When Your Eyes Close

by Tanya Farrelly

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,’ she said. ‘I don’t work in that area. What happened with Nick was an accident. It wasn’t something I set out to do.’

  ‘Yes, but it happened. That’s why I’m here. I know what you’re saying and I know there are people out there who specialize in this type of thing, but many of them are charlatans and I don’t want to take that risk. I need to know who I was … if maybe I knew Nick in the past … Maybe it can help.’

  Tessa eyed her over her glasses. ‘And what if you don’t like what you discover?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it. I’m with Nick for the long haul. Nothing you tell me can change that.’

  ‘You say that now, but you clearly know how complicated Nick’s past is. I don’t think you’ve thought this through. What possible good could come from it?’

  Michelle didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘I’d like to know. I’ve read that we meet the same people again life after life … soul mates …’

  Tessa shook her head. ‘You might never have met Nick before; they say that people don’t necessarily meet in every life. And even if you were both from the same circle, you could be anything to Nick – a family member, a teacher, a friend.’

  Michelle looked at Tessa. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in all this.’

  ‘I didn’t use to, but I’ve done a lot of research since meeting Nick. I’m not prepared to say that I believe in it, let’s just say I’m more open to the possibility.’

  ‘Will you do it? Will you regress me? Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it – and if it’s not helpful, I won’t even mention to Nick that it happened. My priority is to help him. I’m not after anything else … you don’t have to worry about that.’

  Tessa shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Michelle. I understand that you’re curious, but Nick is my patient, and I must consider what’s best for him. There are plenty of hypnotists out there, people who would be happy to do what you want. But if you truly want to help Nick, I suggest that you put your own curiosity aside, and focus on helping him in the here and now.’

  Tessa stood, leaving Michelle no choice but to do likewise. ‘You won’t tell Nick I came?’ Michelle said.

  ‘No. Like I said, anything said in this room is not for me to divulge …’

  Michelle stepped outside and shaded her eyes against the sunlight that bounced off the lake. Maybe Tessa was right – what good would it do them if she discovered something she didn’t like? She got in the car, a part of her relieved that Tessa had refused her, and drove out past the lake, in the direction of home.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Nick

  Nick wasn’t expecting to find Caitlin Davis camped out on his doorstep. He wondered for a minute if the girl, Louise, had lied and knew her after all. Maybe she’d called her as soon as she’d driven out of the school. But no – there was no way any woman would have struck up a friendship with a newcomer who had moved in on her husband. Clearly Andy Quinn had spoken to her. Well, maybe this was a good thing, she’d saved him a journey, and she was obviously keen to talk if she’d made her way straight over to his place.

  She stood on the front porch and turned, watching as he swung into the driveway. He lifted his fingers from the wheel in greeting, but she didn’t smile, she just stood there, hands in the pockets of her long blue coat. When he stepped from the car she barely returned his greeting.

  ‘Is Michelle here?’ she asked.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ he answered, noting the absence of her car. ‘I don’t imagine she’ll be long though. Do you want to come in?’

  She nodded and stood silently by as he unlocked the door and ushered her inside. He offered to take her coat, but she refused and stood stiffly before him in the living room.

  ‘I can ring her if you like?’ he said, taking his phone from his pocket in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Andy,’ she said. ‘He told me you were very interested in David.’

  Nick nodded. ‘I mentioned that I might know somebody who could help.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘And who is this somebody?’

  ‘A friend,’ he said. ‘He works in the line of investigation.’

  ‘The police have been working on this case for a year now and turned up nothing. What makes you think your friend could do any better? And more to the point, why are you so keen to help? You hardly know me.’

  He caught the anger in her voice, though he could see that she was trying hard to control it. It caught him off guard. If he were in her situation, he’d have been grateful for all the help he could get. Something about her reaction just didn’t add up.

  He shrugged, trying to ignore a sudden twinge in his insides. ‘He knows people, people who might be willing to talk off the record. People rarely just vanish, Caitlin, we know that. All those people out there who are missing, someone knows something, they’re just afraid to come forward. As to your question about why I want to help, what happened to your husband is a terrible thing, I’d want to help anyone in that situation. Especially a friend of Michelle’s.’

  Caitlin took a few steps towards the window and glanced out through the blind. ‘But you don’t know me,’ she said. ‘And more to the point, I don’t know you. How do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘I see your point, Caitlin, but …’

  ‘But what?’ she fired back. ‘How do I know, Nick? How do I know you aren’t the person who’s set up a Twitter account in my husband’s name, the person who’s been watching me, posting pictures of me online?’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’ He searched her face for some clue but saw none.

  ‘You heard me,’ she said. ‘It only started since I met you and Michelle. A bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  The door clicked as she said this, and Nick heard Michelle come into the hallway. Relieved, he figured maybe she could defuse the tension, or at least calm Caitlin down so they could get to the bottom of whatever it was she was claiming had happened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Caitlin, I don’t know what you’re talking about. All we want is to help. You can ask Michelle if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Ask me what?’ Michelle asked, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘Caitlin’s upset,’ he said. ‘She thinks we’ve been interfering in her business.’

