The Woods, page 32
“They’re upstairs,” I shout. “Stop them. Stop them—they’re killing each other.” My legs give way and I collapse on the gravel. I lay my face against the hard, sharp stones and I cry.
Detective Levinson gets out of another car. He comes over and helps me up, his grip gentle, but he doesn’t let me go when I’m standing.
“Tess Cooper—I’m arresting you for the murder of Greg Lewis…” As he talks and puts me in handcuffs, I keep muttering the same thing over and over again.
It wasn’t me.
It wasn’t me.
Black spots float before my eyes and Bella is with me, whispering for me to wake up, but I am. I’m finally awake but no one sees. No one will listen.
Chapter 40
They take me to the hospital even though I insist I’m fine. But even as I say it, I’m shaking, unable to stand without help. I can hear the slur in my words and in the end I stop protesting as they help me into the ambulance, still handcuffed, a uniformed officer in the ambulance with me.
Dad arrives before the police, but the uniformed officer standing outside my door won’t let him in. I hear him arguing and it makes me cry because it’s the same hospital they brought me to after Bella died.
Detective Levinson comes in, looking grave.
“It wasn’t me,” I say. “I swear—whatever Max and Lena have been saying—it wasn’t me. It must have been them.” I stop, swallow. “Or Bella.”
This time, I tell him everything. About the secret garden, about Bella and Greg and me. About the lies I told that set her off.
My voice is hoarse by the end of it and when Detective Levinson starts going over the same questions again, I lay my head on the pillow and cry. Dad comes in with a doctor and they all start arguing.
“You have Sean and Jack at the station,” Dad shouts. “And Tess is going nowhere. Let her recover.”
Detective Levinson glances at me and whatever he sees makes him relent. “Okay, I’ll leave. But I’ll be back in the morning.”
Dad sits in the chair next to the bed after Detective Levinson leaves. He holds my hand and there are tears in his eyes.
“Have they found Max and Lena yet?” I whisper.
Dad shakes his head. “They will.”
“I didn’t do it, Dad—I swear to you. It was Max and…” I pause and swallow. I don’t want to tell him the rest, but I have to. “It has to have been them. And Bella. She was with them. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
Dad closes his eyes. It hurts so much having to tell him this, but it’s been hidden for too long.
“I’ve told them—when they find Max and Lena, they have to question them about Bella as well. About what happened out in the woods. I think…I think she was going to go to the police and they stopped her and that’s how she…”
My voice trails off. How she died, that’s what I was going to say. I think Max and Lena killed Bella as well. That’s why Bella came back to me. This is the truth she wanted me to uncover. My stomach turns over in slow, lazy waves and there’s a bitter taste in my throat. Bella is still here, hidden in the shadows in the corner of the room. I don’t understand…I thought she’d disappear. Now that I’ve found out the truth, I thought she’d disappear.
“But they still think it’s me,” I say, hot tears spilling. “They’ve arrested me. Oh God, oh God, they don’t believe me. What if they don’t find Max and Lena? What if they keep insisting it’s me even if they do?”
“Don’t talk anymore,” Dad says. “Try to rest. The doctor said you’re suffering from severe exhaustion. You need to rest before you answer any more questions; you have to make sure everything is clear in your mind.”
It doesn’t sound like he believes me, and the bitter bile in my throat surges higher.
“I should have…when Steve Wallace told me about Nicole and her secret boyfriend, I suspected Greg even then. Some of the things Julia told me about him. But I had no proof. I should have told the police then, but I didn’t want to hurt Julia. They told me what that bastard did to you. I never knew. I swear I never knew or I’d have…If you did do it, I’m glad. I’m glad.” He says it so fiercely I have to look away. But when I look away, I see Bella, her gaze as fierce as his.
Dad glances at the closed door and leans forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. “All this time, I’ve been so worried, Tess. I never told. Never told anyone.”
“Told anyone what?” I say, stomach turning over faster.
“About what you said in the hospital. After they found you and Bella in the woods. I knew it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. If what you’re telling me about Max and Lena is what happened…It’s awful but I’m so relieved.” He drops his head and I feel his tears drip onto my hand.
The waves in my stomach have frozen to ice.
I close my eyes after he leaves but I can’t sleep. The night passes with every second lasting an hour in my quiet hospital room, my brain replaying everything that’s happened. I hear footsteps and open my eyes to find Detective Levinson standing next to my bed.
“We’ve found Max and Helena Rees,” he says.
I sit up. I look at the door and realize I can’t see the shadow of my police guard outside.
“Helena is still insisting it was you, but Max has said enough to corroborate your story.” He pauses. “After a lot of questioning.”
Why? After all their elaborate plans, why did Max confess?
“We looked again at the evidence. They couldn’t explain why they left Dean House last night. Your fingerprints weren’t on Greg Lewis’s phone. But Max Rees’s were. There were calls and texts from his phone that corroborate your story. He broke down.” He pauses and sighs. “I’m sorry, Tess, but he’s saying it was Bella. That all he and his sister did was help cover it up. That his sister sent the texts after Mr. Lewis’s death to help Bella. He was able to quote the messages.”
