The Three Day Rule

by Emlyn Rees

  In the dining room, Stephanie saw that Elliot was reading a newspaper, alone by the fire. He seemed unaware of the commotion.

  ‘Have you seen Kellie anywhere?’ Stephanie called through the door.

  ‘Not since I went to walk the dog,’ he said, from behind the paper, rustling it to signal his displeasure at being disturbed.

  In the television room, Michael and Taylor were watching a film. Taylor didn’t look at her, but stared straight ahead at the screen. Stephanie recognised that it was Finding Nemo, the bit where Nemo was trying to escape the fish tank in the dentist’s waiting room.

  ‘Have you seen Kellie?’ Stephanie asked.

  ‘No,’ Taylor said, not even glancing at her. ‘Why would we have?’

  ‘Michael?’ Stephanie asked.

  He shrugged, his eyes darting away from hers back to the screen.

  She walked back into the hall. ‘No luck, I’m afraid. You’re welcome to look around, but I really don’t think she’s here.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay?’ Isabelle suggested to Ben. ‘Wait until the snow has stopped.’

  ‘No, I should keep looking.’

  ‘Simon?’ Stephanie called. ‘Nat?’

  Nat appeared at the top of the stairs with Gerald.

  ‘Where’s Simon?’ Stephanie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gerald said. ‘I thought he was down there.’

  Stephanie realised she hadn’t seen him for a few hours.

  ‘I’ll go and look upstairs,’ David said, throwing Stephanie a look which clearly meant that he thought she should have been keeping an eye on Simon, too.

  She opened the door of the television room again, feeling flushed and guilty. Michael sat down suddenly on the sofa and folded his arms. His cheeks were red. Taylor continued to stare at the screen and ignore Stephanie.

  ‘Where’s Simon?’ she asked them both.

  They were up to something. She knew it.

  ‘What? Lost him too, have you?’ Taylor said.

  Stephanie had had enough. She marched over and switched off the television.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘Where’s Simon?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Michael said. His voice sounded strange.

  ‘Well bloody well find him,’ Stephanie said.

  Suddenly, she felt her heart start to race. Where could Simon be? Why was everyone behaving so strangely? Was she the only one who was worried?

  Back in the hall, Stephanie met David at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘He’s not here,’ David said.

  It was the first time that Stephanie had held eye contact with him since their fight yesterday. Now as their eyes connected, her heart jolted with fear.

  Chapter 29

  ‘There has to be a way,’ Kellie said, out loud, yet again, but she knew that she was starting to sound hysterical.

  It had been an hour since Taylor, Michael and Simon had left and the storm had got worse and worse. Now it was dark.

  She held the torch that Ben had given her with one hand and tried to use a small rock she’d found to smash the gate near where the padlock had it bracketed to the wall. It still wasn’t budging, however, and she was getting weaker with the cold. She staggered backwards, away from the flurry of snow which blasted through the grille, and sat against the wall, near to some shattered glass.

  Think, she told herself. She had to think.

  She’d worked out by now that Taylor and Michael weren’t coming back. Even if they’d wanted to, the snowstorm was probably too bad.

  What were they doing? she wondered. Were they sitting in Mr Thorne’s house pretending that nothing was wrong?

  The thought made her want to scream. How dare they behave so irresponsibly. Didn’t they realise that she could die of exposure out here? She thanked God for her hooded Spiewak jacket, for being back in her own clothes, not Sally’s or Isabelle’s.

  Then Kellie thought back to the way Taylor had looked at her. She wasn’t going to crack. She wasn’t going to tell anyone what she’d done, because she believed she was right. She believed that Kellie should be punished.

  How bloody ironic, Kellie thought. Just when she’d realised that she didn’t want Elliot after all, and that she didn’t want to mess up his family and that neither, probably, did he, his psycho daughter decided to take matters into her own hands. To think that Kellie had actually believed, only a few days ago, that she and Taylor would one day be friends.

