The Woods, page 25
“What are you doing here, Lena?” I pick up a trowel and start hacking at the roots of a stubborn weed in one of the pots.
“I was going through some of my old photos. I brought them with me—thought there might be some nice old ones of Julia I could show your dad.”
I straighten up. “Oh. That’s…thank you, Lena. That was really thoughtful.”
She rolls her eyes. “Do you have to sound so surprised? Anyway—I found a couple of others. Of Bella. And you. I thought you might be interested.” She pulls half a dozen photos out of her bag and holds them out.
The first one is a photo of Sean and Jack together, unsmiling skinny boys, already so bloody handsome. There’s a photo of Jack with Greg and Bella. Bella’s next to Jack and Greg stands behind them, an arm draped over both their shoulders. Bella’s face is tilted up and it’s Greg she’s looking at, not the camera, not Jack. It makes me twitch.
And then there’s another photo I don’t understand. It’s Bella, looking just as I remember her, smiling and happy, her camera strap hanging off her shoulder. But standing next to her, standing too close to her, is Sean, and they look…they look together. Both seventeen, arms around each other, they stand together looking like boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t remember this. Sean’s words about Bella and Jack, about their connection—was it just a smoke screen?
I stroke Bella’s smiling face in the photo. Was it after this weekend that she stopped sleeping, started sneaking out at night? I don’t remember it being a sudden thing. Wasn’t it gradual, the change in my sister? Gradual enough for me not to notice anything strange. She just changed. But doesn’t everyone at seventeen?
“Surprising, huh?” Lena says. “I always thought it was Jack she had the hots for. But looking at these—well, it could be Greg and Sean, right?” She reaches for the photos but I pull them out of reach.
“It’s okay. You can keep them,” she says. “But you might want to show them to the police.”
Chapter 29
I close the door to my room and sit on the bed, spreading out the photos Lena gave me on the quilt. I bite my lip. Am I imagining it? The closeness I see between Bella and Sean? Does it even matter? I hesitate and take photos of them on my phone and send them to Sophie. She’s got the distance from this that I lack—she’ll be able to tell me if I’m being paranoid. I wait a few moments, then FaceTime her, closing my eyes as I wait for her to answer. It’s only been a few days since I’ve seen Sophie, but with all that’s been going on, it feels more like months, like Jack’s stopped clocks have done their trick and locked me in a never-ending time loop where I bounce from Julia’s deathbed to questions from the police and back again, over and over. I’m wrung out, exhausted, and, right now, all I want in the world is to be sprawled on the sofa of my city flat with Sophie, sharing a bottle of wine and watching crap on Netflix.
“Tess?” I feel a wave of relief as Sophie’s face fills the screen.
“Hey, Soph. Did you see the photos I sent?” I ask.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry, Soph. I know I’ve been a bit…It’s Jack. Jack’s messing with me, he’s been messing with me for weeks. That text—I never sent it, I swear. It was Jack. He thinks I had something to do with Greg and he…he’s trying to…I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but he’s manipulative. He’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Really? Tess, whatever the hell is going on here, it’s not good. You should come back home.”
“How can I? Look, I went over there. To Dean House. And I found Bella’s shoes—they’ve been missing since she died. Someone left them there for me and…and…Please. Look at the photos I sent you.”
She hesitates and sighs. “Hang on, I’ll have a look.”
I wait, my teeth clenched, for her to come back on the line.
“What is it you want me to see?” she says. “They’re just snapshots, aren’t they? Of your sister and…”
“Look at the way Greg’s looking at her. And the other one—it’s Bella and Sean. They look like they’re together, right?”
There’s a long pause. “I don’t know. It just looks like the camera caught her and Greg mid-conversation. And the one with Sean? I don’t…I don’t get why it’s a big deal even if they were together. It was ten years ago, wasn’t it?”
“I always thought it was Jack she was with. But when I saw that photo…if they were together, it gives him a motive. It gives both of them a motive, doesn’t it? A love triangle.”
