The Woods, page 19
My heart is galloping. I can imagine her over there now, dancing and laughing and drinking and even though I know it’s not real—there’s not going to be some time bubble of a decade-old party going on behind the boarded-up windows—I push the gate open and walk up the path.
I walk past the police tape, round to the back where they haven’t bothered boarding anything up. The window at the back of the living room is unlocked. It’s swollen with damp and I struggle to push it up. I have a moment where sense comes back and I think it’s a sign—I should go home. But then the window loosens, opens with a creak, and the dust and dead air wafts out.
I climb through into the living room, stepping down onto the dusty floorboards. It looks the same—as though nothing has been touched in ten years. I haven’t thought about this place in ten years, I haven’t let myself think about it. But if I had, wouldn’t I have assumed something would have changed? That Greg would have returned, or the boys would have come and emptied the house, or the house would have been sold earlier, done up as a renovation project?
I can see evidence that the police have been in here; things moved, out of place, flurries of footprints on the floor, already fading as another layer of dust coats them. But it’s like the very air is the same, stale, starved of oxygen, every breath dust-laden. The whole house is a time capsule, undisturbed, waiting to be opened, secrets revealed. But there’s no spinning, laughing Bella, no sign of a party or anyone else here. I frown, and my gaze catches a small suitcase sitting next to the armchair, old and battered, dark blue, worn white at the edges. I take a breath and hold it. I remember this suitcase. I came to garden once and it started raining. Greg wasn’t around and I looked in the window, hoping he’d offer shelter from the stinging rain. He was in here, sitting in that same armchair, the blue suitcase open on his lap. He was crying, lifting things out of the case, putting them back in, crying over them, weeping. I backed away, feeling like a voyeur, spying on his private moment of pain, and walked home in the biting downpour.
He disappeared soon after that and I remembered the case. I remember now thinking I’d seen him packing up his life, getting ready to leave. I imagined him taking this case on his adventures around the world. I chew on my lip. Did the police have the case out, looking for evidence? But why leave it here?
Unless it wasn’t the police. Unless it was whoever sent those texts, messing with me. I should go now, call Detective Levinson. But…if it is someone messing with me, what might they have put in the case?
Curiosity and fear build inside me, tug me forward until I’m bending down, hand on the zipper of the case. It’s a Pandora’s box—but will it be worse for me to open it or for the police to do it? Other people have ventured here, evidenced in the graffiti on the walls, the empty bottles that litter the garden. Kids, teenagers, here on dares to hang out at the monster house. Other people have done worse than open a suitcase, but it feels like I’m committing a crime as I lift the lid. Greg is still here, unseen, reproaching me.
It is his life inside, but not clothes and passport packed for a trip away. It’s bundles of letters and photographs, the hidden history of a man I never really knew. His own time capsule within the time capsule his house has become since he left.
I don’t read the letters, it’s an intrusion too far. But I flick through the photographs. Some of them are old, 1980s judging by the clothes and hairstyles. I recognize Greg from his smile, rub away the pang in my stomach as I look at him smiling at a girl with her arm slung around him whom I recognize as a young Julia, looking like a red-haired Princess Di with a big frosted pink smile. The decades pass as I flick through the pile. The boys appear, grinning toddlers, mischievous boys, then Ellie. Julia disappears, the photos empty of people, are just of the house, the village, the gardens, the sea.
I stop as I get to the last one and my eye twitches. I stuff the photograph in my pocket and close the case, rubbing the dust off my hands and backing away. The photo I’ve taken shouldn’t be here: it’s a school photo, a smiling class of teenagers. I recognize the uniforms because it’s my school. I recognize it because we have the same photo in an album at home. It’s Bella’s class, my sister smiling in the second row. Three girls along there’s another face I recognize. Nicole Wallace, murdered in that summer of death. Bella’s classmate. Bella’s friend.
The police can’t have left this suitcase here. They would have taken this photograph, wouldn’t they?
I walk back across the room, chased by whispering ghosts, and get halfway when I freeze, all the hairs rising on the back of my neck, my chest tightening until I can barely breathe. Blood whooshes in my ears, pulsing to the beat of my heart. There’s something laid under the desk by the boarded-up front window.
It’s a pair of shoes. My legs are shaking and I can’t take another step. I recognize those shoes. They’re Bella’s. They’re the shoes she was wearing the night she died. She wasn’t wearing them when we were found. She was barefoot then, her feet scratched and muddy, suggesting she’d run through the woods barefoot. They didn’t ever find the shoes; no one believed my insistence that she was wearing them when she set out. Because I didn’t see her leave, because I don’t remember anything. But her shoes weren’t at home, weren’t in the hall where they always were, a pair of scruffy old white Converse, frayed edges and grass stains around the toes.
I searched the house for them afterward, searched everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places, but I never found them. I even went back in the woods, in case she’d taken them off there. But they were never there. I hold my breath and make myself walk over to them. They are her shoes—same frayed edges, patches of light green, one lace with its ragged end taped up. There’s even the faint hint of her initials in faded marker on the inside from when she’d wear them for school PE lessons.
