Little One

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “They’ve gone back to America,” Fran said. “They must have.”

  Adrian pulled onto their driveway, cut the ignition and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “It sounds like they’ve at least moved out. Suddenly, mind you.”

  Had the message from Mary been a goodbye? Had she wanted Fran to see her so she could tell her they were leaving? Her body felt numb as she walked back to the house. All of that worry for nothing. They’d left and there was nothing she could do. She’d never see them again. Things aren’t what they seem. What did that part of the message mean? Was she defending her family from the gossip, perhaps?

  The delivery driver had left their food on the doorstep. Adrian picked up the paper bag and unlocked the door.

  “Am I missing something?” Fran said as they walked into the house. “Is there another explanation for all this? They left suddenly today. They basically got up, decided to fly home and bought three expensive plane tickets. They aren’t well off.”

  “How do you know they decided today?” Adrian put the takeaway down on the kitchen counter.

  Fran eyed the bag. She’d lost her appetite. “Well, I saw them last week and I’m sure Mary would have mentioned them leaving. Plus she… She wasn’t in the right mind to be planning a trip. She was barely functioning.”

  “Well, you could see if it lines up,” Adrian offered. “Check if there are flights leaving now or later. They could be driving to London or Manchester to stay overnight and fly in the morning. Or they could’ve got a cheap overnight flight.” He shrugged. “Unless they didn’t fly back to America at all and decided to rent a house somewhere else. Leacroft hasn’t exactly been kind to them.”

  “Seems a bit short notice to just rent another house.”

  “Perhaps they’ve been looking for a while,” Adrian said. The weariness of his voice made Fran believe he didn’t care either.

  They walked together, stride by stride, through the house until settling onto the sofa. Adrian pulled Fran’s legs over his lap and rubbed her feet, sore from the long day of hiking. Her limbs sank down into the cushions. She was exhausted, she realised. Not from physical activity, but from the emotional weight of caring for those two girls. Yes, she thought of Mary as a girl. Part of her thought of Mary as more of a daughter figure than Esther. If Fran had lived out another life, one where she’d married young and had children in her early twenties, she could have a daughter Mary’s age. But she hadn’t. She’d lingered in a space that eventually squeezed her out, living a life she’d considered glamorous when she’d been working at the women’s magazines. Now it seemed like a frivolous waste, but perhaps that was her anxiety talking.

  “They’d take their toaster,” she said. “They’d take their kettle. Surely. It feels like they wanted to travel light. Pass me the laptop.”

  Adrian leaned over the sofa arm for the laptop resting on their side table. He placed it on her lap and stroked her knee. “You okay, Franny?”

  “I’m fine. I just want to know for sure. I should text her again.” She reached into her jeans pocket for the phone. Then fired off a message. Hi Mary, Adrian and I popped over to check you were okay, but it looks like you’ve either moved out or gone on holiday. I’m so sorry I missed your message this morning, especially if you wanted to say goodbye. Please respond to this and let me know everything is all right. I’m thinking of you all. We’re both so sorry for how things turned out in Leacroft. If you have moved out, we’ll miss you xx

  To her surprise, the words made her tear up. She might never see either of them ever again. She couldn’t imagine them coming back to visit her after the gossip and the graffiti. She put her phone down, cleared the lump in her throat, and opened the laptop.

  It took a while to find what she was looking for. Adrian wasn’t much of a traveller and Fran didn’t like to fly alone, which meant that they rarely booked flights for themselves. She went through several websites and jotted down times for flights. In the end she worked out that they could fly that night, but it wouldn’t be an easy journey. Most of the flights involved them either driving to London or flying to Dublin first. The flight times were long, well over ten hours. Some involved a connection at Boston before heading to Phoenix. It made her head spin just thinking about it.

  “What are they going to do with their car?” Fran said out loud. “Just leave it in the airport carpark? Surely they can’t have sold it on the way.”

