by Elle Croft
Imogen’s stomach plummeted. It was exactly what she feared.
Chapter 65
KAT
‘Muuuummmm,’ Jemima’s voice whines from the kitchen table.
I laugh. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately – laughing. Everything feels light now, in a way it didn’t before. Because now I know what I could have lost. I know what could have happened. And yet somehow, impossibly, I am fine. My family is safe. And that thought, which I’ve woken up with every morning since that night in the shed, makes the smiles, the laughs, come easily.
‘What is it, Jems?’
‘Immy took four pancakes instead of three!’
I close the fridge and bring the punnet of strawberries to the table. I eye Imogen’s plate and raise an eyebrow at her.
‘I didn’t do it. Dylan, you saw! Tell Kat I didn’t do it!’
Dylan and I share a bemused smile. Since we came home, Imogen has taken to calling Dylan and me by our first names. At first I was too worried about upsetting the delicate balance we’d achieved to bother demanding the traditional ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, but now it just feels like we’ve let it go on for too long to start arguing it. It grates on me every time, but I suppose, after all, we’re not her mum and dad. Not in the biological sense, anyway. Demanding that she labels us as such would probably be hypocritical. I hope one day she’ll see us as her parents again, but I know that trusting us again isn’t something that will happen overnight. I’m trying to be patient, to remind myself that having her home is enough.
I laugh again as Dylan steals a pancake from my plate and slaps it on top of the pile in front of Jemima. She looks delighted. I stick my tongue out at Dylan and swipe the pancake at the top of his pile, adding it to my own. Laughter bounces off the walls as the girls tuck into their breakfasts with zeal before they can be stolen from under their noses.
I sit back and absorb the scene for a moment. I can hardly believe the difference these past few months have made to the way we look, the way we interact. This family has been transformed by the truth; the brutal, heartbreaking, raw truth. I’d been so scared of it coming out, of the lies I’d been telling coming to light, that I was trying to control everything. I acted like my own daughter was the one who couldn’t be trusted, like she was the real danger.
And then my worst fears came true, and they were so much worse than I’d ever imagined, and yet … I survived. We survived. And now there’s no more hiding. Imogen knows where she’s come from. She knows who she is.
For the first few weeks after we got home, Imogen was still trying to process everything that had happened. She made us call her Amy for a few days but dropped it soon after she began the search for her uncensored history in earnest. She was hungry for information. Ravenous.
Once the floodgates were opened, the questions kept coming, faster and increasingly more confronting. I sat her down with my pile of paperwork, with the newspaper cuttings and the adoption certificates. We submitted a request for the transcripts of her parents’ trial, and we pored over them together, united in grief and horror and the total inability to understand why.
Imogen wrote to her mother, a beautiful letter that she let me read, a heartfelt attempt to get the answers she so desperately craves. Her hand shook as she slid the envelope into the mailbox, and I mentally willed Sally to do the right thing, to give her daughter the closure she needs. No reply has arrived yet.
She’s been seeing a counsellor, too. I’ve been to a couple of sessions – family reconciliation, they call it. Imogen told me how angry she was that I kept her identity a secret for all of her life, how much she resented the years she never got with her brother. I apologised, told her how afraid we had been for her. I explained that the authorities had believed it was the best way forward all those years ago, too. And I admitted my fear that she’d choose them over us. We cried some more. Hugged. Went out for ice cream afterwards.
I considered sending Jemima to speak to someone as well. But then she’d have to say why she was there – she’d have to admit that she’s the one who stabbed Brad. And no one knows that, not even Dylan. It’s our secret. Us Braidwood girls. We’re bound by it, this shared knowledge of what Jemima did to save her sister; to save me. Whether I was being saved from Imogen, and whether Imogen was being saved from herself, or whether Brad was the one we were being protected from, that’s the one thing we haven’t spoken about. That’s the part I don’t let myself think about.
