Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  So I did something I had never imagined I would do in a situation like this. I lied to a policeman. “No, he wasn’t,” I said.

  The officer laid down his pen and glanced at his colleague. “You’re quite sure?” he said, looking back at me. “You never saw Cameron Craig anywhere near the vicinity of the beach last night or the early hours of this morning?” He spoke gently enough, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.

  “It’s OK if you saw him,” the other one said. “You won’t get into trouble as long as you tell us the truth.”

  “I never saw him,” I said. “I had woken up a few minutes before Brett started screaming and I never saw anyone anywhere near his tent. If Cameron had done it, he would have had to run away pretty quickly, wouldn’t he? I would have seen him on the beach, running back up the steps to the clifftop. We all would have seen him – we were out of our tents within seconds. He couldn’t have got out of our sight that fast. He wasn’t there.”

  “You don’t think he could have been hiding on the beach somewhere and gone back to the house after the commotion died down?”

  I shook my head. “Those steps in the cliff face are the only way up. Someone would have seen him.”

  “What happened when Brett came out of the tent?”

  “We all came out of our tents too, and then Piper went over to him and pulled his hands away from his face.”

  “And that’s when you realized he had needles in both his eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “That must have been extremely shocking for you.”

  “It was.”

  “So when you first came out of your tents, you were all looking at Brett?”

  “Yes, he was screaming. We didn’t know what was wrong with him at first.”

  “In that case,” the policeman said, “you can’t be absolutely sure that Cameron wasn’t there, can you? You can’t be certain that he didn’t run up the steps while you were all looking the other way?”

  “But that’s not what happened.”

  “You don’t believe that’s what happened,” the other policeman replied. “But you don’t know. Do you? You can’t know if anyone fled the scene if you were looking away from the only access point to the beach.”

  “I wasn’t looking at the steps,” I said, hating that I had to admit it, “but I—”

  “OK, Sophie, that answers my question. Thank you.”

  It was a horrible interview. I felt like they were trying to trick me into incriminating Cameron somehow. When it was finally over, we weren’t allowed to see him so Uncle James drove Lilias, Piper and me back to the house. He’d managed to find a lawyer on the mainland who specialized in defending this kind of case so he was going to get the ferry from Armadale to meet with him.

  “I’ll hopefully be back in time for dinner,” he said. “As long as this wind doesn’t get any worse. I’ll let you know when I’ve caught the ferry. Oh, and Sophie, with all the commotion this morning I forgot to tell you. Your mother called earlier. They’re cutting their trip short. They’ll be back by tomorrow and they’re coming here to fetch you.”

  “Fetch me?” I repeated. “But why? Has something happened?”

  Uncle James looked uncomfortable. “I think they just want to be with you right now,” he said. “You can talk all that over with them when they get here. Now I must go or I’ll miss the ferry. If you need anything, just call me.”

  And he drove off, leaving the three of us alone by the gate.

  Piper was the first to speak. “Well,” she said, her voice bright with false cheerfulness, “who’s hungry? Why don’t I make us some sandwiches since we missed lunch?”

  She turned to unlock the gate, and Lilias and I exchanged dark looks behind her back. To my surprise, Lilias took my hand as we walked down the path towards the house.

  As we opened the front door and stepped inside, Dark Tom greeted us from his cage with a shrill: “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye!”

  Lilias shuddered beside me and I wished that horrible bird could have picked something, anything, else to say.

  “Do you want cheese sandwiches or tuna?” Piper asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” Lilias replied quietly.

  “Neither am I,” I said.

  “I’ll do tuna,” Piper said, as if she hadn’t heard us.

  She walked off to the kitchen and Lilias and I exchanged a glance before going upstairs. Lilias was still holding on to my hand and, when we got to the landing, she tugged me down the hall towards her bedroom.

  As soon as the door closed behind us she said, “Piper’s written you a letter. It’s a secret letter.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked. “She can speak to me, she doesn’t need to write me a letter.”

  Lilias just shrugged. “I don’t know. But Rebecca told me to tell you about it. She says you need to read it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In Piper’s room.”

  “Where in her room?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want me to stand guard while you look for it? I have to tell you something first, though.”

  She stared up at me and, although Lilias always looked serious, this time she almost looked like someone had died.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

  “It’s… It’s about Cameron’s piano.” Her lower lip started to tremble.

  “It’s OK, I already know who broke it.”

  Her eyes went huge. “You do?”

  “Yes, Piper admitted to us last night that she did it.”

  Lilias scowled. “Piper didn’t do it,” she said. “She just said that to shock everyone. Piper loves shocking people. It’s one of her favourite things.”

  I frowned. “But if it wasn’t Piper who broke the piano, then who did?”

