Her Sister's Lie

by Debbie Howells

  She sighed. “The problem is, he hasn’t actually done anything, has he? If he really wanted to get to you, he’d have come to the house when you were at home—but he hasn’t. I’m struggling to understand why you’re so convinced of his hostile intent toward you.”

  I was on the point of saying that threatening behavior didn’t need to be physical, but I could tell she’d already made up her mind. I couldn’t believe how unfair this was. I didn’t know what else to say to her. I just stared at her, aghast.

  “Would you be able to identify him?”

  “Yes.” I stared at her. The man’s face, his demeanor, the expression in his eyes, were all imprinted on my mind.

  “Anyway, go on,” she said quietly. “Tell me what happened after you passed him.”

  “Is there any point?” I couldn’t help myself. “If you’ve already decided you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I simply questioned your response.” PC Marsh paused. “Please tell me what happened next.”

  “I was terrified,” I said simply. “I had to get away from him. I drove too fast—I know that. Instead of stopping at the main road, I pulled out, thinking I had enough time before the van reached me. All I remember after that is the impact. Then I must have passed out, because the next thing I remember is voices. And the ambulance.” I nodded. “Then . . .” I broke off, thinking about the face hanging over me.

  “Go on.” She was watching me.

  I shrugged. “I saw a face I recognized. She reminded me of my sister.” I looked up at her. “I know it wasn’t her. I banged my head. I wasn’t clear about anything. I still don’t feel clear.” It was true.

  PC Marsh nodded. “I can imagine. A sample of your blood was taken. That is within the law in a case like this, when someone is unconscious,” she added, seeing the shock on my face.

  I was incredulous. “Why?”

  “We needed to rule out whether alcohol was a factor.”

  “But it was the middle of the afternoon. I’d hardly have been drinking.” I couldn’t believe what she was suggesting.

  “Then the test will come back clear, and there’ll be no problem,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’ll let you know as soon as we have the results.”

  “Do you know where my car is?”

  “It was towed away. I’ll check and let you know where. It was quite badly damaged. The van you hit . . . The driver was uninjured, but you did quite a lot of damage to his vehicle too. His insurance company will be in touch. I assume you are insured?”

  I nodded, dumbstruck.

  She looked at me. “He’s within his rights to press charges against you. For dangerous driving.”

  “What happens then?” My jaw dropped open.

  “There’ll be a court case. You might want to think about finding a lawyer.”

  Summer

  It doesn’t take much, does it, Mother? To embellish the lie, layer by layer, with pretty words and other lies until a whole story’s built around it, until the grain of sand becomes a pearl. Embedded in the past, its origin forgotten, the lie is buried, is no longer.

  What lie?

  And things change, don’t they? You’re always telling us that. And sometimes we all remember things wrong. My cat didn’t really drown, did he? He must have run off, you told me, the day after I buried his lifeless body.

  But you’re forgetting. The most shocking memories, the most disturbing, seared irrevocably into your mind—they are the ones that never leave you.

  Like your and Hannah’s little secret, Mother. I’ve watched you fabricate the story around it, weaving it into the past so no one will know. But there are too many loose ends. Tattered edges. A pulled thread that will eventually come away, after other, smaller threads have worked loose, setting the scene.

  The time isn’t right. Not yet.

  But soon it will be.

  18

  After PC Marsh left, I felt another layer of insanity swirl like mist around me, as I sat in shock, digesting what she’d said. I’d always been such a careful driver. The thought of going to court horrified me. I was still sitting there, going through it all in my head, when Abe came in.

  “Sorry.” I meant about last night, for not being here. It was all I could think of to say. “I’m really not feeling well. Would you mind taking Gibson for a walk?”

  “OK.” He didn’t ask how I was, just wandered through the kitchen and went upstairs, reappearing a few minutes later. “I’ll take him out now.”

  “Thank you.”

  Going into the den, I curled up on one of the armchairs and closed my eyes. I must have slept, awaking a little while later when someone knocked quietly, then let themselves in. Just as I was starting to wonder who was here, I heard Curtis’s voice in the kitchen.

