A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  ‘Does he normally lie to you?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Do you think he set out to hurt or upset you?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Life isn’t black or white, Maddie. You should know that by now. Most of us live in the grey areas. He told you he didn’t want to worry you. He was foolish, but give him the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word.’ She fished around in the box for some teacups and frowned in dismay. ‘Oh, dear. Not even a matching pair.’

  Maddie bridled. ‘I’m not a child, Mum! I run the sanctuary without his help and I handle nearly all the household finances. It’s not just the fact he told me an outright lie, it’s that he’s making decisions for both of us, as if I don’t matter. We’ve already lent Candace more than we can afford to start her own business, but it’s barely had time to get off the ground. Now he’s given her more to buy her own flat.’

  Sarah picked up another cardboard box. ‘Candace may have had a rackety few years, but as I understand it, by and large she’s got her life back on track. Lucas knows his sister. If he’s so sure she’ll be able to pay him back, you have to trust his judgement.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say. How would you feel if Dad had mortgaged this house without telling you?’

  Her mother’s hands stilled. She rarely talked about Maddie’s father. Maddie had no real idea of the kind of man he’d been, or even how her parents had met. There was no secret about it; on the odd occasion she’d asked about him, Sarah had answered readily enough. It was more that she felt as if she was intruding on her parents’ privacy, entering a room that had been theirs alone. Sarah had loved her husband very much, and three decades later, she still grieved for him.

  ‘I’d have trusted he knew what he was doing,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘Maddie, Lucas lied to you, but by your own admission, it was a one-off. Why does it matter to you so much? Is something wrong between the two of you?’

  ‘I don’t expect Lucas to be perfect, Mum. I’m not asking him to tell me every little thing that’s going on in his life.’ She picked fretfully at her fingernails. ‘The papers I found in the car,’ she said in a sudden rush. ‘Lucas has doubled our life insurance. He said the mortgage company insisted on it, because of the loan.’

  ‘You think he plans to kill you for your life insurance?’ Sarah asked calmly.

  It sounded preposterous now her mother had said the words aloud. Delusional, even. ‘No, of course not!’

  ‘Do you have any reason to think Lucas might hurt you?’

  ‘Mum, how can you even say that?’

  ‘You’re the one who mentioned the insurance.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant!’ she cried, wondering exactly what she had meant.

  ‘Does this have something to do with Noah?’ Sarah asked shrewdly.

  Maddie hated herself for even thinking it. But was it possible … just possible … that Candace had hurt her son, and that Lucas knew about it? Candace wouldn’t have done it deliberately, of course. But perhaps there had been some sort of accident. It would certainly explain why Candace had started drinking again and the odd confession in that voicemail: the ‘terrible’ thing she said she’d done. Lucas had covered for his sister about the loan. It was a small stretch to imagine him covering for her again.

  An even darker thought occurred to her. Lucas knew how much she’d suffered with her depression after Jacob. He must know how destabilising it would be for her to lose her child. If he really wanted the sanctuary sold—

  It was unthinkable. And yet there must be some part of her that considered it a real possibility or she wouldn’t have been up half the night trying to convince herself she was just being paranoid.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she had no real idea what her mother thought of Lucas. She’d always assumed Sarah loved him, but in six years her mother had never actually ventured an opinion on her son-in-law, acting instead as an echo chamber for Maddie’s own emotions. Perhaps that’s what parents were supposed to do for their children, but it was a little disconcerting to discover that she had no idea what was really going on in her mother’s head.

  She was so confused. It felt as if she were blundering around in a fog, hopelessly trying to find her bearings. She had gone from thinking no one she knew could have hurt Noah to thinking everyone could have done, including herself. And she was so tired. She simply didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with this right now.

  ‘I googled Lucas last night,’ she said abruptly. ‘Lucas and Candace.’

  Sarah gave her a long, level look, but said nothing.

  ‘I don’t know anything about his life before we met,’ she added defensively. ‘I never asked before, because I didn’t think it mattered, but now …’

  ‘So what did you discover?’ her mother asked. ‘On Google?’

  For a split second, Maddie considered telling her. There had been numerous entries for both Lucas and Candace, dating back a dozen years: accolades for Lucas’s architectural designs, LinkedIn recommendations for Candace’s IT expertise, a newspaper profile from when she’d run the London Marathon, telephone and email listings – the usual virtual footprints everyone left nowadays. Beyond that, nothing. Nothing at all.

  It was as if Lucas and Candace Drummond had materialised fully formed out of thin air twelve years ago. These days, with the internet, it was easy to research someone’s background, but she couldn’t find a single reference to either of them before then; no previous jobs held, no colleges attended, no voter registration, nothing. None of their social media profiles mentioned their schools or where they’d grown up. There were no photographs of them with old school friends or at college reunions. Most ominous of all, there was no record of their parents’ death in a house fire, the kind of story that would have definitely made at least the local newspaper. She was no investigative journalist, but it was odd. More than odd, in fact.

  She didn’t want her night terrors given substance. She didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if the man lying next to her was plotting to kill her or – perhaps even worse – have her committed to a madhouse.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I found nothing at all.’

