The Devil Inside, page 18
Phil flipped open the roll and picked one with the nastiest looking serrated blade. ‘Here.’ He held out the knife to Mel.
Mel didn’t move. She glanced at the knife then back at the boxes, her jaw squaring, face even paler than before. But then she reached out slowly and took the knife from him, her other hand clenching and unclenching at her side.
‘Do you want me to do it?’
She paused. Nodded.
He lifted one of the boxes onto the floor and cut open the top. He looked up at Mel. Her gaze flicked from the open box, back to the unopened ones.
He grabbed one box after the next, placing them in a row before cutting them open.
He looked up at her when done. She simply stared down at the openings of each box, unmoving, mouth a tight line, her eyes dark and glistening. Then she looked at the trunk. ‘It’s locked. Papa said there was no key.’
‘Really? Well, I’m sure Karl has some tools we can use to get it open if we can’t find a key.’
She gave a jerky nod but still didn’t move closer.
‘Do you want me …?’
Her chin firmed. ‘No. I will.’
She lowered herself gingerly to kneel on the floor in front of the middle box and pushed back the flaps. She must have been holding her breath as she did it because she exhaled loudly as she stared at the contents. Then, like a robot, she reached in and pulled the items out one after the other.
Claire and Calvin’s neighbour had packed these plain boxes with clothes and keepsakes she thought Mel might like to keep; well-worn coats, boots and shoes, a striped jumper and one with a reindeer on it, a knobbly scarf, an equally knobbly beanie.
She held onto the scarf and beanie after pulling them out, held them to her face for a moment before putting them aside reverently, then went back to unpacking.
When the box was empty, she turned to the next one.
Inside were two garment bags. She unzipped them, sniffle-laughed.
‘What?’
‘Their Sunday best. Mama made Papa buy a new suit to go with a new dress she bought for a neighbour’s fancy wedding. He wasn’t one to waste money so he agreed as long as they’d get use out of them. Mama said they’d wear them to church every Sunday.’ She sniffled. ‘Papa hadn’t gone much before, but he did after that. He always looked like the cat who’d got all the cream as he walked her down the aisle of the church every Sunday wearing their fancy clothes.’ She ran her hand over the burgundy lace dress with a silvery-shimmery thing underneath. She sniffed again and zipped up the bag, then opened the other one to show a lovely dark navy suit with burgundy and silver tie and pocket kerchief to match the dress. She lifted the suit to her face and closed her eyes. ‘So soft. It still smells a little of him.’ She looked up at him, eyes full of tears.
He wanted to do something. Say something. But he could do nothing but smile softly at her.
Mel closed up the bag and set it aside, then hand trembling a little, reached for the cloth bags underneath. They held a good pair of shoes each and another smaller bag held a fancy broach and a tie pin.
She made a small noise as she pulled out a double photo frame. It held a photo of Claire and Calvin on their wedding day and Mel and Phil on theirs.
‘You sent them a number of photos of our wedding,’ he said softly.
She nodded and set it aside with the clothing.
She peered into the bottom of the box and let out a little cry. ‘Krolik.’ She pulled out a rag-eared and patched up blue and grey fluffy bunny from the box and cuddled it under her chin. ‘I missed you my little Krolik.’ She turned to him, eyes shining. ‘Is it okay if I give Krolik to Arwen?’
He nodded. ‘Sure. She’ll love it.’
‘I loved him so much. I remember the panic one day when I’d misplaced him. Mama and Papa almost tore the house apart to find him—I was apparently unable to sleep without him.’ She squeezed it, but no sound came out. ‘Mama told me it used to make a noise when I first got it but I squeezed it so often, it broke.’
Her smile widened as she lay the bunny in her lap and turned to rifle through the rest of the box. Every now and then she’d stroke the well-loved rabbit, her fingers running over the patches, the sewn-up ear and tail, as if to make sure it was still there. ‘A blanket,’ she said, pulling out an old mink blanket with a puffy satin ribbon border that had been buried at the bottom. She held it up, her fingers running over the Cyrillic letters in one corner. ‘It looks like the one in the painting with the hand in the dark. It must have been mine.’
‘Strange. Are they your initials in Russian?’
‘I don’t know. I can understand spoken Russian but I don’t seem to be able to read this.’ She frowned over it. ‘It’s in pretty good nick. The puffy border is unusual. I wonder what it’s stuffed with.’
He bent down and felt the satin border, stuffed so well it was like a squishy tube. ‘I don’t know.’ He ran his hand over the blanket. ‘It’s incredibly soft though.’
She rubbed it against her face then smiling put it in her lap with Krolik. ‘I want Arwen to have this too.’
‘We’ll put it in her cot when we go upstairs.’
She nodded and started on the third box. It was different from the others, heavier duty with faded blue and white stripes and postal stamps. ‘This is the one, isn’t it? The one that was in the hole in the wall?’
He nodded.
She rubbed her head. ‘I think I remember seeing Mama put it in there.’
She put all the things back in the boxes she’d already emptied—everything except Krolik and the mink blanket—and pushed them to the side. Then kneeling up, she took a few deep breaths and sidled up to the box as if she expected to find a severed head inside.
