Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark

by Lauren Henderson

  She shivers.

  “Like day to night. Just a few days after Jason’s fifth birthday. We had a party for him, balloons and cake and everything. We didn’t have much money, but we wanted it all nice for our boy. I can still see his little face now—he was over the moon, he was that excited. But just a few days later, Kev came home in the middle of the day with a face like thunder, and went straight for the whisky bottle. And after that nothing was the same.”

  She wraps her arms around herself.

  “I told him I wouldn’t stand for it,” she says quietly, “and he said I could go whenever I wanted but I had to leave Jason. He’d get his mum in to look after the boy. I couldn’t take him with me.”

  She looks at me pathetically.

  “I couldn’t stay,” she says, her voice rising. “It got so bad so fast that I ran out of there with only the clothes on my back one night, a bare two months after he started necking down that whisky like there was no tomorrow. Didn’t even stop to grab one thing I owned, I was that scared. I drove back to my mum and dad’s. They tried to tell me I should get Jason back, go through the courts, but Kev came round and said he’d kill me if I tried, and we believed him.”

  There are tears in her eyes now. But, thank God, Jase is coming back to where we’re sitting, concerned at the high pitch of his mother’s voice.

  “Mum, what are you going on about?” he says, looking deeply embarrassed. “Scarlett doesn’t want to know all that old family history stuff!”

  Dawn freezes in her seat, every muscle in her thin body seeming to contract. The only thing that moves is her eyes, wild, as she stares from Jase to me.

  “Mum?” Jase says, sounding worried now.

  “What did you call her?” Dawn said, looking at me incredulously.

  “Scarlett. Scarlett Wakefield. Did I not tell you her name before?”

  Dawn drops her foam cup of tea. It splashes everywhere, a stream of thick dark liquid staining her jeans, splattering onto the floor. She jumps up, patting at herself, and I do too, touching the leg of her jeans, backing away when I realize with great relief that the tea wasn’t hot enough to scald her.

  I run to the tea table to grab some green paper towels to mop her up with. But as I turn around, I see that Dawn’s already moving. Ignoring the soaked front of her jeans, she’s heading determinedly toward the door.

  “I need to get going, Jason. I’m late for work as it is,” she says hastily as I push through the door in their wake.

  Outside, she fumbles for her keys, ducking her head as she drags them out of her pocket, refusing to meet Jase’s eyes, let alone mine.

  “I’ll ring you later, Jason,” Dawn mutters, swinging open the van door, climbing up into the driver’s seat, looking very small behind the wheel of the big vehicle. I notice that she’s put an old cushion on the driver’s side to sit on, to give her an extra bit of height. The steering wheel’s being held together with duct tape, and there are some tools and a rusty old bit of pipe rattling around on the floor. The upholstery’s so faded and patched up with more duct tape that you can’t tell what color it was originally. Jase’s mum isn’t exactly living the good life.

  Dawn doesn’t say goodbye to either of us. She just leans over and grabs the open van door and slams it shut as the engine comes to life, turning over with a noise so rattling that even I, who know nothing about cars, can’t help thinking that it sounds like it needs a good going-over by a mechanic.

  Jase jumps back as the van accelerates away, the exhaust pipe bouncing and grumbling with a series of grunts, the entire undercarriage sounding ominously like it’s about to fall off at any minute.

  We stand there, watching the dirty blue rear of the van disappear down the service road, not knowing what to say, not even looking at each other.

  Because there’s no question that Dawn’s violent reaction was provoked by hearing my name. My full name. Yes, she was nice to me, but only before she realized that I was a Wakefield.

  I sneak a glance over at Jase. I can’t believe what’s happening to us. What good is it that he told his mother I was his girlfriend, if he can’t even look at me now? He’s staring straight ahead. It’s as though there’s a black cloud hanging over his head. I can almost see it.

