Stranger in the Woods: A tense psychological thriller

by Anni Taylor

  Stella’s voice quivered. “Peyton told me you gave them to him. He said you were a nurse and you’d told him that sometimes, girls going through puberty need some extra sleep. He’d give me the pills and do things I don’t remember properly.”

  “Jess?” Alban eyed his wife. “Answer me. Did you give Peyton the drugs?”

  Jessica’s hands retreated into her pockets. “It slipped my mind. I did, a few times. It was a long time ago. He’d been having trouble sleeping. He was a friend of ours, Alban. Why wouldn’t I help him out? I’d no idea he was giving them to poor wee Stella. I swear I never told him to give them to her.”

  An odd look came over Alban’s face. He reached to take the bottle of pills from Jessica’s pocket. He inspected the label closely, his breaths becoming ragged. “Jess. These are the same kind of pills that our Elodie was forced to take.”

  Jessica mouthed the name, Peyton. Her arms reached around her stomach as if she were physically ill. A sharp cry wrung from deep in her throat.

  Alban’s voice sounded like stone being crushed to dust. “It can’t have been Peyton who killed our daughter, can it? Can it? It’s impossible, right? He was in Inverness at the time. His alibi was rock solid.”

  My breath caught—the way that Peyton had paced around in the ruined house flashing in my mind. In straight lines. Like an aimless soldier. Like the path that Elodie’s abductor had taken out of the forest. But I’d read about the alibis of the neighbours here at Braithnoch Square. Peyton had been in the clear.

  “He was here in Greenmire at the time,” Jessica whispered, her eyes huge and suddenly dazed. “He went to Inverness later.”

  Alban shook his head. “You didn’t tell the police that, Jess.”

  “I didn’t tell because I never thought in a million years that—” she began, but her words tore away from her.

  A horrified realisation rose in Alban’s eyes. “It was Peyton. And this house is where those pills came from. The drug that killed our daughter.”

  Aubrey cried out, turning to stare at Diarmid.

  Rory walked up behind Stella protectively. “Are you okay?”

  Tears streamed down Stella’s face. “No one would listen. Elodie told me the same bad stuff that Peyton told me. I told her to stay away from Peyton. I tried to tell Mum, but she said I was just being silly. I came back to Greenmire to tell, but I didn’t know how. I thought everyone would blame me.”

  A roar burst from Alban’s chest. “I should have killed him up on the moor.” He charged forward.

  Rory and Hamish raced to hold Alban.

  “Don’t destroy your life.” Rory battled to keep Alban back. “You’ve got Rhiannon. Don’t do it.”

  Jessica’s eyes went dead. She packed away the rest of the kit, methodically, piece by piece. Everything except for the scissors. I watched her drop the scissors into her jacket pocket, her expression absent.

  She took stiff steps out of the room while everyone’s eyes were on the raging Alban.

  I watched her walk towards the kitchen, her hand inside the pocket in which she dropped the scissors. There was something very wrong about her movements. Almost robotic.

  I knew what she was planning to do.

  I called Alban’s name, but he didn’t hear me. He couldn’t hear me.

  My breath stilled in my chest.

  Jessica’s scream shattered the air, clean and sharp.

  Something—a chair maybe—skidded and crashed across the kitchen floor. Kirk’s yell was drowned by her frenzied cascade of shrieks.

  Diarmid rushed into the kitchen. Seconds later, he staggered into the living room to face everyone, his eyes wide and dazed. “She’s stabbed him. She stabbed Peyton.”

  People ran past me, into the kitchen.

  Camille restrained Stella, keeping her from going, too.

  Five minutes later, everyone knew that Jessica had stabbed Peyton in his carotid artery using a pair of scissors and that Peyton was dead.

  One by one, everyone returned to the living room, dropping into seats, faces numb, heads limp, voices as sober as mourners at a funeral.

  Aubrey clung to Diarmid as he made a phone call.

  Kirk entered the living room, dropping into an armchair. He looked lost as to what action to take. He ended up allowing Jessica to go upstairs as long as someone accompanied her. She could remove her blood-spattered clothing, but it had to be kept in a plastic bag. Nora Keenan volunteered to go with her.

