The House Guest by Mark Edwards(33)

I was still trying to wrap my head round the idea that Ruth had been taken by a secret group. But the answer was obvious.

‘Eden needed to do it before Mona and Jack came back and exposed her.’

‘Of course.’

Something struck me. ‘You said people joined and came back changed. Why hasn’t Sinead come back?’

‘That’s the question that haunts me.’

‘Maybe there’s some kind of test,’ I said.

‘And not everyone passes it.’

‘Jesus.’

We both gazed into the blackness of our coffee cups.

‘Let’s back up to the night in question,’ Callum said. ‘Eden knew she had to take Ruth before your friends returned. Friday night was almost her last opportunity. What would she have done if you hadn’t gone to sleep?’

This was something that had been niggling at me, in the back of my mind, since it had happened. Eden had plied us with drink, sure, but she couldn’t have known I would pass out.

Unless . . .

I stood up. ‘I think she might have drugged me. It would explain how horrific I felt the next day, when I finally woke up. I’ve never felt that bad before, no matter how much I’ve had to drink. I’m still not one hundred per cent now . . . Or what if—’ I broke off. ‘Eden must have known that I would tell Jack and Mona about her as soon as they got back, and that I would find out she was an imposter.’

Callum watched me pace the room.

‘And she must have realised I would freak out when I found out she wasn’t who she said she was. What if she did more than try to knock me out?’

I stopped pacing.

‘What if she was trying to kill me? If I was dead, there would be no one to tell Jack and Mona about her. No one would ever know Eden had been there. And there’d be no one to look for Ruth.’

It all made a sick kind of sense. The way I’d felt on Friday night, like I was tripping. The terrible state I’d been in on Saturday. The way that Eden had removed all trace of herself from the house. It was all designed so Jack and Mona would come home to find me dead and Ruth gone. No one would ever know Eden had been there, so . . .

‘I’m finding this hard to wrap my head around,’ Callum said. ‘If you’d been found dead, the police would search for Ruth. She’d be a murder suspect. Eden wouldn’t want that to happen, would she?’

‘Unless she planned to remove my body.’

He furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t know. Would she and the others want it to look like you’d both gone missing? And if Eden was planning to have someone come and take your body, why didn’t she remove you while you were unconscious? They could have finished the job.’

I shuddered.

‘No, I think she only intended to knock you out. No offence, but she probably thought it was safe to leave you alive because she didn’t think you’d be capable of tracking Ruth down. Of getting anywhere at all.’

I let what he’d said sink in.

‘You’re going to have to prove her wrong, son,’ said Callum.





Chapter 19

‘I need to prove that Eden exists,’ I said the next morning, after a restless night on the sofa. ‘Do you have any photos of her?’

‘No,’ Callum responded. He looked a lot less tired than I felt. He’d already been out and had come back with coffee and breakfast. ‘I’ve tried to get one a few times but it’s harder than you’d think, secretly photographing someone. I got a couple of blurry shots of the back of her head and that’s it.’

‘Sinead didn’t have any?’

‘Not that I could find. I guess Eden doesn’t like having her picture taken.’

‘Except she took a photo with me,’ I said. ‘In the bar. We took a few, in fact.’

‘Then she deleted them off your phone.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Did you notice any CCTV cameras there? In the bar?’

I thought back, trying to picture that night. But who notices CCTV cameras?

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, you’d better get down there and find out.’

‘Aren’t you going to come too?’

‘Can’t. I’ve set up a meeting with a local journalist. She’s an expert in cults.’

‘Cults?’ It was the first time the word had come up. I realised we had been skirting around it.

‘Yep. Apparently this reporter knows everything there is to know about the subject, so I’m going to go have a chat with her. See what I can find out. She’s upstate so I’m going to be gone a while.’ He paused. ‘If you search for cults and secret organisations online, there are dozens of them. Hundreds. But the one we’re looking for . . . there’s no trace of it.’

‘Maybe your contact on Facebook was making it all up.’

He squeezed his empty coffee cup, crushing it. ‘It exists. I’m sure of it. And if anyone knows anything about it, it’ll be this woman.’



Alison’s Starting To Happen, the bar I’d visited with Eden, didn’t open until lunchtime, so I spent the morning at Callum’s, researching cults on my laptop. The word had a chilling power, conjuring up images of religious fanatics living in communes and compounds. The Jonestown massacre. The sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Charles Manson and the butchering of Sharon Tate. They preyed on lost people who were searching for something to belong to, looking for meaning.