The Woman Who Didn't

by HC Michaels

  His reaction to her made her nervous and she had to remind herself she was innocent. The police just had a way of making you feel guilty, even when you weren’t.

  There was just one thing troubling her, but to tell the police about it would be dangerous. She was left feeling like she had a bomb strapped to her back. To tell them would mean instant detonation. Her life would explode and nothing would ever be the same. She’d had enough explosions in her life to see her through to her dying days. She didn’t need any more.

  No, she was not going to get involved. She’d answer any questions the police asked and she’d do it honestly. It wasn’t her fault if they were failing to ask her the one question that had the potential to blow this case wide apart. It was probably nothing anyway. She was making a big deal over absolutely nothing.

  Did she see Skye making brownies the day before Theo died? Yes, she did.

  Did she see Skye offer the brownies to Theo or George? No, George was eating cheese when she left for the day.

  Did she hear Skye tell George not to touch the brownies? No, she didn’t.

  Had she ever made brownies herself? No, Skye liked to make all the sweets.

  Had she ever seen Amber bringing brownies into the house?

  Well, they never thought to ask her that.

  Amber was gutted. It was her fault. All of it. She’d thought she was doing the right thing and now her father was dead.

  Her father! She loved him so much. How could this have happened?

  She thought back to when this whole mess began.

  It was those stupid diaries Clara wrote.

  She’d found them one day on a shelf in Skye’s dressing room. One of her friends at school had needed something to wear to a party and Amber had bragged she could swipe one of Skye’s designer-label dresses without her noticing. She had so many clothes. Amber often stole them and just as she predicted, Skye never noticed. Her stepmother may not have cancer, but she sure was blind. Or maybe she was showing signs of early dementia like her mother.

  She knew Skye believed she never went near her precious master bedroom, but the truth was she was a regular, often sifting through Skye’s belongings when she wasn’t home. It always paid to know as much as possible about your enemies. Besides, she was certain Skye went into her room when she wasn’t home so all she was really doing was evening the score.

  She came across the leather-bound diaries in Skye’s dressing room, poorly hidden behind a pile of thousand-dollar sweaters.

  All thoughts of her friend’s wardrobe crisis fled her mind as she sat on the plush carpet and flicked through them.

  Most of the diaries were in fairly good condition, apart from the one written at the time of Skye’s birth, which had become dog-eared and ragged, falling open at certain entries as if it’d been read a thousand times.

  Amber read these particular entries with great interest, devouring their every word. Finally, she’d found someone who could see Skye for who she was. Everyone else loved her. Even Jeff and her mother never spoke badly about her, although she was certain they must think nasty thoughts.

  She felt like she had an ally in the most unlikely of corners. Clara seemed to hate and resent Skye almost as much as she did.

  She felt a real connection to her.

  She’d put the diaries back behind the sweaters, deciding it’d be less obvious if she borrowed only one at a time than to swipe the entire pile. They were a lot more interesting than the Jane Austen she was being made to read at school. Although, a lot of the themes were similar—love, betrayal, heartbreak ... it even had a Mr Darcy, with the equally as alluring name of Jacques Moubray. He sounded hot.

  Over the following week she read them all (skipping the boring parts about ballet). In the final diary, the entries started to become as jumbled as Clara’s dementia-addled mind. It was tragic. She wrote about her attempts to take her own life, always failing as her desire to live out the remainder of her clear-headed days won out. She was stuck in the ultimate Catch-22.

  It was devastating.

  Amber’s dreams became haunted by Clara’s pleas for help. She even visited her once pretending to be a fan, which was kind of true. She was a fan—those diaries were brilliantly written. She’d tucked her hair into a cap and worn her baggy jeans in case the nurses tried to describe her to Skye, who definitely wouldn’t have approved of her being there.

  The visit had been beyond awful. When she’d walked in, Clara had her nightdress half unbuttoned and chocolate smeared all over her face. Then she’d started behaving like some kind of demented ape, spitting at her and screeching, telling her to go away.

  The horror of it had frozen Amber’s brain and she found herself only able to operate in slow motion, not being able to snap herself back into action until Clara reached into her pants and flung a handful of shit at her.

  She went to get a nurse and when they returned, Clara was standing naked in her bathroom, laughing when there was absolutely nothing worth laughing about.

  It was frightening. The Clara she knew from the diaries would be horrified if she could see herself. No wonder she wanted to end her life before it came to this. She barely seemed human anymore.

  Presumably Skye had also read the diaries. Why hadn’t she helped her mother out of her misery and done what she was unable to do for herself? She was probably petrified she’d go to jail. Skye never did have much courage.

  That was when Amber decided to go through with the plan that she’d been formulating.

  Skye didn’t have the guts to give her mother her wish, but she did. It was the least she could do. It was cruel to let anyone live like that. Even Linda agreed with her when she’d asked her about it.

  And if she did it right, she could make sure Skye got the blame for it, thereby solving two problems at once. Clara would get the peaceful end she wished for and Skye would be in jail, far away from her for the rest of her days. There was no way her father would stand by a murderer. Especially not in his profession. It didn’t matter how big Skye’s boobs were.

