Death Wish (The Ceruleans: Book 1)

by Megan Tayte

  ‘Father’s gone,’ I continued. ‘It hurts, I know. But you were miserable with him – you’ve always been unhappy. Don’t you see, this is your chance to make a change. You can do whatever you want now, be whoever you want to be!’

  She looked at me with big, doe-like eyes. ‘But I don’t know what to do, Scarlett. I lost him, and I lost her – now all I have is you.’

  ‘But you have to have more than me. I can’t be your everything. You deserve a life of your own.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t. I made my choice. And now I don’t know who I am any more past all the pain.’ She started sobbing. ‘If I could just find her!’

  ‘I know, Mother.’ I grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. ‘I know you want to be close to her – at the cottage, in her room here, at the graveyard. You won’t find her in any of those places, though. She’s with us. She’s everywhere.’

  ‘You don’t understand. That’s not it. I just can’t bear that she’s lost.’

  ‘I know.’

  She rubbed her eyes, smearing mascara all down her face. I pulled a tissue from the dispenser by the bed and began wiping it away. She caught my arm, stopped me. Her tone was quieter now, calmer, as she spoke:

  ‘I’m sorry. Sorry for being emotional. It’s just been a hard week, you know? Glad you’re here.’ She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. ‘It should be the other way round. I should mother you.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mother.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, her voice thickening with sleep. ‘Hate it. Was Hugo who insisted. Mother and Father. Like a fairy tale. Some fairy tale…’

  ‘Shhhhhh.’ I smoothed back her hair onto the pillow. ‘Go to sleep.’

  Her eyes flew open and she grabbed at me. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you? You’ll be here when I wake up?’

  ‘I’ll stay until the morning,’ I promised.

  I’d barely finished the sentence when her eyelids drifted shut and her grasp on me relaxed.

  *

  The evening stretched ahead. So many hours to kill alone in this soulless place.

  Beyond Mother’s room the house was dim and draughty and silent. I moved from room to room, switching on lights, until I’d vanquished every shadow.

  In Sienna’s room, I rolled up the stained rug. Then I hauled it along the corridor, down the stairs, into the kitchen and out the scullery door. Not knowing quite where to leave it, I dumped it on an empty flower bed beside the house.

  The en-suite to my bedroom was fully stocked as always, and I took a long shower, pushing the control round from hot to scalding. Then I put on a pair of pyjamas and some thick wool socks from the wardrobe and sat at the dressing table, combing out my hair slowly and drying it carefully with the hairdryer.

  Downstairs, in the front sitting room, I built a fire, taking my time arranging the logs just so in the grate, fiddling about with the poker until the flames danced merrily. In the kitchen, I found the fridge full of food as usual, and I made a sandwich, layering up every conceivable ingredient to hand. I took it into the sitting room to eat it before the fire on a cold and creaky Chesterfield sofa.

  The drinks cabinet caught my eye – vast and rammed with all kinds of spirits and liqueurs. I got up and went back to the kitchen. Leading off was the scullery, and within, under a pile of linens, I found what I was looking for: an old-fashioned brass hostess trolley. I pushed it back across the ground floor to the sitting room, loaded it up with drinks from the cabinet, pushed it back to the kitchen and emptied the contents of each bottle down the sink. It was a pointless act, I knew – the cellar was chockfull of wine, and the dining rooms and the kitchen each contained a cupboard full of booze – but it was a statement that I hoped Mother would make some effort to interpret.

  Job done, I sat back down. I found the controller for the wooden panels that concealed the fifty-two-inch plasma and booted up the TiVo box. At the cottage, reception was patchy and I had the basic digital channels. Here, there was a choice of every channel imaginable and I found it daunting. I selected an old Friends episode and settled down to watch it, but it was the one in Vegas where Ross and Rachel get married, and their drunkenness was a little close to the bone. I switched the television off.

