Before I Wake

by C. L. Taylor

  There’s a space under Charlotte’s bed that I should be able to fit under. If I fall to my stomach, maybe I can scrabble under it toward the door. James will leave Charlotte’s side and try to go after me, but if I scream, maybe someone will get here before he has a chance to do anything.

  “You thought you were so clever, didn’t you, sneaking out and leaving me all alone without so much as a kiss on the cheek after everything we’d been through, but I was cleverer, Suzy.”

  I place a hand on the linoleum and lean toward my right. I have to be quick or James will grab hold of my ankle and yank me backward.

  “I went into your sewing room and I found a piece of paper on the floor. A piece of paper torn from the Yellow Pages.” He shakes his head. “I knew you were a lot of things, Susan, but I never suspected, I never”—his voice quivers—“imagined you would murder a child.”

  I scream as my hair is pulled so hard some of it snaps and falls to the floor, and then James is on me, his hand over my mouth, an arm locked around my throat.

  “Get up, you baby-killing bitch.”

  He hoists me to my feet and shoves me toward Charlotte’s bed. My hip hits the metal bedstead, and as I put out my right hand to steady myself, James grabs it and holds it over Charlotte’s mouth and nose.

  “Love her, do you?” he hisses in my ear. “Think she’s beautiful and pure and innocent, do you?”

  “Please,” I mumble against his hand, “don’t do this. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Because she’s not innocent, Suzy-Sue. You know that, don’t you? She’s a little slut like her mummy. I heard her moaning like a stuck pig when she fucked her boyfriend in my spare room. I saw her fucking him doggy-style like a dirty pro, and when she’s dead, I’m going to make you watch it too.”

  “No.” I try and twist away from him, to pull my hand from my daughter’s face, but James holds me firm. There’s suction on my palm as she tries, and fails, to inhale, and a strange snuffling noise fills the air.

  “You took something beautiful and precious from me, Suzy-Sue. You killed my child, and now you’re going to kill yours.”

  He leans his weight so heavily onto my hand that Charlotte’s nose makes a terrible clicking sound and I know instantly that it’s broken. The heart monitor in the corner of the room bleeps urgently, and the red line that used to undulate up and down like a gentle wave oscillates erratically as the color drains from my daughter’s face and her eyeballs roll wildly under her closed eyelids.

  “Not long now,” James hisses in my ear as Charlotte’s body jerks violently and her hands twitch at her sides. He glances at the heart rate monitor and reaches for the off switch. “We don’t want to alert the cavalry when she flatlines, do we?”

  “No!” I wriggle desperately as he drags me away, toward the other side of the room, my left hand flailing desperately as I knock at his head, his hand, his hip. My blows bounce off him, but then, as my hand hits the bedside table, two things happen simultaneously—the bed is showered with a stack of National Geographic clippings and my fingers make contact with the hairdressing scissors. I lift my hand high into the air, then, using all the strength I can muster, I twist to the left and dig them deep into James’s thigh. He howls and falls to the ground, clutching his leg.

  “Help!” I shout as I lean over Charlotte’s body. Her lips are blue and she’s barely breathing. “Somebody help me. Please.”

  I try to push the bed, to wheel her out of the room, but the brakes are on and no amount of kicking them will get them unlocked.

  “Somebody please—” The words are knocked out of me and I’m pinned on top of Charlotte, my head twisted to the right, hands in my hair. I can see James above me, the bloody scissors in his right hand, his eyes black with rage. I close my eyes as he raises the scissors into the air and pray that, even if it’s too late for me, someone will have heard the disturbance and save Charlotte before he can kill her too and then—

  “No!”

  The bed shakes violently and I feel weight on my shoulders and back, then hear a thud, like bodies falling to the floor and the sound of men grunting and metal scraping across paintwork. I try to stand up, to free Charlotte from the weight of my body, but there’s a searing pain in my right arm, and then everything goes black.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Three

  “Do you recognize this woman?” The lawyer, Gillian Matthews, hands me a photograph of a slightly overweight young woman with dark hair, hazel eyes, and a beautiful smile.

  I shake my head and push it across the desk toward Brian. “No, should I?”

  “Not unless you were watching the news twenty—”

  Brian gasps and we both turn to look at him.

  “What?” I say.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  I shake my head. “See what?”

  “The resemblance. She’s the spitting image of you when we met.”

  There’s a vague similarity; the hair is certainly very alike and our mouths have a similar shape, but her eyes are prettier than mine and her cheekbones higher.

  “Interesting that you should say that, Mr. Jackson.” Mrs. Matthews reaches for the photograph and tucks it back in the paper folder in front of her.

  “Why? Who is she?”

  She leans her weight on her forearms and looks me straight in the eye. “The prostitute James Evans murdered twenty years ago.”

  I stare at her in disbelief. “What?”