  Amber had sat at the kitchen counter with her headphones on watching Skye make her weekly batch of brownies so many times she knew the recipe by heart. All she’d have to do would be to wait until Skye went to bed for the night and mimic the recipe, baking a new batch (with a little bit of poison added in) and get rid of Skye’s batch.

  That was one advantage of such a large house. When Skye went to bed, she had no idea what was going on downstairs. Amber could never get away with something like that in her mother’s minuscule house.

  She tested out her plan a few times without the poison to see if it would work. Eating Skye’s brownies was the best way to dispose of them. They were delicious, although didn’t exactly do wonders for her waistline. She figured she could always lose the weight later once Skye was in jail.

  Skye never once noticed the brownie switch. It probably helped that she didn’t actually eat them herself. Far too many calories in a brownie for an anorexic bimbo to possibly consider consuming them.

  It was a perfect plan, except for one very important part—the poison. Or lack thereof.

  Amber did a few internet searches using Skye’s laptop, and got very disheartened. It seemed this wouldn’t be as easy as she’d thought.

  It wasn’t until the Great Shedroom Renovation that everything clicked into place. Ironic really, that it was actually Skye who solved the problem for her by convincing her father to kick her out of the house.

  She’d been helping Jeff sort the rubbish from the old shed when she received a sign from the gods. An omen. Only recently she’d read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and he’d talked non-stop about the importance of listening to omens.

  A carton had split open and four small but heavy boxes had fallen out, right on top of Amber’s left foot.

  She’d sat down on the grass to wriggle her toes and make sure they weren’t broken, when she noticed exactly what it was that had nearly severed her toes.

  There she was l
ooking for the perfect poison and it had literally landed at her feet, practically begging her to use it. If that wasn’t an omen, she didn’t know what was.

  The boxes were labelled as Thall-Rat, a product she’d read about in one of her many internet searches. It hadn’t been sold in Australia since the 1950s, where it was once popular as an effective rat poison. The problem with it was that it was also an effective people poison with a spate of murders and accidental deaths so prolific that it had to be withdrawn from sale.

  It was perfect.

  She’d shoved the boxes into her backpack and fossicked through the junk looking for more. She didn’t know how much she was going to need. Were four boxes enough? She soon realised they were going to have to be. They were the only ones there.

  She decided to wait until she moved out until she started adding the poison to the brownies. Better to remove herself from the scene of the crime. She didn’t want to end up as a suspect herself. She could bake them in her kitchenette in her shedroom and take them to Malvern to switch them. She just needed to make sure she kept a key.

  It was nerve-racking the first time. She was paranoid about accidentally licking her fingers with that delicious, chocolaty mixture, but managed to successfully bake and make the switch.

  It was the first of many switches she made. Linda saw her doing it once, but she was busy and it didn’t seem like she’d paid any attention. Besides, even if she had noticed, she wouldn’t say anything to get Amber in trouble. They had an understanding. Linda had often said she was the only person in the house who ever treated her with any decency. She wouldn’t tell on her, especially since she’d been the one to give her the idea with all that talk of putting pillows over her head if ever she got like Clara. So really, she was implicated as well. There was no way she was going to talk.

  She started with a small quantity of thallium, but another visit to Clara after the second batch told her she was suffering. Her hair was falling out and her extremities were going numb. Classic signs of thallium poisoning. She didn’t want her to be in pain. She had to speed it up and get it over with. It would be cruel otherwise.

  So, Amber decided to make a super batch. The kind that would finish anyone off.

  And of all the batches her father and Uncle George had decided to eat, it had to be the Super Batch. They could have eaten any other batch and nothing would’ve happened other than a few minor side effects.

  Now Clara was still alive, and her father was dead.

  Uncle George would be, too, if it weren’t for the stroke of luck (another omen, perhaps) that Amber had stolen Skye’s spare phone and had it in her school bag the day Sophie picked her up on her way to the hospital.

  She’d found the phone tucked in the pocket of Skye’s jacket when she’d been returning one of the diaries. She’d typed in Skye’s password (the same one she used on all her devices—7593, the numbers on a phone’s keypad corresponding to the letters of her name). It seemed she was using the phone to impersonate a woman called Elle to flirt with Amber’s father. It was obviously one of those sick fantasy games married people played. She’d nearly vomited on Skye’s carpet.

  Knowing it would drive Skye crazy if she thought she’d lost the phone, she decided to swipe it. She could have a great laugh with the girls at school over some of those messages Skye had sent as Elle.

  When she realised Uncle George had been poisoned, she’d pulled Skye’s dodgy phone from her bag and quickly sent a message to Sophie, hoping to save him in time. It was the only way she could think to tell her about Prussian Blue without incriminating herself.

  She’d had to plant the phone on Skye later. She knew exactly which section of the front fence was in a blind spot of the security cameras and threw it over into the garden for the police to find. Thankfully they had. She was worried the gardener might run it over with his mower.