  Father’s study led off from the sitting room, and I found my gaze drawn to the closed door. I walked over and opened it and flicked the light switch. I expected to be greeted by an empty room – upstairs, on the hunt for Mother, I’d found Father’s suite stripped bare. But it seemed Mother sending the staff away had hindered the packing, and the study was as it had ever been: large leather-topped desk, high-backed chair, filing cabinets, book shelves and dreary-but-priceless artworks.

  As children, Sienna and I had been banned from the room, and even in my teens Father’s frown had deepened if I’d so much as knocked and poked my head around the door. Now I took a bold step inside, and then another. Over by the window was an antique globe – the world laid out in faded, yellowed detail. I walked over to it. Trailed a finger along the papery, cracked surface. Thought of Father. Gave the sphere an almighty shove, and another, and another, and watched it spin wildly around. Only when the world had stopped turning did I walk away, shutting the door firmly behind me.

  I returned to sit on the sofa. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly. A memory surfaced. The grandfather clock at the cottage. Jude’s voice, soft and tortured: ‘I couldn’t save her. But I will save you.’ I shook my head. I was muddled – ‘I saved you’; that’s what he’d have said. I sighed. All this melodrama: Luke finding me collapsed on the road; Jude finding me collapsed on the island. It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to be some damsel in distress, feeble and delicate. I didn’t want to require saving.

  I looked up at the clock. Eight. Surely Luke would be back by now.

  He answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Really? How’s the hangover?’

  ‘I’m managing.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At Hollythwaite.’

  ‘Still? How’s your mum?’

  I couldn’t find the words.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. Fine. Mother’s just… struggling a bit.’

  I hadn’t told him about my parents’ split. I’d wanted to keep things light and easy between us.

  ‘Maybe…’

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘It’s none of my business, but maybe she needs to talk to someone?’

  ‘She talks to me. Endlessly. Emails. Texts. Phone messages…’

  ‘I meant a professional?’

  I thought of Father’s postscript – the psychiatrist’s number. I’d never convince Mother to go to Harley Street, though. The only doctor she’d allow near her was the family doctor, Dr McNesby, who was free and easy with tranquilliser prescriptions. But perhaps something a little more her style…

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Are you driving back in a bit?’

  ‘No, I’m staying the night. I’ll drive back in the morning once I’ve had a chance to speak to her.’

  ‘Okay. Drive safely.’

  ‘’Course. Listen, I just wanted to say…’ I thought of the state of Mother, of having to put her to bed, of how uncomfortable it had been to see her like that. ‘About last night – I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

  Luke’s voice was warm. ‘Hey, I said we were good.’ He paused and then added, ‘Besides, remember what I said when I dropped you off at the harbour?’

  ‘That my little white dress was having a little-black-dress effect on you?’

  He laughed. ‘Actually, I mean, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Kind of unfair of me to stay mad at you for last night when I made an arse of myself at one of Si’s dos a couple of years back.’

  ‘Spill it.’

  ‘Trust me, you don’t w
ant to know. It was an ugly episode involving a kipper, a traffic cone and a tutu. I haven’t touched vodka since.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  He refused, I pleaded – eventually, he caved. And the empty sitting room was soon echoing with laughter. By the time I put the phone down on Luke, I felt lighter again, and as I made my way up to bed, the house seemed a little less oppressive.

  *

  I waited impatiently for Mother to get up in the morning. At eight o’clock I took her a coffee and she grunted. At half-eight I slid open the curtains a crack and she squinted. At nine I went in and put a hand on her shoulder and she turned over, away from me.

  I called Bert, to explain that I’d likely not manage walking Chester today, but I’d do double at the weekend to make up. I was keen to do it – not least because I remembered what Big Ben had said on the island about it being an old man with a dog who’d seen Sienna go into the water, and I wanted to ask him: was he there?

  Then I passed the time in Father’s study, on the computer. I surfed rehab clinics, and made a shortlist of the three most exclusive ones in the southwest of England – the kinds of places where ‘exhausted’ celebrities check in that are more like spas, set in extensive gardens with beauty therapists, masseurs and Michelin-starred chefs. One in particular stood out – The Harmony Centre in Somerset. As well as a large pool, sauna, steam room and solarium, the counsellors had impressive credentials. I printed out the key pages of the websites, and put The Harmony Centre’s at the top of the pile.