  Chapter 24

  Monday 12.30 p.m.

  Emily pirouetted on the small round dais in front of the three-sided mirror, holding out her skirts. ‘What do you think, Mummy?’

  There was an unexpected lump in Maddie’s throat. Seeing Emily standing there in her white first communion dress, fair hair tumbling around her shoulders beneath the frothy lace veil, she had a sudden vision of her daughter as she would look on her wedding day. ‘You look beautiful, Emily. Absolutely beautiful.’

  Emily glowed and spun back towards the mirror. ‘I look like I’m getting married.’

  ‘You do,’ Maddie said softly.

  Sarah hadn’t been particularly religious, but Maddie’s father had been Catholic, and in his memory, Sarah had raised her in his faith. Maddie had lapsed when she was a teenager, but she and Lucas had married in their local Catholic church, and all three of their children had been baptised there – Noah’s christening had been less than four weeks before he’d died. At the beginning of the school year, she’d signed Emily up to make her first communion with the rest of her class at her small Catholic primary school, but it’d been more about the dress and the party than a religious sacrament.

  The saleswoman returned with a tiny pearl tiara. ‘We’ve had a lot of little girls from Holy Cross Primary in this week,’ she smiled, taking the tiara out of its box. ‘This one’s a little bit more expensive than some of the others, but it’s definitely a favourite.’

  Emily’s eyes widened with delight. ‘I can have a tiara?’

  Maddie nodded at the saleswoman, who carefully placed it on Emily’s head. She worked the veil around it, draping it delicately over Emily’s shoulders and standing back to admire her work. ‘You look just like one of our brides,’ she sighed.

 
Emily twirled again, admiring her reflection over first one shoulder and then the other with innocent vanity. Impulsively, she leaped off the dais and threw her arms around Maddie’s waist. ‘Thank you, Mummy. I love it.’

  Maddie hugged her back. It was rare for Emily to be so outwardly affectionate; like her grandmother, she was generally self-contained and undemonstrative, rarely seeking hugs or cuddles. Since Noah’s death, however, she’d been much more tactile, as if in constant need of reassurance.

  Maddie helped her daughter change back into her normal clothes and watched as the saleswoman boxed the communion dress carefully between sheets of tissue paper. It felt so wrong to be carrying on with life as if nothing had happened; celebrating Emily’s first communion when they hadn’t even been able to hold Noah’s funeral. But her daughter needed some normality, and Maddie needed a reason to go on living. Somehow, she had to pick up the pieces of her life, for the sake of the two children she still had.

  Emily skipped beside her as they walked back to the car park by the library. ‘Can we go for an ice cream now, Mummy?’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Maddie said reluctantly. ‘I know I said we would, but that’s before I knew you were going to try on ten dresses! We’re running late to pick up Jacob. We don’t have time for ice cream.’

  Her daughter stopped skipping. ‘But you promised.’

  Maddie felt the familiar tug of maternal guilt. ‘I know I did, and I’m so sorry. But Auntie Jayne has to go out and I said we’d be back to collect your brother by one o’clock.’ She put her arm around Emily’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. We’ll do it tomorrow.’

  Emily shrugged. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I promise, we’ll get ice cream tomorrow. We’ll go and get cones and feed the ducks, how about that?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ Emily said. ‘I understand.’

  She seemed like a little old lady, Maddie thought uneasily, so polite and considerate. She said as much to Jayne, as they stood in her friend’s kitchen a little later.

  ‘It’s like she’s aged forty years overnight,’ she explained, watching Emily walking solemnly around Jayne’s new rose garden like a Victorian matron taking the air. ‘A month ago, she’d have thrown a hissy fit if I reneged on a promise to buy ice cream. And now she just calmly gets in the car and offers to help me with dinner when we get home.’

  ‘It doesn’t take a shrink to know why,’ Jayne sighed. ‘She’s scared something bad will happen to her if she steps out of line. What do they call it? Survivor guilt?’

  Maddie switched Jacob to her other hip as he grizzled fretfully in her arms, straining away from her. She understood how he felt; she was so tired, she wanted to cry, too. ‘But what do I do about it?’

  ‘Just give it time,’ Jayne said.

  By the time they got back home, Jacob’s grizzles had given way to full-blown crying. He was gnawing on his fist, drool dampening his T-shirt, and his cheeks were bright red and shiny. He was teething again; he’d been up most of the previous night.

  Maddie gave him a spoonful of Calpol and took him upstairs to settle him down, sitting with him until he fell asleep, his favourite plastic dinosaur clutched in his hand.

  Emily was colouring at the kitchen table when Maddie came back downstairs. ‘Emily, will you be all right for an hour? I thought I might lie down for a minute. Just while Jacob’s having a nap.’

  Her daughter didn’t glance up. ‘OK, Mummy.’

  ‘Don’t answer the door, or—’

  ‘Use the stove or answer the phone. It’s OK, Mummy. I know what to do.’