  “My God.” Brian reaches a reassuring arm around my back, and I wince as his hand makes contact with my shoulder. My arm’s been in a cast for seventy-two hours, but I’ve already taken a week’s worth of painkillers. “You said he was dangerous and I didn’t believe—”

  “James murdered someone?” I can’t stop staring at the paper folder in front of the lawyer. What else is in it? A photocopy of the card he enclosed with the booties? Shots of Charlotte’s blood-splattered room? A photo of the severed artery in his leg? “When? Who was she?”

  She flicks open the notebook that’s lying beside the folder. “Sarah Jane Thompson. The autopsy states the date of her death as October 12, 1992.”

  “That’s three weeks after I left him.”

  “Yes.” She looks down at her notes. “The police say they tried to contact you, but no one knew where you were and there were a lot of Susan Maslins on the electoral register. The search was stopped after a few weeks, and they went to trial anyway. Evans pleaded not guilty, but the police had enough evidence to convict. Apparently he spent a while looking for a prostitute who fit his precise requirements.” She looks back up at me. “Someone who looks like you, it seems.”

  “But he got out.” I shake my head. “How can that happen? How can he murder someone then be set free twenty years later to come after me? How is that even possible?”

  She shakes her head. “He served his time and fulfilled the conditions of his release by reporting to his parole officer once a week. He even had a job”—she checks her notes again—“working in a nightclub in Chelsea. Grey’s. Apparently he was very popular, particularly among the VIPs.”

  “Keisha!” I say. “How is she?”

  A dog walker found her naked body, bloodied, beaten, and barely recognizable, in woodland near Devil’s Dyke. She hasn’t been able to tell the police much, but what she did manage helped fill in the missing pieces of what had happened.

  James found out that I was married to Brian and living in Brighton by searching Google—it was that easy. Once he had my new surname and the town where I lived, it was easy for him to track down the Facebook profile Charlotte forced me to create a year ago to prove I “wasn’t living in the dark ages.” I hadn’t looked at the thing in months so wasn’t surprised when the police told me that my security settings were so poor James had access to all of my updates, photos, and, worst of all, a link to my daughter’s page. Her
page was as public as mine, and when he read that Breeze was her favorite club, it was the link he needed to wheedle his way into her life.

  He already knew Keisha—he’d been one of her clients when she was sleeping with the footballers and rock stars that frequented Grey’s—and she’d liked him enough to tell him she was leaving London because she’d met a great guy in Brighton who managed a club called Breeze. He visited the club on the pretense of being Keisha’s friend, but when he spotted Charlotte and Ella, and Keisha told him that Ella had a crush on her boyfriend, he’d made his move—he told Keisha that unless she introduced him to them and kept her mouth shut, he’d tell Danny about her past. She thought that was it, and it was for a while as James got to know Charlotte better and lent her his spare room so she and Liam could lose their virginity to each other. She had no idea that James would use that most intimate of moments to blackmail our daughter.

  “Keisha’s not great”—Mrs. Matthews closes her notebook—“but she’s stable. Twenty-four hours longer and she wouldn’t have made it.”

  “My God.” I press my hands to my forearms, but my warm palms do little to flatten the goose bumps that have appeared on the surface of my skin.

  “We need to go and see her.” I look at Brian. “If she hadn’t told me what she did. If she hadn’t told me—”

  “Shhh.” He pulls me toward him again, but this time I don’t complain at the pain in my shoulder.

  “When will the recording be destroyed?” he asks the lawyer, his tone hushed. “If Charlotte wakes up, we want to be able to tell her that it’s gone.”

  “When,” I say. Yesterday, her eyelids fluttered when I told her there was no need to be scared of “Mike” anymore. The doctors say I mustn’t read anything into it, not when she’d just come out of an operation to reset her nose and little finger, but I know it’s a sign. She’s trying to come back to us. She’s fighting harder now that she knows it’s safe.

  “Recording?” The lawyer frowns at Brian. “The sex tape, you mean?”

  He cringes at the description. “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid the police will have to hang onto it as evidence. Evans was threatening to send it to the papers and post it on the Internet. If he’d done that, he’d have done more than tarnish Charlotte’s reputation.” She looks at Brian. “He’d have destroyed your career too.”

  “But why try and pass her off as a prostitute?” he says. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  She shakes her head. “All part of his sick plan to get revenge on Mrs. Jackson, I’m afraid. When I spoke to Detective Chief Inspector Carter, he said Evans’s initial idea was to seduce Charlotte and convince her to run away with him, but when he realized that most fifteen-year-old girls wouldn’t look twice at a forty-three-year-old man, he decided to play the part of a lonely gay man and become her friend that way. Once she trusted him enough to go back to his flat, he blackmailed her about the sex tape and then forced Keisha to pass her off as a prostitute at Grey’s. We don’t know what he was going to do after that, although I’ve got a pretty good idea it wouldn’t have been very…” She purses her lips, drawing a line under that thought.

  “My God.” I breathe the words as the full impact of the situation hits me. “No wonder Charlotte did what she did. She’d broken up with Liam, fallen out with Ella, and she couldn’t trust Keisha anymore and there was no one left for her to talk to, so…” The words catch in my throat as I look at my husband. “Brian, Charlotte tried to kill herself because she couldn’t confide in us.”

