When Your Eyes Close

by Tanya Farrelly

  ‘Morning.’ Andy appeared in the doorway as she was making coffee. ‘Smells like manna,’ he said. ‘Think I might have gone a bit heavy on that wine last night.’

  She smiled and took two mugs from the press. ‘Yeah, I feel a bit fragile myself. There’s porridge if you fancy?’ She kept her tone light.

  Andy was tentative as he took the mug of coffee from her. ‘We good?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, we’re good. There’s no need to tiptoe around each other. And no pressure either, okay? It’s just a bit of fun, consenting adults and all that.’

  Andy hovered as she ate breakfast, but he made no attempt to touch her and she was glad. She wasn’t ready for that.

  When she came outside to see him to his van, he kissed her on the forehead. ‘I’ll give you a call a later,’ he said.

  Caitlin went back inside before he’d driven away, relieved to be alone. She showered, washing the smell of sex from her skin. She’d enjoyed it, she couldn’t deny that. Andy had been a leisurely lover. And she’d let him do what he wanted. When he’d parted her legs and buried his face there, licking and kissing, she’d clamped her thighs and thrust her body towards him, unconcerned about anything but her own satisfaction. As she’d climaxed she’d ridden a wave that made her want to giggle, as she’d always done with David, but she’d bitten her lip and turned over, drawing him into her from behind. Not looking at him she could pretend he was a stranger – it made the experience that bit more erotic. She’d placed his hands on her breasts, clenched and unclenched, and felt a real satisfaction in hearing him moan when he came and fell against her. Then she did laugh, and they’d lain back, sweat-soaked, and slept.

  In the office, Caitlin switched on her computer and logged into her Twitter account. There were no new messages, no updates on David A’s account. Was it any wonder, when the likely culprit had been in her bed? She logged out, clicked onto MSN and was about to check her email when she saw the news story:

  Divers prepare to search lake for missing person.

  Guts clenched, she clicked on the link and read how the remains of a small boat had washed up on shore and how a local woman had recognized the boat and remembered seeing two people in it. One was likely to be the French tourist who had been found a month or two before, but now a team of divers were being sent down to search for more remains. Caitlin felt ill. She checked the date of the article and saw that the news had broken two days ago.

  She hadn’t watched the news, so intent was she on seducing Andy. Had it been for nothing? If the divers found that sleeping bag, that was it, wasn’t it? It wouldn’t make any difference whether David’s friend announced his suspicions or not. She needed to think of another plan – and then she thought again of Nick Drake and all that he felt he owed her.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Michelle

  Michelle had been uneasy ever since she and Nick had spoken to Andy. Now, on her way out to the Ashbourne Road, she replayed things in her head. She had to know why Lydia Davis was so reluctant to talk about Caitlin. Why it was that she’d had no contact with her niece after the accident, that she wanted no contact with her now even though she was a grown woman and probably the only relative she had?

  When she neared the mobile home, she saw a lamp was burning. The soft yellow light was a beacon in the darkness of Thornton’s field. Michelle pulled up outside the gate and reached into the back of the car for the bag she’d brought with a bottle of brandy and a few groceries. It had been a while since her last visit and she hoped Lydia would be just as pliable as last time once she saw the gifts Michelle bore. She heard the television playing as she tapped softly on the door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Lydia asked through the closed door.

  ‘It’s Michelle. I’ve brought you a few things.’

  The door opened a crack and the woman peered out suspiciously. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. She eyed the bag and then stood back for Michelle to enter. As she closed the door behind her, Michelle noticed that she had a small wooden bat in her hand. ‘Can’t be too careful out here,’ Lydia told her when she saw Michelle looking. She hung the bat on a hook inside the door.

  ‘Tea?’ Lydia asked.

  ‘Sure, that’d be lovely.’

  ‘Kettle’s over there. You might make me one while you’re at it. Unless you’ve something stronger in that bag?’

  Michelle went to the counter, turned on the kettle and began emptying out the bag of groceries. She handed the brandy to Lydia who took it and immediately screwed the top off.

  ‘It’s been a while since I last saw you.’

  ‘Yeah, my boyfriend is sick.’ She thought about telling Lydia about the transplant, but changed her mind when she saw her guzzle the brandy. What was the point in scaring her? She didn’t need to know about that anyway. She still hadn’t decided how much of the story she would tell her. She needed to keep the focus on Caitlin and see how she reacted.

  They sat for a while. Michelle sipped her tea, waited for the brandy to loosen Lydia’s tongue. She didn’t want to mention Caitlin too soon lest the woman clam up and tell her nothing.

  ‘Did you write that article in the end?’ Lydia asked her suddenly.

  Michelle shook her head. ‘No. I decided not to. What you told me, it seemed too private, and I told you I wouldn’t, not without your go-ahead. Your family suffered so much it didn’t seem right for me to exploit that.’

  Lydia made some sound, a grunt of appreciation maybe.

  ‘How did you end up living out here?’ Michelle asked her.

