Be My Baby (33 page)

Jennie’s heart sank even further. Despite her instinct for self-preservation, she decided she couldn’t
not
tell Alex, but she also reasoned that Mollie had only been missing for a matter of minutes. She might have wandered into the bushes or be hiding. Before she rang
Alex and passed the fear on, she was going to make sure it was a genuine emergency.

She ran around the whole playground, checking behind every over-sized frog-shaped bin, in the little house in the jungle gym, behind every piece of play equipment.

Nothing.

Mollie wasn’t here. Either that or she was
way
better at hide-and-seek than Jennie had ever been.

Her phone burned in her pocket. Five minutes, she told herself. She’d check the surrounding area first. Perhaps Mollie had strayed to say hello to a friendly-looking dog, or got talking to someone…

Even fiercer chills ran up and down her body.

She dashed over to the nearest clump of trees and bushes and dived in, only to emerge empty-handed—bar a multitude of twigs in her hair and something unpleasant-smelling on her boot. She wiped it off on the damp grass and carried on searching. It took more than five minutes to do a complete sweep of the area, but she ignored that fact. Twilight had fallen. It would be completely dark in less than half an hour. Jennie wished fervently that she had something as useful as a mini torch on her key ring, but it was adorned only
with sparkly little shoes and a chunky silver letter J.

It was cold and dark. She shouldn’t be out here. Mollie shouldn’t be out here. They should be watching deafening cartoons, sitting on the living room floor and eating cookies, waiting for Alex to come home.

Home.

Jennie held her breath.

Would Mollie have gone home? What if she’d merely wandered off and then had returned to the playground, only to find no sight of Jennie because she’d been searching the bushes? She was a bright kid, and Alex’s house was visible from the playground. Would she have taken herself off home?

Jennie started running.

Her cold breath seemed to be ripping shreds out of her lungs by the time she reached Alex’s house. Jennie had her key in the lock as soon as she could unknot her fingers. She slammed it open.

‘Mollie?’ she yelled. ‘Mollie!’

She made herself stay still and wait for a response. As she stood there, panting, her brain caught up with her surroundings. There were no lights on anywhere. Everything was just as they’d left it.

‘Mollie?’ Her voice was quieter now. She knew she wouldn’t get an answer but she started walking around, opening doors, flipping light switches, looking in corners and behind bits of furniture. And when she’d covered the whole of the ground floor, she went upstairs and repeated the process.

Nothing. No sign of Mollie.

She was going to have to phone Alex.

Mollie’s bedroom had been the first place she’d checked up here, and she returned there now, wandering over to the large window and cooling her forehead on the glass as she stared into the back garden. There was no putting it off now. She reached into her pocket and dialled his number, her stomach icing over. Coward that she was, she hoped fervently that it’d go to voicemail. No such luck.

‘Hi, what’s up?’ He sounded distracted, as if he was reading something. Nothing like the low-voiced, sexy greetings he used to give her before they were married.

Jennie closed her eyes. ‘It’s Mollie.’

His voice changed instantly. ‘What’s happened?’ She had no doubt she had his full attention now.

‘I…I can’t find her. We were at the park and she ran off.’

There was an ominous silence on the other
end of the line. Alex must be furious with her. Two days and she’d failed at being a mother. It made her pitiful attempt at being a good wife look stellar in comparison.

‘Where have you looked? ‘

She banged her head against the glass. ‘Everywhere! I don’t know what to do.’

Why? Why had Mollie run away? Why today? Was there something Jennie had missed? Something she’d done wrong?

Suddenly, an image of another girl popped into her mind. A little blonde girl with a blue suitcase clutched in her hand, scurrying away from her house, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone was following her.

Wow. Where had that memory come from?

Running away had been a favourite game of Jennie’s when she’d been a child. She’d pack her bunny and her favourite book and a bag of toffees, just in case, in the little blue case she kept her ballet kit in, and she’d hide herself away somewhere in the vast gardens of her father’s house. Usually, the pool house. Maybe the gazebo in summer.

Okay, it hadn’t exactly been a
game
. She truly had been unhappy in those moments. But the running away had been more about wanting to be found again, knowing that someone cared enough to notice she was missing, cared
enough to come and find her. A silly, childish tactic to demand her father prove his love.

