by Sam Ripley
‘It’s not just that,’ he said. ‘The truth is, in the past, Susan had a history of mental illness. Anorexia in her teens, self-harming too. Ever since I knew her she has been on some sort of medication. But she seemed so much better with Sara-Jane. Like a different person. But now –‘
His shoulders started to shake as he tried to suppress his emotions.
‘If I ever come across the fucker who – who did this, I don’t think I’ll be able to answer for my actions.’
Kate placed a hand on his forearm.
‘I know it must be difficult for you, but I’m certain the person who took your daughter away from you will be brought to justice.’
‘You are?’
‘Yes,’ she said, realising that she was anything but confident. As she said goodbye she found it difficult to meet his eye.
6
Cassie Veringer stretched out her right hand, almost feeling the cool tiles before she actually touched them. Her fingers traced the diamond pattern on the bathroom wall, moving over the ridges and grooves. The layout of the room was so familiar to her – she was sure she could picture it in her head just as well, if not better, than a sighted person – that she didn’t need to use her hands to get around. But it was force of habit.
She used her left arm to feel for the edge of the shower curtain. As she moved towards it she felt the light breeze coming through the window, and smelt the saltiness of the ocean in the air. The plastic curtain rustled in the wind, a sound that took Cassie back to when she was a little girl on her grandfather’s sailboat in the sea off Newport. In her head she still had a clear picture of what he looked like – the head of silver hair, the bronzed, lined face, the glint in his grey eyes.
What would it have been like if she had never been able to see, she asked herself. She tried to imagine it for a moment and couldn’t. Even though she had been completely blind for fifteen years – a result of juvenile glaucoma - at least she had the visual images of her past to call on. She knew what the inside of a rose looked like. And the waves crashing on the shore. When she touched a person’s face now she was able to recall all the noses, foreheads, lips, cheeks, jaw lines and mouths she had seen before to compose a visual portrait in her head. As she turned on the water, took off her light bathrobe and stepped into the shower she remembered how that skill had served her, how it had helped put a man behind bars. That man – if you could dignify him with such a term – had died in prison. But without her help he would have been free to prey on women, to continue – what was it the newspapers had said? – his reign of terror.
As she let the warm water wash over her, she tried to erase those memories from her. The therapist had taught her a technique where she had to imagine washing every trace of him from her and, as she soaped herself, she pictured herself cleansing herself of him, rinsing away every speck of him. He was dirt, scum and he had no place within her. She was free of him now. He was dead and could hurt her no longer.
She was looking forward to a night by herself – and Moisie, her tortoiseshell. Settling down with her new audio book and a glass of chilled white wine. She had had a hard week at work at the charity – there had been a crisis about whether the organisation’s grant would pay for the rent increase on the building – and she had to deal with a deluge of calls from various banks, government divisions and a number of wealthy individuals who had promised, but had so far failed to deliver, generous donations. It looked like the Glaucoma Research Trust would be able to meet the rent hike, but it had not been easy. She had hated to break her date with her friend Gloria, who worked in the public records office, but she knew that she would have been poor company. So she had had to leave a message on her cell, apologising for letting her girlfriend down again. Hopefully she wouldn’t mind. She’d make an effort, take her out somewhere nice for dinner, or to that swanky bar where Gloria had flirted with the waiter.
She squeezed some shampoo onto the palm of her hand, and gently massaged it into her scalp. She felt the scars on her skull, traces of something that had happened in her past. Part of her, yes, of course – there was no denying that – but not the sum of her. She refused to be one of those people whose lives centred around being a victim. She was more than that. She had survived. She had moved on.
Just then she felt something sting in her eye. A drop of shampoo. She leant back and let the shower run over her forehead and down her face. She moved out of the stream of the water and blinked, but it still hurt. She tried to ignore the discomfort and rinsed herself. As she turned off the shower, and reached for a towel, she thought she heard a noise. She listened - no, it was nothing. But then when her ears were free of water she heard it again. There was someone knocking at the door. Had Gloria not picked up her message? She stepped out of the shower and quickly dried herself. Another knock.
‘Okay, okay, I’m coming,’ she shouted, feeling her way from the bathroom out into the corridor of her apartment.
As she reached the front door – her hand outstretched to open it - she stopped. Hey, how had Gloria managed to get through the main door downstairs? Perhaps somebody had been letting themselves in just as Gloria had turned up? Or maybe Gloria had pressed the buzzer and she hadn’t heard it because of the noise of the shower, but one of her neighbours in the block had buzzed her in? And yet …
A shiver of fear ran down her spine. Her hand retreated from the lock and she took a step back. She traced her way down the corridor to the lounge. Her hands moved over the sofa. Moisie was lying on a cushion at its edge. He started to purr as he felt Cassie’s touch.
