Katy Carter Keeps a Secret

by Ruth Saberton

  There’s nothing for it. I’m trapped. Reluctantly, I sit up in all my WAG-tastic glory.

  Ollie’s eyes widen behind his glasses and then he starts to laugh. “Blimey, Katy! I thought you were off to have lunch with Tansy? Not swinging around a pole! How is Peter Stringfellow these days?”

  “Very funny!” My face is bright red. “Look, Tansy thought it would be nice to give me a makeover as a thank you for the books.”

  “Bloody hell! What does she do to people she doesn’t feel grateful to?” Still laughing, he turns to Carolyn who, joy of joy, has now joined us. “Caro, you remember my girlfriend Katy, don’t you? Although I won’t be offended if you don’t recognise her!”

  “Nice to see you again, Katy,” says Carolyn Miles politely. Her grey eyes flicker over me with total disinterest before she turns back to Ollie. “Great work today. Remember what I said about applying for the Assistant Head Teacher post. I really think you’re ready.”

  Ollie lights up like Oxford Street on Christmas Eve. “Seriously? You really think so?”

  “I know so,” Carolyn says warmly, giving his arm a little squeeze. “There’s no one else I would want to work with that closely. You’re the person for the job. We’ll talk on Monday and discuss an application. My office at seven-thirty. See you then.”

  And, with this order issued, she’s sashaying across to her little red car, spike-heeled boots scrunching on the gravel and blonde ponytail bouncing with every step.

  I stare after her. My orange face and daft outfit are totally forgotten.

  What’s going on? Ollie is seriously considering applying to be school senior management? He’s never mentioned this to me.

  Just like he never mentioned he was meeting Carolyn today. My skin starts to prickle, and not just from where I’ve been scalded either. I have a terrible sense of unease. Ollie’s keeping secrets from me and he’s never, ever done that before. We’ve always told each other everything.

  I need to find out what’s going on here, and I will do too – just as soon as I’ve got home, scrubbed away the make-up and managed to get these control pants off.

  Chapter 8

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Mads. What do you think? Is it good enough to send?”

  It’s Monday evening and Maddy and I are having a long-overdue girls’ night at the pub. Ollie’s at a parents’ evening, Richard’s looking after the twins and Holly won’t be here until after seven, so we’ve had a window of time to look over my sample chapter for Throb.

  I’m gripping the stem of my wine glass so tightly I’m half expecting it to shatter. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so nervous about showing my best friend something I’ve written. Mads has been my critique partner and beta reader for as long as I’ve been writing, but showing her this sample chapter is absolutely terrifying. I couldn’t feel more exposed if I were sitting in the Mermaid stark naked. I mean, what if she thinks all that stuff I’ve described is based on my own sex life? What if she thinks Ollie and I actually do these things ourselves? Like the bit when Alexi rips Lucinda’s tights off with his teeth, lashes her to the kitchen table, fetches the clothes pegs and—

  Well that. Good Lord. I’m embarrassed just thinking about the scene I’ve handed her. I’m surprised my poor little laptop didn’t burst into flames while I was typing it, too. I know I’m pretty new to this erotic fiction lark, and it isn’t really my bag at all, but it’s amazing just how motivating a big electrician’s bill and the possibility of complete financial annihilation can be. Over the past few days the words have poured from my imagination and onto the screen in an X-rated torrent. I’m actually rather shocked at myself. Who knew what darkness was lurking in the depths of my mind?

  If I get this gig, I’ll have to have a pen name. What if people think I’m writing from experience? And even worse, what if Ollie does? He’ll know we’ve never got down and dirty on the kitchen floor – well, nothing more exciting than sweeping and scrubbing the grubby quarry tiles, anyway! Even worse, will he think I’ve been up to no good with somebody else?

  I gnaw at my thumb. This alter ego stuff is certainly complicated. How Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker cope I’ll never know.

  Mads looks up and fans herself with the printed pages.