  The house plunged into silence again.

  Alban, his face set in a stony shock, stood staring into the flames of the fire for a moment before walking off to his office. He didn’t want anyone with him, saying he needed to be alone. I pictured him sitting in his office and staring at that photograph of the forest on his wall, finally knowing who abducted Elodie. Picturing Alban like that crushed me.

  Rory and Hamish helped me from the ottoman to the sofa, pushing a footrest under the leg with the stitches. My head and body began to feel fiery hot, my flesh prickling under the blanket.

  A slow terror pulsed in my mind. Had an infection whipped up inside me? There were no antibiotics here, no help.

  As minutes went past, the storm eased, the baying wind sounding distant now and no longer trying to knock down the house.

  A loud motor hammered up the driveway outside, then stopped abruptly.

  Police? Ambulance? No, it didn’t sound like either of those.

  Kirk went to the door. The people entered and spoke with Kirk out in the kitchen.

  When the people entered the living room, I saw that they were Gus and Deirdre Chandlish. They must have come from their house in some kind of all-terrain vehicle. I guessed that the call Diarmid had made was to his parents, to tell them that Peyton was dead.

  There’d been no screaming or crying at the sight of their son dead out on the kitchen floor. Gus stood resolutely, as straight as a soldier waiting for war, every muscle in his jaw taut. Deirdre—her face blanched of colour—silently held her arms out to her children, Diarmid and Aubrey.

  Aubrey fled to her mother’s arms.

  Diarmid walked up to them, but he stopped a short distance away. His mother kissed the top of Aubrey’s head, extending an arm. “Diarmid…?”

  Diarmid shook his head slowly, his blue eyes hard as flint. “This could have ended a long time ago.”

  Deirdre smoothed Aubrey’s hair, her lips pressing together as she frowned. “This is a time for family to stick together. We’ve come to take you two home, so that neither of you have to stay in this house with the…with your brother.”

  Diarmid’s expression remained unchanged. “But everyone else in this house has to stay locked in here with him. Every single person here has been hurt by what he’s done. And you both just let it happen. That’s why you didn’t come the first time I called you, isn’t it? You always knew he’d get arrested one day. And you wanted nothing to do with it.”

  Aubrey’s eyes were huge as she extracted herself from her mother’s arms, staring from Diarmid to her parents in confusion.

  Deirdre shrank into herself, her shoulders shaking. Her hand clapped over her mouth as if she had vomited. She exchanged a long glance with her husband. She collapsed to her knees. “We should have done something about him years ago. Why didn’t we…?”

  A vague look of disgust crossed Gus Chandlish’s face. “Get up off the floor. As if we’re not dealing with enough already.”

  Deirdre sat back on her heels, unable or unwilling to rise to her feet again. It was as if everything that had been Deirdre Chandlish flatlined, and this was all that was left. When she spoke again, her voice strained from deep within her lungs, breathy and abject. “You knew something was wrong with him, Gus. You knew that. Always covering up for him. The photos of young girls he hid away. The mementoes he kept in that damned box. The way he bullied Aubrey and Diarmid. The way he marched about like a damned soldier every time he was upset or angry. Even stringing that damned bogle up in the tree a week ago. He was wron
g in the head. But you just wouldn’t have it.”

  I eyed her in shock. She and Gus had known about Peyton for a long time. A vision of the hanged scarecrow stole into my mind. Why did Peyton do that?

  Aubrey stared at her parents with red, wet eyes, her face grown white. “You both knew all that and you covered it up? Why? Why?”

  “I can tell you why,” said Diarmid, barely controlling himself, a rage underlining every word he spoke. “Because the company and the Chandlish name were more important. They let him get away with everything, Aubrey. You never believed me when I told you it was Peyton who put straw under your pillow during the night and made those stupid damned noises on the stairs. He got a sick thrill out of scaring a little girl out of her skin, making her believe that the bogles were coming to eat her. You believed Peyton because he was always able to put on a good show. He fooled everyone. And now look what he’s done.”