  Michelle looked at Caitlin. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Caitlin. We only want to help. What happened to David is terrible.’

  ‘What do you know about David?’ she snapped.

  Michelle looked surprised. ‘Nothing. Only what you told me. What else could I possibly know?’

  Nick turned to Caitlin. ‘And what’s this about a Twitter account? You say that someone set it up in your husband’s name? That someone is impersonating him?’

  ‘Come on, Nick. I know it was you. Why don’t you just admit it and tell me what the hell you’re playing at.’

  Her anger, subdued when they were alone, now threatened to boil over. What exactly had Andy Quinn said to her?

  ‘Look, I swear to you, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what else I can say to make you believe me.’

  Caitlin didn’t answer for a minute. ‘Okay, show me your phone – both of you.’

  Michelle took a step forward. ‘What? I don’t understand. Why would you want to see our phones?’

  ‘Because someone’s been taking pictures of me in the wine bar. Nick was there both nights that it happened. And whoever this maniac is, they’ve been tweeting under my husband’s name.’

  Michelle looked at Nick and handed Caitlin her phone. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘But whatever’s going on, it’s got nothing to do with us, Caitlin. We just want to help … Scroll through whatever you want, I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  Caitlin thumbed the screen as Nick and Michelle watched, and, seemingly satisfied, she passed the phone back to Michelle.

  ‘Okay, now yours,’ she said to Nick.

 
Both women looked at Nick, and he felt the blood surge up his neck. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘If you can’t just take our word …’

  ‘What? Are you afraid I’m going to see something I shouldn’t? Or maybe you’re afraid Michelle will, is that it, Nick?’

  ‘Right. Whatever,’ he said. He took the phone from his pocket, pretending to open the icon for her in the hope that he could delete the picture that kept flashing through his mind before handing it over, but she snatched it from him before he had the chance.

  Christ, let her miss it, let her somehow not see it.

  He watched as she scrolled through his picture gallery, photos of houses, of potential building sites, then there was something akin to a gasp as she saw it. He closed his eyes. ‘I can explain,’ he said.

  She looked at Michelle. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘It’s not the same picture,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet if you look at the Twitter feed, whoever owns it, it’s not the same picture.’

  ‘And what difference does that make? This picture or another one, what does that prove?’

  He looked at Michelle, appealing to her to help him. ‘Tell her,’ he said. ‘Tell her it’s not what she thinks.’

  Michelle looked at him silently. ‘I think this needs to come from you. I think you’d better explain the whole thing.’

  ‘What the hell are you two talking about? Why are you spying on me?’

  ‘Caitlin, look, I know how this seems, and in your shoes, I’d think the same thing, but if you’ll only let Nick explain. We want to help you, that’s all. Nick didn’t post those pictures; he barely even knows how to use Twitter. Will you sit down, give him a chance to tell you the truth?’

  Caitlin handed the phone back to him. ‘All I want to know is who the hell you are and what makes you think you’ve got any right to stick your nose into my business.’ Her voice shook with anger.

  ‘Can we sit?’ Nick gestured at the sofa. ‘I’ll explain everything, but I swear to you what Michelle is saying is true, I know nothing about any Twitter account, or any other social media for that matter. I’ll explain the picture, my meeting you in the wine bar, the whole thing, but first I need to give you the background. I need you to listen and not think I’m crazy.’

  Caitlin glanced at Michelle who nodded, and reluctantly she sat down. ‘Okay, but if you’ve been spying on me, if you know anything about my husband, you can be sure I’m going straight to the guards. Andy knows I’m here by the way, I sent him your address.’

  Nick took a breath before starting. ‘Six weeks ago, I went to see a doctor; I was diagnosed with liver failure. He told me that if I didn’t stop drinking I’d be dead in a year. So, I decided to go to a hypnotist to help me to stop drinking – the only way I might be saved is if I can get on the transplant list and I’ve got to be six months clean to do that.’

  Caitlin didn’t react. In other circumstances he imagined she might have said she was sorry, but she was clearly too angry to do that.

  ‘Anyway, here’s the weird bit, and I don’t know how I can expect you to believe this, but please hear me out. During hypnosis, something happened, I saw myself in a different place, a different time. I didn’t know what it was, a dream maybe, some kind of hallucination – until I checked the facts and they turned out to be true.’

  He stopped talking, glancing at Michelle.

  Caitlin was getting impatient. ‘I’m sorry, sorry about your illness, but what does any of this have to do with me or with David or anything?’

  ‘Caitlin, under hypnosis, I was regressed. I was accidentally brought back to a previous life. I know you’re not going to believe me, but before you walk out that door, let me prove it.’

  Caitlin looked confused. ‘Prove what? What are you talking about?’ she said.

  ‘In my past life, my name was John Davis.’

  She got up from her seat, shaking. She looked from him to Michelle. ‘You people are insane,’ she said. ‘What kind of sick game is this?’

  Nick spread his hands. ‘It’s true. I wish it wasn’t, but in 1980, I did something terrible, then, not able to bear it, I took my own life. Ask me anything, Caitie, anything, and I can prove it to you.’