  I wait for him to speak. I’m wondering what he’ll say about his mother’s weird behavior. But when he does finally say something, it isn’t about Dawn at all.

  “I’m going back home,” he says, still looking off into the distance. “You’ve got to listen if I say I need some space. I’ve got so much going on in my head. I can’t deal with one more thing, okay? Not one more thing.”

  He turns to look at me, and there’s so much pain and darkness in his eyes. I hate seeing him in so much agony when there’s nothing I can do about it.

  “I’ll ring you when I can,” he continues. “But I’ve got to be by myself right now.”

  I start to say something, but then I stop myself. No use talking when he’s made it clear that’s exactly what he doesn’t want.

  I thought I was the person Jase turned to when he had a problem. Him and me against the world. And maybe I am, still, though the way he’s looking at me right now, I doubt it. But what if I’m the problem? What if his mum’s bolting like a startled horse just now was the last straw for him?

  Jase turns and strides away. I stare after him, wondering if this is the last time I’ll ever see him as my boyfriend.

  I’m so hurt and confused I feel bruised to the bone with it.

  fifteen

  CRABS AND RAMS

  It’s still only five in the afternoon, and there’s no way I can just go back to Aunt Gwen’s as if all this drama with Jase weren’t happening. I’m standing here, in the very spot where Jase left me, contemplating my options, thoughts too big for my head swirling round inside it and threatening to make it explode, when I hear someone say:

  “What’s up?”

  I turn around and see Taylor standing in the carriage arch, her head slightly cocked to one side inquisitively. I’ve been so embroiled in Barnes family drama that I’ve been neglecting her, and she’s been really cool about it. However, I can’t help but feel a little uneasy around Taylor right now. I’d hate to think that I have a closet homophobe lurking inside of me, but for the life of me, I can’t pin this uncomfortable feeling to anything else.

  God, Scarlett, why don’t you just ask her? a voice in my head prods me.

  I should. I know I should. And I would do it, too, if I didn’t have so much on my plate already.

  “You look like you’re away with the fairies, to use one of your Aunt Gwen’s weirder expressions,” she says amiably. “Wanna talk?”

  This is all Taylor has to say to completely disarm me. The awkwardness I felt a minute ago suddenly vanishes. In fact, I’m so glad to see her I have to suppress an impulse to run toward her and give her an enormous hug.

  “Oh God, I so do!” I exclaim fervently.

  Quickly, I fill her in on what’s happening with Jase—his mum’s weird reaction to finding out who I am, Jase telling me he needs to be alone. Then, of course, comes the worst part of all.

  “And Jase said police don’t think it was an accident and there’s going to be an inquest,” I babble. “I think it’s more than he can cope with, honestly.”

  Taylor furrows her brow. “Huh. I wonder what evidence they found at the scene that would make them think that.”

  Last year, Taylor and I saw someone die in front of us, blasted by a shotgun. And then we lied to practically everyone about exactly how it happened. We covered up an attempted murder.

  Which, horrible though it was, does mean that we find it a lot easier than most teenagers would to speculate about the death of my boyfriend’s father without having girlie conniptions.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “Jase told me that he and his grandmother went up to bed the night before, and the next morning his father wasn’t there for breakfast, so they thought he’d gone out early. Jase says his dad mu
st have staggered outside at some stage and gone to the lake, though he can’t think why.”

  “And fallen over and hit himself,” Taylor adds. “But the marks we saw on him didn’t look like they were made by anything he’d fallen on.”

  “I suppose he could have walked into a branch,” I say doubtfully.

  “He’d have had to have run into it at full speed to make that kind of welt on his face,” Taylor points out.

  “Someone could have hit him across the face with a branch they’d broken off,” I suggest.

  “Well, yeah—but who’d do something like that?” Taylor asks automatically.

  I backpedal at the speed of light.

