The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  He shakes his head firmly and she sees a muscle in his cheek pulsing with anger.

  “Oh,” she calls back to him, “by the way. I bumped into Keziah just now. Remember Keziah, who I went to primary school with? She’s invited me to a girls’ night, a reunion thing, at the Ducks. Tomorrow night. You’re all right staying in with Noah, aren’t you?”

  There’s a dull silence from the living room and Tallulah holds her breath.

  A moment later Zach is in the doorway of the kitchen, flexing and unflexing his fists. “Sorry,” he says. “Keziah who?”

  “Keziah Whitmore. I went to primary school with her. She works at the co-op now.”

  “Right. So. Let’s get this straight. After knowing you for nearly five years, I’ve never heard of this person before and now you’re just going for drinks.”

  “Yes,” she says, closing the fridge door. “Tomorrow night.”

  “And how are you going to pay for that?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Mum will probably let me have some money.”

  “So here’s me, working my-fucking-self to death, day in, day out, never spend a penny on anything, not a fucking penny. Single-handedly trying to get us a place to live, and you’re just going to the pub with some slag called Keziah who I’ve never even fucking heard of.”

  “I don’t ask you to work so hard,” she replies evenly. “I don’t expect you not to spend any money on anything. I don’t tell you you can’t go out. And, frankly, I don’t even want us to buy a flat. I like living here with Mum.”

  She glances at him briefly. She can see the clenched jaw start to grind.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t want to move out. I want to stay here, with Mum.”

  He grunts. “Christ, you are such a fucking child, Tallulah. You still haven’t grown up, have you? You still think life is all swanning about, doing what you like, going to the pub, hanging out with Mummy. Well, it’s not. We have a child. We have responsibilities. We’re not kids anymore, Tallulah. It’s time to grow the fuck up.” He looms over her now and she can feel the heat of his breath on her face.

  “I think you should move out,” she says.

  A taut silence follows.

  “What?”

  “I think we should split up. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

  Tallulah’s gaze stays on the floor but she can feel Zach’s rage coalescing in the air around her.

  Another drawn-out silence follows and Tallulah waits. Waits to be hit, waits to be screamed at, waits for the anger that exists so close to the tight seams of Zach’s psyche finally to burst through. But it doesn’t. After a few seconds she feels his presence soften and shrink, sees his shoulders slope, and then he is gone. She follows him into the hallway. He is leaning over Noah’s sleeping form in his buggy and whispering to him. Tallulah feels a terrible chill run through all of her. She moves closer and watches, her body primed and ready to do whatever it takes to protect Noah from Zach. She hears the click of the safety harness being unclipped and watches as Zach carefully plucks Noah from his buggy and lifts him toward his shoulder. Noah doesn’t stir; he is heavy with sleep. His big head flops gently into the crook of Zach’s neck and Zach kisses him softly on his crown.

  His eyes meet Tallulah’s over the top of their child’s head and he says, in a voice hard with resolve, “I am not going anywhere, Tallulah, I am not going fucking anywhere.”

  38

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  Sophie sits at her desk in the hallway of the cottage by the front door. The weird burning-petrol smell in the hallway that’s been there since they moved in has finally started to fade and she’s moved her work area here where the window overlooks the college grounds so she can watch the comings and goings in the school. Shaun told her last night what the detectives had found buried in the flower bed outside the accommodation block; he said it was a lever of some kind, a piece of metal with a handle and a bent tip, very old, apparently. Nobody knows what it is or why it was buried there or by whom. It’s a total mystery.

  But there’s another mystery preying on Sophie’s mind.

  The cardboard sign had been spotted by Lexie Mulligan, Kerryanne’s daughter, just hours after she returned home from a trip to Florida. She claims to have seen it while standing on her mother’s terrace, vaping. Earlier today, Sophie had gone for a walk around the accommodation block and stared upward to Kerryanne Mulligan’s terrace and felt a jolt in the pit of her stomach at the stark realization that the terrace was far too low down to see across the flower bed to the spot where the cardboard sign had been left, and she’d known immediately that, for some reason, Lexie had been lying.

