The Rumor, page 16
At last, they leave, with promises to be in touch before the end of the day. I check my watch. If I hurry, there’s still time to call on Liz.
32
THIS TIME, I DON’T LOOK at the upstairs windows. I walk deliberately up the path and ring the bell. I step away from the door and wait, but, as before, she doesn’t come. The blinds at her front room windows are still closed and, as I peer through the window in the door, I see what looks like mail lying on the mat.
Something is wrong. I feel it in my bones. A shiver runs down my spine. Maybe she’s fallen and broken something. Maybe she can’t get to the phone and has been lying there for days. For all I know, she could be dead.
I should knock at the houses on either side, her neighbors’. Maybe they know where she is and can put my mind at ease. But just as I’m about to go next door, I notice that her side gate is ajar. Last time I came it was locked. I’m sure of it.
I push it gently, but it’s stuck fast on the concrete. It’s very old and the wood is rotting in places. The hinges must have come loose.
“Hello!” I call through the gap. “Liz, are you there?”
Silence.
With one hand on the latch, I use the other to grip the side of the gate and lift it clear of the ground. It swings open and I walk through into the side passage, calling her name as I go.
No answer.
Her backyard is long; it must be at least a hundred feet. Like her house, it reflects her personality. Creative and idiosyncratic. Slightly hippie-ish, with its wind chimes and garden Buddhas, its profusion of colored terra-cotta pots and abundant borders that spill over onto the gravel path that meanders between them. No manicured lawn and neat flower beds for Liz.
A rickety wheelbarrow heaped with bags of compost has been left out, a discarded pair of gloves sitting on top, and at the far end of the garden is an old shed, wreathed in ivy. She must be in there. No wonder she can’t hear me.
But when I reach the shed I see that it’s padlocked shut. I glance back toward the house. She must have gone inside for something. If she looks out of the window, it’ll give her a shock, seeing me prowling around her yard.
I retrace my steps until I’m standing outside her back door. I knock as loud as I can. I call her name. Where the hell is she?
I try the handle of the door and it opens, so I stick my head inside and call into the house. “Liz? Liz, are you there?”
The house feels ominously still, almost as if no one’s at home, but she must be. She wouldn’t have gone out and left the back door and the gate open. She must have been doing some gardening and then come inside to use the bathroom. That’s why she can’t hear me. I can’t just barge in and go upstairs. It wouldn’t be right. I’ll wait by the gate until she comes down. I don’t want to frighten her, but I do want to talk to her. Not just about the Sonia Martins thing, but about book club and whether she’s okay. That email of hers is still on my mind, and the way she was that time I saw her on the street. Distracted. Harassed-looking.
Minutes pass and she doesn’t come out. Perhaps she’s not going to. Perhaps she’s doing something else now and has forgotten all about the unlocked gate. I go back to the front door and ring the bell again, but still she doesn’t come. This is ridiculous. I take my phone out and dial her number, hear it ringing in the house. It rings and rings without switching to voicemail. Reluctantly, I end the call and go back around the side.
Maybe I was right all along and she’s fallen somewhere. For all I know, the house has been unsecured for days. Maybe I just assumed the gate was locked the last time I was here because it was pulled closed. Now that I think of it, I didn’t even look at the gate.
In the kitchen, I touch the kettle. It’s stone-cold. I walk through into the hallway and on toward the open door of the dining room, where, not so long ago, we all sat laughing and drinking wine. An unexpected sensation of dread comes over me, for it was in here that I passed on the rumor about Sally McGowan.
A disturbing thought buzzes in my brain like a fly as I peer around the door. I want to swat it away but it keeps coming back. I call out to Liz again, but once more there’s no reply. The room is empty, so I make my way toward the front door and the living room, which I’ve previously only glimpsed in passing. But that, too, is empty.
I’m at the foot of the stairs now. “Liz, it’s me. Joanna. Are you there?”
