Stranger in the Woods: A tense psychological thriller

by Anni Taylor

  Maybe Jessica would decide to go out and leave Rhiannon with Greer again. If Stella was still in town, the four of us could build a group of snow people in the front yard.

  I guessed I should start taking photos.

  The figure at the window vanished as I took out my camera and aimed it at the house. The snow-encrusted roof line and whiter-than-white surrounds gave the house an entirely different look. There were no puffy mounds of heather to soften and make the architectural lines prettier. But somehow, the starkness made the house design come into its own. Again, I could see why Alban had won awards.

  Stomping about in the soft snow, I climbed the hills and captured pictures of the snow-covered mountains and ghostly trees. Then I trekked back down along the tree-line, snapping small details. A bird alone on a bare, snowy branch. A snow-jewelled larch cone.

  I was spellbound by the wintry-white world, but a continual stream of thoughts ran rampant in my mind. Who was Trent? What had he done to me? What was he trying to do to me now?

  My phone’s ringtone jingled in the crisp air.

  Taking out my phone, I glanced at my screen. It was Rory.

  I’d thought our conversations had come to an end. I’d pushed too hard when I’d tried to find out why Stella had left town and I’d stepped on Rory’s toes. At least, it felt that way. But maybe he’d remembered something.

  “Rory, hi,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s actually snow—”

  “Isla!” he jumped in. “Have you seen Stella today?”

  “No? I’ve only been awake about an hour. I’ve been out on a shoot here at Braithnoch. Why? Anything wrong?”

  “The Keenans say she didn’t sleep in her bed last night. They don’t know where she is.”

  “Oh, Rory, that’s awful.”

  “Camille is beside herself. Trouble is, I don’t know where to start looking.”

  “Could she have gone back home? To Aviemore I mean?”

  “Aye, she could have. But we called her aunt Kelly and she said she hasn’t seen her.”

  “What about her friends here? Does she keep in contact with them?”

  “No. I mean to say, she did have friends, but she didn’t keep in contact. It’s like she threw everything about this town away when she left it. Apart from her grandparents, that is. But Camille’s calling them all anyway, just to check.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  He sighed. “You don’t have to do anything. This is our problem.”

  “She’s just a young girl. It’s everyone’s problem. I’ll head around to the Keenans to see if there’s something I can help with.”

  Ending the call quickly, I hurried down to the snow-buried driveway and along the pathway through the forest that led to the Keenans. I kept sinking into unseen ditches and pitching forward. I wasn’t at all used to running in snow.

  I climbed the Keenan’s fence and crossed the field. Their lovely flowers and trees were now hidden under a white cover.

  Nora Keenan threw open the door quickly, her face pale and anxious. “I have to tell you I was hoping you’d be Stella.”

  I touched her arm. “I know. Rory told me. I can help look for her if you have any idea where I should start.”

  She clamped her eyes shut for a moment. “I just don’t know, that’s the trouble. Come in, anyway—we can all put our heads together and sort this out.”

  Charlie Keenan was sitting at the table, calmly drinking tea, seeming oblivious to his wife’s distress.

  Hamish stomped in through the door, shaking powdery snow from his hair and jacket. “I tried calling out to her all over the woods. Nothing. She’s not out there.”

  “She’s a fighter,” said Charlie.

  “What?” Nora sounded clearly annoyed.

  “She’s fighting her battles, wherever she is,” he said. “It’s in the blood. It goes way back. There was a battle here in the Middle Ages. Griogair Braithnoch got cut fair in with a sword. Bleeding out, he was. He weren’t gonna make it far. He fell into the peat marsh. When he crawled out, he was covered in the thick, sticky mud. It sealed up his wounds. And he made it back to his wife and bairns alive.”

  “Charlie! Not now with your old war stories,” she chastened.

  “Could Stella have fallen into the peat marsh?” I said in alarm.