  “No, I’m wrong,” I say quickly. “Mr. Barnes must have been drunk and tripped and fallen into a tree or something and whacked himself on a branch and …”

  Taylor’s expression is so pitying that it makes my toes curl. And she doesn’t say anything, just lets me trail off, which makes it even worse.

  “It might have been self-defense,” she says eventually.

  My head is throbbing all of a sudden. I can’t let any of this sink in.

  “I know you don’t want it to have been Jase, Scarlett,” Taylor says, as gently as she can. “But logically, he’s the most likely person for the police to look at. They’d had a big fight—threats were made …”

  I can’t meet her gaze anymore. I drop mine to the cement beneath my feet. We’ve been strolling aimlessly around the back of the kitchen block, past the staff car park, too caught up in solving this mystery to notice where we’re going.

  “That’s not to say it was Jase,” Taylor adds. “Maybe it was someone with a grudge against his dad, who got him to leave the house somehow.”

  Adrenaline shoots up my spine. That has to be it.

  “He was the kind of person a lot of people would have a grudge against.” I feel a slight release of the pressure clamping at my temples. “Remember I said Jase’s mum told me about Mr. Barnes starting to drink so suddenly? It sounds like something happened out of the blue, something really big and bad that changed everything.”

  Taylor’s interest is definitely piqued. “Really? Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I sigh. “Dawn left before she could tell me why.”

  Taylor cracks her knuckles, thinking hard.

  “You said Jase’s mom told you his dad started drinking a few days after Jase’s birthday. Which is …?”

  “July twenty-fifth,” I say automatically.

  Taylor breaks into a smug smirk.

  “They have all the back editions of local papers in the public library. We can go check out if anything happened around those dates.”

  Why didn’t I think of that?

  “Wait, this is sort of like going behind Jase’s back,” I say, worried. “I don’t know how he’d feel about it.”

  “All of this happened ages ago. He was just a little kid. It’s not like you’re snooping on him now, is it? Besides, Jase is probably too dazed to realize that the police are going to come after him. Don’t you want to find out the truth before the cops start harassing your boyfriend?”

  I know that Taylor has a bias here: she’ll jump at anything that involves an investigation. But she does have a very good point. If we can get to the bottom of all this before the authorities do, it could spare Jase, and me, a lot of heartache.

  “How do you know that the library has the back editions?” I ask.

  “They always do in detective books,” Taylor says firmly. “They used to be on something called microfiche, but now it’s all on computers.”

  Her eyes are gleaming with investigative zeal.

  “Race you to the bike sheds,” she yells, and takes off.

  I’m right behind her. One thing about Taylor: she always provides a brilliant distraction.

  “Tick tock, tick tock,” Taylor mutters under her breath, twisting her wrist to look at her watch. “We’ve only got twenty minutes now before the dinner bell. Half an hour if we bike like maniacs.”

  “I haven’t even got to the right year yet,” I complain, frustrated. “This terminal’s so slow!”

  “Public libraries, what d’you expect,” Taylor says cynically. “At least it doesn’t smell of pee since that bag lady wandered off.”

  “She really did smell of pee.” I shudder.

  “They ought to have compulsory showers at the entrances to libraries,” Taylor suggests.

  “Not the worst idea in the world.”

  I watch the screen slowly, painfully load itself up with a new set of dates. As Taylor predicted, the local paper, the Wakefield Gazette (“incorporating Havisham, Ponders Hill, and Milching”) has indeed had all its back issues scanned onto the Wakefield Council Web site. The young spotty librarian we asked was very keen to help us access them.

  “No one ever asks to see back issues,” he said wistfully, “and it was so much work to convert them to scannable jpegs. It’s nice to see you taking an interest.”

  Taylor, of course, effortlessly spun a cover story about a school project, but honestly, we didn’t even need it. He was just happy to have a task. After he’d helped us, and moved on the bag lady, all he’d been doing was sitting behind his desk, reading a brick-thick fantasy novel called Dagger of the Elves and staring surreptitiously at Taylor over the top of it when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  “Nineteen ninety-six. Got it!” Taylor says happily. “Now, if it doesn’t take me an hour to get to the end of July …”

  Since Jase is two years older than me, that puts his year of birth at 1991. And, incidentally, makes him a Cancer.