Someone else has been here and put the shoes here for me to find. It makes me aware that I’m here alone at night and no one knows where I am. Except the person who sent me those texts. The person who left the shoes here for me to find.
I grab the shoes, turn, and run. I fumble with the window, convinced for a panicked moment that it won’t open, that someone has crept up and sealed me inside the house, but it opens and I almost fall out, setting out at a run, not bothering to close the window behind me.
I run home, almost falling several times, a stumbling, lurching run along the unlit lane. No one follows, but in my mind, he does, the monster, breathing fire, my death in his eyes. I won’t sleep tonight, I won’t even try. He’ll keep chasing if I close my eyes, Freddy Krueger with his razor fingers, waiting to kill me in my dreams.
Back at the house, I put the shoes on my bed, expecting them to disappear if I close my eyes. My trip to the house has already taken on a surreal edge—it feels like a dream but I know it’s real. I hug Bella’s shoes to my chest. This is real, my visit to the house was real. Someone’s had these shoes for ten years and they’ve left them and the blue suitcase for me to find. I was right. Someone else was in the woods with us that night. Someone else knows what happened to Bella.
Chapter 23
Dad’s already gone to the police station when I get downstairs the next morning. Sean is in the kitchen, a cold cup of coffee next to him. I don’t have time for breakfast and I’m not hungry anyway. I hug my bag close to me. Sean and Jack were both around last night—it could have been either of them over at Dean House, leaving the shoes for me to find.
“It’s already in the papers,” Sean says as I turn to leave.
“What?”
“Just the local paper, a snippet, talking about the ‘find’ at Dean House, speculating about the police presence. It mentions the other deaths, the unsolved killings of those two girls and the rumors from back then.”
My hand convulses on the door handle, knuckles white.
“It’s all going to come back, isn’t it? Everything that happened that summer? This is just the start.” There’s a heaviness in his voice, a dread echoed in me.
The local paper is still in the hall, open on the table where Sean must have read it. I pick it up with shaking hands. Sean is right. As soon as the news is released that it’s his father’s body, there’s going to be more than bones dug up in the coming weeks.
I wanted that ten years ago. God—I wanted that when Bella appeared in my flat. I wanted the police to see Bella as a victim, not a silly girl who got drunk and fell to her death. But now? The thought of the police back here, squirreling their way back into our lives while Julia dies upstairs, the thought of all the questions they’ll be asking Dad right now. The thought terrifies me.
Bella is at the back of my mind, whispering the start of the story again: Once upon a time, two girls went into the woods…
I drift off on the bus. I’m on my way to the police station, Bella’s shoes in my bag, and as the rocking of the bus sends me into that weird netherworld of half asleep, half awake, I see Bella is sitting next to me on the bus. I’ve tuned in halfway through a conversation. All Bella, me silent next to her.
Is this a dream or a memory?
“I never thought it would be him,” she says. “Never, ever.” She turns to look at me, all glowing eyes and pink cheeks. She’s wearing a dress. Bella never wore dresses. She looks radiant. “We talked, after you stormed off. I understand now. I understand why he took us there.”
“You understand?” My voice is stiff, my hands clenched around my bag. My eyes flutter open—did I say that out loud? The woman in front shifts in her seat. She probably thinks I’m mad, talking to myself. I close my eyes again, letting myself drift. If this is a lost memory, I need to find my way back to it.
Bella rolls her eyes. “Don’t be like that. You were the one who stomped off. You were the one who said those awful things to him.”
“You said you hated him.”
“That was before I knew him. He’s like us, Tess, he really is. He’s angry because of what she did. He’s…” Her voice trails off as she gets lost in her memories of whatever he did or said to steal her away.
I could finish her sentence but I don’t think she’d like what I had to say. He’s dangerous. He’s manipulative. He’s using you. He’s wrong and everything she’s doing is wrong.
I’d forgotten all this. I’d forgotten this bus journey. I’d forgotten her words.
Wait. Where are we going? I try to pull out of the dream.
“This didn’t happen,” I say, and she laughs. “I didn’t get the bus back with you. We didn’t have this conversation.”
The bus is fading, the landscape outside blurring.
“But didn’t you always wonder?” she says. “We never talked about it, did we? Dad told us about marrying Julia and we never got around to talking about it.”
I pull awake with a gasp and the woman in front turns to look at me. “Are you okay, love?” she says, a wary frown on her face. I stumble up out of my seat and go to the front of the bus, pressing the bell for the next stop.
I get to the police station just before eleven, walking the last mile. My head feels spacey, weird.
“Is Detective Levinson here?” My voice sounds strange again as I speak—faraway, not mine. I’m aware of curious glances as I’m shown into an office. There are three messy desks, but I’m the only person sitting in here. People walk by, slowing as they look at me. Am I shaking? God—am I even dressed? I check myself—yes, clothes, shoes. No coat and I haven’t brushed my hair or put any makeup on, but I’m dressed at least. God, I can’t remember the last time I slept properly. My eyes hurt. My head hurts. I have to start taking those sleeping pills. I will. Tonight.
“Tess? Have you remembered something?” Detective Levinson comes in, taking a seat opposite me, moving a pile of paper into a tray.
“Is my dad still here?”