He touched her hand as it hovered over the opening. She linked her fingers with his for a brief, shattering squeeze, before letting go to open the flaps.
A few moments later, the contents of the box lay around them: a lockbox with a combination lock mechanism, three photo albums, an expandable folder filled to the brim, a few other loose manilla folders, their contents stamped with a faded red official looking stamp in Cyrillic, and a diary also written in Russian.
Mel took a shuddering breath.
Phil wanted to ask her if she was okay—but that never went over well. ‘What do you want to look at first?’
She reached for the manilla folders. She opened one, her gaze running over the dossier of information within. All in Cyrillic. ‘Damn it. Why can’t I read this?’
‘It makes a kind of sense that you can’t.’
She frowned at him. He gestured at the box with her childhood things in them. ‘If your parents were from Russia, they possibly moved to Texas before you were born.’
‘But I remember running from someone and other people speaking in Russian.’ She closed her eyes, expression tight. ‘They were worried. Scared. They hid me, and then my aunt and uncle came and found me and we were running again from someone.’ She opened her eyes. ‘I think maybe I was born there. Although, how can that be true? I have a Texan birth certificate.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. I used it to get my license and passport.’
He nodded. Of course. ‘I don’t know what the answer is. Whatever happened, you were pretty young. Probably too young to read.’ He waved at the documents. ‘Which is why you can’t read it now, even though you understood what you heard in your memories.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
She stared at the documents in her hand blindly as if lost in a memory again, but then shook her head. She put the manilla folders aside and opened the expandable folder. It was mostly filled with more documents in Russian, but there were a few in English—her birth certificate, Claire and Calvin’s wedding certificate, some school documents and some newspaper clippings of her successes in New York and then with her own agency, Paris-Link Management. ‘I can’t believe they collected these,’ she said, the clippings crinkling as she went through them.
‘They were proud of you.’
‘I never knew.’ She shook her head and put the clippings down then kept rifling through the folder.
A moment later she made a little gasping sound, and with trembling fingers, pulled a document out of the back of the folder. He looked at it over her shoulder. It was in Russian and had her date of birth—that was at least written in letters he could understand—and three names on it: hers, her mother and father he guessed, given they were all in Cyrillic.
A Russian birth certificate?
‘Maybe we can ask Alan if he knows what this says. I think he knows Russian better than Jerry.’ He hesitated, trying to read her expression. ‘If you want to.’
Her gaze skittered over all the documents before she sucked in a breath and nodded. ‘I want to know.’
‘Okay. Do you want me to call him now?’
She bit her lip. ‘It can wait until he comes back.’
‘Okay.’
She touched his hand. ‘Thank you.’
He swallowed hard. ‘Of course. Anything for you, Mel. Anything.’
She stared at him for a long moment, then leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. It was just a small brush of her lips, so quick it was over before it started—nothing like their kiss a few days ago—but it hit him right in the solar plexus and froze him in place as it zipped through every corner of his body before settling low in the pit of his stomach, tingling over his skin.
He loved her. He loved her so much, it hurt. It had always hurt. But not as much as it gave him pleasure. A universe of pleasure and joy. A universe that was now pared back to simply include the hope in one brief kiss, in a few almost memories, in the way she wanted to give her old bunny and blanket to their daughter.
It was both the most wonderful thing and the most horrible thing he’d felt in his entire life because she didn’t know what that one kiss meant to him.
She gave it then turned away, as if oblivious of its impact, and picked up the first photo album to flip through.
***
Melissa couldn’t believe what she’d just done after the disaster of asking him to kiss her the other night. That kiss had been passion and fire. This one was softer, more intimate somehow. Something you wouldn’t do unless there was true caring.
Her lips tingled from the contact, spreading out with an unwanted warmth that zipped over her skin and into her nerves. The warmth made her breasts feel full and pulled at something in her core that throbbed and ached to be fulfilled.
Desire. She desired this man who was her husband. She’d felt it ever since waking and seeing him, the elf-man with the beautiful aching eyes, even as she denied it. He was everything she never wanted in her life. He was uncertainty and wildness and a life filled with chaos. That wasn’t her. She’d always liked certainty. Stability. Consistency. Things she got in her job despite what people might think. Her job was exciting and often filled with the unexpected, but that was when she swooped in and did her best work. She was the control expert, shaping things to the way she wanted them to be, manipulating circumstances to suit the story she wanted told.
Phil wasn’t part of the story she wanted to tell about her life. And her feelings for him, this desire, this caring, was even less expected.
Everything was so topsy-turvy and she most definitely wasn’t in control. Looking around her at the proof of her parents’ lies, their secret lives, she couldn’t help but wonder just how much she’d been in control of anything.
She glanced briefly at Phil.
He smiled at her again. Goddamn that smile. It shuddered through her. She quickly turned away, hoping he hadn’t seen the flush that covered her face—her entire body in fact—and decided that right now it would be best to ignore him. To ignore she’d kissed his cheek. Shared an intimacy she shared with few.
She hurriedly picked up an album and opened it, staring at it blindly until she realised she’d flipped halfway through it.