She knew now that her father had loved her the best he could, that he’d struggled with his own grief after her mother’s death, just hadn’t known what to do with a wilful little tearaway who wanted everything he had to give and more. He’d tried. But it had been easier for him to spoil her with
things
rather than attention, something she’d loved and hated at the same time. Maybe it had been easier for him to do that than spend time with the person who reminded him the most of everything he’d lost.

A single tear slid down her face. More often than not, she’d had a long wait out in the pool house. Many times she’d crept back in the house at nightfall, tired and hungry, and had crawled under her duvet and lay there, shivering.

She pulled her forehead off the window and straightened. A blob in the dark garden suddenly became recognisable—the tree house. Well, not so much a tree house as a play house on stilts, built up against a large horse chestnut tree, with a small veranda at the front with wooden steps leading down to the lawn. There was one place she hadn’t checked. Somewhere
Mollie might have gone if all the doors were locked.

‘Hold on, Alex. I’ve had an idea.’

Jennie was at the top of the stairs by the time she finished talking. She didn’t know where the key to the French windows in the lounge was, so she ran out of the back door and round the side of the house. The lawn was soft and muddy, but she didn’t slow until she was standing at the bottom of the steps that led up to the little wooden house.

‘Jennie?’ Alex’s voice was harsh in her ear.

Was she kidding herself? Was this just wishful thinking? She stood still, listening for any creak, trying to decipher any movement in the shadows inside the tree house.

‘Jennie!’

She couldn’t seem to answer him, her voice stolen by sheer panic. The wind rustled the bare branches up above her head and cooled her cheeks. In the distance, a car rumbled along the road to the village centre. Her heart thumped.

And then…

The shades of grey inside the tree house shifted. Or had she just been standing here, staring at that little Perspex window for too long? She ran up the five low steps to the veranda. She stooped to open the half-sized door
and stuck her head inside. There was a scrabbling noise—please, don’t let it be a rat!—and then silence.

She was too nervous to do much more than croak. ‘Mollie?’

More scrabbling. ‘Go away!’

A flood of endorphins hit Jennie so hard she almost fell over. She compromised by crumpling onto the floor and edging a little closer to where she
thought
the shuffling had come from.

‘It’s okay,’ she said to Alex. ‘I’ve found her.’ And then she slid her phone closed, too intent on finding out if her stepdaughter was all right to worry about Alex. He’d have plenty of time to shout at her later.

‘I was worried about you,’ she said softly.

The only answer she got was a sniff.

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Looking for Mummy.’

The answer cracked Jennie’s heart wide open. ‘Oh, darling. Why did you think she’d be in here?’

‘Auntie Toni said I lost Mummy. And she said Mummy would always be with me. So I ‘cided to look in here, just in case. I found Daddy’s torch but it not work.’

Jennie closed her eyes, despite the dark. She remembered this. The way grown-ups
talked to you about death. Some of her relatives had said some very confusing things after her mother had died, and it had taken her quite a while to come to grips with everything. However, she’d been eight when her mother had died. Mollie was only three. She probably didn’t even understand what it meant, how final it was. And having adults talking in hushed voices and vague terms was only making matters worse.

‘Mollie, do you have Daddy’s torch there? Can I have a look at it?’

She heard more shuffling and then heard something roll along the wooden floor before it hit her ankle. She fumbled with the rubber casing until she found the button. The torch was old and it took a push harder than a three-year-old’s thumb would manage. A pale yellow circle lit the floor. Jennie put the torch in her lap, facing away from both their faces and looked at Mollie. She was huddled up in the corner, her lashes thick with tears and her nose slimy.

‘Are you cold? Do you want to sit on my lap?’

Mollie shook her head, but she inched a little closer.

Jennie took a deep breath. She might be doing totally the wrong thing here, but there
wasn’t time to rush inside and thumb through her parenting book. She was just going to have to go with her gut. All she’d wanted when her own mother had died was for someone to sit down and talk to her about it. But nobody had. They’d pretended nothing had happened and tried to be happy around her. They’d clothed everything in euphemisms rather than giving her facts. And it had made her sad that no one would let her talk about her mummy, about how much she missed her and how sad she was.

Without warning, her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away.

