The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  “Let me,” he says, taking it from me. He used to do that in the early days: I’d wash my hair, he’d comb it and dry it for me. He combs carefully, his hands gentle. He combs out the knots and his breath smells sweet and I wonder if he was drinking downstairs, if he felt the need to drink to settle his nerves before coming up to see me.

  He puts down the comb, but he doesn’t get up. Instead he leans and kisses my shoulder. I force myself not to tense. His lips move up to my ear.

  “Patrick, my head hurts and I’m tired…”

  “You’re always tired these days,” he mutters, and his fingers dig into my biceps. When I wince, he kisses my shoulder again, runs his fingers up and down the red marks he’s left on my arms with one hand, unbuttoning his shirt with the other. I close my eyes as he tugs at my towel and slides his hand underneath.

  Once. Once upon a time, like in a fairy tale, my mouth would go dry watching Patrick take off his shirt. My heart would pound and I’d rush to help him, impatient to strip him bare. His stomach is still flat, his shoulders wide and strong, but it seems like forever since desire was making my heart pound as he closed the bedroom door.

  “Ssh,” he says, pushing me backward onto the bed. “Let’s take advantage of being alone…”

  I close my eyes, but all I can see is him and Caroline.

  “No,” I say, pushing him away. “I can’t.” I get up, start pulling on my clothes.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need some time alone. I need time to think.”

  He gets up and stands between me and the door. A trickle of fear threatens to become a flood. What if he doesn’t let me leave? I glance at my bedside table. What if he goes looking for other hidden secrets, finds the passport applications?

  Does he see the fear in my face? He sees something, because he moves closer to me.

  I hear a door open—one of the children’s. Music comes on, loud through the wall. Patrick’s head turns toward the noise and it breaks whatever spell was building. The tension leaves his body and he sags.

  “Okay,” he says. “Of course. Fine. Time, yes. Take some time, and then we’ll talk. We can sort things out.”

  I wanted to go to the studio, but I didn’t want to see Ben. I’ve always believed the watcher had to be Hooper or, lately, Tom, someone connected with the house and the murders. But since I saw that painting Ben did, his collections of shells, I’ve wondered if it could be him. He’s walked past the house so many times—he could have been watching as I buried the pills. And it was him who found the baby shoes, wasn’t it? Maybe he has some agenda of his own, some weird obsession with Patrick, a long-dead friendship that Patrick has never mentioned.

  Instead of going to the studio, I walked into town, constantly looking behind me to check Patrick wasn’t following. I went to a pub—a bright, touristy pub near the fairground where I recognized no one and no one recognized me. I sat there for too long, nursing a glass of wine, startling every time the door opened, paranoia and anxiety growing, afraid to go home, but afraid not to because Joe and Mia were back there with Patrick.

  An hour. I was only out an hour, but Patrick reaches for me as soon as I step back inside the house. He wraps me in his arms and holds me too tight. I can barely breathe, but he holds me tighter. He’s breathing fast and trembling. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he says, his eyes red. I try to move, but he won’t let me go. This close, I can smell sweat and sour alcohol, and that’s not how Patrick smells.

  An hour. That’s all. What’s he going to be like when the three of us get on a plane and leave for a month? What will he be like if he finds us when we return?

  He relaxes his hold and I step away. His fear is contagious. This isn’t Patrick. This isn’t right.

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it’s not. I say it to stop the fear—the fear breaking Patrick into pieces and the fear rising in me. It dampens the anger, douses it, with icy-cold trickles of panic.

  “Things are going to get better,” he says. “I have a meeting tomorrow at work. Things will be back to normal. The house…”

  “This fucking house,” I say, and he recoils. I take a deep breath and step away. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live here, treading on the bones of that poor dead family. Trying to pretend it’s our home, when it’s not. It’s not, and it can’t ever be. All it will ever be is the Murder House, and the only people living here should be the ghosts.”

