“It was you.” Evie didn’t know where her courage had come from, but suddenly she wasn’t frightened. “You were jealous of Leah. So jealous, you wanted to kill her, and you’ve convinced yourself it’s my fault.”
If she didn’t know firsthand how malleable the human mind was, Evie would never have believed it was possible. Now, as she watched the expression on Casey’s face, she knew it was true. She was so disturbed, her mind was so twisted, she was completely convinced of her own lies.
“Or did Xander do it? How did you bribe him, Casey?” Evie watched the fear in Casey’s eyes when she mentioned Xander. “What about Tamsyn? Did you kill her, too?” As Casey’s eyes flickered, Evie took a shot in the dark. “Or was that Xander, too? Picking off the unloved, the unnoticed, thinking he’d get away with it . . . Aren’t you worried he’ll take you, too?”
“These are lies.” Casey tried to compose herself, but her voice gave her away, each word pitched higher than the previous one. “You’re a liar.”
“You got Xander to attack me.” Evie stared at Casey. “Where’s Angel? Where’s my daughter?”
She’d pushed Casey too far. Screaming, Casey ran at her, the knife raised. Suddenly, Evie was frozen, riveted to the floor, seconds from death when Jack burst in through the open door. In two strides he reached Casey, brought her crashing to the floor.
“Evie, are you all right?”
But Evie was screaming at Casey. “Why? Why did you take her?”
A horrible laugh came from Casey. “Stupid fucking bitch . . . You should have died, Jen. Why should you live? But you ruined it, like you ruin everything. Poor little Jen, always the victim . . . ,” she mocked as Jack pulled her to her feet, wrenched the knife from her hand, and threw it out of reach.
“Can you call Abbie?” Evie’s voice was shaking, her body trembling, as she watched him twist one of Casey’s arms firmly behind her back.
“I already have. In fact, that’s probably her right now.” There was the sound of cars pulling up outside.
Evie was shaking. “Tell her you’ve found Casey Danning.”
CASEY
Nothing is ever by chance. When you came back, the future had shifted. But I’d known it would. My bones held the knowledge of what no one else would ever know, secrets to take to my watery grave, and even when my flesh rotted away and left those secrets exposed on the seabed, no one would ever tell my story. The only person who can do that is you.
It’s in your bones, too.
I remember you at school, the essence of an unfair universe, because you had it all—grades, looks, friends, clothes, talent, a career mapped out. I heard you tell one of your friends you were going to work in television—as if you had no doubt—but for girls like you, there was only certainty.
You didn’t know who I was; I was beyond the dimmest kind of recognition. I was someone you’d seen around. One of the invisible, who blended into the background of other people’s lives. They’re the most dangerous. Did you know that? Always hovering, close by, but you never see them.
Your life was full of promise. Not mine, though. Promise implies the prospect of a positive, exciting future. It wasn’t everyone’s right, though. How could it be? I knew the universe was fucked up when it contrived to give my cheating father a roof over his head when a whole family of innocent refugees had nothing. The suffering of the innocent, of the millions, for the security of the few.
But nothing in life is fair. There is no justice, only a construct manipulated by people with letters after their names. The rest of us make it up, under the guise of so-called morality, the most meaningless word, as subjective and malleable as we want it to be.
Human beings are good at that, though. Twisting words to mean what they want, dressing up unpalatable truths so that they are something more wholesome. What happened to honesty? Or is it like justice, which depends on where you look at it from? One man’s truth is another man’s lie, just as one man’s victory is another man’s failure. Think about it. A killer succeeds; their victim dies. A court case is won; a murderer walks free. That’s justice for you.
You were the brightest summer day, with cornfield hair and eyes the color of cloudless skies; while I was the deepest, blackest night. That was before, of course. Before your summer turned to autumn overnight, making you a dark, tormented shadow of yourself. Before ghosts sucked the happiness out of you, your prettiness, your laughter, even your friends devoured by guilt. Oh, you knew who I was by then. Your guilt and misery and ugliness were a just punishment . . . or so it seemed at the time. They weren’t, though. Not if you knew what I’d gone through. Not when, much later, you managed to shake the shadows off and be so happy.
It isn’t right. And I’ve waited, always wanting to believe the moment would come when our paths would cross again. It seemed inevitable that the past would be redressed, injustice rectified. A matter of balance, which at last would make sense of it all.
They’re fleeting, those moments. Easily missed, like that one a few years ago. You didn’t see me, did you? I was ready to seize it, but you were too busy talking to the man you were with. A few seconds either way would have changed the course of the future for both of us. I glanced away, and when I looked back, you’d gone. I knew then that it wasn’t the right time. There was so much more that fate had in store for you.
You are the last person in the world to deserve happiness, though you’re probably one of those people who think it’s your right. How can you, of all people, believe that? When you alone are responsible for so much misery. When there are innocent, tortured souls in the world. What right have you not to join them?
I came here to hide from a world that judged so harshly, cruelly. I thought this place had saved me. A year ago, when I arrived, I was dying, but you don’t know how it feels to drown in blackness. To exist in a place where there’s no sunrise, just a perpetual night filled with hatred and jeering voices. You don’t know what it’s like to fight each day for every breath, when it would be so much easier not to. Seeing you now brings it all back, hypodermic sharp. You were too fragile, even in your newfound happiness, to put yourself through what haunts me every day.
There’s no love—not for people like me. Not everyone is loved, but you don’t know that, do you? But in the long run, this makes it easier, because from the outset, when you know it isn’t a caring world, there is no harsh awakening to reality.
