Chapter Eight.

CHAPTER EIGHT

↠ Cassie

"In the end, we'll all become stories."

― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

I will now share the first half of a well-known story in Rue that could’ve very well been manipulated to suit a sensationalised narrative. I cannot assure you that everything I’m about to tell you is true, but it is gruesome and entertainig, and nothing captivates the human mind quite like a tragedy. The second half of the story you will learn later on.

There once was a splendid man by the name of Antoine Rabiot who was a formidable figure in English society for a variety of reasons. He had immigrated to Merseyside from Marseille when he was just a young boy with just enough money for a one-bedroom flat and one meal a day to satisfy the needs of the six people in his family.

But the story of Antoine was one of rags to riches, and it was often divulged with excess to inspire personal growth. Antoine overcame the odds and became one of Merseyside’s most sought-after lawyers. He was a successful man by all means, loved by his family and by the community alike.

He was the type of man you would see in the newspaper often, either because he mingled quite well with the country’s elite or because his distinguished wife had hosted a charity event or because his two beautiful teenage daughters continued to excel at absolutely everything they did.

They were the very definition of a picture-perfect family. It seemed unfathomable that there would ever be any cracks in the foundation of their home. But there are many things to be said about the skeletons that Antoine kept in his closet, all of which came to light in the most unfortunate way.

The rot that putrefied the Rabiot family’s core came from Antoine’s many infidelities. His mistresses were always younger women. Some were university students who needed money, others were daughters of his associates who were only looking for a bit of fun. But they were all pretty and thin and tall, and not only did they make Antoine feel young again, but they made him feel attractive and desirable.

On one October day three years before our current setting, Antoine set out to London under the pretext that he was to meet with a law firm of a name he never cared to mention to his family. He was wearing a navy blue suit, had his suitcase filled with old paperwork, and had taken all of his best garments as luggage. He then travelled to the capital with his mistress for a total of three days while his family supposedly remained oblivious as to how he was really spending his time away from home.

Upon his return to Rue, he discovered a crime scene that would make of his family’s name an infamous one.

I personally never got involved in any of the conversations surrounding the Rabiots, finding it bizarre how desensitised the general public was to what had perhaps been the county’s biggest tragedy in modern times. To think of them was to think of death, to think of the unimaginable corners of the human mind. What went on to be known as the Rabiot Murder House attracted the attention of people from all corners of society, but I’d never bothered to travel the forty-minute distance just to admire the macabre nature of a building.

I was, however, willing to travel the distance to visit Ivy on one uneventful Thursday afternoon. The invitation had been extended in a distinctly abrupt manner, very unlike what I was used to. We had both simply expressed our boredom and she proceeded to invite me to her place, unaware that she’d been the very first person to ever do that.

I arrived at the commodious and rustic home of Maeve Olsen, who housed Ivy and a black cat by the name of Mavis, at half-past six.

Maeve’s home had the essence of an old lady plastered all over, from the papered walls to the smell of talcum. To my eyes, Maeve Olsen was nothing but the very precise archetype of an adorable old lady. Her frame was small and hunched, with greyed-coloured hair that was always pinned up neatly. Her hazel eyes were enlarged by the thick circular glasses that framed her round face. But I had heard from Etienne that she had been a mean-spirited person earlier on in life and that she still maintained some of those traits, albeit with lessened energy.

“You must be Cathy,” she said to me upon my arrival.

“Cassie,” I corrected with a polite grin stretching my lips.

“Well, Ivy’s upstairs in her room. Unless she’s in the kitchen or in the living room, in which case she’s in the kitchen or the living room. Don’t mind Mavis. She doesn’t bite anyone who does not deserve it. But she’s a very good judge of character.”

Mavis the cat did look like a good judge of character to me.

It was this particular set of circumstances that allowed me to have a clear view of the backyard of the infamous murder house from Ivy’s bedroom window. “The place is a hot spot for creeps now. The other day I saw a homeless bloke wanking off in there,” Ivy said to me as she rummaged through her belongings, looking for a sweatshirt she suspected Maeve had stolen.

