Summer of Secrets

by Rosie Rushton

  Summer’s mouth dropped open. ‘Wow! I’ve seen that cottage a dozen times and it never clicked.’

  ‘I took photos of it because I’ve got this idea.’

  She touched Summer’s arm. ‘You want your mum’s work recognised, right? You want your dad to realise that locking it all away is a crime.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Summer said. ‘Not that there’s any chance of that happening.’

  ‘Isn’t there? What if I make one of your mum’s paintings the subject of my project? Do what Mrs Cathcart said, and find out the story behind the picture and then make sure your father sees what I’ve done before I go home?’

  Summer stared at her.

  ‘He’d go ballistic – he’d throw a total wobbly.’

  ‘He couldn’t actually do anything,’ Caitlin reasoned. ‘I’m a guest – and after all, I would have simply been innocently working on a painting I saw in a shop window, wouldn’t I?’

  Summer chewed her bottom lip and then beamed at Caitlin.

  ‘Do it,’ she urged. ‘After all, what have we got to lose?’

  ‘I’ll need a photo shop with a machine for printing digital pictures,’ Caitlin murmured as they walked upstairs to shower before supper.

  ‘There’s one in the pharmacy,’ Summer told her. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow. But right now – I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘That phone call from Alex – his gran wants him to take her to Milan for a week to see her sister, and they’re leaving in a couple of days,’ she said. ‘It’s awful – I just simply have to see him before he goes. We’ve got stuff to sort. Can you cover for me?’

  ‘What? Come with you and hang around like before?’ Caitlin didn’t mean to sound petulant but the prospect wasn’t exactly exciting. And perhaps this was the moment to warn her that Ludo might well be on her trail.

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ Summer said eagerly. ‘We’re meeting tonight – eleven o’clock. You don’t need to know more than that.’

  ‘Eleven o’clock? Why so late?’

  ‘And you say it’s me that doesn’t use my brain! Like I’m really going to march off in broad daylight and risk being seen.’

  She lowered her voice. ‘After supper, I’m going to say I’ve got a migraine coming on – I get them sometimes. They’ll think I’ve gone to bed and I’ll be free to slip out and meet Alex. Cool, eh?’

  ‘You can’t go on with all this cloak and dagger stuff for ever, you know,’ Caitlin reasoned. ‘Can’t you talk to your dad? I mean, whatever argument he had with Alex’s family shouldn’t be allowed to affect your life.’

  ‘This presupposes my father is a reasonable man. But don’t worry, this will be sorted very soon. They won’t know what’s hit them.’

  ‘Summer – what––’

  ‘The less you know, the less you can be blamed, OK? Trust me – I know what I’m doing.’

  She looked so excited that Caitlin didn’t have the heart to ruin it. She knew how she would feel if she was having a secret assignation in the dark with Ludo.

  She sighed. The way things were going, that was never going to happen.

  ‘So where’s this sketch pad, then?’ she asked. ‘You said you’d show me.’

  Summer beckoned her into her room, opened a drawer, removed a pile of clothes and tossed it at her. Caitlin began flicking through the pages of pencil sketches – more seascapes, more forked lightning, a brilliant self portrait, a picture of an old building . . .

  ‘Hey, Summer, look at this one.’

  She stabbed the page with her finger.

  ‘Mm, nice,’ Summer murmured, wriggling out of her shorts.

  ‘Mm, nice,’ mimicked Caitlin. ‘Look what it says in the bottom corner!’

  Summer peered over her shoulder.

  ‘The Abbey, July 2004,’ she read. ‘So that’s it – that’s where she went to paint!’

  ‘So,’ Caitlin went on excitedly, ‘we look on the internet, and find the abbey that looks like this one – and then we’ll know exactly where she went. Can I hang on to this? In case I get a chance to ask Ludo for the laptop?’

  ‘Sure,’ Summer said, looking at herself in the mirror. ‘Do you think my legs are getting any browner?’

  ‘But you’ve only just got here!’ Gabriella gasped over supper, when Izzy announced, quite cheerfully it seemed to Caitlin, that she and Jamie would be leaving in two days’ time.

