The Rumor, page 14
She’s still there, and…oh…she’s posted another tweet.
I stare at it, unable to process what I’m seeing. The sound of the TV recedes and an iciness trickles from the back of my neck all the way down my spine. I must have misread it. Please, God, let me have misread it.
But I haven’t. The words are still there and the message is clear:
Look what you’ve started. You and your big mouth. I’m watching you. I’m #WatchingAlfie.
I wear my sneakers with the bouncy soles so that I don’t make any noise. Tonight, I wait till the last of the evil clowns and walking dead have cleared the streets, till the late-night dog-walkers have long since turned in, and then I slip into the darkness. Feel its cold embrace on my skin. Inhale the purity of its breath.
In a small town like Flinstead, and on windless nights like this when the sea is soft and flat, the silence is profound. Even after all these years, the thrill of having the streets to myself never leaves me. This is my time—Sally’s time.
Inevitably, I’m drawn to the beach. It’s even darker down there, unless it’s a clear night when the moon is shining. The freedom I feel when I’m on the sand, unobserved by human eye, is exhilarating. I’m not scared of the dark or the immensity of the ocean. I’m not scared of anything down there. It’s like I’m moving through a dreamscape, at one with the universe.
Weightless. Immortal.
Invincible.
Tonight, though, I stick to the streets. Most of the houses are in complete darkness as I pass them, but one or two still have a light on in a downstairs room. I conjure up scenes hidden from view. A young couple making love on a sofa, giggling when the springs squeak; an old man drifting in and out of sleep in front of the TV; a nursing mother, head drooping as the baby suckles, husband snoring upstairs.
I’m so jealous of their ordinary lives I could scream. I could pick up this stone here and hurl it through a window. Shatter their peace and tranquility. Make them as scared as me. Just for a little while, so they know what it’s like.
They’ll never know what it’s like.
At her house, a faint orangey glow is just visible at the bedroom window.
28
IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT BEFORE I dare to go to bed. I must have checked the locks on every window in the house at least three times, and I’ve drawn the bolts across on the front and back doors, which I don’t usually bother with, as long as they’re locked. I can’t shake the image of someone watching me from the street. Watching Alfie. A shiver runs through me.
When I go into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water, the blackness of the window above the sink scares me. If there were someone out there, they’d see me as I turn on the tap and wait for the water to run cold. Why haven’t I put a blind up yet?
I’m being stupid, I know I am, but even the sight of the knife block sitting on the counter unnerves me. I remember Mom telling me something she’d read about in the paper once, a horrible story about an intruder using one of the homeowner’s own kitchen knives to attack her when she confronted him. She always hides her knife block in a cabinet now.
When she first told me this, I thought she was being a little paranoid, but now I remove each of the knives and hide them in a drawer under my kitchen towels.
Upstairs in my bedroom, I try calling Michael again, but his phone keeps going to voicemail. I’ve been leaving messages and texting him ever since I saw the tweet.
Call me as soon as you get this message.
Something horrible has happened.
I have to talk to you.
Maybe he’s asleep already. He did say he might drop in to the gym after work. Perhaps he was tired. Or maybe he went out for a drink with one of his friends and hasn’t checked his phone yet.
I know what Mom would think if she knew he wasn’t returning my calls.
After tossing and turning for goodness knows how long, I get up and go into Alfie’s room. I lift his comforter as gently as I can and slip into bed next to him, wrap my arms around his warm, sleeping body, and breathe him in. The sound of my heart beats loud in my ears.
I know, deep down, that whoever sent that tweet is just messing with my mind, just like I know that Michael isn’t playing around. But still, I won’t sleep tonight.
* * *
—
IT’S A WHILE before I realize that the distant ringing noise isn’t part of my dream but is coming from my phone in the next room. I ease myself out of Alfie’s bed so as not to wake him. The watery gray light coming through the gap in his curtains means it’s early dawn. So I must have slept a couple of hours, at least.
It’s Michael. “I’m outside. I didn’t want to ring the bell in case it woke Alfie.”
The sight of him on the doorstep with his big leather duffel on the path behind him is balm to my frayed nerves. His arms enfold me in a long, close hug. He must have woken early and seen my messages, driven here as soon as he could.
I tell him about the photo at the school first, and I can see from the skeptical expression on his face that he thinks I’m overreacting.
“You say some of the other kids were made to look like zombies?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know they were zombies?”
“For God’s sake, Michael! I know what a zombie looks like! Their faces were gray and their eyes all weird and bloodshot. And they had oozing wounds. You know, the usual zombie stuff.”
“So I don’t see how Alfie having a knife sticking out of him is any worse than that. It’s a classic Halloween image, isn’t it?”
“Well, Mr. Matthews thought it was inappropriate. He agreed it was odd that Alfie had been singled out in that way.”
Michael raises his eyebrows. “He was probably just saying that to defuse the situation. Come on, Joey. You can’t really think there’s anything more to it than that, can you?”
