Down the Rabbit Hole

by Evelyn Amber

  She stood in the shower, letting the warm water warm her. She still had no idea what she wanted to say to Faith, but she knew that she needed to talk to her again for Minnie’s sake.

  Once she had dried herself and changed, she wandered into the kitchen and noticed the Alice in Wonderland book on the side. She felt like it was a burning a hole through the table.

  Alice left the book where it was and grabbed one of her Poirot books. She settled in front of the fire with it as she waited for Faith.

  8

  Alice paced back and forth in front of the crackling fire, every step feeling a million miles apart. She had abandoned her book as the clock ticked past eight, her mind too focussed on her own case to follow along with Hercule Poirot. She peeped through the drawn curtains and saw nothing but raindrops pounding against her garden path.

  Alice huffed and sank down into her chair. She hated lateness, but she wouldn’t mention that to Faith. Alice was grateful she’d even agreed to talk to her after their last get-together.

  The clock struck half past eight when she heard a knock at the door. She approached the door and breathed in deeply before opening. Faith stood with a black umbrella, her nervousness shining in her dark eyes. The cold air sent a chill through the cottage.

  “Come in,” Alice offered with a half-smile as she stepped to the side. “You must be freezing.”

  Faith stepped over the threshold and closed her umbrella. She looked around and took in her surroundings with wide eyes. The way she stared at everything reminded Alice of a child, but she shook that feeling when she remembered that Faith had caused a lot of unnecessary suffering for her friend.

  “You have a nice place.” Faith finally spoke. “Really cosy.”

  “Thank you.”

  The atmosphere was more awkward than Alice had hoped for, not that she had expected them to hug and laugh about old school times.

  “Where are my manners?” Alice said with an unnatural smile plastered across her face. “Would you like a drink? You like tea, don’t you?”

  “Tea sounds lovely.”

  “Just make yourself at home,” Alice said, motioning for Faith to head into the living room. “I’ll be right back.”

  Faith nodded and walked through to the front room, her steps unsure and her face showing how uncomfortable she felt. Alice wondered if Faith was experiencing something similar to the white rabbit when Alice had chased him down the hole into Wonderland.

  Alice prepared the tea quickly before walking into the front room. Faith was by the fire, biting her nails frantically as she stared at the flickering flames.

  “Thank you,” Faith said as she took the tea.

  Alice took the settee across from Faith and sensed something was different. Unlike their last meeting in café, Alice felt more exposed in her natural surroundings. She had so many questions, but she didn’t know where to start.

  “I didn’t do it,” Faith confessed. “I know you think I did, and I don’t blame you, but I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Alice replied. “A lot has happened.”

  Faith stared into the surface of her tea for a long time before looking back up.

  “I was angry.” Faith’s nostrils flared. “I was really angry, but I didn’t kill him. I would never have done that. I understand how it must look from someone else’s perspective, but it wasn’t me. I really did love him.”

  Her big doe eyes were pleading for Alice to believe her. Alice wasn’t as convinced as Minnie that Faith was the culprit.

  “What happened?” Alice asked without accusation. “Where did you go after you found the note?”

  “I went straight back to the inn,” Faith said with a tight smile. “I sat at the bar to drown my sorrows, as they say. I was going to leave Ashbrook and return home.”

  “You didn’t try to find Trevor first?”

  Faith shook her head and took a sip of her tea before looking back down into it.

  “He wasn’t answering his phone,” Faith said. “So, I figured that was that. There was always a small voice in the back of my mind telling me that it wouldn’t work out. You know what men are like.”

  “How did you even get back in touch?” Alice asked. “High school was a long time ago.”

  “I came back here,” she replied. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I didn’t come back for Trevor, though. I wanted to see Ashbrook again. I missed it.”

  “And Trevor found you?”

  “I looked him up and found out he was married.” Faith paused to sip her tea. “I was surprised when I found out who his wife was.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Well, I saw the way you three used to hang out together.” Faith chuckled. “I always thought Trevor liked you. He followed you around like a lost puppy. I was so jealous of you.”

  “Me?”

  Trevor had asked Alice out once back in high school, but after she’d let him down gently, they had never spoken of it again and had carried on as good friends. When he and Minnie had got together, she’d been happy for them. Faith being jealous of her was almost humorous.

  “He always had a thing for blondes,” Faith admitted. “That’s what he told me.”

  “So, you came back to Ashbrook to see it, and finding Trevor wasn’t your intention?”

  “I had happy memories from my childhood here, but I should have known I was looking back on my past through rose-tinted glasses. I was only passing through for a weekend. After I met up with Trevor, things clicked into place. It felt like we’d both been waiting for that moment since we were kids. I stayed at Asbrook Inn because that’s where we’d go as teenagers. They must have known we were underage, but they didn’t check your I.D. as much back then. As long as we were paying, they didn’t care that we were sixteen.”

  Faith’s eyes had a faraway look as she recounted the information to Alice.

  “It was like fate,” she continued, sipping her tea. “He hadn’t changed much, and he told me I looked like I did that summer. Oh, the nights I would stay awake thinking about the perfect summer of 1983! It’s childish, really, but it was the best time of my life. It was as if no time had passed. It wasn’t true, of course. Everything had changed.”