She looked Mollie in the eye. ‘When I was a little girl my mummy died, too,’ she said, watching her stepdaughter’s face and trying to gauge her reaction. Mollie went very still and looked at her with wide eyes.

‘Did you ever find your mummy ‘gain? Did you lose her, too?’

Jennie swallowed. ‘No, sweetheart. I didn’t.’ And she went on to explain, with simple words and plain facts, why she wouldn’t see her mother again—not on this earth, anyway.

Mollie’s lips began to wobble. Jennie saw the look of hope in Mollie’s eyes, begging her to tell her what she’d just pieced together wasn’t true, and it took all her willpower not
to hide that truth in platitudes, the way everyone else had done for Mollie. The little girl’s whole face crumpled up. ‘Don’t want Mummy to be dead,’ she whispered.

I don’t want mine to be dead either, Jennie thought. And I miss her so much. One of the tears she thought she’d dealt with escaped and rolled down her cheek. She saw Mollie watch it, a look of surprise on her little round features.

‘Why are you crying?’ she said, sniffing, tears falling fast down her own cheeks.

Jennie found she needed to sniff, too. ‘Because I’m sad my mummy’s gone, too,’ she said. ‘And sometimes I get angry. But it’s okay to feel like that. It’s okay to be angry or sad or happy or fed up, and it’s okay to cry if you need to.’

Mollie crawled towards her and inspected her tears with chubby, inquisitive fingers.

‘Are you sure you’re not cold? ‘ Jennie said, trying to smile. ‘Because I am, and my lap desperately needs warming up.’

Mollie blinked and then she climbed into Jennie’s lap and put her arms around her. And then she rubbed Jennie’s back with a tiny hand in a way Becky must have done to soothe her when she was upset. That just made Jennie cry all the harder. All of Mollie’s defences
crumbled and she clutched on to Jennie and sobbed. Jennie wasn’t in much of a position to do anything but join her.

After a short while she felt Mollie relax in her arms. Jennie wiped her own cheeks with her fingers, not even bothering to avoid her mascara.

‘I don’t know about you, but I need a tissue.’

A little head nodded against her chest, and Jennie decided not to think about what kind of smears were now on her rather expensive designer jumper.

‘And I’m hungry, too,’ she added. ‘How about we go inside and find something to eat?’

Another nod.

She carefully lifted Mollie off her lap and scrambled to her feet. ‘Why don’t you use the torch?’ she said to Mollie, who brightened instantly. As she stood up and brushed the dust off her rear end, Jennie thought of yesterday’s attempt at tea—burnt toast, lukewarm baked beans.

She backed out of the tree house door, stooping to avoid whacking her head on the top of the frame. ‘Stuff it,’ she mumbled to herself. ‘I’m getting takeaway.’

Her boot squelched in the mud at the bot
tom of the steps as a little voice called out from behind her, ‘Can we have pizza?’

She smiled and held out a hand. ‘Of course.’

Jennie stared at the open pizza box, having nothing better to do than watch the remaining slices get harder and curlier. Alex hadn’t said much when he’d come in. He’d just dropped his briefcase and coat in the hall and quietly climbed the stairs to Mollie’s bedroom. He’d been up there forty-five minutes now.

She decided she’d go crazy if she didn’t find something to do, so she started to clear the dishes. She was just putting the last one into the dishwasher when she heard Alex’s footsteps in the hall. Her mind filled with reasons why this wasn’t her fault, why he shouldn’t be angry with her. That also was stupid. Suddenly she felt Mollie’s age, scared with the same chilly fear that she’d had when her father had made one of his rare appearances in her bedroom. Scared of what he’d say. Because whenever there was trouble, she was sure to be the cause of it.

But Alex didn’t rant and rave. He didn’t say a thing. Didn’t look at her with that heavy disapproval in his eyes. And maybe that was worse. He collected a pair of wine glasses
from the cupboard, filled them with Merlot and gestured in the direction of the living room. Jennie followed him there.

They sat in different chairs—Jennie by the fire, Alex on the sofa—the cool awkwardness between them preventing them from doing anything else. So much for tonight being The Night. Jennie sipped her wine and stared into the fire while he collected his thoughts, found a way to let whatever difficult words were in him out. But it took a lot longer than she expected. Alex was so quiet, so still, it made her feel fidgety. Pretty soon she was screaming inside her head.