  Gus’s response to all of it was to stand even straighter. “It’s over now. Peyton’s gone. Nothing can be done about any of it now.”

  Deirdre’s chin quivered. “Is that all you can bloody well say? That’s it?”

  Seconds ticked and decayed in the silence that followed.

  I watched the surreal scene play out, my mind crowding with questions while my body steadily grew hotter and hotter. I felt myself separating from the room, my thoughts fuzzing and my head weighing heavily on my shoulders. My temperature felt as if it was still rising.

  Gus turned his head away from his wife, gazing through the plate glass wall. “It’s a good snow out there. We need the blizzards to come through every now and again. Wipe the slate clean. Make everything right again.”

  Deirdre stared up at him open mouthed.

  A clattering of feet sounded on the wooden stairs in the hallway.

  Nora Keenan came rushing into the room. “Did Jessica come down here?”

  Officer Kirk jumped to his feet. “No, she didn’t.”

  Alban sprinted from the office. “You don’t know where Jess is? Isn’t she with Rhiannon?”

  Nora shook her head. “She insisted on me fetching a toy that the little one had left in the blanket box in your bedroom, Alban. But I went through the box and couldn’t find it. And when I came back to tell her, she was gone.”

  Alban grasped her arms. “Where’s Rhiannon?”

  A look of fear entered Nora’s eyes. “She must have taken her.”

  Outside the house came the roar of a car engine.

  Alban and Kirk sprinted from the room together.

  45

  ISLA

  March 2018

  They found Jessica in her SUV a short distance up the road. The snow drifts had prevented her from getting very far. She’d had Rhiannon wrapped in a blanket and strapped into the same seat belt as herself. From what I’d heard, Jessica had been dazed and uncommunicative.

  Sometime after that, emergency crews had begun clearing the roads around Greenmire. Ambulances and police had finally been able to get through. After a forensics team had come and gone, Peyton’s body had been taken away—wrapped in a sheet and zipped into a body bag.

  I hadn’t seen any of that. Greer told me the details much later—she’d driven straight to Greenmire as soon as the roads were clear.

  Stella and I had arrived in hospital by ambulance. Deirdre Chandlish had been taken to hospital, too, suffering from shock.

  I’d undergone immediate surgery on my stab wound and had the stitches on my leg redone—which had opened up again—with treatment given for the infection that had begun to rage through my body. The doctors told me I came close to dying. Alban’s peat moss and Jessica’s wound cleaning had been lifesavers.

  Later, Stella had been sent away to a special retreat, to rest and recover. Her mental health had been severely impacted and she wasn’t doing well. She wasn’t having contact with anyone from Greenmire.

  I’d returned to Sydney for the months of recovery that followed. There were court cases yet to come, but for now, it was a kind of purgatory for everyone. There were still so many unanswered questions and so many judgments yet to happen.

  Potted palm tree leaves ruffled in a gentle breeze as I sat in my mother’s sunroom in Sydney, curled in a macramé hanging chair that had been here ever since I could remember.

  I knew that Alban would take a dim view of this room, with its potted plants and palm tree wallpaper. But it was home to me. And I needed home. My trip to Scotland had swept me into dark places I hadn’t known existed.

  My brother sat on a chair nearby, strumming his guitar. He and I had stayed up until the early hours last night, playing cards and talking. Yesterday was our Dad’s birthday. It was an unspoken rule between Jake and I that on Dad’s birthday each year, we would play cards in the sunroom and drink his favourite Royal Salute Scotch whisky. I’d only had a tiny glass of the Scotch, but I could almost still taste the smoky notes of marmalade, hazelnut and vanilla on my tongue.

  Our dad used to sit in this room every Sunday and read the newspapers, a glass of Scotch next to him. Then he’d play cards with Jake and me.

  I’m feeling lost, Dad. Wish you were still here.

  “Gotta go, sis’.” Jake pulled himself to his feet, his hair falling across his face as he set the guitar against a wall. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “You look like shit. But not as bad as you did when you first came back.” He grinned to show that he didn’t mean it.