“Lovely sight, I’m sure.”

“I felt seduced.”

I turned to face her just as she’d found the item of clothing she’d been searching for in one of the bottom drawers. “Is it not weird living here?” I asked. “So close to this place.”

She shrugged nonchalantly before draping the grey sweatshirt over her head. “I moved here not too long ago. Don’t even know the whole story of what happened to the Rabiots. I suppose it’s not eerie if you don’t think about it much.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded as I stretched lazily in her bed. My father had killed himself in my apartment building and I still managed to exist in that place despite the heavy history. I never thought of it as eerie. Just unfortunate.

Ivy joined me in her bed, and we both rested on our backs, looking up at the textured ceiling with very little happening in our minds. “Does talking about, like, your addiction make you uncomfortable?”

“What do you want to know?”

“I was just wondering whether everything I’ve heard about you is true.”

“Depends on what you’ve heard.” Five seconds of silence. “But mostly yeah.”

“Are you clean now?”

“Unfortunately.”

“So you miss using?”

“More than anything in the world.” My chest felt heavy. The oxygen in my lungs suddenly failed me. The texture in the ceiling became a puzzle I couldn’t figure out. “A lot of people do drugs because they want an escape. They like feeling numb. Those small moments of nothingness are heaven to some people. But what I miss most is actually being able to feel something.”

“Why do you stay clean then?”

My hands balled into fists. My throat suddenly felt dry. The three words I wanted to say drowned in my mouth. Because of Etienne.

My mother never shed a tear after I’d overdosed. Etienne cried so hard he had to puke. “I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have you, Cass,” was the first thing he said to me when he visited me at the hospital. Every night after my release, he would cry and beg me to stay clean, saying he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if I wasn’t around.

The withdrawal was the most difficult thing I ever had to live through. I thought I was better off killing myself. I thought the world would’ve been a better place without me. But Etienne wanted me to stay, and I loved Etienne more than I loved myself, so I was willing to do just about anything he asked me to.

That’s when I first discovered just how addictive he could be.

I shrugged. “Just figured I might give it a try. What about you? Did you really try killing yourself?”

Ivy chuckled. She did not seem uncomfortable with my enquiring. “It was a gross over-exaggeration. I wasn’t necessarily trying. Just neglecting my livelihood by drinking too much alcohol and accidentally drinking a little antifreeze.”

“Are you shitting me?”

She doubled over with laughter, and although I didn’t find her situation funny, I did find some amusement in her humour. “I was living on my own in this caravan park and so I did all sorts of stupid shit. Drinking antifreeze was at the top of the list, for sure. But I wasn’t trying to kill myself. It was a genuine mistake. I was wasted and I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. I think I got the bottles mixed up or something? I don’t know. I just remember throwing up all over the yard and having the neighbours drive me to the hospital. I was, like, minutes away from permanent kidney damage.”

“That’s awful.”

“And a bit funny, you have to admit,” she added with a laugh. “Anyway, the only person from my family they could get a hold of while I was at the hospital was my uncle Charles, James’ dad. And he was absolutely mortified when he saw the state I was in and the condition I was living in. He thought I was out to kill myself. So he actually sent me to a mental institution to have me monitored and then dragged my ass over here because he did not trust me to live on my own.”

I lowered myself again and we rested in a peaceful silence that extended for over a minute before Ivy put an end to it. “It feels good to be able to share this. People at school would never let me hear the end of it if they found out.”

“Shit, I was probably doing heroin while you were drinking antifreeze. Rest assured I’m not going to judge you.”

It felt good to have Ivy. She was troubled in a beautifully unconventional way. The trials of her teenage years had been far more complex than some hormonal changes and a desire to fit in. I didn’t know the entirety of her story at the time, but I had picked up on the fact that her parents were not around and she used to casually abuse drinking. And it felt good to have someone who was unapologetic about not being well.