That, and the question of what my youngest daughter, the daughter I carried inside me for nine months, the daughter who shares my DNA, is capable of. I’ve told myself it was self-defence. Repeated over and over again that it’s nothing to worry about. I’m good at repressing deep fears. It’s what I did for fifteen years before Brad came along and changed everything.
I don’t want to let myself acknowledge the thoughts that lurk in the wings. Because if I do, I’ll be forced to ask questions I don’t know how to put into words. I’ll have to face myself, delve into my own soul and uncover the truth of who I am, of what’s in my blood, of my shortcomings. I’ll be compelled to ask the questions I don’t think I want to know the answers to. Questions like: is darkness lurking inside all of us? Is it something we inherit, like the ability to curl your tongue? Or does it appear later in life, formed by circumstances and experiences … and parenting? I can’t face those questions. And I don’t need to.
We’re fine. We’re safe. Jemima was acting in self-defence. Imogen isn’t Amy. Everyone is OK.
When I wake up in cold sweats, a scream echoing on my lips, Dylan’s breath at my ear telling me I’m safe, his arm around my sweaty body, holding me tight, I don’t tell him about my nightmares. He assumes he knows, he’s working from the official story. But what I see is Imogen – Amy – towering over me, knife in her hand, resignation on her face. I want to believe that she’d have turned the knife on Brad instead of going through with it. But in those moments in the dead of night, when the nightmare is still prickling on my skin, I’m not so sure.
I shake the thought away. I trust Imogen. She’s proven where her loyalties lie. Whatever may have happened, she didn’t have to make that choice, in the end. Jemima made it for her. And now Imogen and I are forgetting what could have been and are focusing on letting Jemima get on with it, on making sure the way things happened is kept between us.
As far as Dylan is concerned – and as far as the police and media are concerned – Jemima woke up in the car, scared and confused, and wasn’t sure what to do. She found my phone, still in the cradle at the front, and somehow got through to Dylan. She sent him her location, then their connection was lost and she heard a scream. This, of course, is all true. When she came into the shed, however, that’s when our version of events deviates from the truth.
They found two sets of fingerprints on the knife: Jemima’s and Imogen’s. But my clever daughter told the police that after she’d stabbed Brad – in self-defence – Jemima had come in and had pulled the knife out. They didn’t question it. The girls were both covered in blood, and there was no way to decipher spatter patterns in all of that mess. The height of the stab wound was questioned, but as Imogen had been in a struggle with Brad, they deemed it conceivable that she could have stabbed him from an unnatural angle.
As far as the police are concerned, Brad’s death was far from a tragedy. It was a case of a kidnapper who died when an innocent girl defended herself. And we’ve been left to get on with our lives, to be a family again, to carry on.
Sometimes I catch myself staring at Jemima, remembering the moment in the shed when Brad’s body swayed and fell, when my daughter came into view and the truth dawned on me. And I watch her. I wonder what really went through her mind on that terrifying night. I wonder how much she knows, how much she understands. And I look for signs. Until I remember how all of this started, how I made my family implode by not trusting them. And I remind myself of the promise I made when I was lying on that table, staring at the naked bulb and knowing
I was about to die. I told myself that if I survived, I’d always trust my family.
I’m doing my best to keep my promise. I don’t want to tempt fate. I don’t want to be the cause of my family’s downfall again. Besides, I have to trust my daughters, now. They hold a secret that could destroy me.
No one suspects that what we’ve said, the three of us Braidwood girls, is anything other than the truth. We’re united by our lie, bonded by the threads of what actually happened in that dark, hot shed, the truth woven tightly with our statements to the police, so that from the front it’s a neat and tidy picture of a family doing what needed to be done to stay safe. It’s only from the back you can see the loose threads, the knots, the mess.
It’s our mess, though. Ours. Together. And that’s what matters. Besides, we’re all entitled to secrets, aren’t we? We’re family, and family protects one another.
