After the Eclipse

by Fran Dorricott

  I was going to wait for anything Henry could find out about Roger Upton, and in the meantime I’d focus on other stuff. Connections. If Grace did have something to do with Olive, then I’d find out.

  I got up, checked on Gran who was, thankfully, sleeping peacefully, and then slunk down to the dining room. The sleeping tablets were locked away in the creaky upstairs bathroom cabinet with the key tied around my neck. I wasn’t taking any chances. But downstairs there was a bottle of bourbon on the side. Not something I normally touched, but I needed it. I grabbed a glass. Poured a finger. Poured two more. And I drank it all down just to help me sleep.

  * * *

  I tossed and turned all night. I fell into a deep sleep around dawn, punctuated by vivid dreams. They started as they always did. With Olive. She always haunted me at night. Sometimes she was the focus. I dreamed that I was in an airport and she stepped off a plane, or that she was in a school play and I was late. Sometimes she was just an extra face in a crowd, but my heart always stuttered when I spotted her. Always the same as the last time I saw her, eleven years old for ever.

  Tonight was different, though. Tonight I dreamt that I was walking through the fields, looking for somebody. For Gran? No, it wasn’t Gran. I marched on, the wet ground sucking at my feet, pulling me down. Still I forged ahead, palms slick with sweat. I had to find her. Had to see…

  Was that her?

  By the trees I saw a wooden den like one Olive and I had once built. Green wood and nails, empty pallets fitted to look like walls. The girl disappeared inside, her body still partially visible. Not Olive, but—

  “Grace!” I shouted.

  I caught sight of a hand. The hand waved, and then started to beckon. I began to run, breath puffing hard in the cool twilight air. My whole body screamed in protest, aching all over. The hand continued to beckon, the distance between us closing slowly. Impossibly slowly.

  There was a ring on the finger. A silver ring, its mermaid tail twitching, a murky, blackened stone in the centre catching the light. Grace. I tried to call out to her, but the closer I got, the further away she seemed to be. Her hand started to morph. The ring, dissolving, reforming. The stone in the middle flashed bright – red. Nervous. Stress. The hand was different. Now they were not Grace’s slender fingers but…

  Olive’s.

  Just out of reach. A hand I could have been holding. If only I’d been watching. Keep an eye on her.

  back off

  I woke with a start, sweat dripping down my forehead and stinging my eyes. I swiped at it angrily. Reached for the bedside table. Poured myself another finger of Gran’s bourbon and swallowed it down.

  9

  Wednesday, 18 March 2015

  WHEN I FINALLY WOKE up my mouth was dry like sandpaper and my tongue felt heavy. Actually, my whole body felt like lead. The bedside table clock read almost eleven. I groaned and pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes to try and dislodge the sleep. My head was throbbing, and when I rolled over I felt sick. Why did I think a hangover would be a good idea? The alcohol had just turned the bad thoughts into bad dreams, and I still felt like I did after every panic attack: stiff, sore, and very fragile.

  I lay in bed for several minutes, trying to clear my mind. I could hear somebody moving around downstairs, and hoped that it was just Gran and not some thieves come to take what little we had left. I hauled myself out of bed and poked my head over the top of the bannister. There was some music floating upwards, sultry like jazz.

  Jazz had been Grandad’s favourite kind of music and he’d had all sorts of albums, vinyl and CD versions of his favourites scattered about the house. When I’d come back for the funeral, I’d spent two days just trying to sort through them all.

  This music had the faint crackle to it that I associated with our badly tuned kitchen radio. I let the sound wash over me as I popped down to check on Gran. I poked my head around the door. She’d managed to dress herself and had settled in her favourite armchair with a cup of tea. I let out a relieved sigh and headed back up to the bathroom. She’d be okay while I got ready and then I’d sort breakfast. We had a dementia nurse due to pop round later on and I really, really needed a good shower.

