The Bones of You (25 page)
Authors: Debbie Howells
41
“D
elphine? Did you write this?”
elphine? Did you write this?”
She turns to gaze at me with those pale eyes that hide everything. Then nods.
I hear a gasp of breath that’s all mine.
“Why?”
“Why?”
But she turns back to the jar of hot chocolate, measuring it out deliberately, silently.
“Delphine.”
She turns round again, her eyes questioning.
“If you know something, you have to tell us.”
But her look is blank, as though what she’s done means nothing.
Laura chimes in. “It’s okay, Kate.” She catches my eye as she steps toward Delphine.
“It’s too hard to talk about, isn’t it?” Her voice is gentle.
There’s a pause, and then, as she stirs her drink, the back of Delphine’s head nods, barely perceptibly.
“Did Mummy or Daddy do something?”
This time, Delphine doesn’t move.
“Is it easier if you show me?” Laura asks.
Delphine turns round again. Those pale eyes that have seen too much meet Laura’s. She nods.
It’s getting dark as we take my car and drive through the village. As we unlock the Andersons’ house and let ourselves in, Delphine runs back out to the garage. When she returns minutes later, she’s carrying a small leather purse, which she unzips, then tips into Laura’s hand.
Laura picks up the necklace set with tiny colored beads, the one I’ve only ever seen on Rosie’s neck. The one Alex gave her.
“Is this what I think it is?” Laura asks.
I nod.
“Is this Rosie’s?” she asks Delphine.
“Yes.”
“Did your mummy put it there?”
Again Delphine answers, “Yes.”
She turns and goes out again. We follow, into the garage, where she goes to the shelves of her old books, where she pulls out a book with an overtly childish cover, then gives it to Laura.
It’s like any other child’s book of fairy tales, its cover beautifully painted with princesses and dragons from other worlds. Until Laura opens it.
Inside tells another story. In a hollowed-out compartment is an iPhone. Laura catches my eye, then looks at Delphine.
“Is this Mummy’s?”
Delphine nods, then, without pausing, spins round, back outside, and through the side gate into the garden.
She runs across the grass, with Laura and me close behind her. Instinctively, I know where she’s going, though I’ve no idea why. It’s the apple tree, and when she reaches it, standing in the middle of the flower bed, she does the strangest thing. She leans forward and kisses it.
The three of us stand there for a moment, time suspended. Then Laura turns to me.
Her voice is urgent. “Can you get a spade?”
I dig for ages, as the light fades, while Delphine whirls around the garden, then sits on her swing, singing to herself. Eventually, some way down, the spade hits something.
Dropping to my knees, I stare closely at the earth as through a brief gap in the clouds, the last rays of sunlight catch dull metal.
“I’ve found something.”
My heart in my mouth as my fingers carefully ease the knife from the ground.
Beside me, Laura gasps. “Leave it, Kate. We have to call the police.”
“There’s something else,” I tell her.
It’s just an ordinary plastic bag, heavily coated in soil, but as I pick it up, the stench is unbearable. Laura takes it, then starts to open it.
“Dear God.”
ROSIE
She doesn’t need Kate now. It’s just Joanna.
She needs to think. Wiping the knife before carefully putting it to one side, because she mustn’t leave it here. Stripping off, like shedding a skin. Pulling on her gym gear, luckily, there in the bag in the back of the car. Hiding clothes stained with my blood and her tears. Her shoes. Then home. She needs to drink.
And on the way, it’s so easy. She drops the holdall in someone’s garbage bin, which will be emptied, its contents incinerated, before anyone knows it’s there, because tomorrow’s pickup day. Drives home and leaves the car on the road, tiptoes across the gravel and lets herself back in. No one will have missed her. No one will know.
Forgetting, as she always does, about Delphine.
And her reward is waiting in the fridge. The first glass she barely notices. She stops shaking after three glasses. Stops remembering after five. As the bottle empties, finds oblivion.
Until the next morning. Waking up. Head thumping, mouth gritty and dry. Remembers last night, meeting me, leading me into the woods, sick with horror as the rest of it comes back, too. That instead of killing my baby, she killed her own baby. If only she’d never brought the knife.
It was an accident, she tells herself. The most terrible, horrible accident, when she was just trying to help. She didn’t mean for it to go wrong. And there’s this other thing she has to do. Plant a tree. The apple tree. A tree of immortality and love. A mother’s love. Her love.
