Your Guilty Secret

by Rebecca Thornton

  ‘I don’t think so. The only people that would have known we were out are those who normally know our schedule. Matthew. Joan. Lily. She’s my PA. She knew. I’d signed off for the day. And Conor, too, my publicist.’

  ‘Has Joan been with you long?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘She’s good with Ava?’

  ‘Yes. She is.’ I wanted to say lots of things. How she’d said some hurtful things lately. But that I’d managed to keep myself from getting too angry. But my throat got all closed up, and all I could do was nod.

  ‘Right. Thank you, Ms King. That will do for now. I’m going back to the station for an update meeting and I’ll be speaking to Conor. I’ll ring you straight back.’ He walked over to the door of my study. ‘Nice picture.’ He pointed to a black and white shot of me and Matthew behind the door, both of us facing the camera.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is he good with her too?’

  ‘Who? Matthew? Yes. He’s good with Ava. She loves him. Where is he? I need him back soon.’

  ‘I believe he’s down at the station helping out with some enquiries.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, standing up from my seat. ‘Why isn’t he here?’

  ‘Ms King, I’m sure he’ll be home soon. I’ll make a call. Nice he’s good with her.’ He motioned his head towards the picture again. ‘She saw you two getting on lately? Ava?’

  ‘Yes. She did. She was excited about the announcement and the changes it would bring.’

  ‘You ever fight?’ I was about to answer when we heard footsteps. Conor. I recognised the shlump-shlump of his baseball boots and then the door started to open. Detective Mcgraw took a step back.

  ‘Conor. Thank God you are here—’ But before I could get much further, he was holding his hand out to Detective Mcgraw.

  ‘Sorry. Let me introduce myself. I’m Conor. Lara’s publicist. I couldn’t help overhearing you. They are the perfect couple.’ He looked right at me, as though he was trying to tell me something. ‘Aren’t you, Lara? I haven’t seen them fight yet. God.’ He turned to me. ‘Lara. I’m so sorry. I really am.’

  ‘We don’t fight.’ I looked at the picture of us. It had been taken for Vanity Fair only six weeks after we’d first got together. Our first front cover. We’d shifted a lot of copies. I remembered the way I’d leaned back into Matthew. The way he’d kissed the top of my head. ‘We bicker,’ I said. ‘But we don’t really fight.’

  ‘Listen.’ Detective Mcgraw guided Conor out the room and started to shut the door. ‘Conor, if you could give us one minute alone. Thank you.’ He turned to me. ‘Fight, Lara. By fight I mean aggressive behavior towards each other. That Ava would pick up on.’ I thought of my girl. How she’d been when she first found out that I was going out with Matthew Raine. ‘Can I bring him in for show and tell?’ she’d laughed. I hadn’t been surprised. The perfectly structured face – that smile – the one that held the world alight.

  ‘There’s no way,’ I tell him again. ‘There’s no way she heard us fight, because we didn’t fight today. Or anytime recently. You saw how happy she was during our announcement.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Please, are we finished now? She’s out there. Ava’s out there. Somewhere. And you’re in here asking me questions that aren’t relevant.’ I’d managed to control myself before, but the words started to come out in great gasps.

  ‘OK. Thank you, Ms King. So you wouldn’t say you and Matthew are having a slightly tricky time together?’

  A slightly tricky time. Joan’s phrasing. It was exactly the type of language she’d use. She must have said something to Detective Mcgraw. I could hear her voice now, her quietly clipped English tones, the slow nod of her head.

  ‘Me and Matthew having a tricky time? How strange.’ I repeated, ‘No.’

  ‘And would you say you are a good mother?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I would.’ What had Joan been telling him? I didn’t want to start asking myself such big questions at such an awful time. I knew I would start to spiral even more. I told myself to put Joan out my head, and concentrate on my daughter.

  ‘OK. That’s all. Thank you. I expect Conor will be wanting to discuss press strategy with you. I’ll leave you now. And, Ms King?’