  By the time I’d washed my hair I was starting to feel better. I even surprised myself when I saw I’d had a text from Helen and I didn’t feel much of anything at all.

  I dragged my fingers through my mousy hair, pulling the damp curls into a loose plait. When I stood in front of the mirror, I was shocked to see how normal I looked. In control, almost. I met the gaze of my reflection, thinking about Olive. We had the same sort of eyes, gold rather than just hazel. Although Olive’s were incredibly beautiful – and mine always seemed duller, not bright and shining like my sister’s. The morning sun broke through a patch of clouds, making my reflection seem to shimmer, and I shivered. Sometimes I wished I’d inherited Gran’s blue eyes; then I wouldn’t think of Olive whenever I looked in a mirror.

  Downstairs Gran was still sitting with the two cups of tea she had made, a book balanced in her lap as she listened to the music coming from the kitchen. This was one of the small things that reminded me of the past, called up the woman who had spent so many months trying to pull me back from the brink of darkness when my mother died. She made me tea. Always. I was the only person she’d make it for, and she made it just like I loved it – tooth-achingly sweet.

  I’d stayed in town with my grandparents for only a few months after Mum died. I made my plans and was eager to move on, too exhausted to ask questions about Olive, and what had happened. Now it was too late and I wished I’d asked anyway.

  The tea Gran had made for us both this morning was, it turned out, just hot water. The spell was broken, and gone was the Gran I remembered. I knew she was in there somewhere but she was buried so deep by the dementia that sometimes I couldn’t see her any more.

  “Who are you?”

  I resisted the urge to make something up, knowing that wouldn’t help either of us.

  “It’s Cassie,” I said calmly. “Kathy’s eldest. D’you remember? I’m living here with you at the moment.”

  The frown lines around her lips deepened as she pursed them. Her cup of water, balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, wobbled and I tried to catch it. The cup bounced on the carpet and the liquid splashed across the floor.

  “Oh, dear. Let me – let me get that…”

  “No, no. It’s okay.” I held up my hands. “My fault.”

  She watched as I bent to mop up the mess. Then she shrugged, clasping her hands in her lap.

  “Do you want some breakfast?” she asked. “I always make breakfast. Pancakes, or eggs. I make the best pancakes this side of the United States! My granddaughters love them. Joe can’t cook to save his life, but I always say that’s why it’s lucky that he married me. You know, we had pancakes at our wedding, although they called them crêpes and they served them with ice cream! Can you imagine…”

  Gran trailed off as she followed me into the kitchen. When I turned to her, the look on her face was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open, as though moving into different lighting had triggered something.

  “Wait,” she whispered.

  I half-turned, confusion making my movements sloppy. Gran lifted her arms slowly, and when she walked towards me she opened them wide and pulled me into a hug. I was too surprised to move, our contact recently having been fairly limited. This was like the old days.

  I held her close, breathing in the smells of baby powder and old, musky perfume. Her hair was scratchy as it brushed my cheek. I felt her body start to convulse, and I realised that she was crying.

  “What is it, Gran? What’s the matter?”

  “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” Gran repeated over and over.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Oh, my Lord. You’ve brought my sweetheart home!”

  I felt my whole body clench. I was never – had never been – Gran’s sweetheart. Not once
. I was monkey, or honey, or love. Never sweetheart. I tried to pull back, disconnect from the hug, but Gran held me with surprising strength, her chest heaving as she cradled me to her body.

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” she said. “Where have you been? Did you get away? I knew it wasn’t that man they said. I knew they were wrong. Oh I wished you would come home.”

  “Gran, I’m not her.” I tried to stay calm, but my heart was skipping and my throat felt so tight I couldn’t breathe. Our eyes and face shapes had been similar, but Olive’s hair was always darker. “I’m not her, I’m not Olive.”

  Gran finally let go. She held me at arm’s length and stared right into my face. “Then who are you?”

  “I’m Cassie,” I said.

