Stranger in the Woods: A tense psychological thriller

by Anni Taylor

  Jessica had been found not guilty of the charges involving the supply of sleeping medication to Peyton for the purpose of abusing children and any involvement in the sexual abuse of children.

  She still had the manslaughter court case pending. And now there would be two new court cases for her to attend. One to determine her guilt in illegally procuring a surrogate and her actions the night I gave birth to Rhiannon. The other was to be a court case to determine custody of Rhiannon.

  I was in a state of deep confusion. I didn’t know yet what I wanted in terms of custody. In the interim, full custody had been awarded to Alban.

  I hadn’t seen Rhiannon at all since my return to Scotland. Things were too muddled, too confused and strange. All I knew was that the last thing I should do was to rush in and further add to the pain of a little girl who was already missing the only mother she’d ever known.

  A set of blood tests had been ordered to determine for certain who Rhiannon’s biological parents were—and it had been determined that Alban was the father and I was the mother.

  Two dark-eyed, dark-haired people had produced a blue-eyed blonde child. It was biologically possible, we’d been told. Recessive genes for fair colouring had come together, from Alban and myself. One chance in four. Not that unusual we’d been informed.

  Only now, when I looked at photos of Rhiannon could I see what I couldn’t see before. She didn’t look like Jessica at all. She was pieces of Alban, pieces of me, pieces of herself.

  The weight of it pressed on me from all sides. Whatever happened, she was forever my child. I was her biological mother.

  Mother. The word was foreign on my tongue, clunky in my mind.

  I didn’t feel like Rhiannon’s mother. Or like a mother at all.

  I saw Jessica as Rhiannon’s mother—at least, I couldn’t yet unhook my image of the two of them as a unit yet.

  My own mother saw no such obstacles. She’d recognised me in Rhiannon’s features as soon as she’d set eyes on her. Rhiannon was mine as far as she was concerned.

  Mum hadn’t seen Jessica and Rhiannon together the way in which I had. Hadn’t seen them in their matching outfits. Hadn’t seen how obsessively protective Jessica was of her.

  Jessica’s behaviour towards Rhiannon made terrible sense now. She was using Rhiannon as a shield as much as she was protecting her. The outfits were a foil—a thing to fool the eye. I hadn’t seen past it. Matching mother-daughter outfits hadn’t been an unusual thing in my world.

  I didn’t know how to feel about Jessica. She’d taken from me what she believed was rightly hers—the baby. She could have killed me there and then in the church. She could have had Peyton dump my body somewhere. I might never have come home to Mum and Jake, might never have been seen or heard from again. I’d have been one of those sad and tragic pictures of missing persons in the news.

  I’d ended up coming to Braithnoch and staying there right under her nose, unknowingly tormenting her. It had been Jessica who’d asked Peyton to do something to scare me away. It had been Jessica who’d stolen my medication. It had been Jessica who’d rummaged through my handbag, checking my passport to make sure I hadn’t regained my memory and was lying about never having been to Scotland before.

  She’d been trying to make me leave. But she wasn’t evil, or a killer.

  But I hadn’t forgiven her yet. The image of the room in the church kept closing around me, like a dirty, aged coat.

  She left me there.

  With the rats and the dirt and the dark. And Peyton.

  Mum and Greer had done some sleuthing about the previous year I’d spent in Scotland. What they’d discovered had tipped my world upside-down yet again. Mum knew which university in Edinburgh I’d studied at and which course I’d taken. Together, Mum and Greer tracked down a girl I used to share a small flat with. Mum had remembered the first name of the girl, which I’d told her years ago. Her full name was Emily Seidel. She’d been studying art back then, and now worked teaching art at a wellness retreat in Germany, which was her home country. She hadn’t heard about the case—she wasn’t someone who kept current with the news.

  Mum paid for Emily’s flight to Scotland. I had a vague memory of her face—bright blue eyes peeking out from beneath a black fringe. Her German accent and the way she laughed also seemed familiar. But I was unable to recall the months we’d spent together in Edinburgh.