  “Hannah?”

  I was too tired to move. “I’m in here.”

  He came through. “I wasn’t sure you’d be home. You OK?”

  “Not really.” I was tearful all of sudden.

  He came over and put his arms around me. “It could have been worse.”

  Pulling away, I wiped my eyes. “Not much. I don’t have a car, and I may be facing a charge of dangerous driving.” Sitting down, I shook my head. “It was because of this man who freaked me out. Everyone seems to think I overreacted.” My eyes searched Curtis’s face. “If I’m honest, I feel like I’m going mad.”

  “Of course you’re not.” He sat down next to me. “It’s probably the stress of losing your sister catching up with you.”

  “There’s a load of other stuff.” I was silent for a moment, hoping he wouldn’t bring up the last time he was here. “Not the stuff I’ve told you about. There’s been this Facebook post about me drinking. I’ve had students canceling. I’m finding Abe so difficult . . .” I was trying my hardest to hold it together, but my voice wavered. “It’s getting to me, that’s all.”

  “Right now, you need to recover from the accident,” Curtis said more firmly. “You can worry about everything else later on.”

  He didn’t stay long. The reassurance his presence had generated quickly wore off after he’d gone. As the evening went on, I felt progressively worse. I put it down to a delayed reaction to the crash, told myself that was the cause of my throbbing head and aching body. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the stream of thoughts that galloped, disjointed, relentlessly through my head—not just about the accident, but about Nina. Then suddenly I found myself thinking of Summer, as everything I’d blotted out for years came flooding back.

  In my mind, I replayed a series of images, each fading into the next. The carefree, tangle-haired little girl who ran barefoot, getting older, more curious, with questions Nina had no answers for, becoming the angry teenager with flashing eyes who wanted a world she felt she had no access to. What had been fine when the children were young hadn’t worked as they got older. Nina had made a mistake.

  Instead of calming me, the glass of wine I poured made me nauseous. I desperately needed to sleep, but when I stood to go upstairs, the room started to spin. Trying to steady myself, I reached out to grab the table, then sat again, heavily, just as Abe came into the room.

  “Thinking about Summer, Abe.” I hadn’t planned to say it, but my tongue seemed disengaged from my mind. I felt giddy all of a sudden, the room seeming to tip sideways, then start slowly rotating.

  “Why?” The word sounded like an echo. As I looked at him, I tried to focus, but sitting across the table from me, instead of one Abe, there were two.

  “It was good . . .” As the words came out, I couldn’t remember what I was talking about.

  Abe looked furious. “You have no idea what it was like.” Then I thought I heard him say, “I saw what happened.”

  I caught his words as they died away. My eyelids were suddenly heavy, so that it was all I could do to stop them from closing. “Help . . . me?” I tried to say, knowing my words were slurred.

  I blinked, trying to focus as
he said something I couldn’t hear. When I didn’t reply, he repeated it, louder, but all I could make out was a single word.

  “. . . drunk . . .”

  “Not drunk.” I tried to say, followed by “. . . bed . . .” But too heavy for my lips to frame, each word remained silent.

  As I sat there, I saw his face moving. I frowned. Why couldn’t I hear him? He came over and, taking my arm none too gently, helped me stand, then slowly make my way upstairs to my bedroom.

  * * *

  I woke early the next morning with a blinding headache, noticing the curtains hadn’t been closed, and that I was still in the same clothes I’d been wearing yesterday. Tentatively, I tried to move, but I was in too much agony.

  As I lay back on my bed, I remembered Abe helping me up the stairs. I’d felt so drunk, but I’d only had a glass or two of wine. The alcohol must have interacted with the painkillers the hospital had given me. I tried to remember what Abe had said to me last night. In my mind, I saw his face, his mouth moving. Then I had a flashback, a single word in my head, as if whispered to me. Summer.

  It was followed by another, Abe’s words, his eyes blank as he spoke. I saw what happened.