  “How long ago was this?” Alice asked.

  “About a year ago.”

  “This has been going on for a year?”

  “No.” Faith shook her head. “We agreed to be friends. I convinced myself we could be, and we did try for a while, but we had such amazing chemistry together. I was a teenage girl in love again whenever I was around him. I wasn’t an aging spinster, I was his girl. I saw it in his eyes too. He felt like he was that boy again, and he loved it. We were timeless and ageless whenever we were together. We lit up the room with our laughter. We couldn’t help ourselves. The love we felt had spent thirty years bubbling away. It needed to come out. One thing led to another, and it just-”

  “So, you’ve been staying at the inn for a whole year?”

  “No,” Faith replied. “Like I said, I only planned to pass through for a weekend. I just wanted to visit. Relive old memories, and all that. I spent that whole weekend with Trevor, and then I went home. He wanted me to stay, but how could I? He had Minnie.”

  “But that didn’t stop you.”

  “We decided to be friends,” Faith continued, ignoring Alice’s comment. “It started out fine. We’d send emails, and text messages, and then it turned into phone calls. They’d last for hours! Time whizzed by whenever we talked. It wasn’t enough. We wanted more. I started visiting in secret when I could. As I said, I had every intention for it to just be one friend seeing another, but it didn’t stay that way. Trevor told me it was crazy for me to be so far away, and he didn’t want to have to wait weeks to see me. That’s when he decided that we should be together.”

  “And it didn’t matter to you that he was married?”

  “I know,” Faith said as she gazed at the crackling fire. “I’m not proud of myself. Everything is
such a mess now.”

  “What happened during the summer of 1983?”

  “It was the summer holidays after our last year at high school,” Faith said with a sweet smile. “We didn’t even know each other before then. I was supposed to go on a date with Andrew Weston, but he stood me up.”

  “He did that a lot.” Alice laughed. “At least that’s what I heard. He had a long string of admirers. I think everyone in school fancied him. Even I did. Last I saw him, he was a divorced long-distance lorry driver with more hair on his face than his scalp.”

  “Isn’t that always the way?” Faith said, returning the laugh. “We were supposed to meet outside the record shop. I think it’s a salon now. I was a little late, but I waited for nearly an hour and he never turned up. I was so embarrassed. I went and sat at the clock, and I don’t even remember how long I was there. Trevor was on his way back from his friend’s house and he noticed me.”

  “Then what happened?” Alice asked, feeling guilty that she was enjoying reminiscing.

  “I told him I was waiting for a friend,” Faith said. “He saw straight through the lie. Apparently, boys talk just as much as girls. Like a true gentleman, Trevor took me on a date instead, and we got on like a house on fire. We spent every minute together after that.”

  “Then you had to move?”

  “It broke my heart to leave,” Faith confessed. “I begged my dad to reconsider but he wouldn’t budge. We promised to stay in touch.”

  “Did you?” Alice asked. “Stay in touch, I mean?”

  “For a while,” Faith said with a small nod. “We’d have late night phone calls and he used to write me love letters, but you know how things are at that age. We both had different lives and it wasn’t fair on either of us to hold onto a teenage romance. It wasn’t as easy to stay connected without social media back then. We grew up and moved on.”

  “So, it was more than a summer fling?”

  “Much more,” Faith replied. “I tried to move on. I had other boyfriends, and I was even engaged at one point, but as they say, you never really get over your first love.”

  “I married my first love,” Alice said dryly. “That didn’t work out so well. Where did you move to?”

  “Newcastle.”

  “That’s a big difference,” Alice said. “Did you like it there?”

  “No,” Faith replied glumly as she sipped the last of her tea. “I hated it. It was so noisy and busy. Dad loved it though. By the time I was old enough to make my own decisions, I felt like I had to stay there with him. He had no one else.”

  “I couldn’t imagine leaving here,” Alice said. “Me and Minnie joked about moving to France or Italy, but truly, I love it here too much to ever leave.”

  “If I’d had the choice,” Faith muttered, “I’d have stayed.”

  “Do you want a refill?” Alice asked as she eyed Faith’s empty mug.

  “No, thank you,” Faith said as she placed the mug on the table. “If I have any more, I won’t sleep a wink.”

  “I have decaf.”

  “In that case,” Faith replied with a smile, “I wouldn’t mind another.”

  Alice took Faith’s mug and strolled into the kitchen. She had hardly touched hers, so she left it. She opened the box of decaf teabags, happy she finally had a use for them, and plopped one into the mug. She flicked the kettle on and leant against the work surface, going over everything Faith had said.

  Listening to Faith’s story, she wasn’t so sure about her guilt, but she wasn’t prepared to eat her own words just yet. Alice hoped she would confirm or deny her suspicions of Faith before the end of the night.

  After the kettle boiled and she added milk and sugar, Alice walked back into the living room where Faith was stood at the mantlepiece. She seemed to be staring at a family picture taken during a happier time. Alice placed the mug on the table and Faith was so enthralled that she jumped.