  ‘Aaagh!’ she said out loud. Why, oh why had she been such a bloody fool? How could this have happened?

  There had to be a way through this. Somebody had to come and rescue her. Ben must have realised she was missing by now.

  Or would he? Another thought had occurred to her. What if Taylor had got to Ben and told him a pack of lies? What then? What if she’d managed to convince him that Kellie was safe? Because she might have, mightn’t she? In just the same way she’d made a complete fool of Kellie and tricked her into coming here.

  Kellie wished now that it had all been different. She wished she’d followed her gut instinct and had insisted on telling Ben about Elliot before anything had happened between them. Because now, if Taylor had miraculously told the truth and confessed what she’d done and why, then Ben would hate Kellie anyway. He would have found out that she’d lied about Elliot, and surely that would invalidate everything that had happened between them?

  That was the worst case scenario, surely? But then something else occurred to her too. What if Ben had got stuck in the snowstorm in the boat? What if he was in trouble himself? What if something had happened to him?

  Genuine fear gripped her again, but she forced the bad thoughts away. She was going to survive this, she told herself, and the only way to do that was to escape. She had to get out. And soon. She knew now for certain that she couldn’t spend the night here. If she did, she’d be lucky to survive. She took a look around her.

  This place must be a mine of some sort, because that’s what Michael had called out to her when he’d first raised the false alarm. He’d said that Simon was stuck in the mine – but this didn’t look like a mine shaft to her. Didn’t they go down vertically? Not that she’d ever been in one, and the only ones she’d ever studied at school had been opal, not tin. Well, one thing was for sure, she thought, shining the torch inside, it had to lead somewhere, and anywhere was better than here.

  She remembered what Ben had said about men tunnelling deep beneath the island. What if she fell? What if she tumbled down a shaft so deep nobody would ever find her? She looked into the darkness and felt terrified.

  On the other hand, she thought, forcing herself to take the opposite perspective, what if there was an exit just around the corner? What if there was an easy way out? What if she was helplessly panicking, and froze to death here just because she was too afraid to move?

  She shone the weak torch beam into the tunnel. It was swallowed up in the darkness. If she was to go down there, would she be swallowed up too?

  She looked back through the grille. No one was coming. She knew that for sure. She would just have to be brave. She had to think about the positives. She had her big coat to keep her warm, she had a torch and she had music. Warmth, light, music. What was there to be scared of, then?

  She felt into her pocket, pulled out her iPod and put in the earpieces. Music. That was going to help the most – but her hands were shaking as she selected her play list. How typical that she’d deleted the Batman movie soundtrack. She felt like a bat, rustling around on her own in the dark. If only there was a red emergency phone on the wall and a Batmobile.

  ‘It Must be Love’ was the first track. It gave her confidence. It brought back all that was normal in the world, as she set off into the darkness. Where there’s a will, there’s a way out, she told herself.

  She was determined. She was going to get out of here and back to Ben.

  Ben. It was all she wanted. To see Ben again. To make everything right between them.

 
Ahead of her the tunnel became narrower. She held the torch in her mouth, and it wavered around as she felt her way with both hands. The walls were slippery and freezing cold.

  For a second, she closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. Are you listening, God? she thought. Because I just want to get out of here alive. How odd, she thought, that she’d finally got religious at Christmas time.

  Where was this tunnel going to lead her to? She had to find out. She shuffled forwards into the darkness, her heart pounding with fear.

  And then her foot slipped.

  Chapter 30

  Michael’s throat was parched. His skin itched from where his sweat had dried all over his body.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked Taylor.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Don’t say a fucking word.’ She spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Not a fucking word, or they’ll hear.’

  The sound of footsteps hurried down the hallway towards them. ‘Simon?’ a man’s voice shouted.

  Outside the Thorne house, the storm raged. The TV room’s windows were like portholes on a ship tossed at sea: the light they threw off showed up flashes of movement and snow in an otherwise dark and dangerous world. Michael thought of Kellie, out there alone, trapped behind that metal grille. What had happened – what they’d done to her – he wanted to undo it all. He wanted to make it not so. It was all too real, too grown-up. He didn’t want to be a grown-up, not any more.