And then comes the next part. The future. From here, she has to be so careful about what she says, what she does, what people see, every second of every minute of every day. Even more than before. Create her mask, behind which, behind the blankness in her eyes, you can’t tell if there is a fairy princess or a psychopath. For as long as it takes for Neal to see how much he needs her.
Or it will all have been for nothing.
42
A
fter, as the horror recedes slightly and the heat of another summer settles on us, I allow myself a glimpse of Jo’s tangled world of shattered dreams and blurred boundaries, of the brutality and twisted logic that led her to believe that she could keep Rosie’s secret and her own perfect world preserved forever.
fter, as the horror recedes slightly and the heat of another summer settles on us, I allow myself a glimpse of Jo’s tangled world of shattered dreams and blurred boundaries, of the brutality and twisted logic that led her to believe that she could keep Rosie’s secret and her own perfect world preserved forever.
I try to explain to Angus that you could liken what’s happened to a rosebush, because however pretty it is to look at, however many blooms it has, if underneath the roots aren’t strong or the soil’s poor, it won’t survive.
But he just looks at me, utterly incredulous. “Kate, she killed her own daughter, for Christ’s sake.”
I’m not sure Jo will ever leave this place she’s found, with its blinding drugs and high-pitched walls that keep her safe. If she could even cope with the real world, least of all one that at last, because of Delphine, knows the truth. Maybe after killing Rosie, somewhere in the dark corridors of her labyrinthine mind, Jo sentenced herself to her own slow decline.
ROSIE
It’s easier than Joanna thinks it will be, even though her grief, shock, horror are all sickeningly real. As she’s always said, when you want something enough, you pay a price.
Then, after all she’s done for him, when he tells her quietly, with no threatening or bullying or harsh words, that he’s still leaving her, that nothing will change that, she knows the light has dimmed, the passion has gone, feels a part of her die inside.
But even through her shock, her fear of being without him, she knows. She’s always known. She can’t let him be with someone else. Anything is better than that.
Humiliation, betrayal, even prison.
And in the end, because of what she discovers about him, it’s so easy.
His arrest almost destroys her, but she clings on, won’t let go, no matter how hard this is. In her twisted mind, she still has him.
For a while, she believes she can do this, but inside, what she’s done tortures her. Every second of every minute of every day. Somewhere buried deep in her stone-cold heart, the small shred of decency and goodness that’s somehow survived this long inches out and pitches her down the slope to madness.
And now, she’s caught forever in her locked-down world, where no one will ever reach her.
43
W
hat’s happened makes me think about the lines we all etch into our lives, between right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate, a kind of moral compass, one that when her brain shortcircuited, Jo lost forever as she crossed over into madness.
hat’s happened makes me think about the lines we all etch into our lives, between right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate, a kind of moral compass, one that when her brain shortcircuited, Jo lost forever as she crossed over into madness.
I still wonder how I didn’t see. But as Laura puts it, we can use all our skills, our experience, observe body language, read between as many lines as we choose, but we see mostly what we want to see. And if someone wants to hide the truth, we may never know.
Trying Jo for murder may take some time, if it ever happens at all. Laura says there’s an irony in that they’ve found the murderer, but all that’s left is her body. And there are laws against taking someone to court who will just sit, not understanding, not seeing, not able to speak, catatonic, which is what she is now. But Jo’s guilty, of deception, of emotionally abusing her children, of murder. Whether the law will ever call her to account for that, or whether locked away alone in her own hell, she’s found her own way of atoning for her crime, she can never be free. But I don’t think she ever has been.
All that may be, but even so, I knew her as a friend who was struggling, who needed me, just for a while. A damaged woman whose crimes were her obsessive love for her husband and her vulnerability. But more people are guilty. Laura’s publisher flew her out to see Jo’s parents, who would say nothing of any consequence, which, as I now know, means little. But they haven’t been to see their daughter, which speaks volumes, nor do they show any concern. Behind the closed doors of Jo’s childhood, anything could have happened. One day, if she’s able to face it, maybe we’ll know.
I’d thought Delphine would go to Carol’s, but just before it was agreed, she took my hand and asked if she could stay with me and Angus. Even without everything she’d been through, her terrible secret, which she couldn’t find a way to talk about, there was no way we could have said no.
