Local Girl Missing (9 page)

I’ve seen Leon three times since Frankie’s revelation and each time I couldn’t bring myself to finish with him.

Last night, our fourth date, I contemplated ending things. How could I not, after what we did?

I still have nightmares about it. Flashes of memory from that hot August night. We were kids, just sixteen. I was wasted, drunk for the first time in my life thanks to Frankie stealing those spirits from behind her father’s bar. The three of us had gone to the old pier to get hammered and listen to music where nobody would catch us. Both of us were convinced that we were the one he was in love with. Now I look back and cringe at the way I acted, the way we flaunted ourselves at him. As if he’d ever have fancied me. Now I know how ridiculous we both were to hope for a romantic relationship with Jason. Maybe if I hadn’t been so delusional it would never have happened. He would still be alive.

I already know I’ll never be able to tell Leon.

Guilt. It turns you into a liar.

Anyway, I’m digressing. Back to last night.

I arranged to meet Leon at the old pier. As we sat there on the rotten floorboards, bleached by the sun and hot to the touch, all I could think about was that this was the last place Jason was seen alive. Eventually, after a couple of cans of Red Stripe, I felt brave enough to broach the subject.

Leon stared at me when I asked about Jason. ‘Did you know him?’ he said, his brow deepening into a frown. He listened intently, his piercing eyes boring into me as I explained that Jason had had a summer job at Frankie’s parents’ hotel, that the three of us were friends.

As I talked he took my hand, rubbing his thumb across my palm. ‘His death was a huge shock to us all,’ he said when I’d finished. He didn’t look at me as he spoke, instead concentrating on a splintered piece of wood by his knee. ‘We were close growing up, he was only six months older than me. He wasn’t just my cousin, he was my friend. He was found in the sea. He’d drowned. The toxicology report said there was a lot of alcohol in his blood, which contributed to his death. But I often wondered if he did it on purpose, you know? If he took his own life.’

I was horrified and in that moment almost spewed out the whole ugly truth; the guilt of it was inching its way up my throat. I had to bite my lip to stop the words tumbling out.

‘Why …’ My mouth was so dry I could barely speak. I swallowed and started again. ‘Why would you think he’d kill himself?’

‘Jason was always a piss-head. And he took too many
drugs. His mum, my dad’s sister, was an alcoholic. She kicked him out when he was seventeen, that was why he came here. A new start, apparently. But he was troubled, Soph.’

I remembered Jason telling me about his parents, especially his father, who he’d described as a ‘waster’. We had a lot in common, that’s probably why I’d liked him so much. He was my first love. Frankie felt the same way too, that was the problem.

Frankie was the one he liked, I’ve always been sure of that. Yes, we had a lot in common, coming from similar backgrounds. We would often sit and chat together – in a quiet spot on the beach or on the old pier. Sometimes I sensed that Frankie felt left out when we got into one of our philosophising sessions. I could tell by the way she’d try and distract us whenever she saw us deep in conversation. (Although she never admitted it, that’s not her style. Frankie never has liked to admit to any weaknesses!) But I always knew that Jason saw me as a friend, nothing more.

‘What about his kid sister?’ I asked. ‘He always spoke of her so fondly.’ I only ever saw her once, at Jason’s funeral, standing forlornly next to an older woman. She would only have been about twelve, pretty with huge blue eyes, like Jason’s.

Leon lifted his head to look at me, his eyes softening. ‘She came to live with us for a while. She’s OK. Happy. She’s sixteen now. My parents dote on her, the daughter they never had.’ His smile vanished. ‘Hey, why so sad?’

I blinked back tears. ‘It’s just … it’s tragic, what happened to Jason.’

He squeezed my hand and then pulled me to him so that I was sitting on his lap. I felt safe wrapped up in his strong arms. ‘He had his problems, it wasn’t easy for him,’ he murmurs into my neck. ‘He was a teenager who was struggling with his sexuality. Trying to understand himself.’

I sat up straighter and pulled away from him so that I could see his face, my arms still around his neck. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He was gay. Didn’t you know?’

The shock must have been apparent in my expression. ‘Gay? But he fancied Frankie. I was sure of it … I …’

Leon shook his head, his wavy hair flopping in his face. ‘No, he didn’t. He had a lot of girls as friends, but he wasn’t interested in them in that way. He came out to me when he was fourteen. He’d always known, that’s what he said.’

I had no clue. All those times we sat and put the world to rights. I wish he could have confided in me about it.

Today at work (I’ve now jacked in my job with Stan and I’m working at the hotel every morning except Tuesdays!) I told Frankie what Leon had said. I was helping her change the bedding in a double room and she stopped, duvet cover in hand, the colour draining from her face. It was most peculiar. I wondered if she was going to throw up. It took her a few moments to
compose herself and I felt sad for her. It’s obvious that she’d thought the same as me – that Jason had loved her. Maybe that’s what kept her going, what helped assuage her guilt. And I had taken that away from her. When she recovered, she snapped at me that I’d better not ever tell Leon what we did. And then she waltzed out the room, leaving me to change the bed by myself.