  “It’s not the house. It’s not—”

  “If we hadn’t come here, Joe would never have been attacked. You would never have lost your temper with Mia.”

  He closes his eyes. “No. It’s pressure of work, not the house. Like my dad… you wouldn’t understand.”

  He opens his eyes and stares at me. “John Evans stole this house. His father bought it while me and my parents lay bloody in the dirt and he gave it to John, like it was a new football. God, I hate them—all of them, with their lying shark smiles, all charm on the surface, rotten inside.”

  “I thought you were friends. That’s what I heard.”

  “John fucking Evans stole the house and I got it back. That’s what matters. Mia and Joe were out of control long before we moved here and things would have been worse if we’d stayed in Cardiff. And you… you, Sarah. You took an overdose and almost died. That wasn’t in this house, was it? No, moving to this house is what saved you.”

  Patrick’s face is white. “It was never John Evans’s house—he stole it, he ruined it, and I wish he’d—”

  “You wish what?”

  Patrick shakes his head and pushes past me.

  “You wish what?” I shout, but he’s already gone, slamming the front door behind him.

  The next morning I’m standing in the front garden staring down at the border under the window when Ben walks up to the gate. I’m looking for another footprint, a hint of who might have dug up those pills, small or large—wouldn’t that give me a clue? But there’s nothing. And now here’s Ben, passing by again.

  “I wanted to check you were okay,” Ben says, his hand on the gate. I don’t say it to him, but I saw him coming. I was upstairs and he had paused in the exact spot I saw the watcher on the first night.

  “Sorry,” I say. “There’s been stuff going on. I’ve been distracted.”

  “I haven’t heard you up in the studio.”

  I didn’t know he’d been looking out for me.

  “Can I come in?” he asks.

  A group of girls in school uniforms walk past and stare at us. One whispers something and they all burst into laughter. What if they tell Mia, if Mia tells Patrick about the man on my doorstep, standing too close?

  “I’m gardening,” I say, even though I have no gardening tools, even though my feet are bare. “Let’s stay out here.” All I can think about is that damn painting of him and Patrick, and I don’t want to be in the house alone with him.

  “What are you going to plant here?” Ben asks, coming to stand next to me.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “It used to be beautiful,” he says.

  I turn to him. “You saw it?”

  He nods. “When we were still friends, I’d come over sometimes. Patrick’s parents liked gardening. We weren’t allowed in the house very often. Boys can be so messy.”

  He sounds like he’s repeating words he’d heard. I can imagine Patrick’s mother saying it, shooing them out when they came in with muddy feet and sticky hands. When I knew Patrick’s parents, they didn’t have a garden, just that crowded, dark little rented bungalow, a few paving slabs for outdoor space. I don’t remember them having a single plant.

  I put my foot in the earth, right where I thought I saw that original footprint. There’s something hard under my heel. I crouch and dig my hand in, pulling out a plastic figure, a little white Stormtrooper. I wiggle my fingers farther into the dirt and there they are, half the cast of the original Star Wars films, plastic corpses emerging from the ground.

  I
pick them up and clean them off. They’re still recognizable, but some of them are warped, half-melted, as if they’ve been pulled out of a fire. Han Solo is featureless, his head nothing but a melted blob.

  They weren’t there when I buried the pills. They weren’t there when Patrick turned the border over just after we moved in.

  “I remember these,” Ben says, and I go rigid.

  He nods at the tortured figures in my hand. “That was one hell of a punishment.”

  “Punishment? What do you mean?”

  He sighs. “I don’t know what Patrick did, but his father threw his Star Wars figures in the fire. That’s how he got the scars on his arms. He put his hands in to rescue them.”

  How had he said he’d gotten those scars? A fireworks accident. A rocket gone astray. “Why would his dad do that?”

  Ben frowns. “That was what he did. Give Patrick something he really wanted, then take it away. Good thing they never let him have a pet.”

  That’s not what his father was like, no. But most of what I know is from Patrick, and haven’t I learned recently that not everything Patrick tells me is truth? I open my hand and let the figures fall back to the ground, scooping earth back over them, burying them once more.