  ‘It’s been amazing and I’m really grateful,’ Izzy declared, slipping her arm through Jamie’s. ‘But Jamie says he’ll take me to Venice, and I’ve always wanted to go there . . . isn’t he a honey?’

  She planted a kiss on Jamie’s cheek and Caitlin heaved a sigh of relief. She’d finally managed to get her brother back on track.

  Caitlin had just climbed into bed when there was a knock on her bedroom door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  She prayed it wasn’t Gabriella or Ludo, hunting for Summer. She’d done the dying swan bit with the migraine so well that they were all probably frightened she was going to expire at any minute.

  ‘It’s me – Jamie. Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure, it’s unlocked.’

  The moment she saw her brother’s face, she knew something was wrong.

  ‘It’s Izzy. She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘With that slimeball Freddie!’ he stormed. ‘I don’t believe this – all through supper he was going on and on about his bloody motorbike and how much it cost and how fast it could go. And then she said––’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Caitlin interjected. ‘She said she’d always wanted to go on the back of a motorbike.’

  ‘How did you know? You didn’t put her up to it, did you?’

  ‘Give me credit for some sense,’ she sighed. ‘It’s just that – well, that’s the way Izzy operates, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Now, don’t you start slagging her off,’ Jamie replied defensively. ‘It’s not her fault – she was just being friendly. But now they’ve gone for what Freddie calls a burn-up down the coast road.’

  He perched on the end of Caitlin’s bed.

  ‘You don’t think she’s falling for Freddie, do you?’

  He looked so crestfallen and embarrassed that she didn’t have the heart to tell him what she really thought.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she replied. ‘And anyway, after tomorrow you’ll be on your own with her, won’t you? That idea of yours about Venice was ace – can you afford it?’

  ‘It was her idea, not mine,’ he admitted. ‘But at least I get her to myself and even if it takes my last hundred quid to do it, so what? She’s worth it.’

  I’m not so sure about that, thought Caitlin.

  ‘We need a plan,’ she told him firmly.

  ‘A plan about what?’

  ‘If Mum or Dad phone to speak to you, I’ll say you’re in the pool and then I’ll text you on your mobile and you can call them back. That way, they’ll never know where you are.’

  ‘Do you know, I would never have thought of that?’ Jamie told her admiringly.

  ‘That,’ said Caitlin, ‘is because you’re a guy. Guys don’t think. Period.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘The visions of romance were over.’

  (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey)

  CAITLIN WOKE TO THE SOUND OF A BANGING DOOR. SHE peered, bleary-eyed, at her bedside clock. Ten minutes past midnight. If that was Summer, she’d have the whole house awake.

  ‘Good God, no!’

  Caitlin’s heart sank. Sir Magnus! He must have discovered that Summer was missing, or worse still, bumped into her as she crept back into the house.

  She threw back the sheet and grabbed her bathrobe. Padding to the door she peered out. It seemed all hell had been let loose.

  ‘Bloody fool!’ Sir Magnus was shouting downstairs. ‘What possessed you to let him go, Gaby?’

  ‘I’m not responsible for every member of your family, you know, whatever you may like to think! I’ll
get the car.’

  ‘Someone ought to tell Summer and Caitlin,’ she heard Ludo protest. At the mention of Summer’s name, Caitlin hurtled downstairs. The family were gathered in the entrance hall, and Caitlin’s stomach did a double somersault, although more at the sight of Ludo in his boxer shorts than anything else.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Caitlin asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Now just sit down and stay calm,’ Gabriella ordered her, pulling a sweatshirt over her pyjama top. ‘They say it’s not nearly as bad as it might have been . . .’

  ‘That idiot brother of mine took Izzy out on the bike,’ Ludo told her. ‘They’ve had an accident.’

  ‘Oh my God . . .’

  Caitlin could see the headlines already: Politician’s daughter unconscious after spree with millionaire’s son . . . Boyfriend mad with grief . . . Family gather at bedside . . . ‘I warned her,’ says teenage friend.