I peer up toward the landing, but I can’t hear anybody moving around. The stairs creak as I make my way, slowly, tentatively, upstairs. Sunlight streams in through the front door and through the banisters, striping the glass of the framed black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall.
The silence is oppressive, and I don’t like the way I’m trembling. I shouldn’t be snooping around Liz’s house like this. I hardly know her, not really. Maybe I should just leave and phone the police, get them to check it out. Yes, that’s exactly what I should do. But still my feet continue to climb upward. Why? What am I expecting to find?
Upstairs, I’m more convinced than ever that something bad has happened. I’ve never seen inside any of the bedrooms before because, whenever I’ve used the bathroom on book-club nights, the doors are closed. Just like they are today. I open them one at a time, bracing myself for what I might find. Liz lying injured on the floor. Unconscious. Maybe even…
The bathroom is empty and so are the two bedrooms at the front of the house. My muscles tense. There’s only one place left where she can possibly be. The back bedroom.
Hardly breathing, I turn the handle and push open the door. My eyes roam each corner of the room. It’s not a bedroom at all—it’s an art studio. Several unfinished paintings are stacked against the wall. There’s an old oak table she obviously uses as a desk. It’s cluttered with jars of pens and pencils, big pots of paintbrushes and piles of newspapers and scrapbooks and photocopied clippings. Coils and slivers of paper litter the surface of the table and the floor beneath. The closed blades of scissors of various sizes have been stuck into lumps of Blu-Tack and ranged in order of height along the side of the table.
I sag against the doorframe. This isn’t an episode of Murder, She Wrote, and Liz isn’t lying facedown in a pool of blood. Nor is she hanging from a beam. She’s just slipped out to the store or something and forgotten about the unlocked gate and back door. She’s an artist. They have a tendency to be absentminded, don’t they? I almost laugh.
I must get out of here. Now. If she comes back and catches me in her studio, I’ll be mortified. Would she believe me if I told her I thought she’d fallen?
I’m just about to leave when I spot an unusual painting leaning against the wall. It’s nothing at all like her other stuff. This is an incomplete self-portrait. Unflattering to the point of ugly. I can’t resist staring at it, this brutally honest depiction of a Liz I’ve never seen before yet instantly recognize, even in this raw, unfinished state. There’s something odd about it, though. It looks as if it’s created out of something other than paint.
I step a little closer and see that I’m right. Of course. That explains all the cutouts on the floor. It’s made out of tiny scraps of paper, some white, some black. The black bits are used for the shaded areas of her face—the hollows under her eyes, the pupils of the eyes themselves, the sunken cheeks, and the nostrils. Such a labor-intensive process. It must have taken her ages just to get this far with it.
Then my eyes snag on the headline of one of the newspaper clippings on the desk and my heart does a weird little flip. “I still remember the blood,” says child killer Sally McGowan’s former friend and neighbor Margaret Cole. It’s the same article I read online. It’s been printed from the internet, and right in the middle, where the picture of Sally McGowan’s face used to be, is a hole.
Blood thunders in my ears. Are those scraps of paper that make up Liz’s self-portrait what I think they are? Are they cut from images of Sally McGowan’s face?
The floorboards behind me creak and I spin around. Liz is standing in the doorway, a carving knife in her hand.
33
THE KNIFE CLATTERS TO THE floor. Liz stares at me.
“Joanna!” she says. “What are you doing in my house?”
I open my mouth to explain, but all I can think of is the self-portrait behind me and how it’s been made.
I swallow hard, eyes glued to the knife on the floor.
“I thought you were an intruder,” she says, picking it up.
My whole body stiffens.
“I thought someone had broken in.”
“I’ve been calling you for ages,” I say at last. “I sent you emails. I was worried about you so I came by and…”
She’s staring at me through narrowed eyes. The knife hangs loosely in her hand.