But it was not long until we heard a car’s engine die outside, followed by the sound of three familiar voices joyously greeting Maeve. Ten seconds passed, and James Olsen kicked open the door to Ivy’s bedroom with a wide grin that I’d always known to indicate mischief. Behind him, River entered with that friendly disposition that he always seemed to carry. Behind him stood Etienne, looking absolutely horrified by the sight of me.

Their arrival had been an impromptu one, made to justify their absence at a party they had no interest in attending. River and James greeted me without bringing too much attention to how out of the ordinary this was for me. Etienne’s greeting had been considerably more strained—just an acknowledging nod, with his gaze meeting mine for only a quarter of a second.

He’d been pretending we hadn’t almost kissed a couple of nights before. I had opened the door of possibility only for him to slam it shut in my face. It was a bit embarrassing. We had not talked about it, but the following day he had slept with his back turned to me and that had been enough for me to understand that the entire ordeal was still heavy on his mind.

I didn’t regret trying. I couldn’t have possibly misread all of the signs. I couldn’t have been too off in my assumption that he sometimes thought of me as more than a friend. But he’d been keeping to himself now more than ever and the distance he’d been trying to establish between us made me fearful that my assumptions had been wishful thinking. That I was risking a very beautiful friendship in the process of trying to make a reality out of a childish fantasy of mine.

“Why is Peter not with you?” I asked no one in particular but also naively hoped that Etienne would be the one to respond.

“Because we got lucky tonight,” James replied.

“He’s off at some party,” River explained, pulling a bottle of vodka from his backpack but stopping halfway and looking at me with alarmed eyes. “Uh, are you okay with… this? I can put it away. I don’t even drink and those two idiots can wait until we’re—”

“It’s okay,” I interrupted. “I’m trying to stay off heavy drugs. A little bit of vodka is not going to kill me.”

James and River exchanged careful looks. Etienne’s stern gaze was set on the ground.

“Alright. Just a little bit. And I will be monitoring you,” James said, feigning a tone of authority while keeping a tender smile plastered on his lips. He then pointed over at Ivy. “If anything, we should keep the booze away from this one.”

James passed me the bottle. I could feel Etienne’s eyes on me.

Talk to me. Tell me not to do it. Say something.

He didn’t.

“It’s a good thing Ivy likes you,” James told me an hour into our evening. Everyone but River had been drinking vodka with coke, and somehow we had managed to amuse ourselves with open conversations that became more entertaining the more alcohol we consumed.

My attention had been focused on Etienne in an attempt to get our gazes to meet. If I would’ve been better at reading the room then I would’ve understood that this was only further irritating him, that I was crossing one of our unspoken limits by doing so. But I was frankly getting tired of those stupid boundaries that had never once worked in my favour.

We could cross over them without any trouble. An alarm would not go off, Etienne. This was not a highly-secured perimeter. It was just you, inside your head, trapped inside those four walls that had fooled you into a false sense of security. The world would continue to turn if we stepped over those boundaries. We would be alright.

“Now you don’t have to worry about waking up with a dead mouse under your pillow,” James continued.

“I only did that once, and I was eleven then. And our cousin George had it coming.”

There was silence. Then I asked, “How did you get the dead mouse?”

“It sneaked inside my trunk—”

“That’s how nasty it must have been.”

“—and I accidentally crushed it with my books.”

“Accidentally.”

…

We all stared at the house now in front of us, which appeared to the naked eye as ordinarily abandoned. Its windows were boarded up and its maintenance had been severely neglected. The white exterior was in desperate need of several coats of paint to regain its presentable facade again. Dust and cobwebs covered every discernible surface.

However, to do justice to the memory of a building that is very vividly engraved in my memory, I must note that it did not look like a house that had been in an arduous fight with time. Nature had not yet putrefied its foundations.