  “No, our girl Stella knows where the marshes are,” Nora said. “Charlie just has a habit of drifting off into his own world. Hamish, go take a run over to Aviemore and see if you can find Stella. And while you’re there, why not stop in at Kelly’s place to see if she’s got any suggestions?”

  “It’ll be a dark day before I go to Kelly’s house,” he responded.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” said Nora.

  Hamish raised his dark eyebrows. “Maybe because Kelly’s always a rude bitch to me?”

  “Ach.” Nora waved a hand dismissively. “You three kids should try to get along. I don’t know what’s up with you lot, I swear.”

  “I’m not going,” Hamish told her. “Hell can freeze over for all I care.” He sounded more annoyed than deathly serious.

  Nora pressed her lips together with so much pressure they turned white and her neck strained. “Well, I’ll have no rest until I know where my little Stella is.”

  “Bloody hell,” Hamish huffed. “All right, I’ll go to Aviemore. But I’ll not go to Kelly’s.”

  Incensed, Nora turned her head to me. “Isla, you wanted to do something? Could you perhaps go with Hamish? He’ll have to quit his silly carry on if he’s got you with him. I’d go, but someone needs to stay here with Charlie. If he wanders off in that snow, he won’t last long. And he does wander off at times.”

  “Of course.” I glanced at Hamish hesitantly.

  Hamish muttered under his breath. “I don’t need a chaperone.”

  “Please,” his mother begged him. “This cold war between you and Kelly and Camille has been going on way too long. But if you can’t end it, then at least take Isla with you so that you stay civil. Between Stella missing and your father bleating on with his old war stories, I can’t take much more.”

  Drawing his mouth into a firm line, he gave his mother a single nod.

  Moments later, I was sitting in Hamish’s beat-up car, freezing on the cold seat and wondering how I was going to survive a trip to Aviemore with him. He wasn’t a happy person and I guessed it would be easy to say the wrong thing.

  He drove away, through the town of Greenmire.

  We chatted in awkward fits and starts but mostly stayed silent. His car heater didn’t work very well, and I remained cold all the way, listening to his selection of heavy metal music. I wished now that it hadn’t snowed. Everything was carpeted in white and I couldn’t see much of the scenery. Worse, the snow might make finding Stella harder.

  Mountains rose higher and higher in the distance and the roads climbed higher, too. Hamish drove a bit erratically and I was starting to worry about coming along with him on this trip. Rory was right. These people weren’t family—I barely knew them. If Stella was in Aviemore, she was probably safe and with a friend.

  The main street of Aviemore was lined with low sets of buildings, the snow cleared to either side.

  “We’re here,” he announced, even though I’d seen the Aviemore welcome sign quite a distance back. “Guess we’ll just drive about and see if we can spot her.”

  In their winter clothing, the Aviemore townspeople all seemed to look similar. Everyone in thick dark coats and knitted hats. Trying to pick Stella out would prove difficult. We tried to peel our eyes for groups of teenagers, especially young girls on their own.

  Hamish ringed around a couple of the town’s resorts and then along a river.

  “That’s the River Spey,” Hamish remarked, breaking the silence. “Goes all the way through the Cairngorms and out to sea.”

  I stared out of the car window. Some of the trees that lined the riverbanks were still holding onto their fiery red and orange autumn colours. The effec
t was stunning—white snow topping autumn trees, along the bank of the fast-flowing river, with the snow-encrusted mountains in the distance. The photographer in me wanted to take some shots, but this wasn’t the right time.

  Hamish kept driving. At one point, we were driving through a housing estate and ended up at the site of a small, ancient stone circle, the stones half-buried under snow. So casual and yet so Scottish. It seemed that the Scots were used to remnants of their ancient structures everywhere in their towns.

  “Well, nothing left to do but show our faces at my sister’s place,” he said morosely. “Keep my mum happy, if nothing else.”

  He drove for a short distance further, then parked outside a line of townhouses not far from the stone circle.

  Kelly Keenan cracked her door open and peeked out after Hamish banged on her door. She had the same dark hair that Camille and Hamish had, with quick brown eyes. Her mother had said she was twenty-three, but she looked even younger than that, like a teenager.

