by Susan Lewis
Remembering it only too well, Andee deflected by saying, ‘There aren’t so many parallels between the two stories, so there’s no reason to think this will end the way the book did.’
Maureen nodded, apparently agreeing with that. ‘Why, of all things to take did she choose that book?’ she wondered.
Andee shrugged. ‘To be a nuisance? She knew I was studying it.’
Her mother didn’t appear to be listening. ‘It wasn’t a good ending, was it?’ She was staring bleakly into the empty space her memory should be filling. ‘You can tell me.’
‘It depends how you look at it.’
Maureen swallowed dryly. In the end she said, ‘Is it possible for someone to be rotten through and through, the way Cathy Ames was?’
Not knowing what else to say, Andee countered with, ‘Cathy Ames was a fictional character.’
‘Maybe Penny considers herself to be fictional, with all her different names.’
Andee reached for her phone as a text arrived. She was so certain it would be from Jonathan that it took her a moment to understand fully what it said.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she murmured, her heart turning inside out. ‘Oh my God, this can’t be happening.’
Chapter Seventeen
Abandoning her car on double yellow lines at the marina, Andee ran through the traffic towards the Grand hotel, answering a call from Gould as she went.
‘Apparently Alayna left Carluccio’s about one thirty,’ he told her. ‘She was with a middle-aged woman and young man. This allows just about enough time to get to Kesterly, if this is where she is. Still nothing to support that, unless you tell me differently.’
‘I can’t. Was there anything unusual about the way they left,’ Andee demanded, almost colliding with a cyclist, ‘something suggesting she didn’t want to go?’
‘Not that I’ve been told. No descriptions yet either. Are you at the Grand?’
‘Just arrived.’
‘OK. I’m a couple of minutes away. Are you sure you want to see her on your own?’
‘Absolutely. If she’s here.’
It would be just like the Penny she was getting to know to send her on a wild goose chase, either to give herself more time, or simply for the perverse pleasure of it.
Minutes later Andee was in the dimly lit hallway of the hotel’s tenth floor, knocking at Suite Six, having been told it was where she’d find Michelle Cross who was expecting her.
If that were the case, why wasn’t Penny answering the door?
She knocked again, praying with all her might that she was going to find Alayna inside and unharmed. She shuddered as she remembered the text: Your daughter for my son.
What the hell would Penny do to her? What was there to gain from hurting an innocent young girl – her own niece – whom she was apparently using as a bargaining chip?
Niece? Family meant nothing to Penny. She’d proved that definitively enough thirty years ago, and had carried on proving it the entire time she’d stayed away. Then there was her apparent disinterest, even contempt, for her own son, Jonathan. So why would she care about a niece?
Was it possible the other twin was still alive?
If he was then something far more threatening, even terrifying was happening than Andee could begin to imagine.
Why didn’t Penny answer the bloody door?
She began to knock again just as the door opened.
‘Sorry, I was on the phone,’ Penny apologised, standing aside for Andee to come in. ‘You’re here sooner than I expected.’
‘Where is she?’ Andee demanded, infuriated and alarmed to find no sign of Alayna.
When Penny didn’t reply Andee swung round, ready to shout at her again, but hesitated when she caught her gazing into thin air, as if she’d already forgotten Andee was in the room. Her hair wasn’t in its usual neat style, but hanging loosely about her face, uncombed; Andee hadn’t realised it was so … sparse. It made her seem oddly vulnerable, and the haunted, distant look in her eyes was baffling too. This wasn’t a Penny she’d seen before. Instinctively she said, ‘Are you all right?’
Penny’s eyes came to hers. It was plain she hadn’t heard anything Andee had said since she’d come into the room.
‘I asked where Alayna is,’ Andee repeated.
Penny’s expression changed, showing a fleeting glimpse of surprise, even anger, before her manner dipped into coolness, as if she were perfectly in control and hosting nothing more bizarre than a tea party. ‘I guess we’re talking about your daughter,’ she stated frostily.