  It can’t have been Ben who put them there. Can it?

  I look at him but can’t read the expression on his face. He’s staring down at the shallow grave I’ve made for the Star Wars toys.

  “Patrick’s the friend who needed sanctuary, isn’t he?”

  Ben hesitates, then nods. “He was off school once, for days. When he came back, it was assumed he’d been ill. He was thin and pale and too quiet. But I saw him when we got changed for PE and he was covered with bruises. I asked him about it—I knew things weren’t right at home. But he was hostile. He started distancing himself from all of us. I kept an eye on him, though,” he says. “And later, when he came back, I gave him a key to the studio.”

  “When he came back from where?”

  Ben looks at me. “It… I’m sorry. I misspoke.”

  “I don’t know who he is anymore,” I say. “Since we moved back here, I’ve found out all these things.”

  “Like what?”

  Like he was friends with you but I’ve never heard your name mentioned, I could say but don’t. The ease I felt around Ben after our first meeting has all gone. “Like this,” I say, pointing down to the half-buried Star Wars figures. “Like that he was friends with John Evans. Like that I’m worried he’s been sleeping with my best friend.”

  He blinks, leans down to pull up a dandelion. “Is it the first time?”

  “First time what?”

  “First time he’s been unfaithful.”

  “Yes. At least, I think so.” The doubt grows more doubt, gives birth to a whole litter of doubt that squirms in my belly.

  “Are you sure? Can you always account for where he’s been?”

  Is he still talking about Patrick and another woman? “What do you mean?”

  “He was always…”

  “Always what?”

  “He never had one girlfriend at a time. Never anyone steady. He had a string of girls who’d follow him around.”

  I can’t picture it. I have no doubt girls fancied him at school—I’ve seen photos: he was as beautiful then as he was when I met him. But I can’t imagine him with loads of girlfriends—he’s always been so single-minded, so focused on one passion at a time. For all these years, it’s been me.

  “Patrick? Really?”

  “A different girl every other week, it seemed. Never letting anyone get close. I saw it the summer before I left for university. Patrick and John Evans teamed up, worked their way through half the town.”

  Patrick and John Evans… Tom had been right, then. About them being friends. Which means Patrick is still lying. What else is he lying about?

  “He told me he hated him.”

  “Maybe he did, later. When John got the house. I don’t know—I’d left town for college by then. But at the time, before John got together with Marie, they’d hunt together.”

  Hunt.

  “Patrick had a type,” he says. “Perhaps that’s why I felt the need to give you that key. All his girlfriends looked like you and I remember how he treated them.”

  Caroline doesn’t. You couldn’t get any further from me than Caroline. Could Mia have been wrong about what she saw? I haven’t been able to imagine it—maybe because it isn’t true. What did Caroline say that night in the hospital—it’s not what you think. I feel a surge of hope. God, I want Mia to have gotten it wrong.

  “When Patrick left town for university, and John and Marie moved into this house, I assumed that was the last I’d see of him. But I came back during vacations and I’d see him around sometimes—not regularly, but every couple of months or so. He took up with John and his group again like nothing had happened.”

  But what about the things Patrick had said about John Evans? It didn’t sound like friendship. No mention in his bitter words of evenings spent in the pub, a friendship or acquaintance, or whatever the fuck it was, lasting longer than me and Caroline. I wish he’d… What had Patrick been going to say?

  I think back to the day the story came out. The house, Patrick’s house, now our house, blown up huge on the front page of all the papers, not just the local ones. Welcome to the Murder House. Not there yet, the spray-painted graffiti: the walls were bare then.

  Oh, God, Patrick, isn’t that your old house? I remember saying, and Patrick picking up the paper, staring at the photo.