  “Good question,” Adrian said. “Maybe they did sell it on the way. These internet sites make it much easier to sell things I suppose.”

  Fran checked her phone. No response. Having said that, some of the flight times she’d researched would put Mary in the air right now. “Oh, Ady.” She leaned back and sighed deeply. “I don’t like this at all. First those girls come into my life and they need someone. Me. I don’t know. But every time I tried to help, I just made things worse. Now they’re gone and I can’t do anything. I’ll never know if they’re safe again, will I? I’ll never know.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As suddenly as the Whitakers had appeared, they were gone, their absence as noteworthy, as their presence had been. Even though Fran tried not to listen, wherever she went, she heard talk. In the post office, at church, the newsagent, the pub. Did you hear about the Whitakers? They left. Vamoose. Gone. One day here, the next nowhere to be seen. Most people got their home state wrong. Nearly every rumour Fran heard had them hightailing it back to Texas where Elijah was a pastor. Others said that they couldn’t go back to America because they were fugitives. I think they stole that child and came over here to get away from the police. That’s why the girl kept running away, because she wanted to go home.

  In the days that followed their disappearance, Fran checked her phone forty, fifty times a day, hoping for a response from Mary. She called and left voicemails. She sent multiple text messages and Facebook messages and WhatsApp messages. Eventually, the number was disconnected. Mary’s Facebook profile was deleted. There was no way for Fran to contact the Whitakers anymore.

  Fran skipped choir practice the first week, but she decided to pull herself together and go the second. Spring hopped into a hot summer, and her usual walk up the hill left her breathless and sweaty. On her way into the village hall, Emily waved her over.

  “Have you heard anything from them?” she asked.

  “No,” Fran said. She was about to turn away, but then she decided not to. “We forced them out, you know. It’s all our fault.”

  Emily’s expression hardened, her smile settling into a thin line. “We all know you called the police so don’t take that tone with me.”

  Fran was stunned. “How?”

  “This is a small village, Fran. My nephew is a police officer. He was on call that day. He even saw them and went into the house. He’s an idiot, mind. I told him there was something fishy going on, but he said they were all fine. They shut the investigation down and now look. They’ve scarpered! If that’s not a sign they were guilty I don’t know what is.”

  “Or maybe they left because of us. It’s not like we made them welcome. Someone sprayed graffiti on their house!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Get off your high horse. That little kiddie kept running away for a reason, you know. They didn’t belong here.”

  “We didn’t give them a chance.”

  “You called the police,” Emily reminded her. “You know more than anyone that something wasn’t right. I said it to the coppers myself when the girl went missing. I told them. He’s a strange one, I said. He’s the one you need to watch. They did nothing. If the coppers won’t do anything, the alternative is to get them out, stop anything happening to one of our own.”

  Fran put her hands on her hips. “You can’t just accuse someone of child abuse.”

  “Look, I’m older than you and I’ve learned a few things. I know what you think of me. Gassy old Emily, standing around being a gossip all day. I understand people because I talk about them. You know what? We all have instincts and
sometimes they’re right. My instincts told me there was trouble as soon as I clapped my eyes on Elijah Whitaker. There’s trouble with a capital T. I don’t care where they came from or what they believe in. I felt it and you did too. Didn’t you?”

  Fran didn’t want to meet the woman’s eyes. She didn’t want her to see the truth on her face. Yes, of course Fran had felt that same instinct. She’d felt it that morning when Esther Whitaker had lifted her gaze and told Fran she was waiting for her father. A chill had run down her spine. Normal seven-year-old children didn’t speak like that.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think that child is theirs,” Emily said. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you? Blue eyed, blonde haired, pale. And they both have dark hair and dark eyes.”

  “That happens,” Fran replied. “Lots of parents have children that look nothing like them. Or they could’ve adopted Esther.”

  Emily shook her head and lifted the corner of her mouth. “Adoption? The mother can’t be much older than twenty-two, she barely looks nineteen. How many women that age do you know who can’t conceive?”