  ‘Right, when is my birthday?’

  ‘The 6th of January. You were born in 1975.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything. You could have found that out online with all your snooping.’

  Panicked, he tried to remember what he’d seen in his flashbacks. ‘Your mother, Rachel, and I used to take you camping. We’d take a tent, go up the mountains. She loved to sing, ‘Kisses Sweeter than Wine’, do you remember that?’ You had a teddy bear, you brought it everywhere with you – Noel, you called it, because you got it at Christmas. You had a whole stack of them, but Noel was your favourite.’

  Caitlin was staring at him now, disbelieving. ‘How do you know all this? Who are you?’

  ‘I told you, I’m … I was Johnny Davis. I’m sorry, Caitie, so sorry. When I found out, I had to look you up, had to know if you were okay, and then you told Michelle about David. I figured it was the one thing I could do for you … to help you in some way. If you still don’t believe me, you can talk to Tessa, the hypnotist, she’ll verify everything.’

  Caitlin was standing staring at him. ‘What did you buy me for my fifth birthday?’ she asked.

  ‘A blue bicycle with a basket on the front. You tried to carry the dog in it.’

  She put her hand over her mouth.

  Michelle sat next to Caitlin and took her hand. ‘How did your parents die, Caitlin?’

  Caitlin shook her head. ‘An accident …’ she said. ‘The car went off the pier, but I was rescued.’

  Nick stared at her. ‘Before that, do you know what happened before?’

  Caitlin looked up, stared at him for a moment. ‘You killed her. You killed my mother.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Caitlin

  They sat in the low light of the room for a long time. Every now and then Caitlin stole glances at Nick, the man who claimed to be her father. There was no denying he knew things only her father could know, but how was this all possible?

  Michelle had left them alone. Her job was done, Caitlin supposed, in bringing the two of them together. She must really love Nick to have believed in everything he’d told her; another woman would have thought he was insane. She certainly would have. If David had spun her a story like that, there was no way she’d have believed it.

  ‘She was sleeping with him, wasn’t she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My mother. And the man you killed. That’s the reason you did it, isn’t it, because they were together?’

  Nick nodded.

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘I don’t think I was a very good husband. I don’t know. I had these flashbacks under hypnosis, the things I told you about: the three of us in the mountains, building a campfire, you on my shoulders walking through the woods, singing – you must have been what? Three years old. And the man, he was someone I knew … a friend.’

  ‘Uncle Brendan.’

  ‘What?’ Nick looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘He wasn’t really an uncle,’ she said. ‘But he was always in the house, always with you and mam, so I called him Uncle Brendan.’

  Caitlin thought of Andy then – of herself, David and Andy – always together, a triad. It had been a similar situation with Brendan, hadn’t it? Only he often came over when her father was out. Sometimes when that happened, they’d send her to play outside if her mother couldn’t arrange for her to be at a friend’s house. That’s where she’d been the day when her father came home unexpectedly. She hadn’t heard his car, she was playing among the trees at the end of the garden, but she’d heard the shouts: Uncle Brendan’s yells and then her mother’s terrified screams. She’d left her teddy bears, gone inside and stood at the bottom of the stairs. There was no more screaming, but she heard a man sobbing. She’d crept up the st
airs, holding tight onto the banister like her mother always warned her to, and when her eyes were level with the landing, she’d seen her father leaning over the bed, crying. There was blood on the sheets. She could see one of Uncle Brendan’s blue-clad legs, but the rest of him was hidden behind the bedroom door. Her father had seen her then, he’d jumped to his feet and rushed into the landing. She’d asked him where they were going when he’d buckled her into the car, but he hadn’t answered.

  She looked at Nick now as she tried to piece it all together, the bits of the jigsaw that had continued to elude her despite having stumbled upon those newspaper articles.

  She still didn’t remember anyone telling her her parents were dead, but somebody must have. There were two boxes in the church – one for her father and one for her mother. Nobody mentioned Uncle Brendan. She’d stayed with their neighbours, the Barrys, for almost a month, and then a woman had come and taken her away.

  ‘You drove us off the pier,’ she said.

  Nick nodded. ‘I can’t remember. I read about it … the articles … there are so many blanks, Caitie. I wish I could tell you what was going through Johnny’s mind, wish I could explain it.’ He looked up then. ‘It’s what I used to call you, isn’t it? Caitie?’

  She looked at Nick. He didn’t look like her father, not physically. And yet she still felt that pull towards him, that familiarity she’d felt the first time they’d met at the wine bar and she was sure she’d met him somewhere before.

  ‘There’s something I have to ask you … something I have seen under hypnosis … you had a brother, didn’t you? Daniel.’

  Caitlin stiffened. Of course, he would know about the boy – if he knew about her, he’d know about the boy too. She’d told Michelle that she didn’t have any siblings, but that wasn’t technically a lie, was it? ‘He died,’ she said.

  Nick looked at her, hard. ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘There was an accident. He fell from the treehouse.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Nick looked stricken. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Two and a half …’