  ‘According to the police, they were swerving all over the place and the bike’s wing mirror clipped a car coming the other way,’ Gaby explained. ‘Then they came off the road and crashed into a ditch. Lucky for them, they were being followed by a police car. It had just overtaken them and was flashing them to slow down – otherwise, God knows what might have happened.’

  ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘They’re having X-rays now,’ Ludo said. ‘We must get going. Caitlin, you’ll stay with Summer, right? Don’t wake her, though – no point worrying her till we know more. Oh – and your brother, you’d better tell him.’

  ‘I’ll go and wake him – he’ll want to go with you,’ Caitlin said. ‘After all, Izzy is his girlfriend.’

  Not so you’d notice, she thought. I never did like that Freddie.

  For the next hour and a half, Caitlin lay in bed trying, without success, to fall asleep. After everyone had left, she had made a hot drink to try to stop herself shaking. Jamie had been as white as a sheet at the news, and she’d so wanted to go along to the hospital for moral support – but, of course, she had to pretend to be on hand for when Summer woke up. She wished she would hurry up and come home; the house was so quiet and with no one to talk to she kept imagining the worst.

  Finally, tired of tossing and turning, she got up and went along to Summer’s room just in case she’d crept home so quietly that Caitlin hadn’t heard her come in. The room was empty. She opened the cupboard and took out the paintings. This was her chance.

  She nipped back to her room, got her camera and flashed off half a dozen shots of the pictures, before homing in and taking close-ups of different elements of each scene. It wouldn’t be as good as having the pictures themselves, but if she mounted the photos together with the close-up of the painting of the boat, she could make something of them.

  She wandered downstairs, peering out of windows as she went in the hope of seeing a car turning into the driveway. It was when she passed the den at the far end of the corridor that she spotted the laptop. And it was switched on.

  It was obviously fate. The opportunity she’d been looking for to find out about the abbey. It took a bit of fiddling but eventually she was on to Google. Abbeys of Italy, she typed. There were loads. Abbeys of Liguria – that would narrow it down a bit.

  She scrolled through the results – San Anna, San Antimo . . . this was useless. They looked nothing like the picture on the sketch pad. Perhaps she was wasting her time; after all, apart from that one sketch, it wasn’t as if Summer’s mother had painted abbeys. The art of Elena Cumani-Tilney was far more exciting than that – all those grotesque images, storms and desecration; it was the sort of thing the tutors at her summer school the previous year had challenged her to think about when she was preparing for her GCSE . . .

  What if The Abbey was the name of some kind of college or further education place where people could go and paint? Perhaps these painting holidays were courses in Art. Maybe that was it.

  The Abbey she typed. The results flashed up on the screen. The Abbey School: no good – red brick and no turret; The Abbey School of Catering – hideous 1960s concrete monstrosity; The Abbey Centre for Psychiatric Respite Care. That one looked pretty much like it, but it was a hospital and . . .

  ‘Remember when she had to have time out, to get away . . . her best stuff was done when she was at the abbey . . . She took me in a boat at midnight . . . scared . . . slept in the rain and got soaked. Mum was quirky – all artists are . . . she did some silly things . . .’

  The words leaped into her mind of their own accord as Caitlin scanned the screen a second time. Her mouth went dry and her heart began pounding.

  The Abbey Centre for Psychiatric Respite Care. She double-clicked on the entry.

  The Abbey Centre occupies a stunning position on the South Downs overlooking the seaside town of Eastbourne . . . patients are able to enjoy excellent recreational and therapeutic facilities . . . appropriate treatments to enable rehabilitation into the community and family life . . .

  Caitlin stared and stared at the screen. Eastbourne was only twenty miles or so from Brighton. What’s more, the photograph on the home page was identical to the drawing in the pad.

  So that was where she went for her so-called painting holidays. And that was why––

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Caitlin screamed and twirled round in the chair. Ludo stood in the doorway, staring at her incredulously.

  ‘You made me jump,’ she gasped, leaping out of the chair and turning her back to the screen. ‘I didn’t hear a car. How are they? How’s Izzy?’

  ‘I said, what are you doing?’ Ludo repeated.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep – I was just surfing the net for my art project. Summer said it would be OK.’