  She gazed at me openly. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a girlfriend, Hamish.”

  “As if I’d tell you anything,” he retorted.

  I held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Isla. I’m not his girlfriend. I’ve been staying at Braithnoch with the McGregors.”

  Kelly shrugged as she shook my hand. “Oh, you’re the one Greer told me about.” She cast a scrutinising eye over her brother. “I didn’t think you’d actually have an adult for a girlfriend. How old was your last one again? Oh, I remember now. Fifteen.”

  He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Stop, Kelly. I didn’t come here for any of this.”

  “Well, then you can leave,” she said pointedly. “I already told Mum that Stella didn’t come back here. Why she had to send you over here is a mystery.”

  “She wanted me to take a look around the streets,” he muttered, his bravado of a minute ago crumbling. “Something you’re not able to do because for some unknown reason, you don’t drive. Anyway, you don’t want me here any more than I want to be here. So, now that I can tell Mum I talked to you in good faith, I’ll be on my way.”

  She sighed. “Look, you’re here now. May as well come in and have a hot drink. I’ve made scones, too. Do you like scones, Isla?”

  “I…don’t think we’ll be here long,” I replied.

  “You’ll be here long enough,” she said firmly. “Hamish can stomp around looking for ten minutes and satisfy everyone that I’m not stowing Stella away somewhere.”

  She waved us in.

  I followed the grudging Hamish into the house and sat myself down on a stool in Kelly’s tiny kitchen. Everything was painted in yellow and blue, looking a lot cheerier than the grey exterior of the building. The underfloor heating warmed my chilled body.

  Hamish went into another room to call his mother to see if there was any news on Stella.

  “Your place is cute,” I told Kelly. I smiled at a teenage picture of her standing with her mother—a fluffy black puppy in her arms. “Is the pup yours?”

  “Yes, he was mine. He died last year. I wasn’t able to bring him here—they don’t allow pets at this rental.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “He was a lovely little dog.” She sighed heavily. “Gosh, I feel so helpless with Stella missing. Especially seeing as I don’t drive or have a car, as Hamish was so rude to point out.”

  “How’s she been doing?” I asked her.

  The way she sighed and shook her head reminded me of her mother. “She’s a handful. As I see it, I deserve a medal for taking her on. But I’m treated like I’m leading her astray. She was going to run away from my sister, no matter what. If I didn’t convince her to stay with me, she would have headed for either Inverness or Edinburgh. And just what was going to happen to a wee girl of twelve on the streets of a city? Nothing good, that’s what.”

  “Do you have any idea why she wanted to leave so badly?”

  She chewed her lip as she poured me out a tea. “She won’t tell me. What can I do? You know, sometimes I wonder if there’s something rotten there in Greenmire?”

  I studied her pinched expression curiously. “What do you mean?”

  “Things have been going on for a while. I don’t know if Stella got caught up in any of it. But there’s been a few odd things happen. It seems to me that someone must know something. But nothing ever comes out into the open. Sometimes, bad things happen in families and everyone rushes to cover it up. You know how it is. They just keep patching up the broken bucket, so it can keep carrying water.”

  I smiled briefly as she pushed a cup of tea and a plate of scones towards me. “I’d be interested in knowing what those odd things are. Stella’s been hanging out with me for the last couple of days. She seems like a young girl who needs help, but I don’t know where to start.” I ate one of Kelly’s scones. They were dry and lumpy, but I chewed as if I were enjoying it.

  “Well, none of this is about Stella,” said Kelly. “It happened a long time ago. But if the same person is still around, then who knows?” She stirred her tea. I noticed she put lots of sugar in, just like Hamish. “When I was ten—thirteen years ago—I used to do ballet classes with Aubrey. One day, when we were getting ready for a recital, we noticed a couple of tiny holes had been put into the wall. This was in the girls’ changing room. Someone had been watching little girls get changed.”