  I pulled a mock offended face at him. “Thanks, brother. Where are you going?”

  A sudden shy look embedded itself into his face and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Out.”

  “Out to see Charlotte again? I’m happy for you, Jake. It’s going well, huh?”

  “Settle. We’re just friends.”

  “Friends who spend every free minute of the day together.”

  He shook his head dismissively as he left the room, but I could tell he was smiling.

  In the stillness that followed his absence, I felt a sudden rush of anxiety shooting from my stomach into my throat. I wanted to ask him to stay and keep playing his guitar. It was soothing. But he had places to go and I had to sort out my own stuff.

  Images began looping in my head. The church. Peyton. Jessica. Trent. Elodie.

  Attacks of anxiety like this came and went constantly, making my skin burn and adrenalin chug through my veins.

  The mental fatigue of not knowing exactly what happened to me in the old church constantly ground me down. So far, Jessica had refused to talk.

  I could see her so clearly, standing over me in that room. And I could hear her voice, above the din of that damned piano.

  She was being held in custody. I knew that Jessica was up on at least two charges. The first was manslaughter, for stabbing Peyton to death. Her lawyer was going for a plea of temporary insanity, due to the extraordinary circumstances and the state that Jessica was found in after she tried to drive away with Rhiannon. The second set of charges concerned the illegal supply of sleeping medication to children and me for the purpose of abuse. As far as I understood, that court case was to determine three things: whether Jessica supplied the drugs to Peyton knowing that he was going to use it on Elodie, Stella and me, whether she took part in any of the abuse, and whether she directly gave any of the medication to us.

  I could understand what Jessica did in relation to killing Peyton, but the thought of the second charge being true was sickening. Had she really been involved in any of that? It wasn’t looking good for her that she’d withheld information about Peyton’s whereabouts on the night Elodie was abducted. And I knew for certain that she’d been at the church and stood over me while my body was twisting in pain.

  I was deeply conflicted. She’d seemed genuinely shocked when she was told what Peyton had been doing with the medication she’d given him. And she’d cleaned and bandaged the wound that Peyton had inflicted on me and taken care of me. But was all of that just because she knew t
hat would be expected of her? I didn’t know.

  The only bright spot—if it could be called that—was the discovery of who had abducted Elodie. And the knowledge that this person was never going to harm another child. Now, Greenmire knew for certain that it wasn’t a passing stranger who’d chased an eight-year-old child through the wood that night. It had been one of their own. I could sense the town in mourning—a fresh mourning for Elodie but also mourning for their lost innocence. The predator had been among them all that time.

  It had been Peyton who’d taken the photographs of young girls in the changing rooms at dance practice a decade or so ago. It was Peyton who’d assaulted Stella when she was twelve and caused her to run away from home. It was Peyton who’d been grooming Elodie.

  People speculated that he hadn’t meant to give Elodie a lethal dose of sleeping medication. He’d probably given Elodie the same dosage he’d given Stella, but Stella at age twelve had already been the height of a short adult woman. Either that, or he hadn’t been focusing on the dosage at all.

  I’d had two weepy conversations with Aubrey over the phone. She’d kept apologising for Peyton, but what he’d done wasn’t her fault. She told me she’d been certain it was Diarmid who’d tried to frighten her with the tattie bogles when she was a child. It had been Diarmid who’d first told her the myth about the tattie bogles—but then, lots of children in Greenmire scared each other with those stories. The old myth was confined to Greenmire, apparently.

  I learned a lot about Aubrey and her past from those conversations. From the time she was five, she’d begun finding straw on the stairs and under her pillow in the morning, and she’d be terrified. Peyton had been fifteen then. She’d developed a phobia of the scarecrows. When she was a teenager, she’d carved faces in wood for the scarecrows and hammered them into the stakes. She’d done that to try to gain some control back over the scarecrows. All the time, it was Peyton who’d been playing a sick game with her.

  My mother poked her head around the doorframe. “Isla, you’ve got visitors. Are you up to seeing anyone?”