  “Bloody hell, Katy Carter! You’re a dark horse. That thing Alexi did with the courgettes! I’m blushing!”

  I’m blushing too. This little detail came to me when I was peering in the fridge looking for something to eat and contemplating a courgette and margarine sandwich…

  “Don’t look so worried; I don’t think you and Ollie have a vegetable fetish,” she continues, returning to the manuscript and thumbing through it. “Ditto golden syrup, clothes pegs and cocktail sticks. No, girlfriend, unless the mild-mannered Mr Burrows is a serious deviant, you have got one twisted imagination. Congratulations. You’ve written a perfect porny sample chapter.”

  “It’s erotica!” I protest.

  “You just keep on telling yourself that,” Mads says kindly. “Is there any more? I can’t wait to find out what Alexi finds next. How about the Hoover? Or a feather duster?”

  I place my head in my hands. “This is all wrong. I want to write romance!”

  “I thought Alexi was very romantic with the clothes pegs and washing line,” grins Maddy. “Next time I’m hanging out the laundry I’ll make sure I call Richard over!”

  This image is enough to make me reach for my drink.

  “Anyway,” my best friend continues, “romance isn’t paying the bills, but I’m sure this will. Email it to Throb, babes. Our work here is done.”

  My thumb hovers over my phone. The sample chapter is attached to an email to my (potential) editor, and it’s ready to fire into the ether.

  “Send it,” says Mads sternly. “Stop being such a jelly.”

  My thumb’s still poised over send. I know we need the money, I know this chapter ticks all the boxes in the brief and I know I can deliver the goods, but something deep down inside me is saying this might not be my brightest idea. I’m aware that Ollie’s been keeping secrets from me too – meeting Carolyn for one, and his head-teacherly ambitions for another – but it just doesn’t feel right. Besides, it was bad enough when I was writing for Tansy. How would St Jude’s feel if their prospective Assistant Head Teacher was living with Tregowan’s answer to E L James?

  “I’m not sure,” I say cautiously. “Maybe I should run it by Ollie first?”

  “What will that achieve? It’ll only stress him out,” Mads points out. “What our other halves don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “Err, that wasn’t what you said a moment ago when I told you Ollie hadn’t mentioned the Assistant Head thing.”

  “Different rules for us, babes. Never forget that. Anyway, didn’t you say that Throb would give you a pen name? Ollie won’t even know it’s you and neither will anyone else. Now stop making such a fuss, think of the money and send the bloody email!”

  For a vicar’s wife Mads is pretty happy to tempt me with Mammon – which, let’s be honest, isn’t very hard. The local sparky pushed his estimate for the rewiring through the door this morning and, ever since I scraped myself off the floor after the shock, I’ve been trying to figure out how to pay him. Is Maddy right? Is this the only way? I just don’t know.

  “Mads! Katy! I knew I’d find you in here, darlings! Let me buy us some drinks to celebrate my return to the motherland!”

  Frankie Burrows – Ollie’s cousin, who also happens to be a rock icon – bursts into the pub and flings his arms around us both. I’m caught in a wiry embrace and tangled in his flowing Hermès scarf; my thumb slips on the iPhone screen and oops! The email is sent. Call it fate, call it coincidence or just call it my sodding bad luck as usual, but the issue has been decided for me. I have just submitted a sample chapter to Throb.

  “Shall we have champagne, darlings! On me?” Frankie trills. “Bolly? Cristal? Dom P?”

  “Stop being such a show-off,” Mads scolds. “You’
re in Cornwall now, not L bloody A. Seriously, Frankie, you’re spending far too much time with celebs and not nearly enough with the peasants! Get over yourself and drink house white like the rest us.”

  “Righty-ho,” says Frankie, who by now is used to Maddy’s razor-blade put-downs. “Three glasses of paupers’ white it is. Oh! Here’s Holly! Hello, angel! Wine for you as well? Celebrate that sparkly ring and marrying the delicious Guy?”

  My sister joins us, pulling off her bobble hat and running her hands through her red curls.