  “But he’s older,” Fran said.

  Emily shrugged. “You’re right, he is. But I still find it hard to believe that an adoption agency would give a child to those two. My son applied and jumped through dozens of hoops to get within sniffing distance of a chance.”

  “It was in America though.”

  “True.” Emily paused. Her eyes were open wide, and her head kept bobbing up and down, reminding Fran of some old sage handing out wisdom. “What does your instinct say?”

  Fran watched the other choir members filtering into the hall. She lifted her hand to say hello. The hall was almost full by the time she turned back to Emily. “It tells me something was very wrong with that family. But what can I do now? They’re gone.”

  Emily dumped her large shoulder bag onto a chair. “That’s right. They’re not our problem anymore.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Fran threw herself into running. Her morning runs became longer, harder. She incorporated hills, ran off the road onto trails. She ran in the rain. She ran on the hottest day of the year. But the one thing she did every single morning, was run through the village green and stop by the swings. She pictured Esther Whitaker standing there, in that yellow dress, too reticent to take Fran’s hand. Every time she stood in the park she imagined Esther’s body by the brook. Lifeless. That was what Fran had considered all of this moving towards. The unbearable tension of seeing what she didn’t want to see—the solemn child who runs away, the strict, traditional home, the bruises, the meek wife, the controlling husband. Throughout it all she’d been terrified of her own paranoia, and the direction she saw it all heading. That direction was Esther’s lifeless body by the brook.

  Maybe it was still heading in that direction, the difference being, she couldn’t see it happening and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. For a week she went home panting, with sweat running down her nose. She’d turn the shower to a temperature she could hardly stand and come out with steaming skin. Adrian scratched his arms and frowned whenever he saw her like that. She’d already noticed an eczema flare up in the crook of his elbow. Her stress was spilling out and infecting her husband. If only she could control it.

  One morning, the realisation hit her. She could not move on with her life, no matter how hard she tried. It wasn’t a tap to turn off. She couldn’t stop caring because they didn’t live in Leacroft anymore. It made life trickier, she knew, but once her mind was made up, a sense of peace washed over her. She had some work to do. Nothing more, nothing less. She had to approach this in the same way she would a story: with research. And for that, she started with the internet.

  She took her coffee out onto the patio with her laptop and a notebook. Hair damp beneath the morning sun. Skin tingling with the summer heat. She pulled in a deep breath and typed Mary’s name into the search bar. It was the beginning of a new day, and for the first time in weeks, her mind had one single focus.

  Neither Elijah nor Mary Whitaker came up in the results. At least, not the Elijah and Mary that she knew. She found an Elijah Whitaker who liked to comment on a fan forum for the Boston Red Sox, and a Mary Whitaker on IMDB who’d worked as a sound engineer for a few movies. There were plenty of results on those sites that tracked ancestry, but she couldn’t find anyone living in Arizona. Neither of them had any social media profiles, at least not anymore, and the usual sites that sell addresses hadn’t proved fruitful. Which meant that she had to try elsewhere. She had to go out into the world.

  At Chatsworth House, Mary had mentioned Elijah’s cousin in Derby. But she hadn’t given any details. No names. No specific part of Derby. But what if someone had been needed as a reference when the Whitakers rented the house in Leacroft? Fran knew a few of the estate agents around the area. Could she get some information from them?

  She typed the address of the Whitakers’ house into the search engine and found it listed as available to rent again. The agency controlling the listing was Forest Taylor, and it just so happened she’d gone to school with Nick Taylor, the owner’s son. They weren’t exactly best friends, but she could make a few calls, or even have him over for dinner. Her mind stirred into action. First, though, she decided to book in a viewing at the house for the next day.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  There was a young man in a suit waiting for her when she walked up to the front porch. His suit was smart, but clearly from a high-street store, the material on the shinier side of tasteful. He held out a hand, face brightened by a perky smile, and introduced himself.