  Taylor glances over at me.

  “I just realized we might be slowing things down by both being on the council Web site,” she points out. “Why don’t you get off it and let me do this, since mine’s going faster?”

  I yield to an awful temptation and immediately type the words astrological sign compatible into the search engine window. Shortly thereafter, I learn that Jase, as a Cancer, is a sensitive, sympathetic homebody water sign, whereas I, an Aries, am a Mars-ruled fire sign. Apparently, our road “will be a testing one.” I also have “unflagging energies and an onward-and-upward imperative,” while Jase is “happiest at home” and is “deeply protective of the personal realm,” which means that “clashes are inevitable.” Above the summary of our relationship, a crudely drawn ram and crab butt heads.

  Oh, rats.

  Of course, I know this stuff is all nonsense: I once heard Aunt Gwen dismiss astrology by asking witheringly what the movement of the planets had to do with her neurological connections, and much as I dislike her, I had to admit she seemed to have a point. So there’s no reason that I should be all wound up by the results, especially as the whole part about the “lure of the bedroom” being “strong” is true enough (blush).

  Still, it’s a bit disconcerting. Naively, I was hoping for a full-on, hundred percent endorsement of Jase and me as a couple, and all these caveats can’t help but be worrying.

  I’m so distracted by all this that I barely notice when the tapping sound of Taylor hitting the Page Down button stops, because she’s found what we’re looking for. I only gradually realize its absence, and that’s mainly because I’m aware that she’s cleared her throat and is still staring at the screen, as if she’s trying to call my attention.

  I swivel my chair around toward her terminal, drawings of crabs and rams no longer dancing before my eyes.

  “Uh, Scarlett …” It’s very rare that Taylor sounds hesitant. She clears her throat again. “You might get a bit upset by this…. I dunno how to warn you, but did you ever make any connection to the dates? End of July, nineteen ninety-six? Does it ring any, um, personal bells for you at all?”

  I look at the screen myself, and all silly thoughts of astrology fade as fast as if someone’s wiped my brain settings, because the headline is hitting me like a punch in the face.

  Heir to Wakefield Hall Dies in Road Accident!

 
; it’s blaring.

  Sir Patrick Dead, Wife in Coma!

  Taylor reaches out under the desk surface to take my hand, and I let her, though it lies limp in hers because I have no physical sensations at all right now. I’m nailed to my chair and all I can do is stare ahead of me at the copy of the front-page article, dated 1 August 1996, which reads:

  In a terrible tragedy that strikes at the very heart of Wakefield, Sir Patrick, the heir to Wakefield Hall, was knocked off his Vespa motor scooter yesterday afternoon while out for a ride with his wife, Sally, Lady Wakefield. He was killed instantly. His wife lies in a coma at Havisham General Hospital. She is not expected to recover. There were no immediate witnesses to the accident, but farmers plowing a nearby field report seeing a silver or gray van speeding away from the scene down Ditchling Lane.

  Sir Patrick and Lady Wakefield are survived by their young daughter, Scarlett, who at four years old is now likely to be tragically orphaned. Honoria, the Dowager Lady Wakefield, declined to comment to our reporter yesterday evening.

  That isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is the fact that the article’s illustrated with a big photograph of my parents on their wedding day, coming out of Wakefield Church, a line of soldiers from my father’s regiment holding their swords together to make a canopy as some bridesmaids throw flower petals and my mother’s long white veil is tossed in the air by a breeze. It’s a black-and-white photo, of course, from a newspaper twelve years old, but it’s pretty good quality: their radiant expressions as they look into each other’s eyes are enough to bring a lump into my throat the size of a pigeon’s egg.