Your Guilty Secret

by Rebecca Thornton

  So I’m going to try and work this out and take a break until the papers get wind of this. But until next time.

  Here with the latest updates on missing Ava King, brought to you by Lara King’s number one fan.

  Twitter: @ryan_gosling_wannabe

  September 1st 2018

  0800hrs

  ‘Someone’s got hold of the autopsy report,’ said Matthew. He’d come to find me in the kitchen as Joan and I were organising Ava’s memorial service. ‘A random guy on the web. It’s gone crazy online apparently. I don’t know how it got out. I’ve left a message with the station asking for someone to call me back to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Show me,’ I said to Matthew.

  ‘No. Let’s wait until Conor gets here.’

  ‘Show me now,’ I demanded. He handed over his mobile phone. I read the words in front me.

  ‘Oh God. This must be crap,’ I said, relieved. ‘I mean firstly whoever wrote this has got it wrong. She ate at the announcement,’ I told Joan and Matthew. ‘I’m sure she did,’ I said, although my voice wavered. At that point I wasn’t sure of anything.

  ‘She said she had eaten,’ I repeated. ‘Joan, when did you feed her?’

  ‘I gave her lunch,’ she said. ‘Whilst you were having your hair and make-up done. We had a late lunch and then she said she was hungry again later and that she was going to ask you to go with her to get some food that had been prepared for the journalists.’

  I thought back to the day of the announcement. Her small voice begging and pleading, asking me to go with her to the table of canapés. ‘There’s too many people,’ she’d whispered. I thought back to her getting ready to sleep. I’m hungry. I’m hungry, she’d said. But I’d dismissed her because I thought she’d been time-wasting. Oh God.

  ‘She said she had. I know it. I was going to take her for ice cream.’ I thought back to my internal struggle at calling the paps. If only I’d called them. They would have known. The world would have known that I was thinking about my daughter. That I hadn’t intentionally starved her. Letting the world know I’d made a mistake by being on my phone was one thing. Having forgotten to give her breakfast was another matter entirely.

  ‘Didn’t you check?’ Joan asked.

  ‘No. I trusted that she had eaten.’ I felt the judgement leaking from her every pore.

  ‘Well, Anthony. He normally cooks.’ I went silent. ‘Anyway, that day, I told her. I told her to wait for me. Whilst I got ready that morning. I asked her to go downstairs. I thought she’d . . .’ I trailed off but Joan had left the room. Matthew turned to me.

  ‘This isn’t good, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’ve done things that aren’t good either,’ I snapped, instantly regretting the words the minute they came out my mouth. He shook his head at me and walked towards the door.

  ‘Don’t. Don’t even go there. I know you lost your daughter but after everything I’ve done for you . . .’

  ‘Done for me?’ We could both hear Joan somewhere near the hallway. He put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘I suggest you call Conor to try and sort out your mess.’

  I was left alone then. I didn’t want to look at what was online. I refused to let myself, but the longer it was silent around me, the more intense the feeling and the louder the voice in my head became. Just a quick look, I told myself. Just to see if you are all blaming me. See what you are saying about me. It had to stop. My reliance on you. I knew it. But it was like an unbearable itch. And it wasn’t like you turning on me was going to hinder the search for my girl any longer, which made it even worse. That I was relying on you for my own vanity’s sake.

  I waited until I was sure Matthew and Joan had gone. I could hear the creak of the floorboards upstairs. It would take Matthew a good forty seconds to get all the way back downstairs and so I got my laptop, which automatically logged in to all my social media.

  People were beginning to turn on me. I could see that. People who had been so eager to offer their condolences. Mary Mae, who I’d had a public spat with years ago. ‘Devastated to see news of Ava King’s #autopsy. Starving child. Neglected kid.’ And then I scrolled down and saw a never-ending stream of it. People who had been so supportive of me before Ava had died. How quick they were to turn.

  It was OK, I told myself. I would try and keep Ava’s name and reputation clean for her sake. Her fans. They would still be onside, and so I logged on to a few Twitter accounts that I knew would be supportive, no matter what but even those had changed their tone.