  My heart was racing. Was that what he’d said? Or barely conscious at that point, had I imagined it? I closed my eyes. What had he seen? Or had he been telling me he’d seen what happened to Summer? Oh God, what if he had?

  I sat bolt upright for a moment, then slowly lay back again, thinking of Nina’s cottage, besieged by an unstoppable flow of memories, watching that night unfold all over again. Nina and Summer’s raised voices coming from her bedroom, escalating as I went in; Summer’s physical attack on her mother. Then silence.

  It had been worse than their usual rows. Instead of letting Summer say what she had to, Nina had been on the defensive, and the most terrible argument had kicked off. I remembered going in there as Nina yelled at Summer to leave her alone; Summer launching herself at Nina, tearing at her clothes in her desperation to be heard; my own ineffectual attempts to intervene. Hearing the commotion, one of Nina’s friends had knocked on the door, but Nina had screamed at him too. I couldn’t remember exactly when it happened, but Summer had physically attacked her mother, scratching at her face and arms, drawing blood. She was surprisingly strong, but Nina was bigger than her daughter. She’d shoved her away. Then Summer had come at her again, screaming in a way I’d never heard before. I could remember Nina’s eyes—blank, defeated, as with all her strength she shoved Summer across the room.

  I didn’t hear the crack of Summer’s head. All I noticed was that she’d stopped screaming. I went rushing over to her, crouching on the floor beside her. Nina’s words, spoken harshly, uncharacteristically: leave her there. I got up, hesitantly, noticing Summer wasn’t moving, that her eyes were wide open, staring, unseeing.

  Across the room, I watched Nina stagger as she swallowed another pill with a swig from her glass while I crouched down beside Summer again, trying to rouse her, my words becoming more urgent, until I was shaking her, more and more violently. Then I heard the crash as Nina dropped her glass, fell to her knees beside me.

  After the initial silence, I remembered my sister’s scream. For so many years, I’d blocked the memory, never once considering that Abe could have been there, invisible, the way he often was. I had no memory of seeing him. The voice of reason kicked in. He’d only been four, I told myself. Too young, surely, to have coherent memories of that time.

  A sinking feeling filled me. I knew that wasn’t true. I knew from my own childhood: he had been old enough. It was the traumatic images that stuck, that were most difficult to shake. I had enough of my own.

  The next day, I’d heard Nina misguidedly lying to Abe, telling him Summer had gone away, imagining every maternal cell in her body urging her to protect her son from the hideous truth about his sister, the same truth that had later derailed her. Now, I couldn’t help wondering if it was herself she’d been trying to convince. But if he’d been there, all along, Abe would have known.

  As Summer lay on the floor of Nina’s bedroom, no one had suggested calling an ambulance or even the police. A friend of Nina’s—Sam—had carried Summer’s body outside. Nina’s typical lack of regard for convention, she’d asked Sam to bury her body in the woods near the cottage. Maybe too near, I’d thought at the time. Even now, I could remember the small clearing where her grave was, how the following spring it was covered in soft green grass and primroses. The peaceful setting should have soothed my spirit as I stood there, with rays of early morning sunlight filtering through the trees, but the reality of what had happened was too brutal. It was the last time I ever went back.

  It was one unfortunate accident that changed everything. Nina was no longer able to bear living in the home she loved, and the ensuing move accelerated her descent into addiction, while all I’d done was hide—from Nina, from the truth—I could see that now. Instead of supporting her, I’d let her down.

  And now it was all catching up with me, turning my world into a place I no longer recognized. But it was what I deserved. As self-pity welled up inside me, I collapsed into uncontrollable sobbing.

  * * *

  Wrung out, I tried to pull myself together, needing to work out what I should say to Abe. I knew life hadn’t been easy for him since he’d moved here. If I explained that I hadn’t been feeling well since the accident, I hoped he’d understand or at least be prepared to hear me out. I managed to drag myself out of bed, but I felt only marginally better after a shower. I glanced at the time. It was ten o’clock.

