An Unwanted Guest(72)

She told herself that Dana also had a lot to lose. She was about to marry, and obviously into money. Lauren was certain Matthew didn’t know about Dana’s past. Dana would keep that from him, surely. She wouldn’t want a man like Matthew to know what she’d come from. But Dana knew something about Lauren that Lauren couldn’t allow to get out.

Of all the shitty luck.

How easily it all came back to her that night. That horrible time in her life. She was full of rage. She’d been removed from her family’s house and sent to that wretched foster home on the other side of the city. Her parents had found her unmanageable and she thought they wanted to teach her a lesson. She hated them for it. Her father had had enough of her, but her mother – her mother thought Lauren was just unhappy. Her poor, long-suffering mother. She never really understood who Lauren was.

The foster home was awful. She didn’t even have her own bedroom, but had to share with two other girls. One of them was Dani, tall and skinny and vicious. She never knew what Dani’s situation was – they never talked about home, and how they ended up in that shithole. The bathroom was shared among six of them. No one ever seemed to clean it. The food was barely edible. But she ate it anyway, and hated herself for shovelling it in, looking for comfort wherever she could find it.

They would go up onto the roof. It seems unlikely now, unbelievable, that when they were in care, they would climb up the TV antenna tower in the backyard and get onto the roof. The house was at the end of the street, and if they stayed on the back of the roof, no one saw them. They would hang out up there, smoking cigarettes that Dani stole from Mrs Purcell, the woman who was supposed to be looking after them. One afternoon, one of the kids, Lucas – he was thirteen, but seemed younger – climbed up after them and asked Dani for a smoke.

Dani told him to fuck off.

He stayed. He kept pestering them until Dani told him his parents were drug addicts and they were never coming back for him because she’d heard the social worker telling Mrs Purcell that they’d overdosed and he was an orphan now. She really could be a cold-hearted bitch.

‘You’re lying!’ he shouted, furious tears streaming down his face. ‘I’m going to tell on you!’

‘Go ahead,’ Dani said, flicking her cigarette ash. Then she added, ‘God, you’re such a baby.’

Getting nowhere with Dani and stinging with hurt and the need to hurt someone else, Lucas turned on Lauren and said, with a contempt beyond his years, ‘You’re fat and ugly!’

And Lauren stood up suddenly and pushed him off the roof, just like that.

Dani turned to her in shock. ‘Jesus! Do you know what you just did?’

They looked down at the boy on the patio stones below. He wasn’t moving; his head was split open and leaking. They bolted off to the mall and didn’t come back until suppertime.

It was assumed he’d fallen, or jumped. He was a troubled boy, the child of drug addicts, with probable fetal alcohol syndrome and poor impulse control. No one even questioned where they were. But Dani knew what Lauren had done, and for a few days she held it over her, threatening to tell whenever she felt like it.

Dani left, no more than a week after Lauren pushed the boy off the roof. She stuffed her things in a bin bag and said, ‘See ya, loser.’ And then she was out of the house, slamming the door behind her. Lauren didn’t know if she’d gone back to her parents or to another foster home.

Lauren wanted to go home. She hadn’t thought she would be there long. But it dragged on, week after week, until she wondered if her parents would ever ask to get her back, and no one told her anything. Lauren’s rage grew and grew.

When Lauren was finally reclaimed, her mother came for her alone. Her father was gone; she never saw him again. Her mother took her home and things went back to normal, with Lauren doing whatever she wanted. A couple of years later, her mother remarried. Her stepfather adopted her and she changed her name to his.

And then Dani showed up at Mitchell’s Inn.

That night, Lauren didn’t actually take her sleeping pills. She waited until Ian was asleep, and then, when all was quiet except for the bluster and rattle of the wind, she slipped out of her own room and padded quietly down to the first floor and knocked lightly on Dana’s door. She was all alone in the hall; everyone was asleep, the storm crashing outside their windows. She didn’t have to knock twice.

Dana answered the door, looking guardedly at her. Lauren said that they should talk. Dana glanced back at the sleeping form of her fiancé, slipped the room key into the pocket of her dressing gown, and stepped into the hall without a word. She followed Lauren down the stairs to the landing and then stopped. ‘Wait,’ she said, her voice low. ‘We can talk here.’ And she stopped as if she wouldn’t go any further. So, at the top of the stairs, Lauren looked Dana in the eye and said, ‘We need to clarify a couple of things.’

Dana stared, her eyes wide, the same way she’d stared at Lauren in the dining room when she made the crack about someone falling off the roof. They had a fraught, shared history. The only question was, what happened now?

A cool, blank expression settled over Dana’s face. ‘What is it, exactly, that you want to clarify?’ she asked. And then she simpered and said, ‘Oh, wait! I know. You want to be sure I’m not going to tell anybody that you’re a murderer.’

‘Shut up, Dani,’ Lauren snapped, her voice low. ‘Don’t think you can push me around any more. Things have changed.’