  @Eat_clean_healthy. As a recovering anorexic I find this awful. Lara King obviously making her daughter anorexic for the media #badparenting #autopsy #AvaKing

  I scrolled down and down and the comments only got worse and worse. People saying they wanted to kill me. That I didn’t deserve to be a mother. That the truth was now coming out.

  @team_Kim_Cattrall Let’s slay the bitch.

  @team_SJP I’m with you. For once. Let’s unite.

  @Carly_violet Let’s all unfollow Lara King. She doesn’t deserve our love.

  @Jamie_J Done.

  The last two tweets had been retweeted forty thousand times already and I had lost nearly fifteen thousand followers. I noticed Conor or one of his team had been tweeting from my account, right up until seven a.m. Tweets about love, grief, loss, finding happiness. He must have scheduled the tweets to go out and forgotten to delete them whilst all this was going on.

  People just kept on and on. People I hadn’t thought of for months, if not years. I logged on to the news headlines to see video footage of Frankie sitting in his office. The sunlight gleamed through his window, reflecting on the silver, bronze and glass award statues around the room.

  ‘So sad. I just wish things had been different. That I had had a chance to get to know her and look after her.’ Bastard.

  Everyone was disassociating themselves from me. A tightness started to creep around my head. The edges of a migraine. I went to find some Tylenol when the doorbell rang. I looked at the video intercom to see Conor, his face white, his eyes sunken and red.

  ‘Matthew called me.’ He walked straight past me to the living room, when I opened the door. ‘Told me he thought you were losing it.’

  ‘It looks like the same could be said for you,’ I told him.

  He sat down and rubbed his face.

  ‘Shit. I don’t know how to contain this.’ I was glad of Conor. Glad that he was so invested in his job that he wasn’t interested in making me feel bad. Glad for me too.

  ‘But we need to. You realise that. Don’t you? We need to sort this out before the memorial. And whatever happens after. With you, I mean. I don’t want you to have to go into hiding for the rest of your life.’ I had no idea he was even considering something so drastic. ‘And even if your career ends now,’ he went on, ‘I have my own reputation to protect.’ He stared at me; I was shocked. I knew Conor was cut-throat, but there was some naïve part of me that thought he might have cared about me and my career. Stupid, really. I should have known.

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ My mind pulled back to Ava. The autopsy. The gash to her head. Dehydration. I knew what happened to the body in a state of extreme dehydration after I’d done a piece to camera for a Syrian charity. Confusion, hallucination, delirium, kidney failure. I thought of her stumbling around, unable to work out where or who she was. Then I thought about the pathologist opening up her small body. And then I remembered the car journey to Laurel Canyon. Her handing me her opened bottle of water.

  ‘You must drink lots. Like you always tell me. Water is good for your skin and replenishes you.’ I had been meaning to give it back to her but I hadn’t. I had drunk most of it and then set it aside, despite the fact that the second bottle of water had been right next to me. My heart felt shattered. I had to tell myself to stop, or the guilt would destroy me. I told myself she wouldn’t have wanted that but the thoughts kept going, a cattle prod to the brain. />
  ‘My website?’ I offered. ‘Should I write another entry? Like about me being on my mobile? A public apology?’

  ‘No. That won’t cut it. It will have to be something more drastic. Something about Ava refusing to eat. This is going to have to be the big one. Trust me on this. The memorial is in what, five days? We cannot afford more people turning. And I’m trying to hold off this other woman selling her story. The one we discussed. The woman who keeps emailing from England.’ He looked at me out the corner of his eye. ‘She’s been contacting the office again. Over and over. Desperate now. Saying she’s not going to let up. That she wants to speak to you and if not, she’s going to tell the press everything.’