‘Everything’s fine, Moisie,’ she said, trying to calm herself. ‘Just fine.’
Cassie picked up her specially-adapted cell phone and spoke into it, asking to be connected to her voicemail. She had one new message.
‘Hi, Cassie, you lightweight.’ It was Gloria in typical upbeat mode. ‘Got your message. Don’t worry about blowing me out – yet again. Suppose I’ll have to enjoy another night in with my secret admirer.’
Cassie tried to laugh – that was the name Gloria called her vibrator – but she couldn’t. The message only filled her with more fear.
If that wasn’t Gloria at the door then who was it?
She sat on the edge of the sofa, paralysed, frozen. Outside her window she heard the sounds of people walking on the boardwalk. A group of boisterous young guys boasting about how much beer they could drink. The high-pitched squeal of a couple of children at play. The passing swish of rollerblades. Help was close at hand if she needed it, she knew that. So what was bugging her?
She stood up and walked around the room, taking a series of deep breaths as she did so. There was probably some logical explanation. It could have been one of her neighbours asking to borrow – surely not a cup of sugar – but a bottle of wine or a tub of ice cream. Maybe it was a courier with a stash of documents relating to the new rental agreement. Or –
There was no point going through all the possibilities, she told herself. She would check it out.
She felt her way down the corridor to the door, careful not to make a sound. As she placed her ear against the door she thought she could hear the beating of her heart. She tried to calm her breathing, thinking that whoever it was on the other side of the door – there was no point trying to tell herself there was no-one – would be able to hear it. Was that the sound of rustling? No, that noise was coming from the direction of the street. Who was that wheezing? She listened carefully, finally realising it was herself. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and concentrated. She could hear the distant banter of a couple of stallholders further down the promenade and the noise of joggers as they ran past the apartment block – but finally she became convinced that whoever it had been had gone. But then, as she stood up, she heard the quick approach of footsteps and then the sound of a key entering a lock. It was her neighbour, Ron, the gay guy who lived opposite.
She fumbled with the lock and opened the door.
‘Ron, Ron,’ she said, holdin
g her bath robe close to her chest.
‘Hey, what’s up, Cassie. Is everything all right?’
‘Yeah, sure. I thought there was somebody outside the door. You didn’t see anything when you came in? Nothing suspicious?’
‘No, nothing,’ said Ron, removing his shades. ‘You look really freaked out. Do you want me to call anybody?’
‘No, no, I’m fine. I just got carried away, that’s all. Over-active imagination. But there wasn’t a problem with the door down to the –‘
As she shifted position she felt something by her right foot.
‘What -?’ she said, her head automatically dropping down, her sightless eyes moving in the direction of the object.
‘Oh, here’s a package for you,’ said Ron, bending down to pick it up. ‘Looks like there was a courier for you. I guess he must have got someone else to sign for it. Here you go.’
Cassie opened her hands to receive the package, a rectangular cardboard box. Gee, she had worked herself up into such a state. All because of a stupid delivery. It would be the latest batch of audio books she had ordered a couple of days back. A couple of classic English novels – she couldn’t believe she had never read Jane Eyre – as well as an American writer’s account of buying and renovating an old villa in Tuscany and a new CD of Emily Dickenson poetry. She turned the package over in her hands, relief and anticipation running through her in equal measure.
‘Sorry to be such a weirdo, Ron,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m too much.’
‘No worries,’ he said, turning back to open his door. ‘See you around.’
‘Thanks – bye,’ she said, retreating back into her apartment.
She could feel her face stinging with embarrassment. It was occasions like this, she thought to herself as she threw the package onto the sofa, that she was pleased she could not see. At least she was spared the sight of her stupid face in the mirror. She laughed to herself as she opened the icebox and took out the already open bottle of white wine, enjoying the sensation of the chilled glass against her skin. She heard Moisie meow as she entered the kitchen. A moment later he was snaking her way between her bare legs.
‘Your dumb mummy has just made a fool of herself,’ she said, bending down to stroke its head. ‘Nothing new there, I suppose.’
She poured herself a glass of wine and picked up a pair of scissors from the work top. Sometimes these packages were a nightmare to try and open. Last time she had been sent a package she had broken one of her nails on the damn thing. Before she sat down on the sofa she arranged her glass of wine and the scissors on the low-lying wooden table in front of her. She picked up the cardboard package and felt along its outer edge for a tag to pull. Nothing. Gee, that was a surprise.