I reach for my phone and go onto Twitter. “Wait till you see this, then.”
But when I click on my followers the Sally Mac account has vanished. She’s not following me anymore. I search for her username, but there’s no trace of her.
“That’s weird. She’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
I tell him about Sally Mac (@rumormill7) and the tweets she’s posted. His eyes narrow. Then I tell him about the Watching Alfie hashtag and they narrow farther still.
“That’s sick,” he says.
“You don’t think it’s her, do you? That she’s somehow gotten wind of the fact I’ve been spreading this rumor?”
Too late, I realize what I’ve said.
Michael stares at me. “What do you mean, you’ve been spreading the rumor?”
My cheeks burn with embarrassment. Embarrassment and shame. “When I first heard it, before I even mentioned it to you, I talked about it at my book club.”
Michael rolls his eyes.
“I was trying to deflect attention away from Jenny, one of the other members, because Karen was quizzing her on her love life and Jenny looked really uncomfortable. It was the first thing that came into my head. I’ve regretted it ever since.”
“But you haven’t told anyone what I found out, have you? Nobody knows I’m planning a book about her?”
“Nobody knows about the book, but—”
“But what?”
“The week after book club, one of the women—Maddie—told me she’d been talking to a friend of hers from Pilates who used to be a probation officer and told her all this stuff about witness protection. Maddie put two and two together and came up with five. She convinced herself that Sonia Martins from Stones and Crones was Sally McGowan.”
Michael shakes his head in disbelief. “So all that’s because of you, too.”
“Oh, so I’m responsible for Maddie blabbing to her friend, am I?”
He sighs. “No, of course not. But that’s how these things get out of control. They spread like wildfire.”
“Anyway, she doesn’t think it’s her anymore. Apparently, the husband of another one of her friends at Pilates ran off with Sonia Martins, so now Maddie thinks her friend has started this false rumor about her out of revenge.” I clench my toes. “Someone put a brick through the shop window the other night.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Michael says under his breath.
“I know. The whole thing’s ridiculous.”
“Anything else you want to get off your chest?” He’s looking into my eyes. He knows there’s something I’m not telling him.
I take a deep breath. This isn’t something I want to admit, but if we’re really going to make our relationship work I have to be honest with him.
“I might have mentioned what you said about her being moved to a dry town.”
He sighs deeply and looks away.
“Why?” he says at last. “Why would you do that? I didn’t think you were a gossip.”
“I’m not. It’s just that…Alfie’s been having problems making friends. Nobody was sitting next to him at lunchtimes. I didn’t want him to be miserable. I didn’t want him to be the victim again, not after what he went through before. All that horrible name-calling he had to put up with. And I’ve been finding it hard, too. The other mothers already know each other. I feel like the new girl at school.”
“So you thought gossiping to them would help.”
“It did help. They asked me to join the babysitting circle. And Alfie got invited to Liam’s birthday party. I’ve been trying to pour cold water on the story ever since.”
I’ve been looking at my hands while I’ve been telling him all this, but now I lift my head and force myself to meet his eyes.
“You don’t think it’s Sally McGowan, do you, Michael? This Sally Mac person on Twitter?”
“Hardly,” he says. “I would think having a Twitter account is the very last thing she’d want to do. It’s probably another one of the mad-mommy brigade.”
He wipes a stray tear from my cheek with his thumb. It’s a tender gesture that makes me cry even more.
“It can’t be a coincidence that the account’s been deleted the day after Halloween, Joey. It was a malicious joke, that’s all.”
“I hope so. I really do.”
He enfolds me in his arms again. I’m glad I’ve finally told him. It feels like a weight has been lifted.
“Twitter is full of twits,” he says. “Twits and trolls and people with something to sell.”
“So I guess I fall into the twit category.”
He laughs. “You said it.”
29
THAT EVENING, AFTER MICHAEL’S PUT Alfie to bed, we search online for the documentary I read about a while back—In Identity Limbo, written and presented by Martin Knight—but we’re only able to find short clips of it on YouTube. Excerpts from interviews with protected persons, shot so you can only see the silhouettes of their profiles talking, or where their faces are deliberately blurred, their voices distorted.
While some are grateful for their new identities, others say they wish they’d never agreed to leave their old lives behind. The strain of living a lie, of continually having to be on guard, has exacted a terrible toll on their mental health. One of the interviewees, Peter—not his real name, of course—explains how hard it is not to screw up when you first take on a new identity. What worked for him, he says, is including a small element of truth somewhere in each of his lies, something to lend them authenticity.
Then a psychologist cites the “illusion of truth” effect, whereby the more times something is repeated, the more it is believed. Like rumors, I think. So what happens in the end is that people start believing their own fictions and their old lives become less and less real to them.