She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, as though it was my fault that Jason had been gay. Either that or she was cross that I hadn’t finished with Leon like she hoped. The thing is, I don’t know how long my relationship with Leon is going to last. I know it can’t be for ever, not with this huge secret between us.

The hand that’s holding the letter begins to shake uncontrollably, and I watch it, shocked, as though it’s taken on a life of its own. I feel trapped, like a defenceless animal, with no choice but to wait for my predator’s next move.

I’ve tried to bury the memory of Jason and what we did all those years ago, Soph. I’ve gone to great pains to turn my life around, to reinvent myself. A new start in London, the growth of the hotels, which was down to me more than my parents. My mother had always been the driving force behind the business – Dad preferred the social side of things – but since their semi-retirement I’ve thrown myself into making sure the business is a success. And it’s worked – we’re just a few months away from opening our third hotel. Not the tacky hotels of our youth either; these are boutique hotels with opulent furnishings and Wi-Fi, with white, fluffy robes in the bedrooms and upmarket toiletries in the en suites. The type of hotels that run twenty-four hours a day, with demanding guests and a high turnover of staff, that seem constantly busy – unlike my parents’ place, which only ever seemed to get full in the summer months.

I’ve been running from my past. Now the past has caught up with me and I feel wrong-footed, out of control.

I tried to convince you that dating Leon –
Jason’s cousin
– was a mistake. I was terrified that you would be unable to keep the secret from him. You were always so kind, loyal, a soft touch. You trusted people more than I did, believed in them, assumed that they would live up to your expectations. But what if you did tell Leon? Does he know that we were involved in his cousin’s death and is seeking revenge?

I take a deep breath and open the front door. I dart through the rain and slip into the passenger seat of Daniel’s car, still clutching the envelope. I can’t stop trembling.

His mouth is set in a straight line. I might have been embarrassed by our near kiss if I wasn’t so worried about the letter. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says without looking at me. ‘Seeing you again …’ He reddens.

When I don’t answer he turns to look at me. His eyes shift to the letter in my hand. ‘What is it?’

Wordlessly I thrust the letter at him and he scans it quickly. ‘Where did you get this?’

I explain everything, about the letters, the person who followed me last night.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I didn’t know what to say, or whether I could trust you.’ I fumble in my bag for a tissue.

His eyes are hard. ‘Trust me? You’ve known me since
you were seven years old. What, you think I sent you these?’

I shake my head. ‘No, of course not … but …’ I stare at him, watching for signs that he might have had something to do with it. His right eyelid twitches.

‘What?’

‘You were there, this morning,’ I say. ‘Did you notice the envelope in the letter box then?’

His eyebrows knit together in concentration. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘So someone obviously posted it while you were in the apartment with me.’

He runs his hand over his chin. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It could have been in the letter box, I doubt I would have noticed, to be honest …’

I sigh. ‘Someone knows, Daniel. Someone knows what Sophie and I did …’

There is a stunned silence as I realise what I’ve said. The only sound to be heard is the drumming of the rain on the roof of the car and the swish of the windscreen wipers. Daniel turns the ignition off and swivels in his seat to stare at me.

‘What did you do, Frankie?’

In that moment, I know I can trust him. If I tell him what happened he’s hardly likely to go to the police; it would implicate you too and he wouldn’t want your name dragged through the mud.

‘It was our fault,’ I whisper, shredding the tissue in my lap. ‘The night Jason died. It was an accident, it’s true. But we were there. We were with him.’

And carefully I tell him what I think he needs to know.

As soon as we met Jason that day in my parents’ dining room we were smitten with him, although I don’t tell Daniel this part. I don’t think I’d even admitted to you how much I’d fancied Jason – although you could probably tell by the way I flirted when I was with him. He was the reason I turned Daniel’s advances down that summer. How was I to know he was gay? He never told us, and my sixteen-year-old self wasn’t worldly wise or sophisticated enough to realise. He was just a hot, sexy, older boy who was nice to us. To both of us. Equally.

As the weeks progressed we became friends and the three of us would hang around together. He didn’t seem to mind being seen with a couple of giggly girls. He preferred that to hanging out with Daniel and his friends. I knew he’d had a troubled upbringing – he preferred to tell you most of this. I think he saw you as a kindred spirt, somebody with a similar background to his own. I never really thought he fancied you though; no offence, Soph, but you were an ugly duckling back then, only later turning into a swan. But you had that fierce intelligence, that analytical brain, and could discuss things with him – philosophical things that I wasn’t interested in. You were naive in so many ways, yet you were also mature beyond your years. You and Daniel were left, most of the time, to fend for yourselves while your mum worked all hours. Not that it was her fault, she had a lot on her plate, both
financially and emotionally. You hardly spoke of your father except to say he was a violent bully. Your mum was doing her best to make a life for the three of you away from him.