  Emily told us that we’d rented the flat for three months, the last month of which I’d begun dating a man named Trent Dorrington. She said Trent had quickly become possessive, almost immediately putting pressure on me to come and live with him. One night, he’d invited some friends of his to a small party that Emily and I were throwing at our flat. Trent’s friends had trashed the flat, causing a large amount of damage. Trent had assured us that he’d pay for the damage. But he became angered when I turned down his offer to stay with him at his place. He left Emily and I to pay the bill—twenty thousand in Australian dollars.

  Emily said we’d both had no choice but to return home to our own countries. We were broke, in debt and unable to rent anything else due to the damage caused in our names. We’d had to find temporary accommodation at a backpacker hostel. But Emily said that I’d suddenly come up with the money, without any explanation. And I’d told her I’d changed universities and was going to finish the rest of my studies in Inverness. She said she tried to stay friends, but I distanced myself. She finished her course and returned to Germany and didn’t hear from me again.

  It wasn’t hard to guess where I’d gotten the money from. Jessica had said she’d paid me thirty thousand in Australian dollars.

  Emily and I had hugged at the end of our meeting and promised we’d keep in touch.

  It was the last piece of the puzzle. I now knew why I’d been so desperate for money that I’d agreed to become a surrogate for Jessica. Also, I now knew that although Trent hadn’t done anything that caused me to lose my memory, he hadn’t been the innocent he’d painted himself as.

  I knew everything now, but I was still lost. I’d seen a psychologist twice over the past fortnight. She’d told me it was possible that I would never fully regain my memory. It was as if a hole had been burned through a year of memories in my brain, just like the burned pages of a diary. Burned to smoke and ashes.

  There was one question I was desperate to know the answer to, but knew I never would. Why did I change my mind about the baby? Why did I want to keep her after I was a few months into the pregnancy? I’d been a young university student with no desire to start a family.

  The kettle boiled, shaking me from my thoughts.

  In Greer’s sunny kitchen, I poured some tea for Mum and myself.

  Mum walked in as I was stirring the sugar and milk into the hot cups of water. She had her hand cupped over the phone receiver.

  “Isla,” she said, “It’s Alban.” Her eyes were wide open. She’d looked like that almost constantly since she’d been in Scotland, bewildered by the truth of what had really happened to me last time I was here.

  I gulped a quick breath. Was I ready to talk with Alban? We’d barely spoken since the night he’d pulled me from the marshes on the moor. Things had been too raw. We’d each been dealing with our own demons.

  Taking the phone, I tried to calm the sudden squeezing sensation in my chest. Thoughts of Alban mixed with images of Peyton and Jessica and Rhiannon in my mind. I could see him with his wife and daughter, the family that had seemed perfect when I’d first seen them together. And I was transported back to that night with Peyton on the moor. I could almost feel the blade of Peyton’s knife plunging into my flesh, feel myself sinking into the ice-cold marsh, feel the terror as Peyton had Alban pinned to the ground.

  I managed a half-whispered hello, suppressing a desire to put the phone down and walk away.

  “Isla…,” he began, then stopped.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Holding on. Well, trying to. You?”

  “Same.”<
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  “I know. Right now, I don’t even know how to pick up the pieces.”

  “How is…Rhiannon?”

  “She’s doing her usual things. Playing with her wee giraffe. Avoiding vegetables like the plague. Trying her best escape routines every time she’s put down for a sleep.”

  His words pulled a smile from me. “I hope she’s been okay.”

  A slow exhale came through the line. “She knows something’s wrong. She knows Jessica’s not around. But my mother’s been staying here. And Greer comes to see her. Maybe it’s enough for now. I don’t know. I….”

  He didn’t finish his words. And I didn’t step in to rescue him. I knew why. The newness and awkwardness of the two of us talking together about Rhiannon—our child—had made both of us tumble into silence. I felt like an imposter, a delusional woman pretending a stranger’s child was her own. Surely someone would come and tell me that this was wrong—the blood tests were wrong; Jessica’s story was a lie and Rhiannon didn’t really have my facial features.