  I shivered. “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah. A year later, the photographs were found. Not just of us, but other girls, too. All from the ballet hall. The pictures had been stuffed into a hidey hole in a playhouse—between the McGregors’ and my parents’ house.”

  “The playhouse?” I said, startled. “Where Elodie McGregor was found that night?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened about the photos?”

  She exhaled, staring fixedly into her tea. “Nothing. Nothing happened. There was a bit of a fuss for a while, but it died down quickly. My mum told me I was overreacting. You girls’ chests are flat as pancakes, she said. You’ve got nothing to show. Well, true enough. None of us had breasts. But those photos made me aware of my body for the first time. That might sound strange, but what I mean is that I was suddenly aware that others might see me differently to the way I saw myself. That was a big revelation for a ten-year-old. Up until then, my body had been something that could do things. I could make it spin and jump high. But now it had become something to leer at.”

  “I get it,” I told her. “I went through the same thing at that age. Not in the same way you did. For me it was just noticing men staring at me in the street sometimes.”

  Kelly talking about the photos reminded me of Stella having been hesitant of photographs being taken of herself. Had anyone ever taken bad photos of her, like the ones Kelly was describing?

  We both looked up suddenly as Hamish entered the kitchen. “Stella still hasn’t turned up. Just called Mum.”

  “Have some tea and scones, Hamish,” Kelly offered.

  “No thanks. Your scones are shite.”

  “Thanks, brother.” She rolled her eyes at me.

  “You haven’t changed and neither have your scones,” he stated. “Let’s head out, Isla.”

  I nodded reluctantly. There was nothing to do but say goodbye to Kelly and get back into Hamish’s chilly car.

  Hamish drove back through Aviemore in silence. Faint sunlight glistened on the snow on the rooftops and put a sheen on spots of thin ice on the road.

  I was disappointed I hadn’t been able to stay longer and keep talking with Kelly. She knew things about Greenmire that I wanted to know more about. I wondered if Rory knew any of those things? The person who’d taken the photographs of the little girls was certainly creepy. That had only happened thirteen years ago. That person could certainly still be living in Greenmire.

  Stella had reacted strangely the first time I’d asked her if I could take photographs of her. Was it possible that there was a connection?

  Thoughts came a
nd went through my head, like the flurries of snowfall outside. The countryside flattened out. We were nearing Greenmire again.

  “I didn’t know,” Hamish stated, staring straight ahead at the road.

  Confused, I glanced at him. “What didn’t you know?”

  “I didn’t know that the girl was fifteen. The last girl I dated. She worked next door to my shop. I thought she was nineteen or so. She wore a hell of a lot of makeup. She was the one who persuaded me that we should go out together. Catch a movie or something. So, we went out a few times. But I ended it when I found out just how young she was.”

  “It’s none of my business, Hamish. You don’t have to explain.”

  “My ever-delightful sister made it your business. She doesn’t think much of me, but she doesn’t have to spread stuff around that isn’t true.”

  Hamish hit the wheel several times with the heel of his hand. “You think I’m a total loser, now, don’t you?”

  “Of course not. I’m sorry, it didn’t help much to bring me along, did it?” I shot him a nervous smile, trying to lighten his mood. In truth, I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not. Guys who spent their time chasing after the youngest girls they could legally—or illegally—get were creeps in my eyes. I could especially understand Kelly having an adverse reaction to men who were attracted to very young girls, after what had happened to her with the dance practice photographs. I didn’t know Hamish well enough to know whether or not he was telling the truth.

  Hamish hit the wheel one more time.

  The car swerved and slid.

  “Shit. Ice!” He grappled with the wheel, but the car spun us completely around, slamming into an oncoming car.

  The impact threw my body back into the seat, a grinding noise filling the air.

  Dizzily, I watched the dim sky through snowflakes, while searing hot pain shot up my leg.

  27

  ISLA

  I woke gasping, shielding my face from an oncoming car that was no longer there.