Her One Mistake(72)

I waited at the cottage like I’d told Charlotte I would, though I didn’t know if she would come. Five years I’ve had to confide in my only friend and I didn’t, so I doubted I’d gotten across what I’d needed to in five minutes. I didn’t know if she believed me—I couldn’t blame her if she went straight to the police—but I had no other choice except to wait.

Had I made another grave mistake by calling her? My plan was already so feebly held together. I had proved that by the frantic way I was ripping it apart. I was becoming my own undoing and now that I’d reached out to Charlotte, I may as well have handed her the rope that would hang me.

But I needed help, and the only person I hoped I could trust was possibly the one person I should have confided in at the start.

The minutes ticked by on the grandfather clock as rhythmically as the metronome that had sat on my music teacher’s piano at school. Back then it had lulled me into a trance where I’d waste large chunks of the class staring out of the window, dreaming of a different life. Now with each sharp tick, a fraction of hope evaporated.

Tick. You still don’t know where Alice is.

Tock. The longer you wait, the worse it will be.

I fidgeted impatiently in the armchair in the living room. I got up and paced the floorboards in the kitchen. I went upstairs and looked out the front window onto the lifeless road below. Everything was morbidly still. Even the branches of the trees were immobile, captured in a moment of time.

How long would I wait? Hours? Days? There would come a point when I would need to do more than patter about the inside of an empty cottage. When I would need to call the police myself.

What would be the tipping point?

I stood at the front window, my hands splayed against the net curtains as they pressed against the glass. My heart burned with the crushing realization that whatever happened now, Alice would undoubtedly be taken from me. But all I wanted was to see her—I would risk everything to know my daughter was safe.

“Come back, Alice,” I called into the silent room and, as if in response to my plea, a shard of sunlight pierced through the window and flickered onto the patterned carpet. In a moment of clarity, I knew I had to take back control and figure out what I’d say if the police arrived or it got to the point I needed to call them.

Searching in my bag for my notebook, I took out the Elderberry Cottage business card I kept in the back pocket. I turned it over and stared at the blank space. Then I grabbed a pen from a jar on the mantel and sat in the armchair, chewing on the end of the pen as I thought. Carefully, in an impression of my father’s loopy scrawl, I wrote a short note on the back of the card.

It was crude and doubtfully sufficient, but as I read over it I figured it was better than nothing. I tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans as the grandfather clock chimed six o’clock.

If Charlotte had walked out of her door the moment we’d hung up, she would have been here by now. Sitting up straight, I set deadlines. I would go back to the pay phone and call Charlotte again if she wasn’t here by seven.

I would call the police and tell them everything if my father and Alice hadn’t returned by eight.

? ? ?

AT HALF PAST six I peered out the window again, but the same quiet, motionless scene lay outside. The little street lined with bushes, the tall trees with the sun now dappling only the very top of them as it dropped behind the house. I wished something looked different, just so I could see there was still life out there.

My stomach grumbled with hunger, reminding me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so I searched the sparse kitchen cabinets. There were a few tins and a loaf of bread, a half-eaten packet of crackers, and a variety box of cereal with three boxes missing.

I ran my fingers over the cereals, trying to work out which ones had been eaten. Had Alice had one that morning? When was the last time she’d been in the house? It could have been days ago, I thought, with a surge of sickness rising through my stomach and up into my throat. I slammed the cabinet door shut just as there was a loud rap on the front door.

Automatically I froze. It felt too good to be true that it could be Charlotte. But if it wasn’t her, then who was it? The police?

Slowly I crept toward the front door, looking through its obscured window, but not even a shadow flickered behind it.

I opened the door a crack and looked out, pulling it open wider. With a plummeting sense of disappointment, I realized there was no one there and that deep down I had thought it would be my friend. Closing my eyes to stem the threat of tears, a heavy sense of despair told me I should never have expected Charlotte to come.

I began pushing the door closed when I felt the slightest puff of breath against the back of my neck. The hairs on my arms pricked up, goose bumps splattered across my bare skin.

Someone was behind me.

I felt him. I smelled the woody scent of his aftershave. He was inside the house, standing in the hallway, breathing against my neck. I would have screamed if the sound hadn’t frozen in my throat.

“Hello, Harriet,” Brian murmured, his mouth so close to my ear I could almost feel the brush of his lips.

My hand shook violently against the doorknob as he reached over my shoulder to gently close it. “Surprise,” he whispered.

Slowly I turned around. Brian’s face was almost pressed against mine, skewed into a smirk though it couldn’t hide the wrath emanating from his empty eyes.