Kiss of Death (20 page)

And without meaning to be too much of a bitch, I do think Aunt Gwen should be more careful about commenting on other women’s looks. I mean, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I close my eyes for a moment, feeling a little woozy. I squinch the lids shut tightly, shaking my head, in an attempt to wake myself up.

“So you’re not still in contact with Jase Barnes?” Aunt Gwen asks. “You don’t have any idea whether he’s planning to come back to Wakefield?”

“No,” I say, opening my eyes again.
Why is she going over this?
I wonder.
I already said I wasn’t.

I turn toward the window a little, letting the air blow onto my face. I’m feeling a bit dizzy again. Probably because I got so little sleep last night—or rather, this morning.

“I think I should go and lie down,” I say to Aunt Gwen, stifling a yawn.

“Not yet,” she says with a shake of her head. “We have a lot more to talk about.”

Really?
I think.
All you seem to be asking me is the same question about Jase, over and over again.

“I just feel a bit woozy,” I say apologetically.

“Stay where you are,” Aunt Gwen says calmly. “You’re fine in the armchair.”

It’s true, the armchair’s very comfortable, squashy and yielding; it’s just that it’s hard to relax in Aunt Gwen’s presence. No, I amend that; it’s impossible.

“Did you ever wonder, Scarlett,” Aunt Gwen continues conversationally, “why I live in the gatehouse? Not the family wing of Wakefield Hall? There’s a whole floor, almost, of the Hall, that was being done up for your father and mother. And now it’s closed off, and I’m in that tiny little cottage where the lowest member of staff used to live.”

My eyes widen.

“I
did,
actually,” I admit. “Wonder about it, I mean.”

She nods.

“It was my mother’s idea,” she says. “After your parents died. She wanted me to move in there with you, bring you up; she wanted me to bond with you. Be a sort of substitute mother, I imagine.” She snorts in contempt at this idea. “Crammed together in that horrible little box—what was she thinking?”

She leans forward again.

“But of course, you realize her
real
motive,” she adds. “She was terrified. Terrified that I had something to do with your parents’ being killed. She couldn’t bear to think about it. So she made me take you in and bring you up, to prove to herself that she didn’t believe it. And, I assume, to make sure nothing happened to you. She didn’t think I could risk anything happening to you when you were in my care.”

My mouth is hanging open; I’m dumbfounded. This is so unexpected, so hard to process, that there’s nothing I can think of to say.

Also, my head feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton wool, and my lips don’t seem to be working very well.

“And she was right, wasn’t she?” Aunt Gwen smiles. It’s like watching a crocodile bare its teeth. “I couldn’t have risked you having an accident when you were small and vulnerable, could I? It would have been much too suspicious.”

“But
Mr. Barnes
killed my parents!” I manage to get out. “He knocked them off their scooter—he ran them down with his van!”

Aunt Gwen raises her hands and claps once, mockingly.

“Why don’t you try thinking for a moment, Scarlett? You’re supposed to be a bright girl. Did it ever occur to you to wonder why Kevin would bother to do something as senseless as run over Sir Patrick and Lady Wakefield? Why would he have taken a risk like that unless he had something huge to gain? What, did you think he was a homicidal maniac? You’re as big an idiot as your mother, that brainless little fluffball. Kevin killed your parents so that I could inherit the Hall, my dear. We were in it together.”

I simply don’t believe this. She’s playing a horrible joke on me, torturing me, knowing that no one will believe me when I tell them what she said to me, because it’s so impossible and outrageous.

I try to shake my head, but it’s as heavy as lead. Something’s very wrong with me.

“Don’t you like what I’m telling you, Scarlett?” Aunt Gwen says, smiling even more now. “Then why don’t you leave? I won’t try to stop you.”

I push my hands down on the arms of the chair, but I can’t lift myself. I’m almost paralyzed; my bones might as well be made of polystyrene, my muscles of cotton wool. I can’t brace myself against the chair; my arms collapse instead.

