The Game You Played (41 page)

Six months later

TOMMY PUFFED UP HIS CHEEKS AND blew out the three candles on his cake. Nan and Mrs Wick busied themselves giving out slices of cake to the guests.

Jessie and a friend from her new school collected slices of cake, then walked down the hall to Jessie’s bedroom, giggling about ten-year-old girl things.

I paused after I snapped a photo of Tommy, glancing out the window beyond his laughing, cake-smeared face. Green hills rolled away to a small village, the air saturated with yellow summer sunshine.

I’d bought this new house after Luke and I had sold our house on Southern Sails Street. The house was located an hour north of Sydney, on the coast.

I’d returned to my Southern Sails house with Luke after that terrifying day at Pria’s island. Both Luke and I had wanted Tommy to return to his own house and his own bedroom. Tommy’s reaction had been shock and joy at seeing his home again. I couldn’t give him back all the things I’d destroyed, but he still had some things, including his beloved train tracks.

But I’d known from the start that I couldn’t stay there long: I didn’t want to stay there. We put the house on the market after the first three months and it’d sold almost immediately, at auction.

After selling my house, I couldn’t have stayed with Nan even if I’d wanted to. Her home, and all the rest of the terrace houses on Southern Sails Street had been demolished months ago. They were all gone now. All the people gone.

I was glad that house number 29 had been torn down, but a part of me also felt the terror of what might have happened if it had been demolished six months earlier. I would have never found the boat from the nightlight. Sass would have never made the connection that the boat wasn’t from Tommy’s nightlight. Sass wouldn’t have rescued me from Greensthorne and she, Bernice and I wouldn’t have shared the discoveries that led to Pria’s island. If no one had found out about Pria’s island in time, Luke could have drifted around in the cold winter ocean of the Bass Strait until he died of exposure. Jessie and Tommy would have been left alone and defenceless on the island—with an unstable woman who was capable of carrying out terrible things. I thought of what she’d done to the cats that she’d imagined hadn’t loved her enough and I couldn’t stop a shiver from travelling down my bare arms.

Pria was in jail now, awaiting trial. Every time I’d seen her face on the TV, her expression had been a mix of cold detachment and bewilderment. The court had given me custody of Jessie. Her father, Jake, had returned from New Zealand when he’d heard what happened, willing to take her, but Jessie didn’t even know him. He’d left Pria when she was pregnant with Jessie. We learned then what we didn’t know. That Pria had made Jake’s life hell, alternately being spitefully jealous of every woman he spoke to and telling him he’d never be half the man that Luke was. Jake promised he’d be in Jessie’s life now. I hadn’t allowed him to take her away anywhere with him yet, though. He seemed nice, but I remained cautious.

Detectives Gilroy, Yarris and Haleemi hadn’t made me come into the station to give my statements. They understood that I was suffering anxiety due to the hours I’d spent there being told I’d written the letters and then that I was under suspicion of harming Tommy. They came to Luke and me at our house. Detective Gilroy got down on the floor and played trains with Tommy. He’d never met him, of course, before the day we found him. He half let it slip to me that he’d thought Tommy was dead during the six months that he was gone. I didn’t blame him for that. In my own mind, Tommy had been both dead and alive; a paradox that had almost destroyed me.

Nan didn’t come with me to live at my new house, despite my urging. She’d said she couldn’t leave Sydney. It’d been part of her for too long. Nan and Mrs Wick went into a retirement home together in North Sydney. They had been good friends as children, back in the 1940s. I’d sold my story of the search for Tommy to the media so that I could raise the money for Nan and Mrs Wick to go and live in a nice retirement home. A TV station paid me an enormous amount of money and the story made international headlines. The media had used me and so I figured it was a kind of justice to use
them
in return.

All of the elderly residents suffered when they had to leave their homes. But I think it was Bernice who suffered most of all. All of her carefully collected treasures were taken away from her. She had no money to put them into storage. I offered to pay, but she declined, saying I’d already done enough for her mother. She surprised everyone by taking off to travel the world as a yacht deckhand. Earlier today, Mrs Wick had shown me the latest photographs Bernice had sent her—pictures of sea and sky and exotic ports. Bernice said she would come back when her court case began.

Luke had refused to speak to his father since he’d learned about what he’d done to Bernice. Luke’s father was going to plead
not guilty
, but I prayed that the truth would come out in the court room. Luke’s mother was sticking firmly by her husband, and Luke was barely speaking to her either.

Luke was renting an apartment in the city these days. Still working hard at his real estate business, coming up to see Tommy every second weekend. I was still unable to reconcile my feelings for him. I still loved him, but I didn’t know if I
liked
him. And worse, he’d kept secrets from me—about seeing Pria. Had he always kept secrets from me? When I thought back, to the days when he’d first turned up in London and how he’d swept me away so easily, I couldn’t understand it. It almost seemed like he’d slipped past me, into my life. In the years afterwards. Luke had tried hard to shape me into the wife he wanted. Flynn had blinded me, too, in his own way. He’d sold me a picture of the incredible future we’d have together, then he’d pulled the rug from under me. I’d been stupid enough to buy that picture twice.

Luke was here today, standing awkwardly by himself, eating a piece of cake he was obviously not enjoying. Luke wasn’t fond of cake. Especially not a children’s cake with blue frosting and sugar frogs on it. (Tommy had asked for a cake that looked like frogs in a pond.)

Kate’s twins skipped up to me, their eyes and cheeks bright with excitement and sugary party food. “Can we take Tommy outside to play?” Orianthe asked.

“Sure,” I told her, glancing up to exchange smiles with Kate and Elliot.

Kate and I had made up a few days after I’d returned from Pria’s island. She’d cried her eyes out and she’d been certain the friendship was over. But it would have been stupid of me to hold anything against her. I imagined I would have acted the same as she had, had I been in her position.