The police weren’t interested in what you’d done. Didn’t look past your pretty hair and your tears. Nobody could. Even you didn’t know you’d killed my family. You didn’t see the rift you’d caused, which became a chasm, one into which each of us fell, spinning deeper and deeper until we were gone. You fooled everyone. In a world that favors beauty, each and every one of them was taken in.
Not me, though. My razor-sharp eyes saw straight through you. That’s why I’ve kept breathing. There was a moment out in the future, spiraling toward us, when the truth would be exposed and everyone would know.
Rick hadn’t needed to teach me to surf. Or to instruct me about swell and rips and storm surges. The universe brings us what we need. The day I stood on the beach as the waves powered in, the rain lashing the shore, I saw the giveaway signs of the rip.
It had always been there when I needed it. The knowledge that I could disappear for good. I was calm, resolute, ready to die if it was my time, and I threw myself at the mercy of the elements. It was their choice whether I lived or not. The prospect of death didn’t frighten me. After years of pain, I envisaged uncomfortable minutes in cold water as it filled my lungs, stopped my breathing. Minutes that, after a lifetime of hurting, would seem like nothing. Then blessed eternal release.
As I waded out, I didn’t falter. The storm had given the rip a force I hadn’t felt before, and that sent a strange euphoria coursing through me as it swept me out to sea. It was the ride of my life, one that there was no turning back from, as I was lost among the might of the waves.
It’s life’s greatest cert
ainty—death. Our strongest instinct is to keep it at bay, and it takes inhuman strength—or maybe desperation—to invite it in. I’d known today would come. Counted down as the blackness grew more dense, more suffocating. No one would miss me. In a matter of minutes, Casey Danning would be gone forever.
I was ready. I let my board go. Felt myself choking on the seawater, then heard the sudden quiet as I submerged myself, felt the current dragging me down, panic building as my lungs wanted to explode. My last thoughts were about how long it would take to stop breathing, how long until I drowned.
* * *
Does the manner of your death define your arrival in the next life? I hadn’t expected to come round on a small sandy beach, blinded by sunlight. Was this death? Thrown up on a shoreline? The most gentle rebirth into whatever came next?
I ached as I tried to move. Flashes of the storm came back to me: the height of the waves, my surfboard blown away, as if made of paper. Disappointed all of a sudden, because after a life in which I’d achieved nothing, in death, I’d failed, too.
As I lay there, I waited for the darkness to return, but I could feel only the sun warm on my skin. For the first time I could remember, I felt peaceful. The universe had granted me a second chance: it must believe I was worth something.
Above the beach, I glimpsed a single white-painted house and the brilliant, hopeful beginning that follows the darkest, most bitter end.
“You okay?” The voice startled me. “You must be crazy to have been out there. You could have killed yourself.”
After dragging myself up so that I was leaning on my elbows, I saw a guy in a wet suit.
“I’m Rick.”
“Hi.” I stared at him, at his friendly eyes, as I realized I’d been granted a fresh start. “I’m Charlotte.”
The easiest place to hide—behind a name.
I saw it as repayent of a karmic debt. After betraying me and moving with her parents to California, Charlotte Harrison had owed me. And I was only borrowing her name.
“Whatever happened to you, Charlotte?” Rick sounded bemused.
“A narrow escape,” I told him. “In more ways than you’ll ever know.”
As he helped me climb the rocks, then led me along the path toward his yard, suddenly I knew there was a reason I’d been spared. One I could see, one that was crystal clear. In the bright sunlight after the violent storm, everything was falling into place.
I’d thought it was my time. I could see that from the way Rick ran me a bath, then, after cooking breakfast, told me to stay as long as I wanted to. The darkness was nowhere to be seen. It had been laid to rest with Casey Danning.
Later that day, I sat in the yard, looking out across the bay. What a difference a day could make. How much life could change. It didn’t matter how much you try to control things. Sometimes the universe has its own ideas.
You thought you were hidden, didn’t you? But no one can hide forever, can they, Jen? When I saw you a few weeks ago, I knew that finally it had come. The moment our eyes would meet. When you would remember what you’d done. The first time in all these years you actually saw me.
People, cats, children—everyone dies. Does it matter when? You were lucky, weren’t you? You weren’t supposed to be found. Xander laughed when he heard you’d been taken to the hospital. You weren’t supposed to survive his attack. Some things just are, like Einstein’s laws or Newton’s or the regularity of the tides or the predetermined length of a life span. Wrongs must be put right. Karmic debts repaid. Balance reestablished.
An eye for an eye, a life for a life.
46
EVIE
As Jack led Casey out of the barn, Evie’s heart was thudding. She reached the door in the makeshift wall, turned the handle, expecting to find the door locked, gasping when it came open and she saw what was behind it. This couldn’t be right. She was hallucinating. Angel’s things were piled up against the far wall. Her little bed with the pink duvet. Her wall hanging, crumpled on the floor. All her clothes, in shades of pink, piled messily in a corner. Evie cried out, and her hands went to her mouth. Even one-eared Pony was here on the floor in front of her. Her mind was playing the ultimate, cruelest trick.
Suddenly she was light-headed, the room was spinning round, and her legs were feeling as though they couldn’t take her weight. Jack was right. She needed to go home.
But before they left, she wanted him to see this. She called out to him. “Jack . . .” A plaintive, desperate cry for help.
A voice answered. It was a voice she’d know anywhere, a husky voice, from a little girl with tangled hair and chameleon eyes, who she knew from the depths of her soul, emerging, terrified, from the shadows.
“Mommy . . .”
Part of the Silence Page 26