“Antihistamines always had this effect on you,” she informs me. “I gave you one when you were small and had hay fever, and you went out like a light.” She looks reminiscent. “It was
very
tempting, I can tell you! But, as I said, it was too soon. I made a note of the active ingredients in the pills, and I bought some more last week and put them in your water bottle. I was hoping you’d fall off the edge of that mountain and split your head open.” She shrugs. “Well, I didn’t have much luck with that, did I?”

“Taylor said … antihistamines …,” I mumble.

“Taylor’s a clever girl,” Aunt Gwen agrees. “That’s why I was so relieved when you didn’t want her to come back with us this afternoon. Goodness knows what’s going on between the two of you, but it worked out perfectly for me. Your tea had four pills crushed up in it—you should be very drowsy by now. I just hope you can take in what I’m saying. It would be a disappointment for me if you couldn’t, frankly.”

“You—and Mr. Barnes?” I say, my lips almost numb.

She nods abruptly.

“We were—together, when we were younger,” she says, and now she looks wistful, almost vulnerable. “But it was impossible, of course. He was the gardener’s son, and I am a Wakefield! Ridiculous! But Kevin was always ambitious. When I made it clear to him that no one could ever know that we were seeing each other, he got furious. Really angry. Kevin had a terrible temper. He tore off and married the first woman he met, that stupid little nothing, Dawn.” She’s frowning now. “But naturally, that didn’t last. How could it? She bored him to death. So we began seeing each other again. And it occurred to both of us that if your father was out of the picture, my mother would be a lot more generous to me.”

She looks directly at me, her eyes flashing.

“Patrick was always her favorite,” she says bitterly. “The son—her firstborn—serving in the army, marrying a Wakefield cousin, for God’s sake! He did everything right in her eyes! And then, when they had you, and it was clear that you were going to be a perfect tiny little Wakefield clone, it was as if I didn’t even
exist
for my mother anymore. Everything was Patrick’s,
everything.
I thought if he wasn’t around anymore—and your mother, too, because my mother just
drooled
over her—that it would all be different.” She sighed. “I wanted you gone too, of course. That would have been best. But Kevin wouldn’t do that.
Not a little girl,
he said. That was too much. He turned out to have some scruples.”

She laughs, without a hint of humor.

“But it was too much for him anyway, wasn’t it?” she says resentfully. “He couldn’t cope with what he’d done. He was weak, weaker than I ever expected. After running down your mother and father, he dived straight into a bloody whisky bottle. God, it was so infuriating! He’d barely even look at me afterwards—he blamed me for talking him into it, when it was his idea just as much as mine.” Her eyes narrow. “Pathetic! Catch me ever falling to pieces like that! At least my mother never made the connection. But I know she suspected I was involved somehow, I
know
it. Otherwise I would never have been sent to the gatehouse. And made to look after you.
God,
those were the worst years of my life. Waiting, waiting, until enough time had passed, and you were old enough so it wouldn’t look suspicious. Till I could finally get rid of you and be the only heir to Wakefield Hall, whether my mother liked it or not.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I thought this would be the perfect opportunity—up in Scotland, a different location. It has to look like an accident, of course. The smoke bombs were
such
a good idea, weren’t they? I knew no one would ever think a teacher would do something like that. And that note I put in your room!”

Aunt Gwen is almost beaming with perverse pride. “
So
clever! With all those St. Tabitha’s girls around, there were bound to be some who you’d had a fight with! I know exactly what teenage girls are like—best friends today, deadly enemies tomorrow. Ugh, such a waste of an excellent plan!” She sighs. “If you’d only been killed falling down that staircase … I gave you a hard enough push, God knows! It would have been absolutely perfect. They’d have looked at the smoke bombs, found the note, and thought it was a prank that went horribly wrong.”

I’m pushing down on the arms of the chair now frantically, with everything I have, trying to get my feet underneath me to take my weight, but my legs keep collapsing. I’m never getting out of this chair under my own steam. Panic is rising in me. It might seem totally unbelievable that I haven’t freaked out before now, but the antihistamines make me feel as if I’m being wrapped in layers and layers of padding; it takes ages for anything to sink in, to seem real. Let alone a story as insane as Aunt Gwen’s.