“Then…”
“You’re free to go once the doctor has been in. But we still need you to come in and answer some more questions. As a witness, not a suspect. Your father is waiting outside.”
“And Bella? Did they say what happened to Bella?”
He shakes his head. “Both of them deny any involvement in your sister’s death. There’s still no evidence to suggest that Bella’s death was anything but an accident.”
“But…” But what? Do I tell him that Bella is still here, still insisting it wasn’t an accident?
“What about the murdered girls? Was it Greg Lewis?” I say this as the detective turns to leave.
“It’s something we’re investigating.” He glances back at me. “We’re gathering evidence that…if it was him, then by killing him, your sister and her friends may well have saved you. If you’d continued visiting him…”
I go cold. It could have been my body out there in the woods, not Greg’s.
I sink my head back against the pillow after he leaves. That’s it, then. All the ghosts laid to rest. I look to the corner of the room where Bella still hovers.
All except one.
We sit around the table, Dad, Sean, and me. I’ve spent all day at the police station, answering questions, telling them again everything about Greg, Max, Bella, and Lena. I told them everything Max told me, all the strange happenings that I put down to paranoia that I now think were down to Lena. Sean, after he’d been treated for cuts and bruises, sat in a room down the hall, answering the same questions. Jack’s gone home to his wife and son. Whether they’ll let him back, I don’t know.
I didn’t tell them about Bella coming back.
And I didn’t mention what Dad said at the hospital—it makes no sense. His words went over and over in my head all night in the hospital, but I don’t remember saying anything to him after Bella died.
I’m numb now. I have no more words. We sit in silence at the table, staring into mugs of cold tea. I think I’m going to sleep tonight and I hope there’ll be no more bad dreams. I guess at some point soon, Sean is going to go home, but he hasn’t mentioned it and Dad hasn’t asked him to go. I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting there before I notice Bella is sitting in the fourth chair.
My eyes fill with tears and I blink them away. I think she’s here to say goodbye. I think when I sleep she’ll disappear for good. I found out the truth like she wanted. I found out the truth and now we can both sleep. She leans forward and looks at me, tears in her own eyes.
Remember, Tess.
I shake my head. I still don’t remember that night. But I found out what happened, I don’t need to remember it—Max confessed.
Remember.
I scrape my chair back. “I’m going to bed.”
Dad glances up, eyes blinking back into focus. “Sleep well, Tess.”
Sean follows me out of the room. “I’m sorry for what my dad did to you,” he says in a low voice.
I clench my hands into fists. “Sean—stop.”
The look on his face is tortured. “I suspected, didn’t I? All that time, I wondered and so did Jack. Could we have saved those girls if we’d said something? Could we have saved you?” He pauses. “We might even have been able to save him. That’s what’s eating Jack up—if we’d gone to the police, Dad might have ended up in prison but he’d be alive.”
“Stop,” I say again.
Sean looks at me, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears.
“He didn’t…he didn’t do anything to me. I don’t know if he killed those other girls, but he didn’t do anything to me.”
“But…”
I open my mouth to tell him I lied, but the words won’t come out. “Max and Lena made it up. Bella was mistaken, she saw something she misinterpreted and Max and Lena used it to try and make people believe I did it.”
I’m still lying. Is that why Bella hasn’t disappeared?
I do sleep. Not right away, but I do sleep.
When I open my eyes, I’m walking through the lane with Bella. It’s night and she’s talking, mid-conversation.
“You never would listen when I told you,” she’s saying.
“Am I awake or is this a dream?” I say.
“What do you think?”
I look down. I’m wearing the jersey pajama trousers and T-shirt I went to bed in, I’m barefoot like her. I can feel the sharp stones under my feet and the cold breeze on my arms. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m awake. I don’t know if this is real.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“You know where we’re going. You’ve always known where we were going.”
Time drifts and we keep walking in silence, broken every now and then by Bella speaking. “I tried to tell you, tried to explain.”
“What?”
“What happened. Why we did it. Why you…”
“Are you talking about Greg? I know what you all did. I know…”
She shakes her head. “Not Greg.”
“Then…”
“You need to remember, Tess,” she says. She stops walking and I see we’re outside Dean House and I’m shaking my head, because I don’t want to. I don’t have to.
“Yes, you do,” she says with a smile and then we’re inside, we’re upstairs on the landing and I can see the woods out of the window, I can see the trees looming up and the moon is shining through the window and lighting the stairs and there’s shouting and there’s a…there’s a…
Oh.
Once upon a time, two girls went into the woods…
“I remember,” I whisper, and Bella steps back, fading a little.
“I remember what I did.”
Chapter 41
Once upon a time, two girls went into the woods and only one came out…
That’s how the fairy tale starts but I couldn’t remember how it ended or what happened to the two little girls in the woods. It’s been so long since my mum read it to us. It always scared me, even then, so Mum started skipping it, reading the happier stories instead.