  She stopped. Took another step backwards, regarding me with a more critical gaze. She looked at my forehead, for the mole that was mine and not Olive’s. Her eyes traced the line of the scar on my neck – the one I got the summer I fell out of the tree in the garden of this very house. Not Olive’s scar. Mine. She glanced down at my hands, saw the nails that had been bitten so much they no longer grew back evenly.

  “Oh,” she whispered. Her whole voice seemed to disappear on that one word. She started to collapse, to fold in on herself, and I had to reach for her. She steadied herself, stumbling slightly on the kitchen tiles. And then she looked at me with eyes filled with tears, and said it again. “Oh…”

  “Why don’t you – why don’t you go through there? I’ll make you a cup of tea and a sandwich,” I said, trying to calm my voice. Trying to control the skipping rhythm of my heart. “Go on. I’ll bring it through.”

  She did as I asked.

  * * *

  Did you get away? Gran’s words were rattling around inside my head like a pinball. I knew it wasn’t that man they said. I went up to my bedroom with a cup of tea and sat on my bed, laptop across my knees.

  I’d never asked Gran who she thought had taken Olive. The police suspect pool in 1999 was limited, and fleeting. The list, in the end, had boiled down to my father and one other man.

  I knew who Gran was thinking of. It was all over the news at the time. Local man arrested in connection with missing girl case. And then, later, local man released. But the police didn’t involve us. At least, they didn’t involve me.

  Cordy Jones.

  I clenched my teeth as I opened my laptop and navigated to the search page. If Grace and Olive were connected, this was the place to start. In my Olive Diary – on the pages I had specifically avoided yesterday – I had written everything I knew about him.

  Cordy, or Jonesy as we’d known him, had run the Bishop’s Green youth group between 1992 and the summer of 1999. I remembered little of him now, apart from the blurred and grainy images I’d seen in newspapers. I didn’t recall that he’d been particularly nice to us. Or particularly not nice.

  He’d been a Nothing Man. One of those adults that I had never paid attention to. Olive and I had been to the youth group only a handful of times that summer, once for a barbecue, and to a couple of other smaller events where the children would play party games or have water fights. I didn’t think Olive had ever been alone with him. Was that enough?

  The Google results weren’t anything new. Although there weren’t any of the original articles, here I found several web pages dedicated to unsolved missing child cases. I’d always avoided them before.

  Somebody had taken the time to write about Cordy, though. To find old news headlines and compile them into one streamlined story. The story of a man, first condemned and then, suddenly, freed. “Cordy Jones questioned in missing Olive Warren case” read one headline. The next said merely: “Cordy Jones cleared of involvement”.

  I tried to recall how Mum and Dad had reacted at the time, but all I could see was Gran’s expression as she shook her head and said, “I don’t think so. He’s been running that club for years. I knew his uncle, Barry”

  Cordy Jones had played a role in many of my fantasies about what had happened to Olive. On my darkest days he had played the role of captor, keeping my sister from the world. But most days I preferred the fantasies where Olive turned up one day like Jaycee Lee Dugard or Elizabeth Smart; in those fantasies I didn’t like to think of who had taken Olive, or what had happened to her since, only that they had somehow, for some reason, let her go again.

  I scrolled through the web page, desperate for new information. For evidence that he could have taken Olive, that the police might have been wrong when they dismissed him. That he might still be around now. I wondered if we might have missed something, if somehow the bastard who took Olive had been living out the rest of his life in anonymity while we had the crucial evidence needed to put him away.

  But the information here was still inconclusive. As far as I could tell, it was all circumstance. Cordy Jones had been in Chestnut Circle during the eclipse, but nobody remembered seeing him after the event was over. Last I’d heard, people in town were harassing him so much that Grandad thought he might leave Derbyshire altogether.

  The day Olive was taken Jones had arranged a youth group photo session in the Circle that he never showed up to. He had no alibi, could only tell the police that he had been “around town” when Olive disappeared. I started to feel the old familiar anger well up inside me, fear creeping close behind it.