  She had no idea when she’d been texting Sophie that her father had eaten the brownies, too. She just assumed George had snuck one off the plate in the fridge when Skye wasn’t looking. Her father never ate those brownies. Skye had been very clear with him not to touch them.

  The only good thing to come out of this mess was that Skye had been arrested and was likely to spend at least the next twenty years in jail. There was so much evidence against her. Internet searches for thallium on her laptop. The empty boxes of Thall-Rat hidden in her garage. The mobile phone in her garden. The brownie crumbs in her kitchen.

  Skye had also helped enormously by ruining her reputation with the fake cancer. Now that she’d lied about something as huge as that nobody believed a word she said. She must be a murderer. She clearly had issues. Why would they look at a teenager when they had a full-blown psychopath in their clutches? She hadn’t even called an ambulance for at least an hour after her husband died. What kind of normal person would do that?

  No normal person.

  Maybe if she had called an ambulance sooner they would’ve been able to get him some Prussian Blue in time.

  Now, according to her mother, Amber was set to inherit her father’s estate. It would be held in trust for her until she turned eighteen.

  But she’d forego all the money (she’d even forego seeing Skye in jail) if only she could have her father back. It was a mess.

  She’d committed both the most perfect crime and the most imperfect one. She’d gotten away with murder. The problem was, she’d murdered the wrong person.

  Detective Hooke sipped on his beer. It tasted even better now he’d had to wait so long for it.

  It’d been an arduous week at the station. The other guys had gone straight home to their families, exhausted. Hopefully their wives hadn’t baked them any brownies to welcome them. As he didn’t have a wife to go home to, he headed to the pub to have that beer he’d been dreaming of all week. It didn’t matter he was alone. After the day he’d had, alone suited him just fine.

  That Skye Manis was one twisted piece of work.

  He’d really thought she was going to crack and confess, but she’d held firm, seeming genuinely perplexed as to why nobody believed her story. She wouldn’t even admit to trying to poison her mother. Nobody else would’ve done that. He might have been prepared to accept her poisoning of Theo was accidental if only she’d admitted to that.

  Screw her. If she was going to lie about cancer, then about poisoning her mother, as far as he was concerned she was lying about everything. He felt sorry for Theo having been married to a psycho like her.

  Death had changed his perspective on his former rival. It was hard to hate someone who could no longer breathe. All the poor bastard had wanted was to get laid, not poisoned to death with dessert. She could’ve at least screwed him to death. It might’ve been worth it then.

  He ordered a second beer, watching the bartender pull on the tap sending cloudy liquid swirling into the glass before it settled to an amber colour when the oxygen escaped.

  It was strange the way something as transparent as air could change the colour of a liquid. It was no different to people. Usually it was the ones you least expected who had the ability to completely change your world.

  He liked that analogy better than the one of the pond, not because it was necessarily better at explaining people, but simply because it involved beer.

  The bartender slid the glass across to him, leaving him with his thoughts.

  He raised his drink in the air, lifting his eyes to the ceiling.

  “This one’s for you, mate,” he said to Theo, certain that wherever he was he could hear him.

  As the cool liquid ran down this throat, he ignored the feeling it left in his gut. Skye was as guilty as she was cancer-free. The case was closed.

  12 Months After The Break

  Skye pulled at the bright green fabric of her polyester tracksuit pants. They were hideous. Although, they were quite comfortable. So was the baggy green tee-shirt she wore them with. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was naked.

  Screw comfortable. She’d
happily swap these shapeless sacks for her MaxMara pants with the seams that dug into her legs and her Dolce and Gabbana shirt with the label that itched the back of her neck.

  Not to mention her shoes. Oh, how she missed her beautiful shoes. These flat, rubber clogs made her look like a clown. She’d give anything to see her Christian Louboutins one more time. She wondered where they were now. She’d been stuck in this wretched place for a year. They could be anywhere. As long as they weren’t attached to Amber’s feet. That would just about kill her. Thankfully Amber’s giant hooves would never fit into them.

  It was these kinds of thoughts that plagued Skye. She wished she didn’t have so much time to think. Prison had robbed her of her freedom, handing her the curse of time in its place.

  There was just so much time in here, hovering in the halls like a dark presence, creeping under the door of her cell, snaking its way into her dreams reminding her it was there.

  How long was it until lunchtime, exercise time, shower time, library time? How much time had the judge given her? How much time did she have left? What time was she locked in for the night? What time was she woken in the morning?

  Time ruled her life, with the ticking of the clock of equal importance to the beating of her heart. Perhaps that’s why jail sentences were referred to as hard time. There was nothing easy about the way the clock ticked in here, each seemingly interminable hour stretching impossibly longer than the one to have passed before it.

  She thought about all the time she used to spend putting together outfits in the morning or carefully applying her make up. There was no more of that. Nor was there any more having her nails painted, legs waxed, eyebrows threaded or skin peeled. No more laser treatments, massages, spray-on tans or botox.