  The woman shrugged. ‘Didn’t feel like living among people. The neighbours were keen enough that I move on too. The way they looked at me … I stopped going out, was housebound for years, the neighbourhood pariah. Not that I’d ever belonged among them anyway. I’ve always been a private person, didn’t like to mix, if you did they’d be on the doorstep day and night. I made that mistake when I moved back. Is that how you found me, someone on the estate told you?’

  Michelle nodded. ‘A woman two doors down from your old house said a man called Thornton let you live on his land.’

  Lydia took another mouthful of brandy. She was drinking it too fast, the liquor making her words come easy.

  ‘Bill’s an old friend of mine.’ It was the smile that pulled at the corners of her mouth that suggested that Bill Thornton may have been more than an old friend, at least at one time.

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘About the past? Sure, Bill knows everything. I’ve been close to Bill since we were kids, used to run in the fields together, wild we were. He was the only one I could turn to after it happened, the only one who wouldn’t judge. It seemed like our family was cursed, first Daniel, then Johnny and what he did to Rachel.’

  ‘If it’s a curse, it hasn’t been lifted,’ Michelle ventured.

  Lydia Davis lowered the bottle to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A year ago Caitlin’s husband went missing. There are no leads – he seems to have just vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘How do you know Caitlin?’

  ‘She owns a women’s weekly. I work with the Simon Community and she ran an article I did about homelessness.’

  ‘Was it her who sent you up here? She wants the details about what happened to her mother. If it wasn’t for that child …’ Her anger, sudden like the flare of a match, surprised Michelle.

  ‘No, she doesn’t know anything about my being here.’ Michelle paused. ‘Look, I’m going to level with you, Lydia. The reason I’m here is because some people suspect that Caitlin’s husband didn’t simply go missing, that maybe something … sinister happened. This is nothing journalistic, I’m not snooping for a story here, it’s personal. My boyfriend, Nick, he owes Caitlin, there was something … between them in the past and I’m worried he may be getting involved in something he shouldn’t.’ She paused, looking down at her hands steepled in her lap. ‘Last time I was out here, you told me about the accident – when Caitlin an
d her brother were little. Did Daniel really fall from the treehouse? Did Caitlin do something …?’

  Lydia stared at Michelle, then shook her head and looked away. ‘It’s the reason I didn’t adopt her … people wondered, thought I was a heartless bitch allowing them to take her like that.’ She stopped and swigged from the bottle, leaving the top off. ‘I saw them through the kitchen window. Somehow, she’d got him up there, he was too small to climb that ladder on his own. He was teetering at the edge and I saw her reach out … next thing he was on the ground, and I was running, but it was no good …’

  ‘Are you saying she pushed him?’

  Lydia was crying now, her mouth jagged as she tried to suppress the tears that ran freely down her lined face. ‘I could never be sure, but yes I think she might have. I told Johnny, but of course he didn’t believe it. He thought I was saying it to take the blame off myself. That it was my fault, no one else’s.’ She took a moment to compose herself, swiping at the tears with the sleeve of her sweater. ‘Of course, they spoiled her – they were totally wrapped up in her and she in them until Daniel came along. Then they had someone else to consider and she didn’t like that – she used to pretend to be sick just to get their attention. For a whole month she refused to go to school until finally Rachel made her. She became clingy and difficult. She didn’t like anyone else being near her parents, me included. I don’t know where it came from, such a possessive streak. It wasn’t from Johnny, you might think so, given what happened, but no … he’d never been jealous before the accident. If anything, he’d probably been too laid back when it came to Rachel and Brendan’s friendship, but the way he looked at it, they’d known each other for years. If something was going to happen, it would have done so before he came along.’

  Clingy. Difficult. If Caitlin’s jealousy had driven her to shove her little brother from a treehouse, there was no telling how it might have manifested itself in adulthood, was there? Michelle looked directly at Lydia. ‘Caitlin’s husband was having an affair,’ she said.

  Lydia didn’t answer but gave her a sharp, knowing look and raised the bottle to her lips again. ‘That girl,’ she said, ‘is capable of anything.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Nick

  When she opened the door, Caitlin seemed agitated, but she stood back and ushered Nick into the living room. He was surprised to see a fire in the grate, a real one. The curtains were pulled closed and the room was cosy.

  ‘I was hoping you’d call by,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to show you, something I’d like you to hear.’ She crossed to the mantelpiece, took something and then held it up for him to see. It was a cassette. ‘Before I was taken to the orphanage, they took me over to the house. They told me I could take just two toys from my room – the rest would be given away – but I also managed to take this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, inserting the tape into a hi-fi system – he didn’t even know they still sold ones that played cassettes. ‘It might bring something back to you.’

  He sat down with no idea what to expect. Caitlin stood by the system and pressed play. There was some crackling on the tape, the noise of someone recording. Then a woman began to sing. She began to laugh as she neared the end of a verse and a man joined in, the two voices fusing and rising in perfect harmony. He remembered the flashback he’d had under hypnosis – him and Rachel singing as they’d crossed the fields, Caitlin on his shoulders as they’d traipsed through the long grass. He closed his eyes. The voices were familiar, as familiar as any that he’d known in this life. The song finished, and he heard the man talking, coaxing, and then a child’s voice reciting a nursery rhyme. He opened his eyes. ‘It’s you?’ Caitlin nodded.