“You didn’t answer the doorbell, so I…I went around the back. The gate was open. I called out for you. You weren’t in the yard and the shed was locked up. The back door was unlocked. I thought maybe you’d…I thought maybe you’d fallen somewhere.”
Her shoulders sag as she exhales.
“Oh dear. I was around the back of the shed, weeding.” She raises her finger to her earlobe. “I don’t have my hearing aid in.”
“I didn’t know you were deaf.”
She frowns. “I’m not deaf, I’m just a bit hard of hearing. Come on,” she says, turning to leave the room. “Let’s put some coffee on. We’re lucky we didn’t give each other a heart attack.”
I follow her downstairs. Why isn’t she saying anything about the portrait? She must know I’ve seen it. My face was only a couple of inches away from the canvas when she came into the room. And she must know I’ve seen the clippings on her desk.
Thoughts slide about and crash into one another in my head. Could this mean what I think it does? Is Liz Blackthorne Sally McGowan? Why else would she make a self-portrait out of pictures of a child killer? Is it Liz who’s been sending me those threatening tweets? Did she alter the class photo, too?
My knees tremble. I touch the handrail for support, the palm of my hand sticking to it as I concentrate on setting each foot down. My eyes slide to the black-and-white photographs on the wall and it’s like I’m seeing them for the very first time. One is of a stocky man in a striped apron standing outside a butcher shop, legs apart, arms folded. Another is of a little girl in a cotton dress and knitted sweater pushing a toy baby carriage along a dirty street.
My stomach contracts into a tight little ball. Some are shots of rooftops, a whole sea of them all jutting up against one another, and, in the distance, huge industrial chimneys belching smoke. Others are of children crouching at curbsides or clambering over burnt-out cars. Children clustered near decaying buildings.
They’re just like that documentary Michael and I watched the other day. Why didn’t I notice them before?
Liz is at the bottom of the stairs now, and I’m just a few steps behind. If she were to turn around and run up at me with that knife, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
She turns and walks toward the kitchen. I could open the front door and leave. Tell her I’ve just remembered I have to be somewhere else. Tell her I’ll call her later. But I don’t. I follow her into the kitchen and watch as she opens a drawer and drops the knife inside, pushes it shut.
I breathe out. She switches the kettle on, then unscrews a metal French press. She opens the drawer again. I take a step back, but she’s just getting a spoon out. She fills the press with three heaped dessert spoons of coffee. She plucks two pottery mugs from one of the open shelves above the counter.
This is Liz. Liz from book club. Clever, funny Liz, with her love of books and art and conversation. This isn’t Sally McGowan. It can’t be. And yet…I know something’s coming. This fussing over coffee is just a prelude. I sense it in the way she’s moving. Slowly. Deliberately. She’s playing for time. Working up to it.
She puts the French press and two mugs on a tray. “Do you take milk and sugar?”
“Just milk, please.”
She’s almost at the fridge when she freezes. “Oh.” She makes an apologetic face. “I don’t think I have any milk. Sorry.”
“That’s fine. I’ll drink it black.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I taught myself to appreciate black coffee when I was at art school,” she says. Her voice is warm and friendly, as if this is any old day and we are just two friends having coffee. I try to tell myself that this is any old day and that we are just two friends having coffee. I haven’t found a disturbing self-portrait in her studio and a pile of newspaper clippings about Sally McGowan.
“It went with the territory,” she says. “Along with copious amounts of red wine and lots of bed-hopping.”
She smiles and hands me the tray. “Why don’t you carry this into the dining room and I’ll cut some cake.”
I take the tray and, as I turn, feel the weight of her gaze on the back of my neck. Why am I still here? I need to get back to work. Dave will be wondering where I am.
When I’ve put the tray on the dining room table, I take my phone out of my pocket and speed-dial the office.
“Sorry, Dave, I’ve been held up at Sea Breeze Court. Should be with you in about twenty minutes.”