  I was searching around for a stapler among the scattered papers on the desk when the name Sienna caught my eye. I picked up the paper and scanned it quickly. It was an invoice for her gravestone. Only the product description box didn’t contain the word gravestone, but cenotaph. I had no idea what that meant. A fancy word for inscription, perhaps? I sounded the word aloud. I realised I had heard it before – at the graveside that morning I’d hidden from my parents. Mother had said something about not feeling Sienna there, and what was it my father had said? ‘It’s a cenotaph; what do you expect?’

  I opened up the search engine on the computer and typed in the word. In seconds the definition was up on the screen.

  The world began spinning, only this time it wasn’t me pushing the sphere around and around and around.

  I didn’t walk to my mother’s room, I ran; and I didn’t open the curtains, I ripped them right off the rail; and I didn’t nudge her gently, I shook her roughly, screaming, ‘Where is my sister? WHERE IS MY SISTER!’ and I threw onto her chest the definition I had printed off the computer:

  Cenotaph: A monument erected to honour a dead person whose remains lie elsewhere.

  29: THOSE WHO COULDN’T SAVE HER

  I left the radio off on the drive home. I did not feel like singing. Or thinking. Or feeling. I focused on the car in front.

  I drove straight to Luke and Cara’s. Parked. Got out. Knocked on the door. No one came. I sank onto the front step, put my forehead to my knees, closed my eyes.

  Luke found me there sometime later. He’d barely uttered a ‘Hey’ before the dam broke.

  He sat down beside me and pulled me onto his lap, rubbing my back and murmuring ‘It’s okay, it’s okay’ into my hair as sobs wracked through me. I tried to pull back, tried to quieten the primal noises of anguish coming out of me, but I’d lost all control.

  Finally, sobs turned to hiccups. Still I clung on. He let me for a time and then he gently pulled back and looked into my eyes. His face creased with what he saw there, but he said nothing more than ‘Come’ and then tugged me up and into the house and pushed me down onto the sofa in the living room.

  He disappeared for a couple of minutes and came back with a steaming mug. ‘Drink.’

  I did. It was tea, sweet.

  He sat on the coffee table opposite, his knees enclosing mine, his hands on my thighs, watching me, waiting.

  When all that was left in the mug was sugary dregs, he said, ‘Now talk.’

  I took a deep, shuddering breath and out it all tumbled:

  ‘My parents lied to me. They told me my sister was pulled out of the sea. They told me they found her. She wasn’t. They didn’t. They never found her.

  ‘They lied to me. For me, Mother said – they did it for me, to make it easier on me. Like lying ever makes anything easier.

  ‘She blames my father. Said he pushed her into it. It was him who laid it down, that day they came to my school and told me. He said the coastguard found Sienna. That the paramedics tried to save her. And the hospital staff. He let me think he’d gone to the hospital, identified her. He said she looked peaceful.

  ‘He was a pallbearer at the funeral. He carried the coffin. An empty coffin! It’s insane – all those people standing around the grave, crying over an empty box. And my mother knew – she knew, and she just handed me lilies to drop into the grave. She knew Sienna wasn’t in there.

  ‘All a lie. And for what? Not for me. For them. So they could draw a line under it, make the whole ugly mess neater for the outside world.’

  I was rambling, I knew, but Luke said nothing; he just let me get it all out, stroking his thumbs along my legs, all the while watching me with tortured eyes.

  ‘They told my parents they couldn’t find her in the water. They said the currents were strong. That she may wash up in days, or weeks, or months along the coast. Mother’s been waiting. But my sister’s not there. There’s no body…’

  He pulled me to him, murmuring, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

  But those words – my last words – were rolling about in my mind. A memory: carrot cake; Murder She Wrote; Bert laying down the formulaic rules of a murder mystery: ‘And if there’s no body to be found, the victim’ll be alive and well someplace.’