  ‘Fine, well, let me speak to her then.’ I thought back to the nightclub. I remembered her face like yesterday, white and ghoulish under the lights. ‘She’s a coke-head anyway or she was back then,’ I told him, furious that she thought she could still hold one over me, all these years later. And then I remembered the forums and the person who had commented on the England thread. I wondered if it had been her too. ‘We can do a smear campaign,’ I said. ‘Get started on that. She was fucked when she was pregnant. What does that make her? What kind of a person?’

  ‘A coke-head? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. And as I was thinking back to the nightclub, he held up a photograph of a woman. ‘Her last email, a few hours ago, had her name and number. I think that she’s desperate for contact with you. I’ve looked her up. There’s only one woman with that name on Facebook and Twitter. This her?’ He waved the picture he’d printed off in front of my face.

  She was about my age, with long brown hair and a smile that sparked something inside me, even all these years later. Her eyes glowed with a kindness that radiated out of the image into the room.

  ‘Kaycee,’ I whispered, at the same time that Conor said her name.

  ‘Kaycee, something,’ Conor said. ‘Hang on.’ He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his emails.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Kaycee. It’s not Carys. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do this to me just after I lost my daughter?’ I turned to Conor. ‘It’s Kaycee.’ I thought of Ben. I thought of myself, young, filled with hope and foolishness, and I sat down and wept.

  Ryans-world.com

  Entry: September 2nd, 1300hrs

  Author: Ryan

  Grief makes you angry, right? That might explain the way I’m feeling right now.

  Hands up who’s seen the headlines?

  In case any of you need a recap, here goes.

  ‘Lara is devastated to learn that the public have taken the autopsy report into their own hands. The truth of the matter is something very simple. Ava suffered from intense motion sickness and therefore before any long journeys, whether in the car or on a plane, she would refrain from eating.’

  Who calls bullshit? The press statement wasn’t even delivered by her. It was her PR team, who contacted the LA Times to set the record straight before any more harm was done.

  And I can tell you how I know.

  It’s right there. In her blog. I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Lara and Ava’s entry about travel. I remembered it right away. As soon as I saw the statement about travel sickness. I remembered it because I was taking my cousin on a camping trip, so I read it with interest. For those of you that need a little recap, these are some of the things that Lara said:

  Ava loves car journeys the most. Even really short ones. She will pack a blanket, a bag full of toys, a juice box and some snacks which she’ll lay out next to her on the back seat. Top tip from the King household is to buy some great audiobooks. We’ve posted a selection of Ava’s absolute faves, right here.

  So either she’s lying now, or she was lying in her blog. Either way, she’s a liar, and that makes me mad.

  And she should have the decency to tell us direct. She is too distraught to speak to us but then there were those automated tweets that kept coming and coming as news of the autopsy came out. I should imagine Ava was distraught as she wandered around, trying to find her mother.

  I’m getting so angry thinking about it now. Mad as hell. First she was on her phone whilst Ava went missing. Now this. And the fact that Ava’s body was found so far away from where Lara says they were. She wasn’t the person I thought she was and now . . . now she can’t even look us in the eye. Something just doesn’t add up. We’d been there for her all this time and I know she’s grieving. I know she’s a mother who has lost her child but we’re all grieving too.

  ‘You didn’t know her,’ you might say. ‘What the fuck have you got to be sad about?’ But you see, we did. We did know Ava King. She represented something that many of us don’t have.

  And so did Lara.

  Hope.

  And love.

  And now, it seems, there was neither and if that means taking matters into my own hands, then so be it.

  Twitter: @ryan_gosling_wannabe

  September 2nd 2018

  1600hrs

  ‘Shall I contact Ben? He was my old manager in the UK,’ I asked Conor. ‘And he was engaged to Kaycee.’ I thought about Ben. His hangdog expression whenever he was tired or hungry. My heart squeezed tight. The last person to have known the ‘old’ me.

  ‘No,’ Conor said. ‘Leave it. There’s enough going on.’