  Sophie flips open the lid of her laptop now and googles Lexie Mulligan. She clicks the link to her Instagram account, which is called @lexiegoes. Lexie looks very different in her photos from how she looks in real life. In real life she is attractive but has a certain flatness to her features, a lack of delicacy, but in these shots she looks like a model. There she is in a black satin dressing gown printed with roses, cross-legged and sipping a cocktail on her Florida balcony with the backdrop of a heart-shaped swimming pool. The accompanying text is a thinly veiled promotion for the hotel and is full of hashtags relating to the hotel and its parent company. Sophie glances at the top of the page and sees that Lexie has 72,000 followers. She assumes that the hotel was a freebie as recompense for the publicity and she assumes that with that many followers (Sophie herself has 812) Lexie must get lots of freebies and lots of payouts from the businesses she promotes and she wonders why a grown woman with what looks like a great career is still living with her mum in a tiny flat in a boarding school in Surrey.

  As she thinks this she glances again through the window and sees Lexie herself striding across the campus. She’s wearing patterned leggings and a black hoodie and her hair is in two plaits. She has a carrier bag that looks like the ones they give you at the co-op and she looks a million miles from the girl in the Instagram posts. Sophie watches her as she heads toward the accommodation block. A few minutes later she sees the door open onto Kerryanne’s terrace and Lexie appears with a mug of tea. She gazes out across the campus and into the woods beyond for a moment, before turning and heading back indoors.

  For some reason there is something unsettling about the way she does this, something strangely forensic. Sophie glances down at Lexie’s Instagram feed again and scrolls downward and downward, through Cuba, Colombia, Quebec, Saint Bart’s, Copenhagen, Belfast, the Hebrides, Beijing, Nepal, Liverpool, Moscow. Her head spins with the breadth of Lexie’s traveling. She keeps scrolling until she gets to something more familiar: it’s Lexie in front of the beautiful main doors to the school. Behind her the light from the stained glass in the reception area falls into colored puddles on the tiled floor. She’s wearing an ankle-length fake-fur coat and a green woolen hat with a furry bobble. By her side is a pair of huge suitcases. The caption says, Home sweet home.

  Sophie does a double take. She scrolls through the comments and sees that Lexie’s followers are under the impression that these are the doors to her house. That this is her home. And Lexie does nothing to correct these misapprehensions. She lets her followers believe that yes, this is where she lives.

  Sophie sees a comment from @kerryannemulligan:

  And your mummy is so happy to have you back!

  She blinks. Kerryanne appears to be supporting the illusion that Lexie lives in a Georgian mansion.

  She’s about to start scrolling deeper into Lexie’s feed when she hears a knock at the back door. She closes her laptop and walks through the cottage. She calls out hello.

  “Hi, Sophie, it’s me, Liam.”

  Sophie’s breath catches. “Oh,” she says. “Hi. Just one minute.”

  She checks her reflection in the wall mirror and pulls her hair away from her face. Then she opens the door and greets Liam with a smile.

  He stands before her clutching a novel in his hands.

  She gla
nces down and see that it is her book, the first of the series, the one she wrote when she was still a teaching assistant, the one she had no idea anyone would ever actually read. And now here it is, being held in the good, strong hands of a handsome boy called Liam, and her words, she realizes with a jolt, have been inside his head.

  “I’m really sorry to disturb you,” Liam says, breaking into her train of thought, “but I finished your book, last night. And I just—I loved it. I mean, I really, really loved it. And I just wondered, if you had a minute, I’d love to ask you a question about it. But I can come back another time if you’re busy?”

  She stares at him for a second; then she shakes her head a little and says, “Oh. Thank you. I wasn’t expecting… I mean, yes, sorry. Please come in.”

  He follows her into the kitchen and pats the spine of her book against the palm of his free hand a couple of times. “I won’t keep you. I just, er… But your book, there was something I wanted to ask you. Susie Beets. Is she you?”

  Sophie blinks. It’s not the question she was expecting.

  “I mean,” he continues, “you have the same initials. And she’s blond and in her thirties and comes from South London and used to be a schoolteacher.”

  “No,” she says. “No. She’s not me. She’s more like a really good friend. Or the sister I never had.” It’s a stock answer, but she continues: “If anything, Tiger has more of my personality traits and opinions in him.”