She reached out for the scissors with her right hand, taking hold of her glass with her left and enjoyed a mouthful of wine. She pushed the glass further into the centre of the table, just so she wouldn’t knock it over and settled back into the comfort of the sofa.
As she started to open the package she realised just how light it was. Perhaps it only contained one of the audio books she had ordered, maybe the other ones would come later in the week. She hoped, if that was the case, that she had been sent Jane Eyre. She was fascinated by what happened to Mr Rochester in the course of the book, intrigued by the idea of a blind romantic hero.
She cut along the top edge of the cardboard, her hands prising open the envelope as she did so. She ripped it open quickly, searching out the square, plastic CD case. This is odd, she thought, as she came across something quite different. It was a long, sausage-shaped object, made of felt, with a zipper running down its middle. What was it? Her hands turned it over, her fingers running down the length of the zipper, feeling its ridges down its spine. At its top end was a toggle which she pulled towards her. It was a pencil case, she realised, the kind she used to have when she was a child.
With one hand she held the case open, while with the other she searched inside its soft folds. For a moment she hesitated as fear threatened to surge up inside her again. It was only a kid’s pencil case, for god’s sake, obviously delivered to the wrong address. Perhaps it had been found by a passer-by who assumed it had been lost by one of the children inside the apartment block. Who had kids? There was Nadia and Jim, on the fifth floor, they had a couple. Then there was that gay couple – Janine and Debbie – and she thought there was another guy, a weekend dad, who had a six- and an eight-year old. She’d probably find a clue inside if she kept looking.
Just then she felt something – a small, nugget shaped object - at the bottom of the case. What was it? An eraser? But one of its outer edges seemed wet, sticky even. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and brought it out of the pencil case. As she examined it she felt the slight, almost indistinguishable, contours that seemed to run around one of its surfaces. Then there was something sharp, an edge that formed itself into a half-moon shape and another surface that was flat, harder. She turned it around in her hands, feeling the stickiness begin to spread across her palms. As she brought it up to her face she smelt the unmistakable stench of blood. She felt fear begin to stifle her. She threw what was in her hands onto the floor, steadying herself on the sofa as she tried to stop herself from retching.
She ran to the door, wrenched it open and finally screamed.
‘Ron! Help. Ron!’
‘What the fuck –‘ he said, as he opened his door and saw Cassie, her bathrobe open, her sightless eyes wide with terror.
‘In – there,’ she said, her arm pointing not to her apartment, but to a bare wall. In her panic she had lost her sense of direction. ‘That package. The package.’
‘What?’
‘It contained a couple of – of –‘ She couldn’t spit out the word. ‘The ends of – two or three – ‘
‘Cassie?’
‘F-fingertips.’
7
Wherever she went in the house Kate saw something to remind her of her father. On the walls of the dining room were a number of his watercolours, sketches of Hope at different stages in her life, charcoal drawings of Kate as a girl, quick portraits of some of his showbiz friends and the occasional landscape: the view of the sea from the beach house, a colourful gouache of the Beverly Hills home he had bought way back in the fifties, vistas from various hotel rooms in Europe. There were a number of impossibly glamorous black and white photographs of the couple – her mother with a smile as dazzling as the diamonds that circled her neck, her father in a dinner suit, looking serious, his dark eyes brooding, troubled.
As she walked into his study she almost expected to see him sitting there at his piano, his long, tapering fingers poised above the keyboard. The room was exactly as it had been the day he had died. Unfinished musical scores littered the surface of the piano, the series of seemingly haphazard black notes arranged around the faded paper like the remains of an insect colony. A pair of half-moon glasses lay on the piano stool, as if they were waiting for their absent-minded owner to walk into the room to reclaim them. On the desk, situated by the French doors that looked onto the lush garden, was a mass of paper – a couple of appointment books, old diaries, pages ripped from the New York Times, letters from various orchestras around the world asking about the possibility of performing his work, statements from his agents in America and London, a few of his favourite scores (Prokofiev, Stravinsky) that he seemed to read with the same ease as Kate read novels. On one of the shelves next to his desk were arranged a number of his awards – accolades from the American Film Institute, the British Academy of Film and Television, even an Oscar for his score for The Place Outside. But all these awards, Kate knew, had meant little to her father.
‘Sure the film business has been good to me,’ he had once said to her, during one of his recurring bouts of depression, ‘but really it’s no better than prostitution. I shouldn’t have been seduced by it. I should have held out for something else, something more lasting. Nobody is going to be interested in me after I’m
gone.’
She had tried to argue, tried to convince him that wasn’t true. That he was an artist. But he wouldn’t listen. He was just a second-rate composer who hired out his talents to philistines, he said. She had left him sitting at the piano, his head in his hands.