I see Neal, just briefly, one last time. He comes over one evening, when Angus is home. We’ve talked about this, and Angus is prepared to be civil, though I know the personal cost to him. Really, he’d like to punch Neal’s lights out, but the time for that has passed.
“Thank you,” Neal says, meeting Angus’s eyes first, then mine. “For taking care of Delphine. That’s all I came to say.”
It hurts to think that if it wasn’t for us, if Carol also hadn’t offered a home to Delphine, Delphine would have ended up in foster care. Not that it’s of any real concern to Neal, who, because he could afford a good lawyer, paid a disproportionately small price for the abuse he inflicted. Who, with his newfound freedom and lack of interest in his daughter, doesn’t actually care.
Now the sham of decency is on our doorstep, holding out his hand, a gesture of conciliation toward Angus, who sees through him.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Angus is openly hostile.
“I know. But you needn’t worry. I came to tell you I’m leaving.”
“You’re a bastard, Anderson.” Angus can’t help himself.
I take my husband’s arm. Neal shrugs, then turns to leave.
“Where will you go?” I blurt out the words.
He looks at me, holding my eyes, with the same knowing look I saw that evening he kissed me.
“Where I always said I’d go,” he says softly.
At my side, Angus stiffens. Then, as Neal walks away, mutters, “Should have punched him.”
“No,” I tell him, reaching up and kissing his cheek. “You were wonderful.”
“What did he mean just now?”
I watch Neal disappear out of sight.
“He’s going back to Afghanistan.”
When I ride Shilo through the woods that evening, I’m thinking of Rosie, then Alex and Delphine in the same instant, wondering if just maybe, in their shared loss, in some way they can help each other. Then I urge Shilo into a canter, listen to his hooves pounding, leaving my thoughts far behind.
I choose the same path I always take, up the slope to the clearing where Rosie died, where we pull up and just stand there. A rare peacefulness comes over me. The air is completely still, yet alive, so alive I can feel it on my skin, seeping into my soul, so that just for a moment, I myself, Shilo, the trees, everything, we’re all one and the same.
I close my eyes, framing the thought in my head first, then my heart, before sending it out there.
Don’t worry about Delphine. . . . I’ll look after her....
And wait. But there’s nothing, not a flicker.
That’s when I know Rosie’s gone.
ROSIE
What you don’t know is that on the longest, blackest night, there is always a light. That the wind is myriad souls singing, passing from one world to the next, as they begin their journey to the stars.
Suddenly, my thoughts come in fragments. I know now that what needs nurturing isn’t the blowsy, transient flower, but what’s underneath, like people’s hearts. But I know, also, the consequences of what happens if you leave a heart unloved, un-nurtured, unimportant, destined never to reach its potential.
Why? The word echoes around me, resounding through my soul. Why have children? I don’t understand, when Joanna had choices. But like with everything, whether in this world or the next, there was a reason.
Then against the black, I see two far-off lights, pure, dazzling, untarnished, on a collision course. I watch them close until their paths touch, then flare brightly as one brilliant shooting star, before vanishing in opposite directions.
Once, I was my mother’s perfect daughter. I could do no wrong. Until she discovered that I wasn’t perfect and nor was she, and it broke her.
Then I’m back at the beginning. It’s coming to me; I’m starting to remember what’s missing, who I’ve lost, who I’m waiting for.
And through the woods, I see her, with Alex’s eyes, with the pale skin and the hair shining silver, like mine—because they are mine. She’s running through the trees toward me, and as she gets closer, the love inside me wells up and overflows around us, enveloping her, drawing her close until at last she’s here, with me. I reach my arms out, feel her melt into me, and the gaping emptiness is gone.
That’s when time stops, the trees, the earth, the sky fading, slipping away, as it’s the wind that comes for us, with its choir of voices, that most pure, blissful sound, soaring us higher, up into the heavens, into the stars, into the light.
Other books
The Stars Came Back by Rolf Nelson
Numb by Sean Ferrell
A New York Love Story by Cassie Rocca
Beware of the Beast by Anne Mather
To Catch a Wolf by Susan Krinard
Autobiography of My Mother by Meg Stewart
His Demands by Cassandre Dayne
Mountain Madness by Pyle, Daniel
Comanche Moon by Catherine Anderson
Protocol 7 by Armen Gharabegian