“No worries,” Dave says. “It’s nice and quiet this morning. See you later.”
While I wait for Liz to come in with the cake, I study the pictures on the wall. Her paintings. They are fierce and abstract. Kaleidoscopic swirls of color and form. Which is what makes the realism of the self-portrait upstairs all the more striking.
“Some people don’t get my kind of work.”
I didn’t hear her come in. She’s standing next to me, so close that our shoulders almost touch.
“I don’t know much about art,” I say, afraid she’ll hear my heart beating.
The weird thing is, I don’t know if I’m genuinely frightened of her or whether it’s just a heightened awareness that I should be frightened, and that’s producing the same physical sensations. I feel like I’m a character in a movie. None of it is really happening. But it is. It is.
“I really like these, though,” I say. “I don’t know what they’re supposed to represent, but they draw me in.”
“That’s why I prefer not to give my paintings titles,” she says. “If you read the title of a painting, it directs your thoughts in a particular way, and I’d rather people drew their own conclusions.”
She pushes down the plunger on the French press. “I have my own private titles, though.”
What, I wonder, is her private title for the unfinished portrait upstairs? Will she tell me? Will we even speak about it? We have to. We can’t just drink coffee and eat cake. We can’t just have an intellectual conversation about the meaning of art when there’s a giant elephant in the room.
I take a chance. “You’ve heard what’s been going on at Stones and Crones, I suppose.”
Liz takes a bite of her cake, washes it down with a mouthful of coffee.
“I have. And it sickens me. Poor Sonia.”
I squirm in my chair. Does Liz hold me responsible for what’s happening with her friend? I want to tell her that it’s almost certainly Maddie’s friend Anne Wilson who put those pictures up, but then it will look as if I’m trying to dump the blame on her when, actually, Maddie wouldn’t even have known about the rumor if I hadn’t blurted it out in the first place.
And how do I know for sure that Maddie is telling the truth? Maybe Maddie hates Anne Wilson for an entirely different reason. Maybe Anne has been flirting with Maddie’s husband and it’s Maddie who’s the vindictive one. After all, how well do I really know Maddie? How well do we know anyone, come to that?
If only I’d never said anything at book club. If only I hadn’t told Cathy and Debbie what Michael told me about the dry-town theory, then Cathy wouldn’t have told everyone at the babysitting circle meeting and none of this would be happening. Without fresh gossip, the rumor would have fizzled out by now.
“Michael and I tried to help her,” I say.
Liz widens her eyes. “Michael?”
“Yes, Alfie’s dad. My…my partner. He’s living with me now.”
Liz goes very still. “How does he think he can help her?”
“By writing an article about false accusations. Making it clear she’s not McGowan.”
“You mean, he’s a reporter?”
“Yes.”
Liz presses her lips together. Something about her has changed. There’s a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“We were wondering if…if you’d speak to Sonia. Try to persuade her to talk to Michael. She got very angry when she found out he was a reporter. I can’t say I blame her, but Michael says it’ll get worse. There’ve been cases where people have been hounded out of their homes because of false rumors.”
“I know,” she says. Her voice is clipped. She won’t meet my eyes.
I want to tell her I feel bad for passing the rumor on. I want to tell her it was only that once. At book club. But knowing me, I’ll go red when I say it. My face always lets me down when I’m lying, and then she’ll know I feel guilty. Better to say nothing. I’ll only end up tying myself in knots. And besides, another question burns in my mind.
The question I don’t dare ask her.
34
“YOU NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING about me,” Liz says.
I brace myself. This is it. She’s going to tell me who she is. Our eyes meet briefly, then we both look down at our coffees. Part of me doesn’t want to hear what’s coming next. I want to get away from her. Away from this house. Back to Dave in the office. Back to normality. But another part knows I’m staying. I have to know the truth. Not just because of Michael and his book—my God, what he wouldn’t give to be here now—but because I’m curious. I need to know.