  “Sorry,” Alice said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “I shouldn’t be so nosey,” Faith muttered. “Are these your children?”

  “Yeah,” she replied proudly as she inspected the picture Faith was looking at.

  The picture was of Alice, Gordon, and their three children. It had been taken over ten years ago when they had taken a trip to Great Yarmouth. They looked like the perfect happy family, and as far as Alice knew, they were at the time.

  “That’s Justin,” Alice started, pointing to him. “He’s twenty-six now. He works at the bookshop with me.”

  Faith looked at it with such wonder, Alice couldn’t help but smile.

  “That’s Lucas,” she said, pointing to her middle child. “He’s twenty-two and he’s in the army. He’s home now for a bit. And that’s Holly, she’s eighteen and she’s just gone to university to study biology.”

  “Can you believe we’re old enough to have adult children?” she asked before pointing at Gordon. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Gordon,” she sighed, his smiling face looking up at her. “My ex-husband.”

  “You all look so happy.”

  “We were,” Alice said, “but things change.”

  Alice turned away from the photo and looked down at her left hand that had once adorned a wedding ring. She flexed her fingers open and then closed them, quickly pushing the unpleasant thought to the back of her mind.

  “I wish I had children,” Faith whispered. “I’m fifty-two now. It’s way too late.”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Alice said tentatively as she sat down too, “but why did you never have children?”

  Faith took the brew from the table and blew on the surface before raising it to her lips. She paused before taking a small sip.

  “It never seemed right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wanted the perfect family,” Faith said with a sad smile. “I never met anyone apart from Trevor that I could ever see myself having children with. Before I knew it, I was too old. You think you have all the time in the world, but our bodies have different ideas, don’t they? Time goes by too quickly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice offered.

  “It’s okay,” Faith said. “I guess some people just aren’t meant to be mothers.”

  They sat in silence for a while, drinking their teas next to the fireplace.

  “Why did you ask me here?” Faith broke the silence.

  “I don’t really know,” Alice said. “I promised Minnie I would talk to you again. I just want to get to the bottom of this, for her sake.”

  “You both must hate me,” Faith said, looking down again.

  “I can’t speak for Minnie,” Alice said, “but I don’t hate you. I hate what you have done, and I think it’s horrifying for Minnie to have found out the way she did. As a person, I don’t hate you.”

  Faith looked up at Alice and blinked away some tears that had formed in the corner of her eyes.

  “It wasn’t me,” Faith pleaded. “I promise you, it wasn’t. I loved him. I would never want to kill him.”

  Faith placed the mug on the table and covered her face with her hands. Her whole body shook as she cried. Alice had an overwhelming instinct to comfort the woman. She sat next to Faith, moving her hand to her back. She felt conflicted and pulled it back but ignored her thoughts and moved it back, letting it hover before she finally stroked Faith’s shirt. Despite everything that had happened and how hurt Minnie was, she trusted Faith.

  “I believe you,” Alice whispered.

  Faith sniffled as she looked up at Alice.

  “You do?”

  Alice nodded.

  “I hope I’m not wrong,” Alice said as she offered her the box of tissues from the side table.

  “Thank you,” Faith said as she plucked one out. “Not just for listening, but for believing me. And I’m sorry that things ended up this way.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Alice replied. “What’re you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to go home,” Faith replied before blow
ing her nose.

  “Back to Newcastle?”

  “No,” Faith said. “I left there as soon as my dad died. I live in Scarborough now. It’s lovely there, but I always had the yearning to come back here. I should have stayed away. The one thing I had here has gone.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I should go,” Faith said. “I’m leaving first thing tomorrow.”

  “Thank you for hearing me out.”

  They headed for the front door. Faith took her umbrella and paused before turning to Alice.

  “Don’t look back, Alice,” Faith said, her head dropped. “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

  Faith stepped outside and drew her umbrella up, the rain falling noisily on the black fabric. She turned back one more time when she reached the gate, a bitter-sweet smile on her face. She then walked away, her white hair billowing in the wind as she disappeared into the rainy night.

  Alice shut the door and rested her head against it. The words ‘don’t look back’ repeated in her head like a broken record.

  9

  When Alice woke the next morning, she looked at her phone on her bedside table. It was just after five in the morning. The sun had already risen, and it washed the room in bright light.

  She groaned and pulled the covers over her head, needing more rest. After lying there for ten minutes, she gave up hope of trying to get back to sleep. She groggily wiped the remaining leftovers of sleep from her eyes before stretching out.

  Wrapping her dressing gown around her body, she slowly descended the stairs, her body crying out for caffeine.

  Alice placed a cup of her emergency strong coffee on the dining room table and opened her laptop. She started to type in the search bar for information on Alice in Wonderland, and thousands of results appeared. She didn’t know where to start, so she clicked on the first link. The page revealed some interesting facts about the book and its history. According to the page, a house in one of the stories was based on a real house in Lancashire park. Was that the house Thomas’ mystery buyer had grown up near? Alice found it fascinating, but it wasn’t what she was looking for.