  “No.” He tightens his grip on my hand. “She did it because she was trying to protect us. She knew what would happen if Evans’s recording got out. It would have been all over the papers—‘Politician’s Daughter in Underage Sex Scandal.’ Charlotte was so sensitive, there’s no way she would have wanted to put me in that position.”

  “But none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for my relationship with him. He never would have found us if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t—”

  “You stopped him, Sue.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “You did.”

  Brian had left Oli at the counter of Millets with an armful of supplies and a promise that it wouldn’t take him long to pop back to the hospital to get the wallet he’d left in Charlotte’s bedside drawer. Ten minutes, he’d said, but instead of walking in, grabbing the wallet, and walking out again, he’d burst into the hospital room to find his daughter fighting for her life and his wife about to lose hers. He’d launched himself at James, knocking him to the floor. Seconds later, alerted by the noise, several nurses came rushing in to find him sitting astride James’s chest, thumping him repeatedly in the face.

  “No, Sue.” He presses his face into my hair. “You knew Charlotte hadn’t just had an accident and you refused to let it lie, even when I took you to the doctor’s, even when your mother died, even when no one believed you.” He pulled away and looked at me. “Even when I didn’t believe you. I put you all in danger. You, Charlotte, and Oliver, you’re my family. And you protected us. Alone.”

  I touch my left hand to the side of his face and wipe a tear away with my thumb.

  “Excuse me.” Mrs. Matthews delicately clears her throat and we simultaneously turn to look at her. “So are we clear?” she says, closing her notebook and laying the pen on the top of it.

  “Clear?” I shake my head.

  “Yes. The toxicology report suggests that Evans died as a result of MRSA rather than the wounds inflicted by Mrs. Jackson”—she looks at Brian—“or the head trauma inflicted by Mr. Jackson. As a result, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that you both acted in self-defense, the prosecution is dropping the manslaughter charges against you both.”

  I reach for Brian’s hand and squeeze it tightly. “So does that mean…”

  The lawyer smiles for the first time since we stepped foot in the police station. Her mouth opens and closes as she talks, looking from me to Brian and back again, but I only hear one word.

  Free.

  Reading

  Group Guide

  1.As Sue searches for the truth behind Charlotte’s accident, she realizes she had no idea what was going on in Charlotte’s life. Was that her fault, or Charlotte’s, or is it normal in a mother/teenage daughter relationship?

  2.The novel alternates between the main story line and Sue’s diary entries from fifteen years earlier. How effectively do you think this works as a literary device in this novel?

  3.Brian lies to Sue several times throughout the course of the novel. Was he justified in doing so, or should he have been completely honest with his wife?

  4.There are several clues in Sue’s early diary entries that James is controlling. At what point did you notice the warning signs? What do you think Sue could have done?

  5.Discuss the theme of “secrets and lies” in the book and the impact they have on Sue’s attempt to find out why Charlotte stepped in front of the bus.

  6.Sue is forty-three. How does she change over the course of the book?

  7.Sue won’t go to the police because she doesn’t think they’ll take her seriously (because of an incident that occurred during one of her PTSD “episodes”). At which point would you have gone to the police?

  8.Sue sees a mirror of her relationship with James in Keisha’s relationship with Danny. Do you think she is justified in being concerned? How so?

  9.Could young Sue’s friends and coworkers have done more to help save her from James?

  10.What do you think would have happened if Charlotte had woken up before Liam admitted to Sue that they’d been sleeping together in “Mike’s” house?

  11.Sue doesn’t turn to her friends for help during her search for answers. Why do you think that is?

  12.At the end of the novel, when James and Sue face each other in Charlotte’s hospital room, Sue asks if he ever re
ally loved her. Do you think he did?

  13.What did you think of the ending? Would you have liked it to end differently?

  14.What do you think the future holds for Sue and her family? What effect do you think these events will have on their relationships?

  15.What other books would you compare this to? What books would you recommend to other readers who have enjoyed this book?

  A Conversation

  with the Author

  Q: Where did you get the idea for Before I Wake?

  A:I was pregnant with my son when the idea first came to me. I wanted to write a novel about “keeping secrets,” but I had no idea who would be keeping the secrets or what those secrets would be. Then one day, when I was walking back from the supermarket—waddling along under the weight of my groceries—the first three lines popped into my head:

  Coma. There’s something innocuous about the word, soothing almost in the way it conjures up the image of a dreamless sleep. Only Charlotte doesn’t look to me as though she’s sleeping.

  I heard Susan’s voice as clear as day, and I knew immediately that she was the mother of a teenage girl who’d stepped in front of a bus. I kept repeating those three lines over and over again as I walked home so I wouldn’t forget them, then frantically scribbled them down. I kept writing and, less than two hours later, I had the first chapter.

  I didn’t write any more until a couple months after my son’s birth. As a new mom in a new town, I was lonely, and very sleep deprived, and I missed writing, so, during his naps, I started plotting the rest of the story. I finished the first draft in five months.