“The Rabiot house,” Etienne muttered under his breath as he carefully admired the two-story building’s every detail. He looked up at its windows, his mouth agape and his eyes busy as they pictured a scene that was taking place in his imagination.

Our drunken curiosity had taken us out of Maeve’s home and into what had once been the Rabiots’ property. The winds were particularly unforgiving that Thursday evening, but we thought very little of the discomfort brought by the weather when we were seeking to do something so outrageously foolish that it outweighed any other questionable decision we made that night.

“Etienne, don’t go in there,” River hissed. Etienne did not listen. No one in the group did.

Etienne was the first to step inside the house’s porch. Its wooden deck creaked under his weight and I worried that it would not be able to support all of us at the same time. We all stepped in regardless.

Ivy peered in through the small gaps in the boarded windows and was greeted by still darkness that gave nothing away. “I’ve come to have a look around before—”

“Of course you have,” James interrupted.

“—because everyone was making a big fuss about the murders. But there’s nothing eerie about it. It’s just an abandoned house now.”

The once-white porch went all the way around the stately home, and in a tipsy haze that made every idea seem like a good one, we did not hesitate to slowly wander off to the left side of the property, from which we could look at the broad and empty backyard that I had previously admired from Ivy’s bedroom. We saw nothing that called for our attention.

The silence that engulfed us felt heavy, and only Ivy felt daring enough to break it. “And what happened to them, exactly?”

“Well, we don’t really know,” River muttered. “No one does. Antoine Rabiot travelled out of town one weekend. Left his wife, two daughters, and his dog behind. Apparently, when he came back only the dog was alive.”

Both Etienne and James had begun following Ivy’s lead of peering in through the gaps in the boarded windows, only they did so with a less assertive attitude. Whereas Ivy was searching in the hopes of finding a shape in the clunk of darkness, the boys were looking tentatively, clearly nervous about perceiving movement of any sort.

I finished River’s reply for him. “Police soon found out that he’d been having an affair, that he’d been with his mistress that same weekend, so that immediately made him a suspect. The murders had happened only a couple of hours before he found the bodies, and his plane had landed earlier that day, so there were a couple of hours that police couldn’t account for. He said he’d been with his mistress, but police were also suspicious of her and did not trust his alibi. Everything pointed to him and maybe her as well.”

“So he killed his family to be with his mistress?” Ivy asked, standing on the tip of her toes to peer through a small gap in the boarded windows.

Etienne shrugged, stepping back and dusting his hands off the cobweb he had accidentally touched. “That’s what people say. That he wanted to get them out of the way. Also, they were known for being very religious and you know how people like that can be about divorce. They think actual murder is more acceptable.”

“Plus the life insurances,” James added as he peered through a separate window. “Never forget the life insurances.”

“He restrained them with a rope before he eventually strangled them,” Etienne continued on as if James hadn’t intervened. “Apparently, the bodies were a bit mutilated as well, but authorities never said how. So it fits the police’s theory that this was a very personal attack.”

River and I watched on with amusement as the other three tried to make sense of the indiscernible shadows inside, their whispers entertaining the possibility of ghosts plaguing the place. ‘Do you think this place is haunted?’ ‘People tried to play it out like it is, but nothing came out of it.’ ‘Did you see that thing move over there in the corner?’

“He strangled them with the rope?” Ivy asked Etienne.

River responded instead. “No, no. He strangled them with his hands. He used the ropes to tie them up in really uncomfortable positions. Apparently, they looked like contortionists when they were found.”

Ivy turned around, far more engrossed with the house’s history than she had been at the start of the evening. “And was he found guilty?”

Etienne stood with his shoulder pressed against a dirtied wall, releasing a deep sigh and letting his eyes linger on mine for a split second before they returned to Ivy. “He was a good lawyer who knew great lawyers. Police couldn’t keep him in custody because they did not have solid evidence. But he ended up sneaking his way back in here, to hang himself in his home before they were able to try him for his family’s murder.”