  ‘Yes?’ Images of Ava flooded my brain. The soft ebb of her breath. The way she’d kick her right leg out when she was getting tired, or hungry. All the earlier adrenaline seeped out of my body. I felt heavy and absolutely sick with longing to see her. I ached all over. I wanted to look for her around the house. Imagine the way she’d run up to me as she heard me at the top of the stairs. ‘Mom. Mom, can I wear some lipstick?’ she’d shout. I pressed my knuckles into my chest. The pain was becoming unbearable.

  ‘I know how difficult this must be for you. Given the position you are in too. But we’re doing absolutely everything we can to find her.’

  Again, I found I couldn’t speak.

  ‘I’ll make sure that Matthew gets back to you soon. Anything else you need?’

  ‘No,’ I wanted desperately to scream but I just about managed to control my voice. ‘Just my daughter back. Please.’

  Detective Mcgraw left the room, his gaze sweeping the walls as he walked out the door. I sat back down at my desk but the pain was too great to sit still, so I got up. And then I couldn’t do that either, so I sat back down. And then I saw Joan out the corner of my eye talking to Detective Mcgraw. She was doing that thing where she tucked her hair behind her ear, but over and over again like she was on fast-forward.

  I tried to peer through the door to make out what she was saying but her mouth was obscured by Conor’s arm. I leaned right over my desk and as I did so, everything fell to the floor.

  ‘All right?’ The door crashed open and Detective Mcgraw, Joan and Conor watched as I bent down and scooped up the items that had fallen to the ground. I started to cry again. The small blue glass dolphin that I’d bought back for Ava from filming in Toronto, the paperweight from The Larry Bauer Show, the small silver statue from England, with my name engraved on the bottom. The one I’d been handed the moment my life had changed forever. The very moment, in fact, that it had all started.

  ‘Tell me the story again. Please,’ Ava would beg, pirouetting with it above her head. She loved nothing more than hearing it, over and over. My rise to fame. ‘Please.’ I held it to my chest, pleading for her to come home. But when I could bear it no longer, I put it in a drawer and slammed it shut, layers of sadness clamouring for attention.

  ‘Come on.’ Conor picked up some papers that had floated to the other side of the room. ‘I’ll help you. Do you want something? I can get you stuff. To help you, I mean. Take the edge off.’ I thought about the last time I’d taken some downers after a bout of insomnia. Over a year ago – and how out of control I’d felt and how much I’d disliked it. Despite feeling as though I was climbing the walls, I would be doing Ava a disservice if I wasn’t fully compos mentis now. I shook my head.

  ‘Fine.’ He shook his phone up at me. ‘If you change your mind just tell me. And in the meantime you can give me the answers to some stuff the press have been asking.’

  ‘The press? Please, can you just deal with it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lara. I need you here to strategise with me. We can’t get anything wrong.’ He put his face right up to mine. So close I could see small bumps around his jawline and smell the scent of fresh mint gum. ‘I know this is traumatic for you but we need the public onside. To get this absolutely one hundred per cent right. It’s probably one of the most important things that we can do in the search to help her. Given you can’t go out there looking for her. This is something we can do. Do you see? You’ve got the entire world watching.’ He unwrapped another piece of gum from his pocket and bit into half of it. ‘You’ve got all of this at your fingertips. That’s more than anyone else has. So we cannot put a foot wrong now.’ I felt galvanised by the thought that there was something I could be doing. I knew we had to be careful.
I did know that. I knew a hundred per cent.

  Because I knew how it all worked, you see? I knew entirely that this was up to me and the way I played it.

  I knew, right at that moment, that the entire world could choose to love me or hate me. That they could choose to help me or vilify me.

  I inhaled and shut my eyes.

  The idea of it scared me though. More than anyone would ever know. Because I was aware that if I put one foot wrong, one tiny step out of line, a mistimed breath, or an ill-judged word and something bad happened to my little girl – people lost interest in looking for her – moved onto the next story – or even worse, turned on me, then really, I would only have myself to blame.

  August 23rd 2018

  1030hrs

  I thought about what Conor had said. Everyone’s going shit-crazy online. Everyone was watching, waiting with bated breath for the big announcement. Millions of people. I’d set everything on this announcement and was desperate for it to run smoothly. And yet the compulsion to find out what was going on in the swimming pool annexe had become too strong.