It makes sense when you think about it. I told a lie once, when I was a teenager. Said I’d lost my virginity to one of the boys who worked on Mistden Pier, when all we’d really done is make out and feel each other up. I lied to fit in with the right group of friends. Or rather, the wrong group of friends, but I couldn’t see that at the time. We talked about it so often, dissected all the details, I honestly felt like it had really happened. The fantasy seemed far more real than the awkward fumbling that actually took place.
All the people interviewed in these clips are those whose testimony has put gang members behind bars. Either victims of violent crime or ex-criminals-turned-informers. Of course, the likes of Sally McGowan wouldn’t be afforded that level of protection, not in the States, anyway. So we end up watching an old documentary about McGowan instead. It was made in the late 1970s and may well have been groundbreaking in its day, but it now looks and sounds really dated.
We sit close to each other on the sofa, Michael’s laptop resting across our knees, and watch as black-and-white footage of Dearborn and Chicago in the 1960s is interspersed with interviews of people who knew Sally as a child. Students and teachers at the school she attended. Neighbors and people involved in the original investigation into her case and the trial itself. The general consensus is that she was a headstrong child, intelligent beyond her years. A leader, not a follower. According to some of them, Sally had a tendency to be a bit of a bully. Hardly surprising, considering her background.
The music alternates between mournful and menacing, and the sonorous male voiceover is thick with doom. I’m sure I’ve seen some of these shots before, probably in those documentaries I sometimes watch. The ones that focus on a particular block or house and show the changes through time. Grubby children playing unsupervised in the street. Housewives leaning on broom handles, gossiping. Boarded-up stores and derelict houses. The standard it-sucks-to-be-poor footage.
And then, of course, there are the lingering close-ups of Sally McGowan’s young face.
“What do you see when you look into those eyes?” Michael says, pausing the film for a moment.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I say. “I mean, I know what I think I see.”
“Which is?”
I consider his question. “At first I thought she looked defiant. Fearless, almost. There’s an incredible self-assurance about her, don’t you think? A knowingness. My mother would say she looks like she’s been here before. An old soul in the body of a child.”
Michael wrinkles his nose. “I think she looks scared and is trying to hide it. Mind you, I’m not sure what you can tell from a photograph. A millisecond after the camera shutter opened and closed, her face might have changed.”
“You’re right. We’re just projecting what we know about her onto that one frozen image.”
“I was looking at photos of myself as a child the other day,” Michael says. “Wondering whether someone would be able to pick out my adult face, having only seen me as a little boy.” He laughs. “I don’t think I’ve changed that much, to be honest.”
“Are we talking physically here?”
He pinches my thigh in response.
“Apparently, for women, the most changes occur between when you’re young and when you’re middle-aged, whereas in men it’s between middle and old age,” he says.
He sits up and takes my face in his hands, runs his fingertips along my cheekbones and temples as if he’s a cosmetic surgeon, sizing me up for his next procedure.
“We’re not just talking skin here, it’s the facial bones that change shape. The eye sockets enlarge, the angle of the lower jaw drops, and the tip of the nose dips downward.”
“Such a lot to look forward to,” I say.
“You lose the deep fat pads in your cheeks, too, and your eyelids start to droop, which makes the eyes look smaller.” He grins. “I reckon you’ve got another ten years.”
“You rat!” I grab his wrists and make him slap his own face with his hands. The laptop nearly slides onto the floor and we catch it just in time, laughing.
“You’ve really looked into this, haven’t you?”
“Just idle googling, that’s all.”
“And all this happens earlier in women than men? Typical. We always get the short end of the stick.”
We contemplate the face on the screen before us. The face I’ve come to know so well in the past few weeks. And the more I study it, the more it becomes what it actually is: just the face of a ten-year-old girl looking into the lens of a camera, as she was no doubt instructed to do. A child being processed through the criminal justice system.
But this was no ordinary child. This was a child who’d committed a monstrous crime.
Would Sally McGowan have turned out differently if she’d been nurtured by a loving family, if she hadn’t been abused by her father and traumatized by her upbringing? If you can call it that—by the sounds of it, it was more like a downbringing. I guess we’ll never know the answer to that question. And yet, she has never reoffended. Despite her dreadful past and her unthinkable crime, people believed in her ability to change and grow, to move beyond the horrors of her past. They must have, or else she wouldn’t have been given help to relocate.
And now, somewhere out there, possibly in this very town, if Michael’s sources are correct, her anonymity may finally be coming to an end. Because of people like me. And people like Michael, who, for all his faux outrage at my gossiping, has been guilty of fueling all sorts of false or unsubstantiated stories in his time. It’s how he makes his living.
He presses PLAY and the video resumes. Now we’re looking at photos of her parents, Jean and Kenny McGowan, the details of their faces slightly blurred. But there’s no mistaking the look of fear in Jean’s eyes and Kenny’s belligerent swagger as he strides toward the cameraman. I wouldn’t mind betting there was a nasty confrontation after that picture was taken. Kenny’s hands look enormous. One of them is clenched into a fist. A fist that looks ready to swing.