  Maddie kissed the top of her daughter’s head and went upstairs, sliding gratefully between the cool sheets. She just needed to close her eyes for a few minutes. Now that the Easter holidays had started, she was juggling the children along with the sanctuary and everything else. If she could just get some rest, maybe she could make sense of the confusion in her head …

  It seemed just moments later she was being shaken awake. ‘Maddie!’ Someone shook her shoulder again. ‘Maddie, please wake up!’

  Groggily, Maddie opened her eyes. A woman’s face loomed over the bed and Maddie screamed in shock.

  ‘It’s OK, Maddie. It’s Jessica Towner. We met at the hospital?’

  Maddie struggled up against the pillows. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m with the social worker assigned to your case. It’s just routine,’ she added, as Maddie scrambled out of bed. ‘Please, there’s no need to get upset.’

  Maddie glanced at the clock beside her bed. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. She’d been asleep for hours. ‘What are you doing in my house?’ she demanded. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Your daughter Emily. Don’t worry, she insisted I push my ID through the letter box before she opened the door. You should be proud of her.’

  Maddie flushed, embarrassed that the social worker had caught her in bed. What must the woman think of her, allowing her nine-year-old daughter to answer the door?

  ‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone call me and tell me you were coming?’

  ‘We like to make informal follow-up visits in situations like this. Maddie, I don’t want to worry you, but we need to take Jacob to hospital.’

  Maddie’s heart stood still.

  ‘There’s no need to panic,’ Jessica called out belatedly, as Maddie bolted down the hall to Jacob’s room. ‘He’s going to be fine. But there is a chance he’s taken an overdose of paracetamol—’

  His room was empty. Maddie whirled round. ‘Where is he?’ she shouted.

  ‘My colleague Carol is downstairs with him. An ambulance is already on its way.’

  Maddie raced down the stairs. Emily sat at the kitchen table, her blue eyes huge in her pale face. A short, overweight woman with close-cropped grey hair stood behind her daughter, dictating directions to the house into the mobile jammed beneath her double chin. Jacob was unnaturally quiet in the woman’s arms, his eyes half-closed, his head lolling against her shoulder. Maddie’s heart skipped a beat. Not again. It couldn’t be happening again.

  Maddie rushed over to her son, but the woman turned away so she couldn’t get to him.

  ‘Give him to me!’ she cried.

  ‘Let Carol talk to the paramedics,’ Jessica said, putting her arm on Maddie’s. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

  She shrugged the woman off. ‘Let me have my son!’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible just now,’ Jessica said steadily. ‘As I’ve already explained, Maddie, it’s normal procedure to make unscheduled follow-up calls after a suspicious death. You didn’t answer the door, and your daughter told us you were in bed—’

  ‘Jacob’s teething, I was up all night! I haven’t slept! I just wanted to close my eyes for five minutes!’ Her voice rose and the two women exchanged glances. Maddie forced herself to sound calm. ‘Look, I’d put Jacob down for his nap, and Emily was colouring in the kitchen, it’s not like I left them alone or anything.’

  ‘I understand that. But when we checked on your son, as we were duty-bound to do, we found him in a dazed state in his bedroom with an empty bottle of Calpol in his cot. Obviously, his safety and well-being is our first priority.’

  The older woman put her phone away. ‘They’ll be here in a few minutes.’

  ‘Did you give him Calpol, Maddie?’ Jessica asked.

  She immediately felt defensive. ‘Yes, but only a teaspoon, like it says on the bottle.’

  ‘But you left the bottle in his room?’

  ‘No!’ She hesitated, suddenly unsure. She’d been so tired. It was possible she’d left it on the windowsill, which was near enough for him to reach. ‘He couldn’t have got the lid off, anyway, it’s got one of those child-safety tops. He’s only two, he could never have opened it himself.’

  ‘You never know,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe you didn’t screw it on properly. Can you remember how much Calpol was left in the bottle?’

  Maddie shook her head h
elplessly.

  ‘Never mind. We’ll work on the assumption it was full. Better safe than sorry.’

  They were judging her, she could feel it. One dead baby and another child half-unconscious. They must think she was a psychopath or one of those women with Munchausen’s by proxy, who hurt their own children to get attention.

  ‘Is Jacob going to die, too?’ Emily asked suddenly.

  ‘No, darling!’ Maddie said quickly. ‘He’s going to be absolutely fine.’

  The woman holding Jacob opened the back door. ‘Ambulance is here.’

  Maddie started towards the door, but Jessica discreetly blocked her way. ‘Why don’t you follow behind? You can’t leave your daughter alone and she can’t come in the ambulance.’

  Maddie wanted to scream with frustration, but she didn’t have a choice. She and Emily watched as the woman carrying Jacob climbed into the back of the ambulance, panting heavily. Jessica got into a red Prius parked in the drive, presumably the car in which the two women had arrived.

  She called Lucas as she got into the car. He picked up immediately.

  ‘I’m on my way to the hospital,’ he said tersely. ‘The social worker called me. I’ll meet you there.’

  He hung up. Maddie tossed the phone onto the front seat. She couldn’t believe it was happening again. The paramedics, the ambulance, the desperate dash to the hospital. How was it even possible? There’s no way she’d have left an open bottle of Calpol in Jacob’s reach. She was certain of it.