Sass gave me a sideways hug as she, Kate, Elliot and I watched the kids run outside, Orianthe and Otto pulling Tommy along. Sass had always been big on hugs, but she was especially grabby with Tommy and me these days, like she was scared she was going to lose us again.

Sass’s phone buzzed then, and she went off to answer a call. The TV network that she worked for had recently asked if she’d run her own home renovation show for them. Up to now, she’d been one of the organisers of their shows, never in front of the camera. I could tell that this was the call where they were asking for her decision. I could hear the nervousness in her voice.

“Phoebe!” I turned to see Dr Leona Moran. “Sorry I’m running late. Oh damn, I missed the cake.”

“We saved a piece for you.” I smiled at her. She’d been making the drive from the city up to the Central Coast every second Saturday for six months now. On her own time. Unpaid.

She grabbed the plate from the table and took a bite of the cake. “Yummy. Did you make it?”

I nodded. “I’m not much good at making cakes, but I tried.”

“It’s lovely. Come and walk with me outside,” she said. “I can only be here for a short time today. I’ve got to go to a family thing tonight.”

I stepped away with her, through the glass bi-fold doors. Tommy, Orianthe and Otto were rolling on the grass. Luke walked outside with Elliot, glancing across at me.

“Tommy’s getting so big” Leona said, flicking cake crumbs away from the side of her face.

“He got to three so fast,” I said. “Too fast. I missed so much of his second year. One minute I had a little baby and now suddenly I’ve got a pre-schooler.” I watched Tommy, doing all the things that had been denied to him in the months he was with Pria, locked away in a single room.

She studied my face almost too closely. “Phoebe, you know what we were talking about last time—”

“I know. I’m just not ready to talk about that stuff. Especially not today.”

“Yes, of course. It’s Tommy’s birthday. It’s just that I’ll be going away on my annual leave tomorrow and I need to know you’ll be okay. I’ll be in Europe for a month.”

“Enjoy yourself. Everything’s good here.”

She smiled as Tommy jumped like a frog down the slope and tumbled into a roll, Orianthe and Otto copying him. But then her expression pulled tight. “Phoebe, it feels to me that you’re not okay.”

I felt annoyed. “How am I not okay? I bought a fantastic house in a beautiful area. Jessie and Tommy are happy. Everything’s great.”

“Is it?”

I looked away. “Yes.”

“I’m just . . . sensing something when we talk. You’ve been through an enormous set of upheaval and changes. I’ll be honest and say that some things are worrying me. I can’t put a finger on it. But I know. I just . . .
know
.”

Putting a bright smile on my face, I took her empty plate. “Would you like a tea or coffee?”

For a moment, she looked startled, but then she closed her eyes, sighing and nodding. “Yes, I’d love a cup of tea.”

I made my way inside to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

A knock came at the door and when I answered it, my neighbour Jocelyn was standing there with her young son. I’d invited them to the party today. She seemed a little out-of-breath. “Sorry, Phoebe, I got caught up. My sister’s in a bit of trouble. She drove here from Sydney this morning.” She lowered her voice. “Had to get away from her boyfriend in a hurry. I never liked him. She’s going to be staying with me for a couple of months until she gets herself sorted. Hope it’s okay that I brought Chrissie along with me today. I didn’t want to leave her alone.” She turned her head and looked over her shoulder at a girl who was standing near the end of my driveway. A girl who looked about nineteen—purple hair and Goth clothing.

A small well of panic bubbled inside me. No, it wasn’t okay to bring a stranger to my house. But it was hard trying to explain that to people.

“Yes, of course,” I told her, and showed them inside. “Tommy’s out the back. I’ll come out there in a second.”

Sass and Kate were engaged in an excited conversation in the living room. I guessed that Sass had accepted her new television role. I wanted to go and congratulate her, but right now, there was something else I needed to do.

Stepping down the hall, I slipped inside the spare bedroom. The house had four bedrooms and this was the smallest. I was using it as an office. I closed the door behind me.

Up on the wall, I had a large Google Earth map of the town. I had every one of the two hundred and six houses marked, with a table of notes beside the map.

I opened one of the dozen thick folders on my desk. I made a new entry:

Chrissie—Jocelyn’s sister (find out her last name and where she was living). Blonde hair, dyed purple. Blue eyes. She looks upset, but guarded.

I kept notes on everyone in town. I knew their names and where they went each day and what they did for a living, even if I’d never met them. From my yard, I could see everyone’s houses and the local school. Everything like a grid, securely snapped into place.

I kept watch over everything. Kept count.

Six months ago, you slipped past me, Pria. You took my child and I didn’t know it.

There were lots of ways to steal a person away.  You could take them away physically. You could blind them with your love. You could bring them in from the desert and show them a glittering, breathless future. You could reshape them with cutting tools and scrapers and new layers, thinly bridging the gouges and filling in the cracks with fool’s gold.

No one would ever get past me again. Not in any of the ways that it was possible to steal a person.

I would spend my days here, now, in this town where I could see everything.

Keeping watch.

THE GAME YOU PLAYED
is author Anni Taylor’s debut novel.

You can find her online at:
http://annitaylor.me

Please consider helping other readers by telling them what you thought of
THE GAME YOU PLAYED
in a review.

Tim Carter for his cover design.

Cover and title page images used from: Dreamstime.com, Unsplash.com, MoonGlowLilly, DemoncherryStock, Rachel Bostwick.

My beta readers, for their much appreciated time and effort in reading the first draft and giving valuable feedback.
Brenda Telford
, Katie Boettcher, Linda Gonzales, Kira Mattox, 
Lena May
 and 
Carolyn Scott