I remember the little girls—they were silly, sneaking out of their safe, warm homes to run into the woods. And I remember there was some sort of monster, some macabre lesson for the two naughty girls who sneaked out at night.
Am I remembering right, though?
“I tried to tell you before that night,” Bella says.
“I didn’t want to hear it.”
“You were scared. I get that.”
“You were screaming at me, yelling. We’d both drunk too much.”
The world slips and we’re back there, in the woods, the night of the wedding. Bella is in her tank top and jeans, barefoot. Still clean, still whole. She’s crying and so am I.
“You kept sneaking off, Tess, and I knew you were still seeing him. I had to stop it. Stop him before he raped you again.”
“He never did anything to me.”
“That’s not what you told me—you told me he was the monster. You told me what he did to you and I—”
“I lied.”
“What?”
“I lied. I fucking lied. He never touched me, never even looked at me after you came along.”
She recoils and shakes her head. “You lied? What…why would you lie about that? No, you’re in denial. I get that, what he did to you…”
“I lied. He never touched me.” I scream it at her, the words ringing out over the approaching storm. “It was me—I kissed him and he pushed me away. And he was kind but he never touched me.”
“You fucking lied?”
“Yes—I lied and then the words were out there and I didn’t know how to take them back.”
“Oh God, Tess, what have you done?”
I can’t answer her. The enormity of my lie increases the distance between us. She was so loving and fierce and protective after I told that lie. She was my Bella again.
All the color has gone from her face. “Oh God, Tess…you don’t know what you’ve done. You told me he was the monster. You told me and I thought if he did that to you, he must have killed Nic.”
No. No.
“That time he tried to kiss me, Tess, I got away, but what if I hadn’t?” She’s crying harder. “I couldn’t get clean after, I couldn’t scrub his hands off me. Then you told me he raped you and…it’s why I can’t sleep, because in my dreams he rapes and kills both of us over and over again.”
I put my hands over my ears and I can hear a roar, a monster broken loose. No. He was my friend. He would never, never—look how embarrassed he was after I tried to kiss him. If he was what Bella is saying he was, he wouldn’t have pushed me away, would he? But…I was a good girl, he said. Not like the others. I got so angry when Bella said he tried to kiss her, like I was jealous of him perving on my sister. I wouldn’t, I won’t let it be true, because that stupid flash of jealousy makes me sick, makes me as bad as him for even for one second wanting him to have attacked me not her because why is it always her, center of attention, always Bella, never me.
So I lied, made up that awful, horrible story and now Bella has…
No.
It starts to rain, heavy drops that get faster and faster and soak us in seconds.
“I went to confront him. I was going to make him confess.”
No. I scream it out loud. “No—stop it, stop it. You’re lying.”
“I’m not fucking lying,” she screams back. “You’re the liar. You told me he raped you. I thought he was the killer and he was going to kill you too. I had to stop him. I had to—”
Lightning hits a tree and we both scream and jump away, too close to the edge of the embankment. The rain is a deluge, hitting us hard enough to hurt.
“What did you do?” I shout over the roaring in my ears, the howling wind, the crash of thunder.
“We killed him.”
The roaring stills for a moment and there’s silence. Then it’s back in a rush, worse, bigger. Terrible.
“We killed him and I’m scared, Tess. We have to tell the police. Tell them what you told me, tell them what he did to me and…”
“No!” I scream again, voice breaking on the word, and I push her away. “I’m not telling the police anything. It was your fault, you—flirting with Max, flirting with everyone. Leaving me behind. You knew how much I liked Max but you wouldn’t stop flirting with him so he wouldn’t look anywhere but at you. And then…Greg was mine. My friend and you stole him as well. It’s your bloody fault I lied.”
“You stupid girl,” she yells back, shoving me hard. I stagger back and stumble over a rock. “You made up that monstrous lie because you were jealous? You stupid little child.” She shoves me harder, her hands almost punching my chest.
“Stop it,” I shout, and I shove her back, as hard as I can, all my anger behind that shove.
I push her again and she lets me and I’m mad and I want her to fight back and again I come at her and I push—
Oh God, wake up wake up wake up
I remember. I remember how many times she tried to tell me. How often she tried to warn me without telling me what he’d done to her.
“There’s something wrong with him,” she’d say, and I’d shake my head.
“He’s just a lonely man.”
“A lonely man who befriended young girls? Haven’t you ever wondered why? Wondered why Julia really left him?”
“I was lost. He found me in his garden one day. He didn’t call the police. He talked to me. And he listened.”
“He was grooming you.”
I laughed. “Grooming me? Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I believe. All those stories about Nic and the other murdered girl. All the speculation about the person they believed responsible. The profiles…they all fit.”
“There are probably hundreds—thousands—of men living alone, living reclusively in the area. Why him?”
“Because none of those other men have stolen my sister.”
I close my eyes and the door opens again, like it did back then. He steps into view, out of the shadows, and my mind turns handsome, charismatic Greg Lewis into a monster, stretching him taller, painting malevolence onto his face. He’s right there, his hands around Nicole Wallace’s neck, raping and killing her. Nicole’s face turns into mine, into Bella’s…