Inflamed, Andee cried, ‘Don’t do this. I want to know …’
‘I’m not doing anything. I’ve no idea where she is.’
‘Then speak to whoever does know and tell them …’
‘Andee, watch my lips. I don’t know where your daughter is.’
‘You had lunch with her today, in Bristol. You and … Who’s the boy?’
Penny blinked, then to Andee’s amazement she laughed. ‘I’ve been here all morning, on the phone,’ she insisted. ‘I haven’t left the room once.’ As if to confirm this she held up her mobile, her knuckles showing white with the force of her grip.
Andee regarded her fiercely, still too worked up to know whether she believed her or not.
Penny turned away and went to sit on a sofa, gesturing for Andee to make herself comfortable too. She stared at her phone and fiddled with it.
Andee remained where she was.
‘I have to understand from all this,’ Penny said, ‘that you don’t know where your daughter is. Presumably she isn’t answering her phone, or she hasn’t turned up for a date she was supposed to make …’
‘You sent a text,’ Andee reminded her. ‘Your daughter for my son. It was a blatant threat …’
‘Indeed! I was pointing out what it could come to if you don’t tell me where Jonathan is hiding Juliette.’
Andee felt as though she was sinking, struggling, unable to get a grip on reality. ‘So you were threatening to take my daughter …’
With an irritated sigh, Penny said, ‘Wherever she is now, whomever she’s with and whatever she’s doing has nothing to do with me.’
So why wasn’t Alayna answering her phone?
‘I can see you’re finding it hard to believe me,’ Penny continued, glancing at her mobile again. She was clearly waiting for a call or message from someone that was setting her badly on edge. ‘I don’t blame you,’ she continued, looking up again, ‘because I am very capable of lying. In fact, I do it rather well, but in this instance I can assure you I am telling the truth.’
She was like a changeable sky, going from bright to clouded in less than an instant. Guarded and restless, nervous, irritable and now she appeared so sure of herself, so contained and … smug that Andee was starting to feel wrong-footed at every turn.
‘Who’s the young man?’ Andee demanded, feeling ridiculous, but she needed to know. At least she hadn’t asked if it was Penny’s supposedly dead son.
Penny said, ‘I have absolutely no idea what young man you’re talking about. Doesn’t she have boyfriends?’
Andee’s eyes turned hard, her mind was spinning as her phone suddenly rang, and without checking who it was she clicked on.
‘Mum, what the f?’ Alayna cried. ‘Why’s everyone calling me? Even the police have been in touch and your messages are freaking me out.’
Swallowing hard on her relief, Andee asked, abruptly, ‘Where are you?’
‘With Jay and his mum who’re totally weirded out too. What’s going on?’
‘It’s OK, nothing to worry about.’
‘I need more,’ Alayna insisted.
Andee said, ‘It’s just when you didn’t answer your phone … Why didn’t you?’
‘I turned it off while we went for a walk around the Harbourside. Why are the police calling me? I feel such a schmuck, like my family is completely wacko …’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything when I see you. Please apologise to
Jay and his mother, and call Grandma to let her know you’re OK. I have to go now, we’ll speak later.’ After ringing off she ignored Penny’s self-satisfied smirk and quickly texted Gould to let him know that Alayna was safe.
‘So, panic over?’ Penny asked with mock concern as Andee sank down on the chair behind her.
‘You shouldn’t have sent that text,’ Andee told her. ‘What the hell was I supposed to think …’
‘The worst of me, of course. Isn’t that a comfortable place for you?’
Their eyes locked and for a bewildering moment Andee felt her senses slipping, spiralling back into the past to who they used to be. This was her sister, the child she’d grown up with, the teenager whose disappearance had turned their world inside out … It seemed like only days ago that she’d vanished from their lives yet here she was, a woman in her forties with more self-possession and arrogance than seemed reasonable or right. But there was something about her today that was giving Andee pause. Somewhere beneath the harsh veneer of indifference and superiority that had never shown a single crack before, she seemed almost helpless, frightened even – but of what?