  ‘Really.’ He walked past her and stared at the screen. His shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes briefly.

  ‘Doesn’t look much like an art project to me,’ he snapped, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘So. The Abbey. So, Summer knows.’

  He closed his eyes and gripped the back of the chair.

  ‘No!’ Caitlin stammered. ‘I only just found it myself.’

  ‘And how come you were looking in the first place? I know you were asking Gaby loads of stuff yesterday about abbeys. Who’s been talking?’

  ‘I – well, I can’t really say because I’m not supposed to let on and . . .’

  The sound of voices in the hall made Ludo turn and hold up a hand to silence her.

  ‘Say nothing,’ he muttered, grabbing the mouse and closing down the screen. ‘We’ll talk later.’

  ‘I’m really sorry . . .’ she began.

  ‘So am I,’ Ludo sighed, avoiding her gaze. ‘You’ll never know how sorry.’

  ‘Poor you,’ Gaby said, smiling, as Caitlin greeted her in the hall. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’

  ‘I was worried,’ she gabbled. ‘How are they?’

  ‘Izzy’s broken her ankle and her left wrist and she’s got quite a few cuts and bruises,’ Sir Magnus told her. ‘Freddie’s cracked a couple of ribs and dislocated his elbow. They were damn lucky – they could have been killed.’

  ‘The hospital’s keeping them in overnight and all being well they will be home tomorrow,’ Gaby added. ‘Jamie insisted on staying with Izzy – such a dear boy.’

  ‘Pity the dear boy didn’t stop her going with Freddie in the first place,’ Sir Magnus muttered. ‘Now I’ve got to telephone Isabella’s father and tell him what my damn fool son has done.’

  He ran a hand through his hair and yawned.

  ‘Does Summer know what’s happened?’

  Caitlin shook her head. ‘She’s asleep – I thought it best, you know, with the migraine and all . . .’

  ‘Quite right.’ Sir Magnus nodded. ‘Nice to know someone round here has some common sense.’

  Caitlin lay staring at the ceiling. Ludo hadn’t smiled at her, hadn’t even glanced in her direction since finding her at the computer. He was furious, she could tell. He’d probably never speak to her again, much less fall in love
with her––

  ‘Magnus! Ludo! Come quickly!’

  Gabriella’s panic-stricken cries left Caitlin in no doubt as to what was the matter. Doors slammed and she could hear footsteps hurrying along the landing.

  ‘It’s Summer – she’s not in her room!’ she heard Gaby cry. ‘Her bed hasn’t been slept in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t believe it – get Caitlin!’

  ‘She’s probably asleep,’ Gaby protested.

  ‘Well, wake her,’ Ludo ordered. ‘If anyone knows what’s going on, she will.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be back soon,’ Caitlin faltered as she faced the grim faces of Sir Magnus, Gabriella and Ludo. ‘She probably went for a walk to clear her head – you know, the migraine . . .’

  ‘Clearly,’ Gabriella snapped, ‘you’re not a migraine sufferer. She wouldn’t have been able to lift her head from the pillow, never mind go walkabout.’

  She ran her hand through her dishevelled hair.

  ‘Have you searched the whole house?’ Summer’s father demanded. ‘Perhaps she went to the bathroom and fainted . . .’

  ‘What do you take me for?’ Gabriella shouted, close to tears. ‘I looked everywhere before I called you.’

  ‘I’m going to call the police,’ Sir Magnus declared, walking over to the desk. ‘Please God, I’m not going through what I went through with her mother . . .’

  He caught himself in time and started punching numbers into the phone. Caitlin’s mind was in turmoil. Maybe she should tell them – what if Summer and Alex had decided to run away together tonight? What if Summer had lied to her and all that story about Milan was just a cover-up? Or worse, what if Alex was full of evil intentions after all? What if he’d asked her to meet him because he intended to kill her . . .

  Teenager withholds vital information – friend found dead in olive grove.

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘I know where she’s gone. She didn’t have a headache – she was going to meet someone.’

  Sir Magnus let the phone fall from his hands as the clock chimed two.