  ‘Move.’

  Taylor pushed him backwards, away from her, towards the door.

  ‘Hi, Uncle David,’ she then said with an innocent smile, as David appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Have either of you seen –’

  ‘Simon?’ Taylor interrupted. ‘No. Aunty Stephanie just asked us. Not for a while, but we’re coming to help you look.’

  ‘I’m going to check the garage,’ David said.

  ‘Good idea. We’ll search upstairs. We were playing sardines up there yesterday. Simon’s probably just hiding, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ David said. There was a forced calmness to his voice, which his eyes betrayed. ‘But let’s just find him quickly, eh?’

  Taylor trotted up the stairs ahead of Michael.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Michael hissed at her, as they reached the landing.

  ‘Find Simon first. If he’s hiding, then he’s doing it because he’s freaked out – and if he’s freaking out, then he’s probably going to blow it for us all. We need to get hold of him, before he starts blubbing and grasses us up. You go that way,’ she said, pointing down the corridor to the right, ‘and I’ll go this. Check all the wardrobes and under the beds.’

  They separated and searched the rooms. Michael didn’t think he had the energy for it – not after the cold sweat and silence of the last two hours, since they’d abandoned Kellie in the mine – and yet here it was again: panic, building up inside him like an electrical charge. It made him want to shout, to scream. He felt as if his head would burst.

  He kept seeing Kellie’s face, etched with fear and anger and disbelief at what they’d done. He’d hardly been able to believe it himself. Up until then, up until the moment the padlock had clicked shut, it had all been such a rush, like a dare. Taylor had just said it and they’d gone ahead and done it. Other than Taylor getting the padlock from her granddad’s garage, they hadn’t even needed to plan. It had been a game, just like any other that he and Taylor and Simon had played. Only it had been better than make believe, because Kellie had done wrong. She’d hurt Taylor and, therefore, Michael as well. Kellie had had it coming.

  But Michael now realised something else. What they’d done to Kellie as pay-back was worse, so much worse than what she’d done, and every fresh second that passed by was making it even worse still.

  ‘Any luck?’ Taylor asked him, as they met back on the landing.

  ‘No.’

  David appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is Simon there?’ he called up.

  ‘No,’ Taylor said.

  Stephanie almost ran into David. Her skin was livid, like a bruise. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, keep looking,’ she shouted up.

  Michael and Taylor stepped back from her line of sight.

  They heard Ben now, talking in the hall.

  ‘I’m going to go back to the village,’ he said, ‘and see if Kellie’s turned up there.’

  ‘Please, Ben.’ It was old Mr Thorne. ‘Give it another five minutes. Just to see if the storm eases.’

  ‘There’s only my room left,’ Taylor told Michael. ‘The little shit must be hiding up there.’

  She turned and ran up the stairs into the attic. Michael chased after her. She threw the door open and called out Simon’s name. There was no answer. Taylor got down on her hands and knees and opened one of the deep recessed cupboards which ran the length of the room and led into the eaves.

  ‘Come on, Simon,’ she called into the dusty dark space, ‘we know you’re in here somewhere . . .’

  ‘This has all gone too far,’ Michael said. He wanted to have never woken up this morning. ‘We need to own up.’

  ‘Are you fucking insane?’ Taylor said. ‘Have you any idea what they’ll do to us? Have you any idea of what it’ll do to my mother when she finds out why? Don’t you dare go turning chicken shit on me now,’ she told him.

  ‘But you heard what Ben was saying. He knows something’s not right. We’re going to get caught.’ And they were. Michael knew it in his bones.

  ‘No, we’re not. Not if we stick to our plan. Not if we leave her there till the storm dies down and then go and let her out. Ben’s an idiot,’ Taylor said. ‘He thinks Kellie likes him, which makes him as much of a sucker as my dad. He won’t work out what’s happened. No one will. Come on, Simon!’ she shouted, pulling open another cupboard door.