‘Why are you staring at me?’ Penny snapped.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Andee asked. ‘Something’s happened … Or you’re …’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me. So shall we get down to the reason you’re here. You currently have your daughter and my son. As far as I’m concerned you can keep both, but the baby has to come with me.’
Andee shook her head.
‘I’m not asking, I’m telling you,’ Penny stated. ‘The contract he and Juliette signed stipulates very clearly that …’
‘I don’t care what the contract says. If need be we’ll put it to a judge, here in Britain.’
Penny got abruptly to her feet and went to fix herself a drink. It was obvious that she was still badly rattled over something that could have been about the baby, but Andee felt it was more. She hadn’t put her mobile down once, and kept looking at it as though willing it to ring. Or maybe she was desperate for it not to.
‘Do you want one?’ she asked Andee, holding up a bottle of Perrier.
‘No thank you.’
The silence as Penny filled a glass seemed to have a life of its own, drawing in sounds from the bay that had no place in this oddly functioning reality. By the time she sat down again she’d received a text, sent one in return and her manner seemed less irascible.
Eyeing Andee with a curiosity bordering on disdain, she said, ‘You think you know everything, don’t you?’
Since it was such a stupid remark Andee didn’t bother to answer.
‘In fact, you know nothing at all.’
Sounding as exasperated as she felt, Andee said, ‘Is this a conversation worth getting into?’
Penny arched an eyebrow and took a sip of her drink. ‘Have you ever imagined us having any sort of conversation?’ she asked. ‘I mean, over the years, have you ever found yourself talking to me in your mind?’
‘Of course, many times. Needless to say it was never like this.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I’m not sure. It might.’
Andee gave herself a moment to think, to decide whether to be truthful instead of defensive. ‘OK, I used to imagine how happy and relieved we’d feel to see one another again. I thought there would be lots of tears and hugging as you told us what had been happening to you …’
‘So I was always a victim?’
‘It was hard to see you any other way, when I had no idea you’d chosen to leave us.’
‘But mostly you thought I was dead?’
‘Isn’t that what we were supposed to think? The note you sent didn’t leave much room for doubt.’
‘Oh, yes, I keep forgetting about that. Selective memory, I suppose. Were you very upset when you thought I’d killed myself?’
‘What a ridiculous question! You were my sister, I loved you …’
Penny’s laugh was more scorn than disbelief. ‘That’s what you’ve been telling yourself?’
‘It was the truth!’
‘You did a good job of hiding it.’ She appeared more amused than angry, which irritated Andee even further.
‘We had some good times as children,’ Andee pointed out heatedly. ‘We laughed a lot, spent wonderful summers here in Kesterly …’ Penny rolled her eyes. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ Andee almost shouted. ‘In fact most of it wasn’t.’
‘Not for you, but you weren’t me, and you had no interest in being me, or understanding what it was like to be the one who should have been a boy, who was never pretty enough or clever enough or sporty enough. The attention was always on you and you lapped it up. I might just as well have not existed.’
‘And you’re bringing this up now? Haven’t you got over it yet? Even if it were true, and it wasn’t …’
‘Oh, it was.’
‘If that’s what you want to believe, then I’m afraid I can’t do anything about how you perceived yourself, or the rest of us, while you were growing up. But I can tell you that in spite of what you’ve apparently convinced yourself, you were loved, deeply, and your leaving totally devastated our family. It was a cruel and insanely selfish thing to do to people whose only crime was to care for you …’
‘You’re not listening to me, Andee. You didn’t care for me, none of you did.’
Andee wished she wasn’t hearing her mother confessing to not caring enough, only an hour ago.