Sighing, she turned back to the start and looked properly.
It was filled with faded photos of people dressed in clothes from the sixties through to the nineties, but with an eastern European feel to them. Family photos by the looks of them—black and whites to faded coloured polaroids. Claire and Calvin’s faces recognisable in some of them—separate photos of them and other people in two of the albums from when they were young to maybe late teens going by the fashions they wore, while the third included photos of them together and a few other couples in what must have been the early nineties.
She’d seen one of the couples before.
In her dreams.
In her nightmares.
She’d been painting them.
Were they Mamochka and Papochka?
A flash of a man and woman laughing, crouched down next to her, smothering her with kisses.
‘Oh.’ She touched her head, suddenly dizzy again.
‘Mel.’ His hand on her back, steadying her.
She jerked away from it. ‘I’m fine. Thanks.’
‘Did you have another memory?’ She gave him a querying look. ‘You had that look on your face just before you passed out in the garden.’
‘I didn’t pass out,’ she said, not liking the way it made her sound weak.
He smiled. ‘Of course you didn’t. You just decided to have a sudden lie down.’
Her lips twitched. ‘Exactly.’
‘And you felt like you had to maybe take another lie down just now, right?’
Her lips stopped twitching. ‘Yes.’
He nodded slowly. ‘The photos? They triggered something?’ He touched the photo she’d been staring at. ‘These people. They’re in your paintings.’
She rubbed her brow. ‘I know. I think I may have met them. They were playing with me—I think I must have been really little because they were crouched down on the floor with me. They were laughing. They kissed me.’ She could feel the kisses, the slightly sticky-lipstick kisses of the woman and the warmer ones of the man as he … ‘tickled me.’
‘They were tickling you?’
She nodded. ‘Then they tickled each other.’ She stared at the couple in the photo. They weren’t smiling. They looked so serious, as if they would never crack a smile. And yet, she remembered their smiles, their laughter, so clearly, like another reality overlaid on this one. ‘It’s crazy.’
‘Not crazy,’ he said. ‘They’re your memories. We’ve just got to figure out what they mean.’ He gestured around them. ‘What all of this means.’
‘Yes.’ Yes. That’s what she had to concentrate on here. Take control. Find the story that matched the truth and make it work for her. Only then could she move forward. Even if she found out her parents were liars who never managed to tell her a single truth. If that was the case, she’d find a story to deal with that too.
Control.
That’s what she needed to create here and now.
‘I didn’t see it before, but don’t you think this woman looks like you?’
She looked down at the photo Phil pointed at. The woman she’d painted. She touched the photo. ‘Maybe we’re related.’
‘She looks a little like your mother too, so maybe she was Claire’s sister?’
‘Maybe.’ Mama had kissed a photo of this woman. ‘Let’s open the chest.’
‘Have you found the key?’
She looked around her at the things on the floor. ‘No.’
‘Have you pulled everything out?’
She peered into the box again and noticed that there was a pouch of some kind up against the side that was shadowed by the angle of the lights. She reached in and pulled it out. It was a purse, one of the old-fashioned kind with beading on the outside and a metal clasp. There was a small brown stain in one corner—was that dried blood? No. Of course it wasn’t. She was overreacting to stimuli. She had to stop.
She tipped the purse over to open it, noticed a few other brown splatters. Icy fingers crawled down her spine ...
A woman stood in front of her, holding the purse in her hand, her lips a slash of vibrant red, her hair in an up-do with cascading curls, her big eyes highlighted with blue and silver and a hint of purple, her black dress with silver threads crawling over it, swinging around her legs. She turned as a man walked into the room. He was unhappy. So was she. They argued.
Melissa couldn’t focus on the words, fear a scream in her ears as the man grabbed the woman, shook her, then punched her in the stomach. He hit her all the time but never somewhere it would show—oh god, how did she know that?
The woman sprawled on the floor and looked up at him with hatred in her eyes. ‘Please, Marat. Not in front of Milla,’ she gasped.
‘Will you do as I say, Aleksandrii?’
‘Yes, Marat. Of course, Marat.’ He pulled her to her feet and before she could give Melissa a kiss goodbye, dragged her out the door.
The purse slipped from Melissa’s fingers.
‘Another memory?’
She nodded and told him what she’d seen. ‘She was so sad.’
‘Were they the same people who kissed and tickled you? The ones from your paintings?’
She stared at him for a moment, her mind flashing back to the images. She looked down at the photo. ‘No. Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘The man was different. But the woman was the same.’
‘Have you seen the man before?’
She shook her head. ‘No. This was the first time I’ve seen him.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Although, there was something about him that was familiar.’ She tapped her forehead with her fingers. ‘I can’t remember why.’
Phil pulled her hand away from her head. ‘You will. We’re learning more all the time.’
‘Are we?’
‘Yes. Now we know the woman you keep seeing was obviously part of your life. And she looks like you—so we know she’s related in some way to you and Claire Linklater.’
She noticed he didn’t say, ‘your mother’. Were his thoughts travelling the same path as hers? She was afraid to ask.
‘Do you want me to open it?’