  Michael flung the bedroom window open. Icy wind raced in, blowing ash off the beer cans on the windowsill and sending one toppling, clanking on to the floor. The sky was black and angry. Like the ocean after dark, it seemed to heave with a limitless force. It looked like something alive.

  ‘Look,’ he told her. ‘Look how fucking cold it is out there.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So what do you fucking think? Kellie will freeze. We need to let her out. She’ll get frostbite or hypothermia, or whatever it’s fucking called.’

  ‘She hasn’t been there long enough.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Anger flared up inside him. ‘You know that for sure, do you? You’re a doctor now, right? And what about that huge fucking hole in the tunnel? Where Simon nearly fell off the ledge . . . What if Kellie goes in? What if she falls down it and fucking dies?’

  ‘It’s pitch black in there and she hasn’t got a torch. She’ll stay exactly where she is. She’ll wait for us to come back.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You –’

  ‘I do,’ she told him. ‘You’re the one who hasn’t got a fucking clue.’

  Michael wanted to scream. She always had an answer. She always had an answer, no matter what. She turned her back on him and opened another cupboard door and peered inside.

  ‘You’re starting to really piss me off now, Simon . . .’ she called.

  ‘Let me finish it,’ Michael begged her. ‘Now. Let me go back and get Kellie. She won’t say anything. Just like you said when we locked her in. She won’t say anything because she can’t. You don’t even have to come. Give me the key to the padlock and I’ll go and get her and take her back to the village.’

  ‘You’d never make it through the storm. Even if I wanted you to go, you’d have to wait for it to end.’

  She moved along to the final cupboard and looked inside.

  ‘You wanted to scare her, right?’ Michael said. ‘Well, you’ve done it. Do you really think she’ll ever go near your dad again? Not a fucking chance. You’ve got what you wanted, now let her go.’

  Taylor glared at him over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t just want to scare her. I want
ed to punish her.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

  Taylor got to her feet and rubbed the dust from her jeans. ‘It means I’ll say when it’s time to let her out,’ she said.

  ‘But what if we’re wrong?’ This was it. This was what had been really freaking him out. What if even the idea which had driven them to do what they did had been wrong, right from the start? ‘What if she was telling the truth? What if she’s not seeing your dad, not any more?’

  What, in other words, was the point in trying to teach Kellie a lesson that she’d already learnt?

  Taylor didn’t care. ‘That doesn’t make any fucking difference,’ she said. ‘She did it. That’s what matters. Don’t you fucking see? Everything. Everything is because of her. My mum and dad were never drifting apart. That’s not why they sent me away. My dad was never working late at the office. He was fucking her. That’s what he was doing. He was fucking Kellie all the time. He packed me off because of her, and now he wants to get rid of my mum as well.’

  Taylor marched up to Michael. ‘We need to stick together,’ she whispered. ‘You and me, Michael.’ She pressed her lips to his. ‘So long as we stick together, then everything’s going to work out.’

  He pushed her away.

  ‘I don’t want any more to do with this,’ he said.

  She laughed at him, actually laughed, and he remembered her downstairs, there in the TV room, after they’d got back from locking Kellie inside the mine. They’d sat in silence, watching Finding Nemo. Just acting like nothing had happened, just letting the seconds tick by into minutes, the minutes towards hours, giving Kellie plenty of time to think about what she’d done.

  Taylor had laughed, actually laughed at the jokes in the film, as if she hadn’t given a shit about Kellie. The laughter had been mechanical, switched on, then off. How could she have done that? That’s what Michael wanted to know, and how could she still be doing it now? How could she be laughing at him, like he was the one who’d got himself all confused? How could she be laughing at him when this was the most serious moment of his life?

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ she told him. ‘You were there. With me. Even worse, you actually led her there. If it wasn’t for you, she wouldn’t be missing in the first place. You’re in this up to your neck, exactly the same as me, and exactly the same as Simon too.’