  Lilias took a deep breath and clenched her fists at her sides. “It was me,” she said. “I did it.” Tears suddenly filled her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I knew it was wrong. The dolls kept telling me to go downstairs and do it at night after everyone else had gone to sleep but I said no, I wouldn’t do that to my brother. He loves me just the way I am, he says I don’t have to change if I don’t want to.” The tears were spilling down her cheeks now and she was trembling from head to foot. “Cameron’s my favourite person in the whole world,” she said. “And he told me that I’m his favourite person in the whole world too. I would never make him sad. Never, ever, ever. If one of us had to be sad I would want it to be me, not him. But that night it was like I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop. They just kept whispering and whispering at me and twisting it all up in my head. So I did it, even though I promised myself that I wouldn’t. And when Cameron finds out he’s going to hate me forever and I won’t be his favourite person any more.”

  “I think you’ll always be his favourite person.” I went and knelt on the floor in front of her. “He’ll never hate you.”

  I put my arms around her and she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly.

  “We’ll explain to Cameron what happened,” I said. “You’ve known all along that there’s something wrong with the Frozen Charlottes, haven’t you? And I think Cameron might be starting to believe it too.”

  “Is that why Piper does such horrible things sometimes?” Lilias asked, her voice muffled in my shoulder. “Because the dolls tell her to do it?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out. And yes, if you can keep an eye out for her while I’m in her room that would really help me a lot.”

  “OK,” Lilias said, pulling back and wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  “Come on then,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze. “Let’s see if we can find this letter Rebecca is talking about.”

  So Lilias went and stood watch at the top of the stairs while I let myself into Piper’s room and looked around, wondering where to start.

  My eye fell on the desk straight away so I went ov
er to it and started pulling open drawers. The first two seemed to be full of make-up and lotions, but the last one was locked and wouldn’t budge when I tried to open it. I couldn’t see a key anywhere so I did a quick sweep of the rest of the room but found nothing out of the ordinary.

  I knew there wasn’t much time until Piper came back upstairs so I took a risk and forced the drawer open with a ruler I found in one of the other drawers. Piper would know I’d been in her room but there wasn’t time to be gentle about it.

  I pulled open the locked drawer, not sure what I would see. There was just a notebook in there, and I thought it might be a diary at first, but when I pulled it out, a loose page fell from it.

  I snatched it up and was surprised to see my own handwriting. It was the letter Piper had dictated to me a couple of days ago to her friend Sally. I frowned at it, wondering why she hadn’t posted it. Then I flipped open the notebook.

  To my surprise, the first page was an exact copy of the letter to Sally only this time it was in Piper’s writing rather than mine. I quickly flipped through the other pages and felt my blood run cold. It was the same letter, written over and over again, only, as it went on, Piper’s writing became more and more like my own, as if she was trying to copy it. Until, finally, her handwriting looked exactly the same as mine.

  It must have taken her several hours of practice to get it right and I couldn’t think why she would bother, until I flipped further into the notebook and found another letter tucked right at the back.

  This was the letter Lilias must have been talking about. Only Piper hadn’t written it to me, she’d written it as me. It was my own handwriting scrawled across the page, even though I’d never seen it before.

  I read through it and felt all my breath leave my body like it had been sucked out. I sat down on the edge of Piper’s bed with my hand clapped over my mouth.

  It was a suicide note.

  And it had my name signed at the bottom.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Then quickly to the glowing hall,

  Her lifeless form he bore.

  Fair Charlotte’s eyes were closed in death,

  Her voice was heard no more.

  I can’t take it any more. It’s my fault that Jay died and I don’t want to be here if he’s not. Please tell my parents that I love them – and that I’m sorry.

  Sophie.

  For a long moment I just stared at the note in my hand, reading it and rereading it, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.

  She’ll have a plan for you too, Cameron had said. But I had never thought that she would actually want to kill me. I thought back to those schoolgirls and the teacher who had died and wondered whether the Frozen Charlottes really could persuade one person to kill another. I knew that Lilias dearly loved Cameron and would never willingly do anything to hurt him, and yet she had destroyed the thing he prized the most.

  I knew suddenly what I had to do – I had to get the dolls out of the house, every last one of them.

  But there was something else I had to do first. I ripped the suicide note into shreds and stuffed the pieces into my pocket, then I took out my phone and tried to call Mum, but her phone was switched off and I guessed she must be flying. So I called the home number instead. I knew no one would be there but I wanted to leave a message on the answer machine. If anything were to happen to me then I needed them to know that it wasn’t suicide, that I would never do that to myself, or to them.

  But, to my surprise, I couldn’t leave a message because an electronic voice informed me that the answering machine was full. I frowned. How could we possibly have received so many messages in such a short amount of time? I keyed in the password to listen to them and, as soon as the first message started to play, I knew that my life really was in serious danger.

  It was my own voice on the answerphone at home. The first message had been left the night I arrived at the house, and I listened in horror to the sound of myself crying and saying that it had been a mistake to go to Skye and that I felt more lonely and depressed than ever there. As the messages went on they became worse and worse. I listened to my voice telling my parents that I had never felt so unhappy before and that I just wanted the pain to stop.