“Tess…they’re not investigating your sister’s death, are they? You told me it was an accident. I know you had that weird dream, but that’s not proof of anything. Shouldn’t you be concentrating on Greg’s death, on sorting things out with the police so you’re not lying to them?”
I look round, check the door is still closed and no one is listening in.
“It’s all related, I know it is. Whoever’s messing with me knows something about how Bella died. Otherwise, why leave the shoes? Why take my phone and send texts?”
She doesn’t believe me. I can tell by the frown on her face and I can’t blame her. I’m rambling, sounding paranoid, sounding bloody insane. If I left now, went back to my old life, how long before the distance made me not believe it myself? It would take on the patina of an old fairy tale. And I’d be letting Dad and Julia down.
I shake my head but there are tears in my eyes. “I can’t leave. I’m sorry, Sophie, I’m not coming back. I’m going to take a landscape gardening course at a local college near here and stay with Dad.”
“You’re not coming back at all? But…you have to apply for the course and get in. I thought you’d come back for a while at least. You can’t just abandon your whole life. What about your flat? Your friends? What about me?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to be here. For Julia. For Dad.”
Sophie sighs. “Listen, Tess,” she says in a lower voice. “Okay, that’s fine. The course sounds great—perfect for you. I’ll support you all the way. But start it in September and come back home now. I’m worried about you. What the hell is going on, Tess? Are you in trouble?”
My door opens and I jump, dropping the phone, scrabbling to hide the photos. “Is everything okay?” It’s Max’s voice, Max’s hand on my shoulder. Fake Max, a stranger. I pick up my phone and there’s Sophie, my best friend, who only knows the lie of me, the fake Tess I’ve been since I started teaching.
I have to stay. I have to know what happened to Greg, what happened to Bella. I have to see this through.
I force a smile at her. “I’m fine, Sophie. Seriously—I’m fine. There’s stuff going on but I have to be here—for Julia, for Dad. You understand that, don’t you?”
She’s still frowning. “No, not really.”
I don’t want her to say anything else, not with Max in the room. Can she see him, hovering at the edge of the screen, his hand still there on my shoulder? “I have to go. I’ll call you, okay?”
I look up at Max after ending the call, force a smile.
“Are you okay? That conversation sounded intense.”
“She’s worried about me.”
“Well, she doesn’t need to be. I’m here.” He looks down at the photo still scrunched in my hand, the others only half-covered by the quilt. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I say, stuffing the photos in my pocket. “I’m going back downstairs.”
Sean is in the kitchen making toast. “Want some?” he asks, eyebrows raised.
“I thought you were sitting with Julia?”
He nods and cuts his toast in half. “I was. But your dad’s up there now, so I left them to it.”
I drop the photo of him and Bella in front of him. “Lena gave me this.”
He looks at it and puts his toast down. “So?”
“It looks…”
“It looks what?”
“It looks like you’re together.” Even as I say it, I feel stupid. Sophie was right—so what if they were together?
He laughs. “Seriously? Me and Bella? You couldn’t be more wrong.”
He likes you, Bella whispers, and I shake my head.
“Forget it,” I say, shoulders stiffening. He sighs and turns away and the tilt of his chin elicits a whisper of memory—his chin brushing against my cheek as he whispered something in my ear, my face turning toward his…He’s almost at the door when I call him back.
“Sean? Did I…did I kiss you once?”
He looks back at me and smiles. “I wasn’t sure if you’d forgotten or if you were deliberately not mentioning it.”
“It was at the wedding, wasn’t it?”
He nods. I remember now. I remember his cheek brushing mine, the satin of my bridesmaid’s dress against the wool of his suit. I remember pressing myself against him, his arm around me. I remember my head swimming with unfamiliar alcohol, reaching up and brushing my lips against him, how his arm tightened around my waist and we kissed.
“Why?” I whisper. This is what I don’t remember. I hated him then, didn’t I? Him and Jack with their hostility and bristling anger, didn’t I hate them both like they hated us? But Bella had told me Sean liked me. Was that what made me do it? After the sting of what she said about Max, was it that I wanted to kiss someone who liked me back?