  ‘Sounds like a cliché but we were such a happy family. You know, when it happened, they told me my parents had been killed in a car accident. I only found out the truth when I was twelve years old. Violet, the woman who adopted me, she had this stack of papers she kept in a shoebox in her room, and I went there looking for my birth certificate. Inside the box there was this newspaper clipping with a picture of my parents. When I read it, I couldn’t believe it … but I didn’t blame my father … I’d seen how my mother was with Uncle Brendan. Even at the time I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t fully understand.’

  He listened to Caitlin trying to justify Johnny’s actions, his actions, and dreaded the reasons that compelled her to come to this conclusion. But there was no point in putting off the reason he’d come any longer.

  ‘Caitie, I talked to Andy. He told me about David, and about the girl, Louise.’

  She nodded. ‘He only just told me about it too. Can you believe it? He’d known all along and didn’t have the guts to tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t want to hurt you. He cares for you a lot, Caitlin.’

  ‘Yeah, so did David. And look what he did.’

  ‘Did you know that something was going on? I mean, before Andy told you?’

  ‘No, how could I?’ Her tone was sharp.

  ‘You might have sensed something, people often do. Strange behaviour, unexplained text messages …’

  ‘Yeah, well I didn’t have a clue. You have no idea how stupid that makes me feel.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, it can happen. A confrontation, things get heated. I know that better than anyone.’

  ‘What? You think I did something to David?’

  ‘Did you?’

  She stared at him, defiantly. ‘And what if I did, Nick? How would you help me? Anyway, I thought you suspected Andy?’

  ‘Andy thinks it was you, Caitlin. He said he heard someone in the house the evening David disappeared, but when he rang the bell there was no answer.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what he heard, but I wasn’t here when he came by. I was out running.’

  Nick paused. ‘Caitlin, I’m sick. Sicker than they first suspected. Yesterday, I got a call, and I had to go in to see the consultant. I haven’t even told Michelle this yet, but he says I’m running out of time, that my liver is severely scarred. I might only have six weeks left. I’ve thought this through, and if you’ve got yourself into trouble, if something happened and you’re afraid to tell anyone …’

  She looked at him in disbelief. ‘Jesus, are you suggesting you would take the rap for me?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m dying, and if it weren’t for me, for Johnny Davis, you would have had a normal life. This is the only way I can think of to make things right.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘How do I know this isn’t a trick? Something that Andy’s put you up to, or Michelle. Surely, you’d have talked to her first about all this?’

  ‘It’s not a trick. I swear to you, at this point I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll sign a confession if you want, right now, before you tell me anything. But you, you’ve still got so much of your life ahead of you, Caitie. Whatever you’ve done, whatever mistakes you made, it’s down to me. To what happened in the past.’

  Caitlin stood up and moved away from him. He wondered what she was doing and for a moment thought that he’d got it wrong after all and that she was about to call the guards. But then she opened a drawer and returned to him with a notepad and pen.

  ‘Okay, do it,’ she said.

  He took the pen and – his hand shaking – wrote a short confession and signed his name to it. ‘Now tell me what happened,’ he said. ‘When the guards question me, I need to know. I need to know everything.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Caitlin

  Caitlin looked at the notebook in her hand. ‘Are you serious about this?’

  ‘It’s the only thing I can do.’

  She stared at it, at the scrawl of Nick’s signature on the paper before her. ‘Give me your phone,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take out your phone and unlock it.’

  He took his phone from his pocket, punched in the code and passed it to her. She looked at the screen, checking to make sure he wasn
’t recording their conversation. Then she turned it off and laid it on the table. The way she saw it she had two choices. She could tell Nick what had happened and let him take the blame, or she could take her chances that the divers wouldn’t find David’s body.

  ‘Okay, you asked so I’ll tell you, but you can’t go changing your mind afterwards.’

  ‘I won’t, I swear it.’

  She nodded, satisfied that, crazy though it seemed, Nick was willing to do this to make it up for the past.

  ‘I’d borrowed David’s phone to make a call. A message popped up on the screen before I had a chance to start dialling. He was in the bathroom, shaving. After reading the text that had just come in I checked his phone for other messages. I couldn’t believe what I read there. He was too stupid to even delete them. Or maybe he wanted to keep them. When he came out of the bathroom I held the phone out to him and told him he’d just got a message from his girlfriend. He tried to laugh it off, took the phone from me, but I could tell from his expression that he knew he’d been caught out. There was no point in his denying it. He told me he was “sorry”, he told me it was nothing. “Just a stupid joke” … I told him to give me the phone. He didn’t want to, but I didn’t give him much option. I took out my own phone and started to dial her number. He asked me what I was doing, tried to take the phone from me. “I’ll ring the little whore, will I? Ask her?” I walked out of the room, but he followed me, still swearing nothing had happened and begging me not to call her. Then he tried to take my phone from me and I lashed out. We were in the landing, he stumbled, fell backwards down the stairs. There was this terrible noise as his head hit the floor.’

  She stopped talking and stole a glance at Nick.

  ‘It was an accident?’ he said.