  I shot upright. ‘Luke! Do you think – do you think there’s a chance? They never found Sienna…’

  ‘No, Scarlett, you can’t go there.’

  ‘But maybe she swam around to the next cove? Or climbed out? Faking her own death – that’s so Sienna! She could be alive!’

  Luke touched his forehead to mine. ‘Oh, Scarlett. I want to say yes. But I can’t.’

  I pulled back, shaking my head. ‘How can you tell? The man who saw her on the beach that night, going into the water – the man who raised the alarm. Maybe he had it all wrong…’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Luke quietly.

  ‘It was dark, my father said, and stormy. How could he be sure what he saw? And he went for help – maybe she got out while he was gone!’

  ‘No, Scarlett. That’s not what happened. I’m sorry, I’m sorry to say it, but she drowned.’

  ‘But don’t you see, how can you know that for a fact?’

  ‘Because I was the man on the beach who saw your sister die.’

  *

  It would take more than sweet tea to calm me down this time. Frankly, I could have done some serious damage with the china mug. The intensity of the anger that rose up inside me so frightened me that I did the only thing that felt safe – I ran.

  I ran down the streets leading to the village, across the square, across the promenade. I heard Luke following me, shouting to me, but I ignored him. I didn’t stop until I reached the beach. Then, panting, I collapsed onto the sand. Moments later, Luke dropped down onto his knees beside me.

  He had betrayed me. My sister, my sister, dying before him, and me grieving and desperate to understand, and he knew that, he’d known that all the way along, and he’d said nothing. Like my parents, he’d hidden the truth from me. I fisted my hands and prepared to let rip.

  But when I turned to him, the look on his face stopped me. Raw emotion stood out in every line. Whatever pain I was feeling was reflected back at me tenfold. He had hurt me, and that was tearing him apart.

  I looked at him, really looked at him. His jaw, clenched. His dark brows pulled together. His eyes brimming with regret. How this burden had cost him. But he’d carried it. To protect me.

  As quick
ly as my rage had come, it left me. This was Luke. My gentle giant.

  He was talking now, desperately apologising.

  ‘… I wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you since the first day on the beach when I pulled you out. But it was never the right time – how do you say the words? I didn’t want to hurt you. I hate to see you hurt.’

  I smoothed a palm down his cheek. ‘Tell me now,’ I told him.

  He swallowed. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Start here. On the beach. Start on the beach.’

  He sank back on the sand beside me. ‘I don’t – I don’t want to upset you.’

  I reached over and laced my fingers with his. Then I looked away, out to sea. ‘Time to face the fear,’ I said softly. ‘Tell me.’

  He was silent for a moment, and then he began.

  ‘I was on the beach. It was cold that night, so everyone was inside, in Si’s house. But someone had lit a bong and the fumes were suffocating, so I went out the back for some air. It was dark out. I thought I saw someone moving on the beach, but I couldn’t make them out. Then a cloud blew away and I recognised her – her spiky hair, her white dress picking up the moonlight. The tide was out, and she was walking to the waterline.’

  ‘Dress?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Yeah. It was, er, really short, so kind of memorable.’

  ‘But she was surfing – why wasn’t she in a wetsuit?’

  ‘Surfing?’ Luke shook his head. ‘No one could have surfed in those conditions.’

  ‘But Father said… I thought… that’s why I learnt to… why did he tell me that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. Perhaps he thought her surfing was less upsetting.’

  ‘Than what?’

  He looked stricken.

  ‘Please, Luke.’

  I touched his hand. He grabbed mine. Squeezed. Continued.

  ‘I saw her walking to the sea. I don’t know why I went after her. I barely knew her. Maybe it was the way she was walking. Like she had a goal in sight; purposeful, you know. Something about it bothered me. Then… then she started running. And I ran too. But she was fast, and by the time I was halfway across the sand she was in the water. She just ran right in. I shouted to her, but she kept on. Maybe she couldn’t hear me – it was wild out there in the wind.