  What did he say? How did he look? Did he go pale? Did his hands shake? I can’t remember. He sounded as shocked as I was, I remember that. There was a photo, underneath the house. A photo of the family… Did you know them? I asked him, didn’t I? Yes, I asked. I close my eyes, make myself go back there, make myself wait for his answer. Patrick, younger, no gray in his hair. Me, longer hair, not as skinny, just a few weeks after Mia’s birth. Did you know them?

  No.

  That was his answer. He said no, put down the paper, and left the room. I must have thrown out the paper, not wanting to look at the house, at the poor dead faces of that family anymore.

  What about before? The few days before the story came out… the day it happened. Was he home every night? Or was he in the pub with John Evans, the last person to see him before he was murdered? I don’t know. How am I supposed to remember? It was more than fifteen bloody years ago. Mia was not yet sleeping through the night. I was tired, distracted. Every month or so, that’s how often Ben is saying Patrick was coming back here and meeting up with John Evans. Once a month for how many years that I never knew about? What was it Tom said to me, that Patrick knew something about Hooper and the murders? What does he think my husband knows?

  All these weeks I’ve been staring out of the window, looking for the watcher, the monster, the bogeyman, scared that Ian Hooper had come back to town with his bloody knife. What if the bogeyman has been inside the house the whole time?

  I hear the wind chimes again, fainter this time.

  Please. Does she know you at all? After so long with you, she can worry about such a stupid fucking thing? Of all the things to worry about, you turning serial killer is not one of them. You’re good, though. Your mask is almost seamless these days.

  I could give her better things to worry about. I could give her things that will keep her awake for years, worms of worry to burrow their way into her brain, eating, eating, eating…

  But, really, haven’t I already told her enough? Gifts on the doorstep and hints about all the secrets still hidden in the house.

  Slide my glass across the bar to be refilled. The barman smiles at me. “I thought it was you,” he says.

  Thought it was who? The me I am now, or the me I was then?

  CHAPTER 29

  There’s a knock on the door at ten o’clock at night and it sends a jitter of fear through me. I pull the curtain aside and a different kind of fear moves thr
ough me as I see not Ian Hooper and his bloody knife, or Tom Evans, but Caroline. I’ve been expecting her to turn up ever since she came to the hospital. She’s left messages and I’ve deleted them all. The tiny hope that Mia was wrong is still there—but if I speak to her… It’s not what you think, she said. But what else could it be?

  I open the front door and stare at her. She’s not wearing any makeup and her face is blotchy and washed-out. I can’t remember the last time I saw Caroline without makeup. I used to tease her that it was tattooed on.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” I go to slam the door, but she grabs it, won’t let go.

  “I know it’s late, but I had to wait for Sean to come home. You wouldn’t answer my calls. I had to see you.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything left to say.”

  “Listen to me, Sarah. Do you think it was coincidence that Mia was there when he kissed me?”

  Not wrong, then. The kiss was real.

  “Do you really think we’d get so carried away we’d do that knowing she was there? He set it up because he knew it would split you and me up, that it would turn you and Mia against me.”

  I glance behind me, looking for Patrick. He’d said he was going to bed, but what if he’d heard Caroline knocking? I step outside, pulling the door closed behind me.

  “Stop it—stop making bloody excuses.”

  “I won’t. Not until you listen and think about it. I don’t know what lies he’s been feeding you, but do you really think I’ve been harboring feelings for Patrick? Patrick?”

  It doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn’t. But it happened.

  “You know when it was? After you came home from the hospital—I saw the For Sale sign go up on the house and I came around. Did he tell you? Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t let me see you—we were arguing and suddenly he grabbed my arm and kissed me. He smiled. I couldn’t make sense of it—couldn’t work out why he’d done it. I never told you because it wasn’t… it wasn’t a passionate kiss. There was nothing in it that said he was the slightest bit interested in me. He must have known Mia was there, Sarah. He knew exactly what he was doing.” I shake my head, but she presses on. “Think about it. I won’t stay now, but read this—Patrick has been lying to you. Read this, even if you don’t believe anything else I’ve said.”