“You were angry,” he says.
“At you? I kissed you because I was angry?”
His smile fades. “Not at me. You were angry with Max. You’d drunk nearly a bottle of wedding champagne and you were looking for a fight. Instead we talked and we kissed. Then you basically passed out, so I helped you upstairs and that was it. I didn’t see you after that.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand how that day ended up so fragmented. I’m sure, after they found us in the woods, I’m sure the day was complete in my head. It was what happened in the night that’s gone from my memory. It’s like the insomnia is stealing old memories as well as sleep from me.
“Why would I be angry at Max?” Max was my friend, my crush. I should have been kissing him. I thought I was. Didn’t I keep that memory, precious and soft until it got tainted by Bella’s death and the aftermath? I thought…Bella told me Max didn’t want me, but my anger never got directed at him. I resented Bella, not Max.
“Because of what he was up to with Bella,” Sean says, and there’s a roaring in my ears and it’s like an alarm. No, I don’t want to hear this. I’m actually shaking my head and Sean steps back into the room, puts his mug on the table.
“It was never me. She never looked at me. But I don’t think she would have done it if she’d known how much you liked him.”
Not Bella and Max. No, it wasn’t true. I push past Sean, out through the front door, not caring that it’s raining. Bella walks alongside me as I march into the rain, arms folded, stamping through puddles, head down.
“You knew I liked him. Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” I shout into the wind. “I told you. All those nights you couldn’t sleep, all the secrets we whispered to each other. I told you that night in the woods.”
She’s there in the gap next to me with her perfect hair and perfect cheekbones and her bare feet and her bleeding head, but she won’t answer.
“Talk to me, damn it, talk to me. You’re quick to talk when you want to, aren’t you? Talk to me.”
A car slows, the driver staring as he passes. What does he see? A madwoman yelling at nothing in the middle of a downpour. That’s what I am. Bella hasn’t come back to me. What a stupid bloody idea. I don’t even know who Bella is.
“Enough,” I say, calmer, pushing my sodden hair away from my face. “Enough of this. Go, Bella. Leave me alone. Your death was an accident, that’s all. I have to let you go. I have to get some help and some sleep and let you go.”
Max is waiting for me when I get back to the house. I guess from the look on his face he’s already spoken to Sean. The rain has stopped and he’s sitting on the wooden bench outside the house. I sit beside him, feeling the damp from the wood seep into my jacket.
“I had such a crush on you back then,” I say.
He glances at me. “I know. I knew.”
I wince. “Was it that obvious to everyone?”
“Pretty obvious.” He’s laughing at me.
“Oh God…”
“Listen, Tess—about Bella…”
I put a hand up to stop him from talking. “Don’t. Please don’t. It’s ancient history and it really doesn’t matter. I’m…it’s being back here. Sometimes I feel like I’m sixteen again and then I realize how ridiculous it is to get hurt by something from ten years ago. It’s not like you were my boyfriend, is it?”
The woods loom up behind us but for once I don’t care. There’s no monster in the woods, no monster in Dean House. Bella’s death was an accident, a senseless, pointless accident.
“But I think you should know. I did like you, you know how much I liked you—we were friends. And Bella…” He pauses. “It was just sex.”
“I always thought it was Jack, or even Sean, she was seeing. I honestly never thought it was you.”
“It wasn’t really. It was only a couple of times before the wedding. After…she took me into the woods.”
“The woods?”
“Come on, Tess, I was seventeen. I’d have had sex anywhere.”
I close my eyes and see them, a teenage Max and Bella, walking through the woods together. In my mind, they sink to the floor in the same place she died and, in my mind, he pulls off her shoes first, those battered old white Converse.
I open my eyes. When did Max come back for the weekend? I assumed when he came to the house that he’d just arrived, that he was in his flat in the city, nursing his own wounds from our disaster of a night together, but maybe…maybe he was in town a day or two earlier, visiting Dean House with a dead girl’s shoes.
I hear a noise in the trees behind us and jump up off the bench. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter,” I say to Max.