  It would take a couple of minutes to get to the pool to find out why the key fob was missing and why someone had obstructed the CCTV. I needed to make sure everything was in order before Manny started snooping around. I’d promised that he could have a brief look at the house.

  ‘Conor,’ I shouted across the room, as though I didn’t have a care in the world. ‘I’m just going to my study. To call Lily in the office. OK? Check she’s confirmed a few last-minute things.’

  Before he could stop me, I left. On the way back from the pool, I’d call Joan on the intercom to ask her to bring Ava back immediately, because I had no idea where she was. I knew she wouldn’t have gone far. She didn’t like being alone or far away from us both.

  I walked out of the living room to the back of the house. I opened the door and walked through a large Tuscan-inspired courtyard, used primarily as a walkway to the outdoor swimming pool. This opened up to a back lawn. I thought I heard footsteps behind me but when I looked, it was silent. At the very bottom of the garden was the swimming pool annexe. It was a sleek, low white building but given it was never used, I had plans to develop it into a beautiful white and airy third guest house.

  I could already see that the door was ajar. Fear pulsed through me. There were strange, tinny noises in the background. The thud of footsteps and then urgent whispers. And then the sound of faraway music. Someone must have brought their own speakers which meant that either they wouldn’t have known about the Sonos sound system that was installed in the building, or they didn’t want anyone to know they had been using the place.

  I took my shoes off, my feet hitting the soft spikes of grass. The garden had been freshly watered and the drops cooled my soles.

  Leaving my high heels on the ground, I tiptoed towards the door of the pool. I could see someone had tried to wedge a chair under the door handle to keep it shut, but for some reason the chair had fallen to the floor.

  It was open wide enough that I could just about see through the crack in the hinge, although when I looked I could only see a flash of blue and the mosaic tiles surrounding the pool. It was at that point, though, that I heard a rustle, and a cough and something that sounded like someone sobbing.

  Weird, I thought. But surely only one of the staff, taking advantage of their day off, using the facilities on their own time. I thought of who I had hired lately that might do such a thing. Rosa and Marcy had been with me for five years and I trusted them implicitly. The gardener? He was pretty new and Marcy had told me he’d been helping himself to a suspicious amount of coconut water from the fridge but he was in Mexico for two weeks. I resolved to go through everyone’s employment contract again. No personal use of the facilities without explicit permission from myself.

  I pushed the door open a fraction to see what was going on inside. I watched, for what seemed like minutes but could have only been seconds. The more I saw, the more I wanted to scream, my body alight with fear. And then I felt a soft tapping on my back. I nearly jumped, but something stopped me. Instead, I turned around and that’s when I saw Ava’s face behind me. Her golden hair was tied back and her eyes looked huge, and she was trembling all over. She looked very young in her white dressing gown. Almost like a ghost of herself. She was peering around me, directly into the pool house, watching the entire horrific scene unfold. I turned back round again to look inside the annexe. The actual pool was empty. The only signs of someone being in there was a small black box by the side of the water and then the strange sounds again, coming from the corner of the room. Howling. Crying.

  I pushed Ava back as hard as I could and slammed the door shut. My skin tingled. I thought about what I’d just seen and how I would explain it to Ava if she asked. Sex, drugs – all of that in its many guises – I could talk to her about quite easily – but this – no. Not this. I’d have to shut her down if she questioned me. That split-second image had the power to destroy my entire life if anyone found out. And given everything that was about to happen – the announcement – it made it, if that was possible, even worse. I tried to control my fear but the slithering knots inside my stomach, the drill of my heartbeat, meant I was right on the edge of a full-blown panic attack.

  ‘Ava, get up,’ I hissed, because she had slipped over on the wet grass. I knew I had to keep calm, otherwise I’d start screaming and I couldn’t alert anyone to what was going on. Mud and grass had stained Ava’s dressing gown and my breath was now coming in jagged waves.