  “Hiya, I’m Malcolm, or Malc if you like. Are you Mrs Cole?”

  Fran nodded.

  “Great. Come in. I’ve got the keys somewhere.” He rustled in his trouser pocket and came out with a bundle of house keys.

  “Have you had much interest?” Fran asked.

  “Quite a bit.” He gave the door a little shove and they stepped through to the porch. “I think you’re the fifth this week. It’s a nice house. Surprised the owner isn’t selling it, to be honest. They go for a good price around here. Still, you can make a fair bit from renting out these days.”

  It was tidy inside. The landlord, or a cleaner, had vacuumed the hallway. When they walked into the living room, it’d been well dusted, and the furniture had been straightened. The curtains were tucked into their tiebacks, allowing the summer sunshine to fill the room with its warmth. Fran stared at the red velvet armchair sadly. All she could see was Mary’s slim frame leaning over her knees praying for the safe return of her daughter. Emily’s words echoed in her mind, about Esther being an abducted child. No, she thought, not Mary. Not after the love she’d seen between Mary and Esther. She tore her eyes away from the chair and focused on what she’d come here for.

  “Oh, I thought it was empty.” Fran pointed to an old computer set up on a desk in the corner of the room. It’d been where Mary homeschooled Esther. “Is that included with the furniture?” She was faking her surprise, seeing as she already knew Mary and Elijah had left their kitchen electricals behind, but she wondered if she might get a bit more information this way.

  “It can be,” he said. “The previous owners left it. But if you want to bring your own, the landlord can get rid of it for you. Still,” he shrugged, “a free computer ain’t bad.”

  “Do renters often leave items behind?” she said, trying to remain casual.

  “Well, I’m fairly new to the job. But I can’t see why anyone would leave a computer. Most people would at least donate it or something.”

  “I guess they had to scarper. On the run, you reckon?”

  He laughed. “No, nothing like that. The husband had to go back to America to look after a sick family member. They couldn’t take anything large with them on the plane. It’s always a boring explanation like that, isn’t it? Right. Want to see the kitchen?”

  Once in the kitchen, Fran pretended to examine the cupboards, feigning interest in the w
ork surfaces and the appliances while searching for anything else the Whitakers might have abandoned. There were a few old tins. A jar of coffee granules. A sieve. Nothing of any use.

  “Nice kitchen,” Fran said. “Do you mind if I wander on upstairs by myself?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Malcolm said.

  He didn’t seem offended or surprised and that was a relief, because she wanted time to truly search the bedrooms. If there was going to be a clue left behind, surely it would be there, in rooms where secrets can be so easily hidden. She thanked the estate agent and hurried up the steep stairs. She remembered which room belonged to Esther and decided to go there first.

  The room had been stripped of bedding, but the bed, wardrobes and bedside table were still there. It was unmistakeably a child’s room with the pretty wallpaper and smaller-sized furniture. She checked through all the drawers in Esther’s cabinet, trying not to make too much noise. Sound travelled in empty houses. Then she checked the bedside table, where she found a children’s bible. She popped it into her tote bag.

  There was nothing under the bed. Inside the wardrobe, Fran found the yellow dress hanging alone on the rack, with nothing but empty space around it. Her heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t quite process what she was seeing. It was like Esther was in the room with her. She checked over her shoulder to make sure that Malc hadn’t followed her up. Then she snatched it from the coat hanger, rolled it like a beach towel, and shoved it in her bag. The whole time her heart was pounding, as though she was stealing diamonds from a vault. Get a grip, it’s just a dress, she told herself.

  Fran moved on to Elijah and Mary’s room, wondering what they’d left behind. The bedding had been stripped again. She checked through the drawers. They were empty. She checked the wardrobe. Nothing. She checked under the bed. Nothing. The bedside table was empty too. She even lifted the mattress. Why would Mary clear this place out apart from two things, Esther’s bible, and Esther’s dress?