THEN
Chapter 30
August 2008
Wake up, Tess.
I open my eyes and Bella’s sitting on the edge of my bed, fully dressed and smiling. She’s smiling but there’s tension there; she’s practically vibrating with it. I can smell alcohol and cigarette smoke.
“Where have you been?” I whisper.
“Out.”
“Well—duh. I know that,” I say, sitting up. I look at my clock. It’s two in the morning. “What were you doing?”
Her smile widens. “Not sure you’re old enough to know all the details of what I’ve been doing.”
As my eyes adjust to the dark, I can see her makeup’s smudged, her top is half-buttoned. Her lips look swollen and bruised, there’s a red mark on her neck.
I look away, feeling the distance, almost like a physical thing. I know Bella’s had sex before, but I’ve never asked her about it. Sex still scares me. I haven’t even had a proper boyfriend, haven’t come anywhere close to wanting anything more than a kiss off anyone.
What was it like? I want to ask, but I don’t. I’m curious, but my fear of it is greater than my curiosity.
“Who were you with?” I ask instead.
“You don’t know him,” she says, but her smile fades and her gaze flickers away from me.
She’s lying.
“Do you want to see a photo of him?”
I don’t want to—what if it’s Max? But she’s already opening her faded suede bag and she pulls out a battered photograph. She laughs as she hands it to me. I recoil and drop it. I was expecting a snapshot, the two of them arm in arm, maybe. Instead it’s a close-up of a boy’s torso and he’s clearly naked. His face isn’t in the shot and it’s blurred, obviously a sneaky shot taken as he lunged for the camera, but it’s intimate and it hits my hidden fears full-on—a nipple, a smattering of chest hair, a snaking line of darker hair leading downward. Nothing pornographic, only the chest, but I swear I can see what they’ve just been doing, I can smell the sweat and…other things and it totally freaks me out.
Bella laughs again. She leans over and kisses me on the forehead. “You’re still such a child,” she whispers, as if she were a hundred years older.
And for a second, as her smile dies again, she looks like she is, ancient and sad, and as she pauses, I wonder if she wants me to say something, to do something. But the moment passes and her shoulders droop as she puts the photo away.
“Tess, what are you doing here?” Greg asks.
I don’t really have an answer. I never come here at night.
“I wanted…it’s the wedding soon and Bella said Jack and Sean were away for the weekend and I thought…I thought you might be lonely.” I wince at my own words. It sounds ridiculous—a sixteen-year-old girl asking a forty-year-old if he’s lonely. He doesn’t laugh though. He smiles and opens the door wider.
“I’m fine, but come on in. Do you want a drink?”
I follow him into the kitchen and watch as he pours two glasses of whisky, adding water and ice to mine. I take a sip and try not to pull a face.
“You haven’t had any more nonsense from the boys, have you?”
My face warms as I shake my head. Sean can’t have told him it was me who cut his face. I haven’t been back to look for the lost clippers. “I haven’t seen them since…”
He sighs. “I had a word with them. I’m sorry. They’re so bitter, but it’s not fair for them to take it out on you.”
I don’t tell him I’ve pretty much been hiding from them. I’m mortified by what I did to Sean’s face, but it’s his own bloody fault—him and Jack. I hate them both, I do, I do. I’ve barely spoken to Bella in the last two days, since her two-in-the-morning visit to my room with that photo. The bitter sting of her words about Max is still raw, and my fear that the faceless boy in her photo could be him…the house has never been so full and so silent.
“How are the wedding preparations going?”
“Awful,” I say. “Even Bella’s got all caught up in it, going shopping with Julia and everything. Max and Lena’s parents came back this weekend and it was all anyone talked about and…” My voice trails off before I can confess that it’s me who feels lonely. Left out and alone. I was hoping to spend time with Max but he trails round after Bella and Lena the whole time. And Jack and Sean…even Bella is spending more time with them than me. I can’t even hang out with Dad anymore, like I used to when Bella was off with her mates, because he has Julia now.