  “Really?” says Liam, his face lighting up. “Wow. That’s so interesting. Because, I don’t know, I felt like I was reading about you, when I pictured everything in my head; I just saw you doing everything that Susie does. Even down to your shoes.”

  “My shoes?”

  They both glance down at her feet. She’s wearing white trainers, as she nearly always does.

  “I mean, you never describe her shoes, but I pictured her in white trainers. Because that’s what you wear.”

  Sophie doesn’t quite know how to respond. “Do I not describe her shoes?” she asks.

  Liam shakes his head. “No. Never.”

  “Well,” she says, slightly breathlessly. “Thank you for pointing that out. Next time I describe what she’s wearing I will put in a description of her shoes, just for you.”

  “Seriously?” he says.

  “Yes. Seriously.”

  “Wow. And which book would that be in? Are you writing one now?”

  She glances behind her toward her laptop on the desk in the hallway. “Well, technically, yes. But I haven’t written a word since I moved here, to be truthful. Despite my best intentions.”

  “Writer’s block?”

  “Well, no, not strictly. Writer’s block is a serious psychological malaise. It can last for years. Forever in some particularly tragic cases.”

  “So why do you think you haven’t been able to write?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Lots of reasons. But mainly, I think, because of finding that ring. And now all the other stuff going on.”

  Liam nods. “It’s all a bit freaky, isn’t it?” He taps her book against the palm of his other hand again and steps from one foot to another. He seems a little anxious. “I guess it’ll all become clear eventually. I wonder what they’ll uncover next. Maybe there’s someone out there, as I’m talking to you, burying another little surprise for someone to uncover.”

  “Like Easter eggs.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I suppose they are. I just…” He stops tapping the book and rubs the back of his neck with his free hand. “I just don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. If someone knows what happened to those kids, then why the hell don’t they just go to the police and tell them?”

  “Because maybe they had something to do with it?”

  She sees him shudder slightly. “Freaks me out,” he says. “Really freaks me out. Anyway…” He appears to reset himself. “I’d better let you get on. I just wanted to ask you that. About Susie Beets. About the shoes.” He taps the book one more time against his hand and then turns and heads toward the back door.

  After he’s gone, Sophie goes back to her desk and sits for a while, imagining handsome Liam, alone in his room, reading her book. She tries to remember the content of the book, but can’t. She goes to her bedroom to find the packing box that has her P. J. Fox books in it. She slices through the tape and burrows through the contents until she finds the one she’s looking for: the first in the series. Perched on the edge of the bed, she flicks through the pages, skimming them with her eyes. And that’s when she sees it. The thing that’s been hovering in her subconscious since the day she arrived. She flattens the two sides of the book and she reads:

  Susie opened the creaky gate and peered up and down the high street. It was just getting dark and the wet pavements were glowing warm amber in the streetlight. She pulled the sides of her furry coat together across her body and was about to head back out into the night when she saw something from the corner of her eye, in the flower bed to her left. It was a flap of cardboard, nailed to the wooden fence. In black marker, someone had scribbled the words “Dig Here,” with an arrow pointing downward into the soil…

  39

  MAY 2017

  Zach sits on the edge of the bed, watching Tallulah get ready to go to the pub.

  “This is fucking ridiculous,” he says.

  “Can you stop watching me, please.”

  “I mean, for fuck’s sake. It’s not as if these people would even notice if you didn’t show up. They wouldn’t even care.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because people don’t care. Everyone goes around thinking they’re the center of the fucking universe and that people miss them when they don’t come to things, but nobody gives a shit.”

  “So, if you didn’t turn up for football one Sunday, you think nobody would notice?”

  “That’s different. That’s a team. You need a certain number for a team. You don’t need a certain number to sit in the fucking pub.”

  Tallulah doesn’t reply. She focuses instead on rearranging her earrings, exchanging the plain silver studs and hoops she normally wears for a fancy set of earrings that loop together on chains from the top of her ear down to the lobes. They’re similar to the sorts of earrings that Scarlett wears.

  “What the hell is that?”