He frowns and shakes his head.
I push forward the bag I put the shoes in. It’s just a messenger bag, hardly a sterile evidence bag, but they might still be able to get fingerprints off the shoes.
“They’re her shoes—Bella’s shoes. The ones she was wearing the night she died.”
He looks at me but doesn’t open the bag.
“I found them in the house—Dean House.”
“You’ve been in the house?” He frowns. “The house—the grounds—that’s a crime scene.”
“I’m sorry, but I thought…I thought if I went there I might remember something. But when I went in, Bella’s shoes were there, lined up side by side, left there for me to find.”
“By who?”
“By whoever killed Bella.” My voice rises and Detective Levinson sits back in his chair, his face going blank.
“Did you see anyone else there?”
“No. But there’s something else. There was a suitcase. It belonged…it must have belonged to Greg Lewis. And I looked inside and there was a photograph, a school photo of Bella’s class when she was sixteen or seventeen. And Nicole Wallace is in the photo as well. Why would he have had that photo?”
Detective Levinson leans back, rubs a hand across his bald head.
“And I got these texts…” I get my phone out but my voice dies as I open my messages. The texts aren’t there. I scroll up and down but they’re not bloody there. Someone must have taken my phone and deleted them. It has to have been Jack or Lena. My heart thumps. Or Sean or Max. Any one of them could have spied on me tapping in my passcode.
“Did you tell anyone else you were going to the house?”
“No, but there were other, new, footprints in the dust. They were…” My voice trails off and I go cold. They were small, I was going to say. A small foot, clean in the dust next to my prints. I’ve had so many of these blank moments now, these fugues where time passes, where I’m not asleep but I’m not awake either. Black holes in my memory. Those footprints, that other path of prints, so new—were they mine?
The other day, when I thought I’d been sleepwalking, talking to Bella in the woods, seeing lights at the window of Dean House…did I actually go inside? Did I find the shoes somewhere else and put them in the house? I was in the woods, with Bella, and I thought it was a dream. Oh God, what else have I been doing in my sleep? Were those text messages even real?
I shake my head. I didn’t…I couldn’t. “Will you check? Will you look?”
There’s that look again—half pity, half wariness. They might send someone out, but what are they going to find? Footprints in the dust that could all belong to me.
My head is pounding, my eyes are gritty. I shouldn’t have come. I’m not helping. All I’m doing is convincing the police I’m unhinged.
Maybe I am. I see my dead sister, don’t I? It’s more vivid than dreams. How long before the questions are about me, how long before my doctor is asked and he tells them I’m hallucinating? Max has already told them I caused the car accident by grabbing the wheel. It’s possible none of this has anything to do with Bella, it’s possible it’s my own guilt over walking away from Greg and our secret garden. I want him to be guilty to justify it.
I remember…I do remember Bella putting on the shoes. She changed in the afternoon, swapping satin bridesmaid shoes for the comfort of sneakers. But can I really say one hundred percent that she was still wearing them when she went into the woods?
I close my eyes, remembering my obsession with finding them after she died. My dad was so worried, following me around the house as I tore through cupboards and drawers, insisting we find them, insisting they were evidence. But evidence of what? What the bloody hell did I think those shoes were going to tell me?
Detective Levinson’s hand is on the bag, but he doesn’t open it. He isn’t interested in a pair of shoes no one ever believed she was wearing. He thinks I’m doing what they all thought I was doing back then—making stuff up, trying to throw doubt on the accident verdict. The difference between now and then is that, for the first time, I’m starting to wonder the same thing.
When I get back to the house, Jack is sitting in the garden, a lit cigarette balanced on a saucer next to him on the old wooden table. He’s wearing sunglasses and I can’t tell if he’s looking at me as I walk up the driveway.
“Been for a nice trip out?” he says, and there’s amusement in his voice. He’s laughing at me. If I still had the shoes, I’d throw them at him. Was it you? I want to yell to his smug, grinning face.
“What are you doing here?” I mutter, and he shrugs. “Don’t you spend any time at home? Shouldn’t you be trying to sort out your marriage?”
He smiles a twisted smile. “Dani understands I need to sort things out. She, at least, is sympathetic to the fact that my mother is dying and my father’s body has just been found.”
“Sorry,” I say, my cheeks burning. I can’t have a conversation with Jack without ending up in awkward moments like this, feeling fifteen again.
He laughs. “Are you? You should be—you’re part of the reason we’re having trouble, after all.”
“Me? What…?”
“Apparently, I’m too distant. Apparently, I don’t commit. I blame it on my mother fucking off to another ready-made family.” He leans forward and the chair creaks. “Though I don’t think my mother has done any more good for you than she did for us, has she, Tess? You with your half-life, scared to sleep, and Leo watching her die, wasting away himself. And Bella…well, Bella certainly hasn’t come out of it well.”
I clench my fists, wanting to smack his stupid, laughing face. “Do you have to be so poisonous, all the time?”
His smile drops. “It’s all I’ve got left.”
“It’s not true. You have your brother. You have your mother upstairs—she’s not gone yet.”
“Which is why I’m here and not at work or home with my wife and son. To spend quality time with my dying mother.”