‘You pretended sometimes,’ Penny told her, ‘you went through the motions, but it never rang true. I knew I was the oddball, the black sheep, the embarrassment, the one that was different and not in a good way. But it’s OK, don’t beat yourself up about it, because I finally discovered that I didn’t mind being different. In fact, I loved it, because it was real, and because I realised I didn’t care for any of you either. I really didn’t. So that’s why I went. I was in the wrong place with the wrong family, and when it became clear that Uncle John was going to make it possible for me to go, I leapt at it. He gave me a sense of myself that I’d never had before. I meant something – not to him, I’ve no idea what he thought about anything, but I meant something to me. There wasn’t a moment, during those first years I was in Glebe Place, that I regretted taking my life into my own hands, because I was living with people like me, people who cared …’
Andee was aghast. ‘You were a child prostitute,’ she stated bluntly. ‘Those people didn’t care about you.’
Penny simply shrugged. ‘I was doing what I wanted to with no one criticising me, or making me feel like I was a mistake or a waste of space. We were a family in Glebe Place; we looked out for each other, we had fun, we didn’t need other people’s approval or understanding, because we didn’t belong to your rigor-mortised world. We never hurt anyone, all we did was entertain and be entertained in a way that I don’t expect you to understand, because it would never have been the right life for you. You were always the one to conform. It never even occurred to you not to. You’re not a rebel, a free spirit, a radical, or even an imaginative thinker. You see things through the eyes of a society that is ridiculously caught up in morals that it can’t live up to. Standards that are forgotten when they’re not convenient. Judgements that almost never see the other side of an argument.’
Andee was more intrigued than offended. ‘Well that’s a fancy little tale you’ve been telling yourself,’ she commented. ‘A very convenient fudging of what’s right and wrong to make yourself into the heroine of the piece.’
Penny appeared to like the response. She chuckled, sipped more water and gave an odd sort of twitch as she checked her phone again. ‘There you go, proving my point,’ she said. ‘You look at me and judge me by your own standards that may or may not chime with mine. You see, I know that what goes on inside me is different to what drives you. I don’t share your mundane sensitivities or need to be seen to be doing what you call the right thing. I am who I
am, which is nothing like you and who you are.’
Unimpressed, Andee said, ‘You’ve got no idea who you really are.’
Penny’s eyes narrowed.
‘You’re scared of something,’ Andee told her, ‘maybe even terrified. What is it?’
Penny seemed to find that funny. ‘There you are, doing it again,’ she accused. ‘Presuming you know all about me, assessing me in a way that will never get you to the truth.’
‘Then tell me the truth.’
Penny’s eyes remained on hers.
Andee waited, but Penny didn’t speak. ‘OK, then tell me this,’ Andee said. ‘Do you consider accusing Daddy of child molestation was a good or right thing to do?’
Apparently rattled by the question, Penny sipped her water again as she gave it some thought. ‘I told you before,’ she finally replied, ‘I did what I needed to in order to keep my freedom.’
‘So in spite of knowing what those lies could do to him, you threatened them anyway, because you and your freedom mattered more?’
Penny tilted her head. ‘Mm, I guess that about sums it up,’ she agreed.
Outraged by how matter-of-fact she sounded, Andee said, ‘You hurt him so deeply that it ended up killing him. Do you have any kind of conscience about that?’
‘The way he chose to deal with what I said was down to him,’ Penny snapped. ‘I didn’t force him to keep it to himself, to internalise it like a cancer. Now you tell me this, why do you think he was so afraid of it coming out?’
Andee’s eyes widened with horror as nausea churned inside her. ‘If you’re about to say because it was the truth …’
‘I’m just posing the question.’
‘You know very well that that kind of slur destroys careers and families, even if it isn’t true. That was why he kept it to himself. He didn’t want Mum to know that you’d do something so despicable; he didn’t want even the slightest shadow of suspicion to fall over him, not to save himself, to save us. Even you, in case you decided to come back.’
Penny was staring out of the window, but it was clear when she looked back that she’d heard every word. ‘That’s an interesting assessment of what was going on his mind,’ she declared, ‘coming from someone who never had the discussion with him.’