I know it’s true, every word of it. She’s relishing telling me all this; I can see the malicious gleam in her eyes. Everything fits—especially because it slots in the last puzzle piece to Mr. Barnes’s hit-and-run killing of my parents, his motive for doing that. And it explains why both Mr. Barnes and Aunt Gwen were so violently opposed to Jase’s and my falling in love with each other.

“It’s time,” she says, standing up. She tugs down her skirt, smoothing it out, a banal, everyday little gesture that somehow intensifies the horror of what she’s about to do.

I shake my head frantically, a scream building inside my skull, wanting to explode from my mouth; but I can barely manage to make any sound at all.

“I have no idea why on
earth
you’ve been babbling about all this ghost nonsense,” she says almost cheerfully. “You’ve never seemed that sort of silly, childish girl. But it’s perfect for my purposes. You’ve had two collapses in three days. You’re acting so hysterically every single teacher is concerned you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So, my story will be very simple: I brought you up here to talk to you and see how you were, Scarlett, because I was worried about you. After all, you are my niece. I left to make another cup of tea, but when I came back, the window was open. And you were gone.”

She walks toward me, reaching down and pulling me out of the armchair. I can’t believe how strong Aunt Gwen is; I try to struggle but I have nothing at all to do it with.
No juice,
Taylor says, when we’ve worked out so hard our muscles feel soft as toffee and we’re too knackered even to lift the remote to change the channel on the TV, lying there watching a blah program rather than mustering the energy to find something we’re actually interested in. And right now, I have no juice, not a drop of it. Aunt Gwen hauls me up and out of the chair, gripping my sweater rather than my skin, and I know this is so she won’t leave any marks on me that might be suspicious. My feet flail at the ground as she frog-marches me over to the window.

“You opened it yourself, of course,” she’s saying complacently. “That’s why I got you to do it, in case anyone was suspicious—your fingerprints are all over the latch. You wanted to get some air, but you leaned out too far. A tragic accident. I’m not stupid enough to try to fake a suicide—even though it’s terribly common among teenage girls, apparently. Though if that’s what the police choose to believe …” I feel her shrug as she nudges the window open with an elbow and starts to shove me through the frame, out onto the ledge.

Desperately, I do the only thing I can think of. Fighting her isn’t working; the antihistamines have sapped my muscle control. Instead, I slump against her, making myself a dead weight. My feet catch on the windowsill, and she curses, trying to lift me. The rubber of my trainers catches on the paint of the wall below, providing resistance against her attempts to haul me up.

She’s swearing now, a stream of filthy words pouring from her—in any other context it would totally shock me that Aunt Gwen has this kind of vocabulary. I’m hanging from her grip like a huge, unwieldy doll, and I feel her knee come into the small of my back, boosting me, shoving my legs so they fold up enough that she can hoist me through the window frame.

I’m trying to push back, fall back on top of her, make myself so heavy that she can’t maneuver enough to make the final shove. It’s freezing out here, the wind icy on my face, lifting my hair, my fingers feeling numb with cold, and it’s sapping me. I’m exhausted, shocked, and dazed from the drugs she’s given me; part of me still can’t believe that it’s my aunt who’s doing this, my own flesh and blood. My aunt, who’s made several attempts to kill me, and is going to succeed this time …

My neck wobbles, tipping my head forward, despite my best efforts. And that’s fatal for me. An adult human head weighs about ten pounds—I had that dinned into me for years at gymnastics, to remind me to tuck my head in when I somersaulted. The extra weight helps with the rotation.

And now it’s helping Aunt Gwen, tilting my body in the direction she wants it. Forward. Out the window. Off the ledge. Chin resting on my chest, I’m looking straight down at the ground below. It’s hard concrete: the empty parking lot. Not even a car that might break my landing.

Aunt Gwen’s planned this perfectly. There are no lawns below, no soft grass. No question that this fall will kill me.

I close my eyes, not brave enough to watch myself plummet into space.

And then my head spins dizzily as I’m dragged back so abruptly that I hit my head against the side of the window. Pain shooting through my skull, I tumble awkwardly onto the carpet inside, my knees shooting up into my chest, rolling into a ball to protect my face and chest, because Aunt Gwen and someone else are struggling, trampling each other, feet shuffling right next to me, one tripping over my leg as I scramble as best I can to get out of the way.