for some breakfast?”