Keep My Secrets by Elena Wilkes (large ebook reader .txt) 📗

‘No.’

‘I need to.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t care what you need. The answer is still no. We’re fine. We don’t want you.’

‘You don’t understand—’

‘I understand everything. He’s out and it’s brought it all back.’

The punch takes her breath away.

‘You know?’

‘Of course I know. We’re Charlotte’s family. We’re the victims.’

The terrible guilt weighs around her heart like a stone.

‘He’s following me.’

‘And?’

‘I’m scared what he’s going to do next. He’s sending me letters. I’ve seen him outside my house. I don’t know what he wants.’

‘Of course you know, Frankie.’ Her voice is hard and flat. ‘I’m glad he’s following you, obsessing over you. I’m glad he’s vengeful and possessive and driven and angry.’ Her voice is brittle with fury and pain. ‘It’s what you deserve.’ She hears another voice murmuring in the background.

‘Let him. It’ll be justice for both of you.’

There’s a beep as Vanessa cuts her off and she’s left holding the phone, listening to her own silence.

We’re fine.

But we’re not all fine, are we?

Frankie stares out into the quiet lay-by.

Some of us haven’t been fine for fifteen years.

No matter how many kids’ lives have been made better: the smiles, and the hugs, and the hand-holdings, the sitting on beds and stroking faces – no matter how many roofs she climbs and daring rescues she throws herself into, there’s always that one child she didn’t save.

The one she chose not to.

Her own.

Chapter Twelve

‘I shouldn’t be here.’

She says it out loud. Her voice jars oddly into the car’s quiet interior.

She checks out all the houses in Vanessa’s street. The rooflines are just as she remembers them: the front doors, the gardens: everything has stayed the same. It’s like a kind of grotesque dream: something from a very long time ago that comes back to her in pulses of appalling recollection. The horror begins to grind. The old memories come at her, one after the other, a picture-terror that makes her want to gun that engine, put her foot down and get out of there as fast as she can. But her heart won’t let her. Not now.

‘I shouldn’t be here.’

She said those words once before as she stepped over the threshold of Vanessa’s house.

‘Nonsense. Why ever not? I’ve invited you, you’re very welcome. More than.’

She walked into the tiny hallway, feeling Charlotte’s whispered presence like an immediate draught of cold air. She shivered.

‘There’s no need to feel uncomfortable. It’s awful for all of us sitting in that court day after day and you have no one to go home to. I only wish we could do more. Pete and Jack will be in for a cup of tea soon. Come and sit down. Relax.’

Vanessa patted the back of an armchair and Frankie sat, perching on the edge. The room was pleasantly neutral and very neat – fawn carpet, sisal coloured sofa, a glass coffee table – but it felt like a church with old graves under the floor, the bodies lying there, dead and gone, but their creepy company very much alive.

‘There we are. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

Vanessa bustled into the kitchen as something inched its way up Frankie’s spine. She looked around, moving her eyes but not her head, acutely aware that Charlotte’s touch was on every surface – that her fingers had lingered on this, and that: this table, that chair – she could maybe even detect a tiny note of lingering perfume, but when she tried to breathe it in, it disappeared.

Why had she even agreed to come here?

She knew why: it was like her punishment. She deserved to see every second of what they were going through. Their pain should be her agony.

‘Hello! You must be Frankie.’

She jumped. Vanessa’s husband was standing in the doorway to the kitchen watching her; his jumper was filthy, and he had mud on his face.

‘I would come over and shake your hand, but I’m not allowed on the carpet.’ He grinned and scratched his chin, smearing the mud a bit further. ‘I was just saying to Vanessa that you’re very welcome to come out and join me and Jack outside while the weather’s not too bad. You can bring your tea if you like.’ He smiled at Vanessa who had appeared at his elbow with a tray of steaming mugs. ‘Do you like gardening?’

She was aware he was talking to her as though he’d known her for years.

‘Jack and I are just sorting out what we’ll plant next spring. We like to get the ground prepared. It takes our minds off things. Come on, let me show you.’

So she joined the family, standing in a pair of borrowed wellies watching Peter as he turned the compost heap, and Jack, incongruous in his anorak, pulling weeds as the four of them chatted about unimportant things. None of them mentioned Charlotte. Vanessa was right: it was as though the horror of it hadn’t happened.

Vanessa made dinner that first night, a meal that no one really ate, but their family rituals were there: the sharing of food, the passing of plates, including Frankie into their family as easily as if she’d been around that table all her life. For one second, one split second, she wondered if it was Charlotte’s seat she was sitting in, and in that same split second, she realised it didn’t feel wrong; she felt accepted in a way she’d never felt before. Part of her wished she could stay here forever, but part of her knew she should run.

‘By the way, I’ve lied for you. I’ve told Jude I’ve seen you at school.’

She nearly fell over Nat who was sitting on the turn of the stairs.

‘Jesus! You nearly killed me!’

‘I’ve said you’re in some of my classes, but I know where you’re really going every day.’ Nat glanced at Jude’s office door, like any minute she was thinking of grassing Frankie up.

Frankie glared sullenly down at her hunched figure, wondering where this conversation was going: some kind of blackmail, probably. She waited