Her One Mistake(38)

“I’m afraid we’ve found a body.”





HARRIET


What does this mean?” Brian paraded back and forth in the small kitchen like a caged animal.

“We don’t know,” Angela told them.

“But the body wasn’t that far away?”

“No,” she said. “Less than five miles from where he was taken.”

“And it’s definitely Mason?” Brian asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid he’s been identified.”

“That poor family,” Harriet cried. “I can’t even imagine how they’re feeling. I can’t even think—”

“Then don’t,” Angela said. “There’s still nothing that suggests what happened to Mason is linked to Alice.”

“So what did happen to him?” Brian demanded. “How did he die? Was he killed straightaway?” He had stopped pacing, his hands gripping the back of a chair as he pressed forward, leaning toward Angela.

“I understand you want to know, but I can’t give you the details yet.”

“And I don’t want to hear them.” Harriet moved her hands to cover her ears.

Brian moved to his wife’s side and carefully peeled her hands away from her head. “And you don’t need to, my love,” he said, kissing the back of them, his lips lingering on her skin, leaving a moist patch when he pulled them away. He slid into the chair beside her. “You shouldn’t have to be thinking about any of this,” he said.

He left her no option but to think about it, as he continued to ask Angela questions about Mason that she repeatedly told him she couldn’t answer. Brian’s grip on her hands remained tight. His face was close; she could feel his warm breath touch her cheeks in puffs as he spoke. The scent of his day-old aftershave trickled up her nose and into her throat each time she breathed in.

Eventually Harriet extracted herself, making the excuse that she needed the bathroom.

Her heart broke for little Mason’s parents. They had no hope now—all they had was a finality that didn’t make anything better. She wanted to write and tell them how sorry she was, and that she understood how their lives must have shattered. Only she didn’t understand. Because Harriet still had hope. So instead she wrote down her thoughts in the little Moleskine notebook that she kept hidden under a floorboard in her bedroom, and wished they were getting comfort elsewhere.

More comfort than Harriet was getting. She and Brian swept like ghosts around the house that now groaned with loneliness. He would reach out to touch her, utter words in her ear, but they weren’t comforting. Each step she took on the wooden staircase echoed eerily back at her. In the hallway the Ikea lamp no longer cast any warmth, just a long, menacing shadow along the floorboards.

The living room looked as if it had been swept clean of any trace of Alice. Harriet’s fingers itched to grab hold of the plastic toy boxes so perfectly stacked in a corner and overturn them, making it look like her daughter was still there. Had she been the one to hastily tidy them away once Alice had gone to bed last Friday night, or was it Brian who’d meticulously set things to order, restoring the room to a child-free area?

But Harriet knew she couldn’t start throwing Alice’s toys all over the house. She could imagine what Brian would say if she did. It would give him another reason to convince her she should have taken the medication she knew didn’t exist.

At times she would just sit on Alice’s bed, running her hand across the pink duvet embroidered with birds, still ruffled from her daughter’s last sleep. Harriet would look for the indent in the pillow where Alice’s head had last lain, imagining her blond hair splayed around her in a fan, but the image was rapidly vanishing.

Now there was just Hippo on the bed, where she had carefully placed him after finding him wedged next to Alice’s car seat. It broke Harriet’s heart into two clean pieces to think of Alice without the gray hippo that had always gone everywhere with her.

Over the week, the sense of Alice in the little girl’s bedroom had diminished until Harriet was left wondering what was imagination and what was real. It was so frightening that Harriet started writing everything down in her book again.

Eventually she entered the bedroom less and less, but the thought of Alice somewhere else, sleeping in a place she couldn’t imagine, opening her eyes and not being able to see her string of butterflies hanging in the window, was slowly and painfully killing Harriet.

? ? ?

ONE WEEK HAD passed since Alice had vanished and her disappearance was still hot news. A handful of journalists continued to hang around outside their gate now that Mason’s body had been found, and there was more interest than before.

Harriet still read everything she could, however painful. Often she would lock herself in the bathroom with Brian’s iPad and scour websites to see what people were saying. Then she would delete the search history. Brian wouldn’t understand her need that had turned into an obsession. He would only point out how unhealthy it was.

Maybe he was right. She didn’t need strangers voicing their opinions about them. It was Angela’s opinion that counted. She was the person living Harriet’s hell with her, yet she was giving little away.

Harriet liked having Angela in her life. She thought they could have been friends in very different circumstances. Harriet wondered what Angela was feeding back to her bosses at the station. It was her job to watch and cast judgments on their tiny family, so she must have opinions. What did she make of them, dancing around each other like two strangers trapped in a prison of their own misery? Angela had eaten with them, waited while they slept, seen them at their worst. What was Brian telling her when Harriet wasn’t in the room?