Because, in the end, as Sally Sanders so rightly told me, family sticks together, above all else.
Chapter 66
IMOGEN
‘Immy?’
Imogen snapped the top of her laptop closed and spun her chair around, her heart pounding. Her bedroom door opened fully to reveal a pyjama-clad Jemima.
The younger girl padded into Imogen’s room and sat cross-legged on the floor, which was plastered in newspaper clippings, articles printed from the internet and case notes that had arrived after Kat’s freedom of information request was granted.
Jemima picked up the sheet of paper closest to her left hand, a copy of an article that was written during Tim and Sally’s trial, and stared at it for a while.
Satan’s Ranch Shocking Torture Revelations, the headline screamed.
Imogen didn’t need to reread it to know what it said. She’d studied every word of every document in her bedroom, and she knew them all by heart.
Today concluded the sixth day of the trial of Sally Sanders, the woman charged with the torture and murder of her own children on the Victorian property dubbed Satan’s Ranch. The prosecution’s key witness, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Sally, told today of the torture endured by the children under the woman’s care. Speaking via a video link to protect her from those who had abused her, the daughter, whose identity is being withheld for her privacy, revealed that the children were routinely starved, physically abused and kept as prisoners on the property. None of the children who lived there had ever set foot outside the torture chamber they called home.
When she’d first come back home, Imogen had been voracious, needing to learn every single detail of her past, desperate to connect to anything that would make her feel close to Brad again. Nothing worked. Learning about her biological parents’ deeds only made her feel worse, which she hadn’t thought was possible.
Brad had been adamant that their parents weren’t the monsters the world saw them as. But she’d seen the evidence, read the trial transcripts. She’d seen photographs of Kimberley’s scars, X-rays of Brad’s tiny, shattered bones. She knew the truth. It was undeniable.
‘Have you heard back from her?’ Jemima whispered, her eyes wide.
Imogen’s heart stopped for a second, until she realised that Jemima was talking about her mum.
‘No,’ Imogen said, relief flooding her.
Jemima’s shoulders dropped, disappointed. Her fascination with Sally bordered on obsession, which didn’t surprise Imogen, but it had meant that her own interest in hearing from her birth mother was waning. The letter had been part of her therapy. She’d done what she’d been told; she’d reached out. She’d asked the difficult questions, the questions she didn’t really need the answers to. Because those answers wouldn’t change anything. They wouldn’t bring Brad back.
‘Did you need something?’ Imogen asked, unsettled by Jemima’s presence.
‘Oh. Yeah, a Picnic.’
‘Please?’
‘Just give me the chocolate, Immy. Mum wouldn’t let me have anything before bed.’
Imogen sighed and rolled her chair over to the wardrobe, where she plucked a chocolate bar from her hidden stockpile, handing it over. She knew better than to argue, or worse, to refuse her little sister’s demands. If she didn’t give Jemima what she wanted, when she wanted it, she could expect something she cared about to be destroyed: a painstakingly written essay, a friendship. Her brother.
Jemima tore the Picnic open and ate the whole thing within seconds. She threw the wrapper on the carpet and stood up, smiling to reveal chocolate-covered teeth.
‘You’d better brush your teeth,’ Imogen warned. ‘Or Kat will know.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Jemima grinned even more widely. ‘It’s our little secret.’
Secrets. They were like currency in the Braidwood house. Imogen was hoarding a stash of her own.
Kat believed that the secret she shared with her daughters was the only one lurking in their home, but that was just a tiny snippet of the full, twisted picture. She was clueless, her vision blinkered by love, or perhaps by the fear of looking directly at the truth in case it was too much for her to bear. Kat was a coward, Imogen had realised lately.