  ‘Fine. I’ve got to do some organising for the memorial. I’ll speak to you later. Thanks for sorting the autopsy stuff out. Stay here. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll send some food in for you.’ I shut down my laptop. I hadn’t dared to look online since Conor had contacted the press and told me what he’d done. Whereas hours earlier, the pull had been strong enough for me to drop everything, now I couldn’t bear to look. It was like I’d overdone it. I felt sick, mentally bloated with it all.

  I went into the kitchen where I called a meeting with Joan and Matthew. Chef Anthony had come back for the first time since Ava had died, after everyone had been sent away during the investigation. His presence lent some normality to the situation. He’d laid out a colourful spread of sauerkraut, chia seeds, blackberries, bee pollen, porridge breads and smashed avocado, but in truth, I felt like something loaded with carbs.

  ‘Can you whip me up a plate of pancakes?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course.’ He tied up his apron and went for the buckwheat flour. ‘Matthew and Joan? You too?’ They both nodded.

  ‘Normal flour please, Chef.’ He smiled and laid the ingredients out on the work surface.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s call Lily. She’s expecting us in five.’ I’d arranged a conference call with her about the schedule for the memorial. I saw Joan looking at me out the corner of her eye, her hand spread over the screen of her phone but I caught sight of the headline she’d been reading through her fingers.

  Autopsy findings down to Ava’s car sickness

  She said nothing, just stared at the table, which I found unnerving after her earlier explosion about the swimming pool. I tried to make small talk with her but she would only discuss plans for the memorial. The more distant she got the more I felt the need to connect with her, in some sick and horrific way that I’d never experienced before.

  ‘Look. Lily’s done the timetable for the day,’ I said. ‘Now. Firstly, caterers.’ We all went silent, thinking about the last event we’d organised. The announcement. We’d chosen to use the same caterers after a lot of discussion and I hoped that they would do a sterling job.

  ‘Now’s not the time to try someone new,’ Lily had persuaded. ‘I know Fantine. I know how she works. It’s too late to be risking another company now.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, thinking of the two employees with Bear Productions who hadn’t passed the police security checks following the announcement. ‘As long as she’s sure all of her staff are vetted. Any security breaches will mean I never use her again and that no one in Hollywood goes near her.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lily said without batting an eyelid. ‘She’s going to do canapés
for the three hundred VIP guests you’ve listed, Lara.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘And drinks?’

  ‘Well, Chanson have . . .’ Lily went silent.

  ‘Chanson have what?’ I looked over at Conor.

  ‘They’ve pulled sponsorship for the champagne,’ she said. ‘They thought it best in light of the . . .’ I heard her hesitate down the phone and then she said briskly, ‘in light of the autopsy findings. They thought alcohol wouldn’t be appropriate and it didn’t sit with their ethos.’

  ‘Fine,’ I sighed, pretending not to care. ‘Anyone else lined up?’

  ‘I’m looking into it now.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I wanted everything to be absolutely perfect, but I was also enraged with Chanson.

  ‘That’s it for the moment. The band is booked. And the production company are ready for your performance, Lara. You’ll be introduced by the head of the missing persons charity. And then we’ll do the charity single straight after.’ I started to cry. Everyone was silent, waiting for me to finish. This seemed to happen more and more often, that I’d burst into tears, sometimes for hours on end. This bout only lasted ten or so minutes. I saw Joan and Anthony avoiding eye contact with me.

  ‘Lily, we’ll have to ring you back,’ said Joan, leaning closer to the mouthpiece. Matthew came over and pulled me into a hug.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I know. It’s OK. I’m sorry.’ He pushed back my hair and kissed me. ‘Time will make this easier to manage. OK?’

  ‘It won’t. But thank you,’ I inhaled and called Lily back.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I told her. ‘Right. Where were we? Security?’

  Lily didn’t miss a beat. ‘We’ve got Arrows and I’ve drafted in another company that deal with the royals in the UK for a double-whammy. OK?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Well done.’ And I hung up.

  ‘Finished?’ Conor said, walking in and reaching over to the plate of pancakes. ‘Can I?’ But he’d already crammed one into his mouth before anyone could reply.