  ‘Did you see it?’ I said smiling as broadly as I could, despite the fact I thought I was going to pass out. Oh God, I was thinking. Please, let no one come here now. I thought of who might find us. I listed through the possibilities in my mind. At least that gave me some feeling of control. Marcy and Rosa were in the kitchen. Joan was the only person who might have come and tried to find Ava. I prayed she’d be waiting in the house. I wasn’t sure I would be able to pretend everything was normal after what I’d just seen play out in my own home. The place that was my haven. The walls that were meant to protect us.

  Ava didn’t speak but her neck made tiny movements to the left and to the right like a baby bird.

  ‘Ah, just wondered if you had noticed the new painting in the pool house. Did you see what was going on in there? I was just checking it had gone up. They might want to do a . . .’ I looked around and thought for a minute I had felt rain, but realised that was ridiculous, ‘photoshoot in there. Good lighting. Let’s go back, darling, shall we?’ I thought I heard a noise again then. The light shushing of soft-soled shoes on the grass but when I looked, I saw no one. I must be going mad, I thought. Fear.

  Ava looked at me then. Her skin had paled underneath her tan and I wondered what I looked like. Whether my eyes had taken on that sunken look that they do when I go into shock. I reminded myself to ask Tavie to redo my make-up.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked. ‘In the pool annexe? Why did you push me like that?’

  ‘A surprise, my darling.’ I clapped my hands together, trying to forget what I’d just seen, and trying to get her to do the same. It was countdown time until now and I needed calm and perfection. ‘I can’t tell you now. But I promise you’ll love it. Now shall we go back inside?’

  ‘Yes.’ She grabbed at my hand. ‘Yes. Let’s.’ Her arm was still shaking. ‘Please—’ She pulled at my hand. ‘What was happening?’ she said over and over. ‘I saw. Is that . . . was that someone . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. Because in part, that had been the truth although fragments of conversations were now coming back to me and then it all made sense. I started to piece things together and it meant that unwittingly, I was a part of it all too. Oh God. ‘You didn’t see anything, did you now?’ I looked down at her. ‘Did you?’ I repeated. I could feel the crack of her knuckles in mine. ‘Did you, Ava?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But what was that—’

 
; ‘Shhhhh,’ I snapped. ‘Because if you did see anything, or you told anyone, bad things might happen.’ I knelt down, careful to pull up my dress. ‘And you don’t want very bad things to happen, do you, darling?’

  ‘No. What kind of bad things?’ She rubbed at the side of her tiny, freckled nose. I thought of her laughing earlier with Manny, and how different she looked now, the things she had just witnessed seeping up from her subconscious, casting a different light in the black of her pupils.

  ‘Just, bad stuff. You’re too young to really know. But you must forget everything you just saw. OK?’

  ‘I want to tell Joan,’ she cried. ‘She told me I should tell her. Everything that goes on. She could help?’

  ‘Did she now,’ I said, keeping my voice light. ‘Definitely not Joan, because then she might leave us. OK? That’s the thing. If she finds out, she might decide to go. Do you want that?’ I thought back to when Joan had first arrived from England six years ago just after Ava had been born. The way she had stood at our front door with one, large metal suitcase that she’d padlocked twice.

  ‘Joan said she’d never leave me,’ Ava said.

  ‘But she will. If she knows what you saw. OK? So you have to promise not to say anything. Or she’ll pack her bags tomorrow. All right? We don’t want her to go, do we? We couldn’t manage without Joan.’ It was true, I thought. She’d made herself totally indispensable to us now with Ava crying and crying if she took more than three days off in a row. I knew it was cruel to scare Ava like that, but there was no other way. I couldn’t risk everything being destroyed. We were at the cusp of greatness. True greatness, I told myself. The pinnacle of fame. And it had to be kept that way.

  ‘No.’ Ava shook her head. ‘No. I never want Joan to go.’ And the expression on her face at that point told me everything I needed to know – that I was safe. That despite the horrors of it all, despite the fact that this would probably give her nightmares for the rest of her life, Ava had weighed things up in her head and her heart, and would never, ever breathe a word of the things she’d just seen.