  The psychologist I’d seen had told me it was normal for me to feel this way. I’d go through stages and I shouldn’t try to rush myself through them.

  The media had been waiting and hoping to grab a photo of Rhiannon and me together: The real mother reunites with her child. That was the part of the story that everyone was waiting for. But so far, they’d been disappointed.

  “Isla,” Alban said, breaking the deep stretch of quiet. “We’ve got some things to talk about. Would you come to Braithnoch?”

  My stomach wrenched. “Come there?”

  “I understand if you can’t do it. It can be somewhere else. Anywhere you choose.”

  “No…it’s fine. But the press? They’ll be waiting for something like this.”

  “I thought of that. The local police—Kirk and Tash—said they’d scout the area first. Greer could take your mother and mine and Rhiannon out somewhere. I mean, I can’t have Rhiannon here while we talk.”

  I flicked my gaze towards Mum. “My mother would be overjoyed. She can’t wait to meet your little girl.”

  Mum held a hand over her mouth as she nodded, excitement rising in her eyes. She was anxious to meet her first grandchild and she hadn’t been doing a good job of hiding that fact.

  “Rhiannon’s also yours,” Alban pointed out, then sighed heavily. “Listen…just come. It’ll all work out. I’ll do whatever I have to do to make things work. For Rhiannon’s sake. Whatever you choose to do, it’s okay. No one should expect anything from you.”

  I inhaled the scents of tea and fresh flowers in Greer’s kitchen. “When?”

  “Today. This morning. If that works. My mother would like to meet you as well.” He made a low, wry sound. “No pressure.”

  I made a tentative agreement to arrive there at ten in the morning. An hour later, Greer, Mum and I were on our way to Braithnoch.

  My mouth dried as we neared, an anxious beat tapping in my chest. This place had been Jessica’s domain—the place she’d tried to keep me away from. I kept my gaze away from the distant hills and the moor. My blood had seeped into that moor and I didn’t want a visual reminder.

  Immediately outside the house, the heather was in bloom, looking to me like huge, fantastical powder puffs.

  Alban was waiting there, holding Rhiannon. A blonde woman of medium height stood beside him. She hadn’t been at the courtroom—she’d been minding Rhiannon that day and she’d also told Alban that she couldn’t bear to hear any details of what had happened to Elodie.

  I said a brief hello to Rhiannon, trying to remember to smile naturally and not to stare at her too long.

  I met with Alban’s mother while my mother and Greer took Rhiannon for a short walk. I knew that Mum was itching to hold Rhiannon, but she held herself back, letting Greer take Rhiannon’s hand.

  Alban’s mother might have been a blue-eyed blonde, but she had the same intense way of regarding me that Alban did, and the exact same way of tilting her head to the side when considering my words. A warmth exuded from her when she hugged me. “I see you in Rhiannon,” she said to me quietly.

  Alban’s mother, my mother and Greer left with Rhiannon in Greer’s car.

  Alban approached me. “Come inside. I’m sorry—it’s a bit cold in here. I should have gotten the fire started. Summer didn’t last nearly long enough.”

  “It’s fine. Really.” I gave him a smile that felt tight on my face.

  I walked inside with him, where, despite my protests, he began stacking wood in the fireplace. He wore a checked shirt—the same shirt he’d been wearing the time I’d watched him chopping firewood in the fog.

  He soon had a fire crackling and then offered me a hot drink. We sat in front of the fire with cups of tea. I was grateful for the fire then because it gave us somewhere to focus other than each other. I didn’t even yet know what I was going to say.

  “Isla,” Alban began. “It’s an insane situation. I want you to know you can ask me anything—anything that’s confusing you. If I can answer it, I will. I haven’t had a chance to say how sorry I am that my wife put you through what she did. I don’t even have words.”

  I bowed my head, watching steam rise from my cup of tea. “You’re not responsible for what she did.”