It was a humid evening in late August when the three of us made a plan to meet on the old pier to get drunk. We were under age and the downside of living in a small town is that everybody knew how old we were so wouldn’t serve or sell us alcohol. Jason liked a drink – I wonder now, looking back, if he had a problem with alcohol. So, partly to impress Jason, I decided to steal a couple of bottles of spirits from my parents – vodka and rum.

You got drunk the quickest, probably due to your toothpick frame. The alcohol gave you the confidence to act in a way that was totally out of character. I was quite shocked how you began flirting with Jason in the most embarrassing way, sitting on his lap and flinging your arms around his neck. He didn’t seem to mind, in fact I thought that he liked the attention. I even experienced a throb of jealousy at the two of you. We were mixing the spirits with Coke, but that wasn’t enough to dilute the effects. As the evening wore on we became more and more drunk.

I don’t really remember who started the argument – if it was me because Jason was paying too much attention to you, or the other way around. I suppose we were competitive in the way that best friends are. Except I was usually the winner when it came to boys. And I liked to win. After all, you always beat me in class. It was only fair that I came first in something.

Now I twist the tissue in my hands. ‘We were squabbling,’ I say. ‘Me and Sophie. Jason tried to stop us. Sophie pushed him away – not hard, she didn’t mean to, but it was enough to make him lose his balance. He was so drunk. He crashed through the rotten wooden barrier and fell twenty-five feet into the sea below.

‘We watched, appalled, as he flailed about in the water. He could swim, we knew that because we’d often gone swimming in the sea together. But, maybe because of the tide, or the amount of alcohol in his system, he couldn’t keep afloat and we could do nothing … he kept sinking …’ I hesitate, the memory is still so vivid. ‘We could only stare in horror as he got swallowed up by the sea.

‘We couldn’t have saved him, you see, Dan. We couldn’t. We were just as wasted – and neither of us had mobile phones in those days. I often wondered if I should have run for help, alerted one of the neighbours from the nearby houses. But we did nothing. We were frozen by fear, scared of getting into trouble. And so we watched a young man with everything to live for drown.’

There is complete silence in the car. It’s so oppressive that I feel crushed by it, as though I’ve taken a sledgehammer to the clean-cut image he’s always had of me.

Eventually he asks, ‘Did Sophie ever tell Leon?’ His voice sounds raw in the confines of the car, as though he’s not spoken for years.

I shake my head. ‘I really don’t know. I think she was tempted. She hated lying to him. But she was scared. Why? Do you think it’s him writing these notes?’

He shrugs and turns away from me to look out of the windscreen again. The windows have started to steam up so he starts the ignition, and the lull of the windscreen wipers and melodic sound of the rain soothes me. ‘Who knows, Frankie. What happened after … after he died?’

I close my eyes, remembering the shock, the horror of it all; you throwing up over the side of the pier and then screaming uncontrollably so that I had to slap you hard across the face; me grabbing your arm and dragging you away, instantly sobering up as we ran as fast as we could towards the hotel. Dad was still awake and sitting in the living room, reading a book and drinking a Scotch. Luckily all the guests were in bed. I still remember the fear that pinched his face when he saw us, bedraggled and crying, you with vomit down the front of your dress, the words, ‘
What’s happened?
’ sliding from his mouth as though in slow motion.

I exhale and open my eyes. ‘My dad. We ran back to the hotel and told him. He was the one who insisted that we say nothing about what had happened. He didn’t want the police involved. It was an accident, he said. A tragic accident. He never even told my mum.’

‘Your dad is good at keeping secrets,’ he says and I shoot him a look.

‘My dad saved our arses.’

‘You said yourself, it was an accident. You should’ve
been honest, for fuck’s sake, Frankie! You should have been honest then and maybe none of this would have happened. Then Sophie might be alive.’ His voice gets louder with each word, saliva forming in the corners of his mouth. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry.

Tears seep out of my eyes and I don’t bother to wipe them away. ‘I know that now. Dad just did what he thought was right. We would have been in trouble for stealing his booze, it would have got in the local newspaper, as you well know. Dad could have lost his licence.’ I scowl at him as though he was the one responsible for writing the non-existent story despite only being eighteen at the time. ‘And he would have lost his business.’

‘I can’t believe you kept this from me,’ he says, his voice quieter now, less angry. But he still doesn’t look at me.

‘We kept it from everyone.’

His next words chill me to the bone. ‘Well, not everyone. Someone knows, Frankie. And it sounds like they want revenge.’