  She glances at Zach’s reflection in the mirror witheringly, but doesn’t respond. “Aren’t you going to give Noah his bath now?” she says. “It’s getting late.”

  “I’m pretty sure that you don’t get to dictate our schedule since you’re not even going to be here.”

  Tallulah rolls her eyes. “I can’t believe you’re making such a fuss about me leaving the house.”

  “It’s not you leaving the house that’s the issue. You leave the house all the fucking time. It’s you spending money. When we’re trying to save up.”

  She turns and stares at him. “I told you,” she says. “I don’t want to move out. I don’t want to buy a flat. I want to stay here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not particularly interested in what you want or don’t want. This isn’t about you. It’s about Noah.”

  “Noah doesn’t want to go and live in a box on the side of an A road either. He wants to stay here. It’s lovely here. The countryside on our doorstep. There’s the nursery just across the common. His nana. His uncle. Your mum.”

  There’s a beat of silence. He narrows his eyes at her. “You know my mum doesn’t even think Noah is mine.”

  Tallulah freezes.

  “She reckons you’re just using me for money. And you know what, when I think about it, she’s got a point. I mean, all those months when you didn’t want me anywhere near you. All those months where you just kept me at arm’s length—”

  “You dumped me when I was pregnant,” she interjects through bared teeth.

  “And why do you think that was?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “You tell me.”

  “Because I didn’t believe you. Did
I? I didn’t believe you were really pregnant; I thought you were just trying to trap me. Because we were so careful and I knew we’d been careful and I couldn’t see how it could have happened and then I started to think, all those times you said you were revising for your A levels, all those times you were too busy to see me. I just thought, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were off with someone else. And that that’s how you got pregnant. Because it can’t have been me.”

  “So you dumped me because you thought I was pregnant with somebody else’s baby?”

  “Yeah. Basically.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “But then I saw you out and about with the baby and you looked so happy and so beautiful and the baby was just, like, the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen and I thought—” His voice starts to crack. “I thought, well, I wouldn’t be feeling that way if it weren’t mine. I thought I’d know. I’d know if he were someone else’s. And every time I saw him I just fell more and more in love with him, and even though he doesn’t really look like me, I could just tell that he was mine. You know? Like, in here.” He bangs his chest with his fist. “Mine. And I think my mum’s wrong. I mean, I know she’s wrong. Because he is. Isn’t he? Noah is mine?”

  Zach’s eyes are filled with tears. He looks desperate and pathetic. For a moment Tallulah’s heart fills with a kind of pitiful love for him and she finds herself moving toward where he sits on the edge of the bed and putting her arms around his neck and whispering into his ear, “God, of course he’s yours, of course he is. He’s yours. I promise he’s yours.”

  And his arms reach around her and pull her tighter toward him and she feels the wetness of his tears against her cheek and he says, “Please, Lules, please don’t go out tonight. Please stay home. I’ll go out and get us a bottle of wine. And some Doritos. Just you and me. Please.”

  Tallulah thinks of Keziah and her weird little gang of local friends, all so alien to her with their barely begun lives and their safe little jobs, still waiting for boyfriends and babies as if that was all there was to life. She thinks of them all staring at her like an exhibit at a zoo, talking about motherhood and cohabitation as if it was an end goal, rather than a place you might find yourself by accident. She pictures them sitting primly on the velvet sofas at the Swan & Ducks, sipping cheap prosecco and laughing in high-pitched voices at things that aren’t particularly funny, and then she thinks of drinking wine with Zach, of capitalizing on this rare moment of softness after all these weeks of hard edges and cutting comments, of pulling Zach back from the brink, persuading him that he could move back to his mum’s, that they could just co-parent, amicably, just as they’d done before he moved in. She thinks, if they can be nice to each other tonight, maybe they can move on to a place where no one is angry and everyone gets what they want. And what they both want, more than anything, is Noah. And maybe Zach will learn to accept that this is enough, that he doesn’t need Tallulah too, that he doesn’t need a nuclear family, that there are other girls out there who will love him for what he is and not just put up with him for the sake of happy families, girls who would want a future with him, who would want to have sex with him more than once a week—girls who aren’t into girls.