  “I know. But I keep tossing it around and around in my head. If I’d been a better husband somehow, if she hadn’t been scared of losing me—”

  “Then she wouldn’t have gone down the surrogate path? I mean, she wouldn’t have tried so hard to have a second baby?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  I hadn’t expected that kind of honesty from Alban. He could have painted Jessica as evil and himself as a saint if he’d wanted to.

  “Could you have been a better husband?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Everyone could do better than they’re doing when it comes to relationships. Maybe I worked too much or didn’t appreciate her enough. I don’t know. My mother won’t hear a word of that. I’m her perfect boy. She won’t even speak Jessica’s name at the moment.” His face crumpled as he glanced away. “All of the terrible things that happened because of this, because of how insecure Jess felt….”

  “Alban, the psychologist I’ve been seeing told me we tend to want to go back in time and work out what we could have done to fix things. But if we did the best that we could do at the time, with the knowledge that we had, then we need to stop blaming ourselves.”

  I thought of my mother, who still blamed herself for Dad’s suicide, as if she might have stopped it if she’d done something differently. But she couldn’t have guessed what was happening deep inside my father’s mind. Because he never told her and never let it show.

  Alban nodded slowly. “Your psychologist is right. I want to go back and change everything. So that I can bring Elodie back.”

  The sight of the jumping flames blurred as my eyes grew wet. “It’s been a set of dominoes falling, one after the other. One thing causing another. If I had never dated Trent. Or if I’d moved out with him when he wanted and let him pay for the damage to the flat. If I’d never contacted Jessica when I saw her message on the uni notice board….”

  His voice hoarsened. “But if not you, then it would have been another girl. Jessica would have still gone ahead with her plan.”

  “But another girl might have seen the whole thing through to the end. Unlike me. I went back on the deal.”

  His gaze flicked to me and he studied my face. “That’s one of the few things keeping me sane right now. The fact that you wanted to keep Rhiannon. Considering everything else that’s happened, that’s the one thing I’m hanging onto.”

  “Alban…I—”

  “Ach, I wasn’t saying that to put pressure on you. I know there’s a lot of attention and pressure on you right now. Everyone wants to know what you’re going to do. But I want you to know that I don’t expect you to stay in Scotland. I don’t expect you to have a relationship with Rhiannon. It’s just…well, the fac
t that you wanted to keep her when you were pregnant just feels better to me somehow. Rhiannon wasn’t just a transaction to you, she wasn’t just about the money.”

  “Thanks, for not putting pressure on me. I don’t know what’s right or what I need to do. The most important thing is what’s best for Rhiannon.”

  “What’s best for her depends on what’s best for you. It’d be worse for Rhiannon in the long run if you stayed because you think you should. Because it will all fall apart, sooner or later.” He crushed his eyes shut. “None of us want that to happen. We’ll be okay, just Rhiannon and me. I’ll give her everything I have. And she’s got people around her who love her. Her grandparents and Greer.”

  “I need some time. There’s been so much focus on the court case that I haven’t had the mental space to figure this out.”

  “And the court cases haven’t ended, either. Ah, such a tangled mess this is.” He gave a short, rueful laugh. “Looking at wee Rhiannon, I can’t regret that she happened. Not for a second. She’s a treasure. But the craziness of how it happened…what my wife did….”

  I sipped at tea that was already growing lukewarm. “It must have been a strange couple of weeks for you at that Edinburgh hotel, with Jessica running off to my hotel room every night or so.”

  “She’d just say she needed some fresh air and she was going for a walk. I guess I didn’t think much of it. I got myself pretty drunk every night during that time. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted—I didn’t want to get back with Jessica. But she’d laid a pretty heavy guilt trip on me, saying we needed to try to repair the marriage for Elodie’s sake. And so I did. I tried my heart out.”

  “Did it work?”

  He shook his head, staring at the tea he’d barely drunk. “You know what they say about wringing the neck of a dead horse? That described that fortnight we spent together. Of course, I’d no idea what that trip was really all about. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have guessed that she had a surrogate waiting in one of the rooms of a hotel nearby.”