  As I stared at his photograph now, I felt my insides start to cramp, the fear growing. Could this be him? Was he still in Bishop’s Green? What would he look like after all these years? Was he with Grace even as I typed? Even if Grace’s disappearance was unrelated, could this be the man who had kidnapped my sister?

  I fixed my eyes on his face: he had chubby cheeks and bright green eyes, and a dark mop of hair. I couldn’t imagine he would look much different now. But the longer I stared, the more his expression morphed into something fiendish, something unworldly.

  I realised I was shaking, as cold tea dripped down my fingers. I hastily wiped my laptop keyboard. It took half an hour of steadily typing up nonsense notes to myself before my hands stopped trembling.

  10

  August 1999

  TIME SEEMED TO HAVE this sort of shifting feel to it. Like Olive couldn’t trust it. She had only a vague idea of what day it was because of the turning of night into day and then into night again. An endless cycle, already. It didn’t help that she had spent most of the first few days beating her fists against things, scrambling about with her hair in her eyes and her whole body clenched taut with panic.

  She hadn’t seen Sandman since the day of the eclipse. Was that three days ago? Five? Seven? She tried to count them but got a different number each time. She had been too focused, in the time since, on not going crazy, on playing games inside her head and singing “Ten Green Bottles” backwards and forwards.

  She still didn’t know why she was here or when she could go home. Gran still hadn’t come. Olive knew now that she wasn’t going to.

  Sandman. She had stopped thinking of him as anything else, now. Whoever he had been before, whatever part he might have played in her old life, now he was nothing more than a nightmare. Like her bad dreams, she discovered that he only came at night. After she was asleep. He would slip into the room and leave her things; food, clothes, and often toiletries, too, would be in their rightful places on shelves and in the fridge when she woke up. The first morning she woke up and there was suddenly a bulb in the fixture overhead. Once, she had taken her ring off before sleep and when she woke up it was back on her finger.

  Sometimes he left nothing, but she didn’t doubt he had still been to visit. She never heard him come into the room, never heard him leave. But she felt that he’d been there – felt his icy presence each morning like a ghostly hand on the back of her neck.

  What she thought was the seventh night was different.

  It wasn’t yet dark. What little she could see of the sky was smudged a sort of charcoal blue and tinged at the edges with orange.

  She had developed a sort of routine s
ince those first couple of days, when she had dozed and woken in a crazy cycle. After what she thought was probably the third day, she had tried harder to keep things normal, waking as the sun fell on her face in the morning and staring at walls until she got hungry. Already, she knew, she was thinner than before. The clothes he had brought her originally were too big now. The dresses that were tight before had become baggier around the middle.

  A week.

  And now, sitting on the bed and waiting for the light to filter out of the room – she didn’t like to use the lamp because of the brightness, because of the way it made the room feel hollow – she heard him.

  She knew it was him. There was something about the weight of footsteps outside the room, perhaps coming down some stairs… Getting louder all the time. She felt herself shrink instinctively, her knees going up towards her chest. Her breath came thick and fast as a million horrible thoughts rushed through her mind. She didn’t have time to do anything else.

  The door opened. He stepped inside, his arms full of bags. Plastic bags, mostly. Some from Tesco and others from clothes shops like Next and Gap. He was wearing similar clothes to before: jeans, faded T-shirt, trainers. His hair was pushed back from his forehead and a little greasy, the curls lank.

  He closed the door, locking it carefully with a set of keys, which he hung around his neck, and then he dumped the bags on the floor. Olive didn’t move. She was frozen. Her blood felt like ice in her veins and her stomach cramped in panic.

  “How are you, Olive?”

  His voice was calm, but gravelly. Like he hadn’t had enough sleep. Olive didn’t know what to say. What answer could she have given to that? Instead she just shook her head, mute.