In her darker moments, she let her thoughts wander, let herself go back to that night, to that moment, the knife solid in her hand, Kat’s helpless body stretched out beneath her, her mind racing, her stomach churning, her brother urging her on. She let herself imagine what would have happened if Jemima hadn’t come in, if she had driven that knife down, through skin, muscle, sinew, organs. If Brad had lived. If she’d done what he wanted her to do. If she’d known exactly where that knife could enter Kat’s body without killing her. If Brad had let Kat live. If they’d run away and Kat believed that Imogen had tried to kill her.
She knew that there was no point wondering what if, because there was no such thing. But still. Since looking into the truth of her parents, since reading articles that made her skin crawl, and poring over trial transcripts that left her feeling like her chest was shrinking, she’d had to ask herself the same questions that she knew Kat had spent Imogen’s whole life trying to answer. Did that same darkness flow through her blood? Was violence imprinted on every cell in her body? Was cruelty twisted into her DNA?
But, unlike Kat, Imogen had found the answers. She knew that evil wasn’t inherited. It wasn’t passed down from generation to generation, like a medical disorder, or an attached earlobe. Nor was it learned.
Brad, she knew, wasn’t bad. He’d been hurt and rejected and abused and traumatised, and he was looking for his mother’s approval without questioning her motives. He was misguided. And maybe a little too desperate, a little too trusting. But he’d loved Imogen. He’d cared for her when she was sick – and yes, he had been the one to make her sick, but that didn’t mean he cared any less. She knew that, no matter what anyone else said. They didn’t know. They hadn’t been there in his tiny ramshackle house up in the hills. They hadn’t looked into his eyes, seen his kindness, his capacity for good. He wasn’t bad; not by birth, and not by circumstance.
Neither was she. For a while there, she’d wondered. She’d thought maybe the evidence was obvious, that there was no way to escape the science of who she was. But she knew better now. She understood that the only thing that created evil was plain old bad luck. Nothing more, nothing less. Some people were just born bad, regardless of what their family tree said. Her biological parents certainly were. And yes, perhaps their upbringings brought the very worst out in them, maybe their environments enhanced their propensity for destruction. But it was in them, it was part of them, based not on their parents’ genes but on random chance and their own bad decisions.
Imogen knew all about bad luck. Hers had been terrible. It wasn’t enough that she’d been born to abusive, murderous parents. Fate had decided that she should be placed with a family who bore evil of their own.
Jemima didn’t inherit her hatefulness. Kat and Dylan, for all their flaws, were decent enough parents. They were well meaning, even if they were seriously delusional about their precious baby girl
. They loved Jemima, provided for all of her needs. They cared for her, and thought the best of her. Her environment hadn’t shaped her into the monster she was. She was just born like that. Pure chance. An awful, cosmic screw-up that meant Imogen was in just as much danger in the home she’d been brought to for safety as she had been in Satan’s Ranch.
Which was why, when Brad messaged her, when she learned the truth and was offered an escape, she’d jumped at the chance to get away. It had never been her blonde hair and pale skin that had made her feel out of place in her own home. It had been the fact that she couldn’t bear to be related to the monster in the room next door. The promise of a new life, a new family … it was far too tempting to pass up. After all, what could possibly be worse than the one she’d been brought up in?
Her throat squeezed at the memory of how horribly things had gone wrong. She should have known that Jemima would find a way to ruin everything, to take her new family away from her. It certainly wasn’t the first thing she’d destroyed. It probably wouldn’t be the last.
Imogen was doing her part to make sure the destruction was kept at bay. She had learned over the years how to handle Jemima, how to slow the frequency of attacks. She knew that any money she earned – pocket money, babysitting, random errands for Dylan – had to be safely stored at a friend’s house. She changed her laptop password once a week, using a complicated combination of letters and numbers. She slept with a tripwire across her bedroom door so that Jemima couldn’t make good on her worst threats.
But her biggest lesson was to simply go along with the younger girl’s plans, to let everyone believe that Jemima was innocent, no matter what she’d done. If she did that, Jemima would let her older sister get on with her life, relatively unscathed. After all, she needed her around. She needed a scapegoat, like in the case of Emerald.