  I had a window of opportunity to finish reading the letters, but as I got up to fetch them, I heard Gibson start barking. Going over to the window, I looked out to see Erin waving up at me. I went downstairs to let her in, wishing I was more pleased to see her, but all I could think of was Cara Matlock’s Facebook page on her laptop.

  “Hi!” Erin greeted me warmly, kissing me on both cheeks. A Judas kiss . . . The phrase landed in my brain from somewhere as she handed me a bunch of flowers. “I brought you these. How are you today?”

  “Not great.” Deliberately standoffish, I didn’t thank her. “The police don’t believe me about this man who’s stalking me, and I may be facing a charge of dangerous driving.”

  “Jesus, Hannah . . .” Erin frowned. “Look, if you’re having a rough day, would you rather I went?”

  “No. I want you to come in.” It came out more forcefully than I intended. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Really? I’m intrigued.” Erin followed me into the kitchen. “You seem tense. Is everything OK? Stupid question—I know it can’t possibly be. You just seem really on edge.”

  “No. Not really.” Meaning nothing was OK. I went to fill the kettle. “Tea?”

  “Great.” She changed the subject. “I love your house, by the way. Before the other night, I hadn’t been here. But you’re isolated, aren’t you? Doesn’t it ever worry you?” She pulled out one of the chairs and sat down.

  “I’ve always felt quite safe—until recently.” I broke off. I couldn’t pretend I was happy with her. I had to say what was on my mind.

  “What do you mean?” Erin was frowning at me.

  “It’s everything. It started after Nina died. These two people in the village who say they know me . . .” Then I cut to the chase. “The other day, when I was in your study, I didn’t have the number for the police. Your laptop was there, so I thought if it wasn’t password protected, I’d Google the number. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have.”

  “It would have been better if you’d asked,” she said shortly. “But it’s a bit late now. I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “Actually, I think it does.” I watched her face closely, but it was blank. “Facebook was open. But it wasn’t your page. It was a page belonging to a girl called Cara Matlock.” As I spoke, I watched her shift slightly on her chair, then glance away from me. “You know her na
me, don’t you? I take it you know what she’s been posting about me?”

  She looked slightly embarrassed. “Abe told me that someone had written this malicious post about you. It was the other night, when you were in the hospital. I thought I’d take a look, that was all. It was fairly vicious, Hannah.”

  “I know it was. It was all lies.” I stared at her. The post had upset me so much, I hadn’t even told Abe about it. Suddenly I realized Erin was lying to me. “But Abe couldn’t have told you. He didn’t know. I never had the chance to talk to him.”

  “Well, he found out somehow.” Erin sighed in exasperation. “I’d hardly lie to you. It’s not like you don’t have enough to worry about right now.”

  “So what about the conversation you and Abe had with the police? Did you discuss my so-called drinking problem with them? Over a nice cozy cup of tea around my kitchen table? While drunk Hannah was conveniently out of the way? Is that how it was?” I knew I sounded paranoid, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Now, just a moment . . .” Erin was frowning as she got up. “I’m not listening to this. You’re out of line, Hannah. You know, it would be good for you to talk to someone. I’m saying that as a friend. You don’t have many friends, do you? Because you don’t trust people, and you’re suspicious of everyone—including me.” She started walking toward the back door. Just before she got there, she stopped, turning to face me. “Get real, will you? If not for yourself, for Abe. You do have a drinking problem. It’s no secret. Half the village knows. They’ve seen you in the pub over the years. The only person who hasn’t admitted it is you.”

  It was like listening to Curtis all over again. I couldn’t take it. “Get out.” My voice was deadly cold. “I thought you were on my side.”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side, Hannah. I wanted to help you. I’ve no idea what’s happened in your life that keeps you from trusting people.” Erin’s voice was sad. “I was trying to be your friend. But the trouble is, friendship’s a two-way thing, and you keep everyone at arm’s length.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry for you. So much has happened to you, and I know you don’t find things easy, but you have Abe to think about now. He’s a good kid. You could be good for each other. Have you thought about that?”