  I’d heard Piper mimic my voice before but this was something else altogether. And the worst thing about it was that she’d left the first message just hours after meeting me when I arrived at the house. She must have planned this from the start. She’d meant to do me harm from the moment she met me. We had never been friends.

  I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Would my parents actually believe that I would kill myself? Surely they knew me better than that? But with my own voice leaving those messages on the answerphone, what else were they supposed to think?

  My only chance was to get the dolls out of the house and hope that would be enough to stop Piper.

  “The sandwiches are ready!” she called from downstairs at just that moment.

  I snatched up her notebook. Then I noticed her bag by the door and yanked it open to look inside. A collection of broken dolls stared back at me, their white skin stained with black sand. I took the bag with me back to my own room. Lilias hovered in the doorway, watching nervously as I pulled out my suitcase and dumped the Frozen Charlottes inside it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m getting rid of the dolls,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I actually felt. “Can you stand watch for a few more seconds while I get the ones from Rebecca’s room?”

  Lilias’s eyes had gone huge again, but she just nodded and went back to the top of the staircase.

  I took the suitcase into Rebecca’s room and went straight to the doll cabinet. The hateful little things were all lined up on their shelves, their pursed mouths and pinched expressions seemed to disapprove of me, and I was sure I recognized the tiny one that had bitten me lying on the bottom shelf.

  But the moment I stood before the doll cabinet I remembered that it was locked. I ran over to the music box and snatched the key from inside, slamming the lid closed before the box could tinkle out more than a few notes of that creepy ballad.

  I opened the cabinet and, without ceremony, started sweeping the Frozen Charlotte dolls into my case. Some of them cracked and broke as they fell in but I didn’t care.

  “What are you two doing up there?” Piper called. It sounded like she was right at the bottom of the staircase.

  “We’re just coming!” Lilias shouted back.

  But I could hear footsteps on the stairs and I knew that Piper was coming up to see what we were doing.

  “Come on, come on!” I whispered to myself, my palms sweaty as I frantically gathered up the rest of the dolls.

  The bottom shelf was just a collection of limbs – broken legs and arms and heads. If these were ordinary dolls I would have left them there, but I didn’t trust the legs not to go running around by themselves or the arms to pick up a needle or the heads to start whispering their hateful words of poison. So I swept them into the suitcase too and then grabbed the Frozen Charlotte music box and threw that in.

  “I told you we were just coming,” Lilias said out on the landing and I knew she was trying to warn me that Piper was almost here.

  I snatched up the suitcase and ran out of the room just as Piper climbed the last few stairs. She looked up at the two of us. “I’d started to think something had happened to you both,” she said. Then she saw my suitcase and said, “Are you going somewhere, Sophie?”

  “I just thought I’d get a head start on packing,” I said. “Since my parents are coming tomorrow.”

  “So they are.” Piper smiled, displaying her perfect white teeth. “We haven’t got much time left then. What a shame. Well, come on, these sandwiches won’t eat themselves.”

  “Let me just stick this in my room,” I said, indicating my suitcase.

  I put it in my room, snapped the padlock closed around it and put the key in my pocket before heading down to lunch.
Piper had set three plates of sandwiches on the dining-room table, which surprised me because before she had always just made one big plate and we had helped ourselves.

  When Lilias reached out for one of the plates, Piper practically slapped her hand away. “Not that one!” she snapped. Lilias jumped back, looking startled and Piper quickly smiled and said in a more normal voice, “I cut yours into triangles, just the way you like them. Here you go.”

  She handed her sister one of the plates and then picked up the plate that Lilias had tried to take to begin with and handed it to me. “This one’s for you, Sophie.”

  I took the plate from her, feeling suddenly sick. Why was she so set on me having these particular sandwiches? What if she’d put something in them? It would be such a simple thing to mix some rat poison or something in with the tuna. Along with the suicide note and all those answerphone messages, everyone would think I had deliberately overdosed. Whatever happened, I knew I must not eat the sandwiches, or any other food Piper gave me.

  I sat down with the other two at the table and said, “Have you heard any news about Brett?”

  Piper normally ate her food in small dainty bites so I was surprised when she practically stuffed an entire sandwich in her mouth, swallowed it down and said, “I called Brett’s mum a little while ago. She said some surgeons operated on him earlier to try to save his eyesight.”

  “And did it work?” I asked when she didn’t elaborate.

  “Why, no,” Piper said, picking up another sandwich and eyeing it with a greedy look. She took another huge bite, then daintily wiped the corner of her mouth with a napkin and said, “They had to remove both his eyes.” She beamed around the table at us. “Isn’t that tragic?”

  “It’s awful,” I said.

  “He’s a blubbering mess, of course,” she said. “And his mum’s in a terrible state about it. You should have heard her boo-hooing to me on the phone. I thought she’d never shut up. Still, it will be some comfort to her when Cameron goes to prison, I suppose.”