  “Believe me, he’s far from delicious when he rolls in at midnight reeking of fish and booze.”

  “Ooo! How manly!” Frankie shivers theatrically. “I’m just picturing him now, naked except for his oilskins and his skin glistening from the storm.”

  Holly gives him a pitying look. “Guy doesn’t wear his oilskins at home, and if there’s bad weather the last place you’ll find him is at sea because he’ll be in here, propping up the bar. This is real life, not The Perfect Storm.”

  “No prizes for guessing who got all the imagination in the Carter family,” Frankie says.

  “Frankie was just offering to get a round in,” Mads tells Holly, stuffing my printed chapter into her bag. “White wine for you?”

  My sister shakes her head. “No, not for me thanks. I’ll just have a mineral water.”

  “Mineral water?” Frankie looks shocked. “Are you ill?”

  “I’m fine,” Holly says, pulling herself onto a bar stool. “I just don’t need a drink. It’s been a long day. I wouldn’t mind some food though. Maybe a portion of cheesy chips.”

  I look at my sister a little more closely. Never an outdoors person, she looks even paler than usual and there are dark smudges beneath her eyes. She works far too hard at the uni. This doesn’t usually stop her having a drink though. Holly and Guy are such regular fixtures in the pub they ought to have shares in the local brewery.

  “Don’t look at me like I’ve grown two heads, Katy!” Holly snaps. “I don’t have to have a drink to have a good time, you know.”

  “I know that,” I say, feeling hurt.

  “Well, I do need a drink. Good times, bad times or indifferent,” Maddy declares. “And since I’m on a rare night out, I’m going to have another.”

  I open my mouth to remind her about the Lenten ban, then shut it quickly. Mads didn’t listen to me when I protested earlier, so nothing much will have changed. If Frankie drops her in it with the Rev, then it’s her bad luck.

  We all perch at the bar and Frankie has a lovely time ordering drinks and being over-the-top camp just to wind up Derrick the landlord and some of the more conservative locals. Much as they dine out on having a rock musician and his film-star husband as part-time residents, this is Tregowan and attitudes can still be quite traditional – something I know only too well.

  “So what are you going to do about rewiring the cottage, not to mention getting the roof fixed?” Holly asks me when we’ve all settled down to the serious business of eating and drinking, once our plates of chips are in front of us too.

  “Are you trying to drive me to alcohol?” I groan.

  “I didn’t know electricians could charge that much. I might retrain,” says Maddy thoughtfully. “Then I could run an all-female team of electricians. We could have pink dungarees and vans and tools! It would be brilliant.”

  “You could call your firm Pussy Power,” suggests Frankie, and Maddy laughs so hard at this that she snorts her drink all over the bar.

  “I don’t know what you’re laughing about. It was your lava lamp that caused all my problems,” I point out after she’s recovered sufficiently to breathe. “Or the electrician’s bill, at least. I ought to be making you pay for it!”

  “I never talked you into taking it or said it was working. I seem to remember you were the one who wanted the bloody thing,” Maddy reminds me, mopping up her drink with a bar towel. “Did I tell you to plug it in without testing it? Did I?”

  “No,” I mutter sulkily.

  “I’d offer to get it all fixed, sweetie, but Ollie will only say no,” says Frankie. “That boy is too proud for his own good.”

  He’s right. Ollie will say no. He’s scarily independent and never wants handouts or help of any kind. When my godmother died and left us enough money to put a big deposit on our cottage I had a hard time persuading him to accept it, and that was when we were first together and persuading him was fairly easy! I don’t stand a chance these days.

  Especially since he’s still laughing about my WAG-over. He’ll probably never take me seriously again after that.

  “You could always look for the loot,” chips in Derrick the landlord, who’s polishing glasses behind the bar and listening in to our conversation. “That would pay for you to get the place rewired. Probably take care of the leaky roof and the mortgage too.”

  My ears prick up. At the moment rewiring, roof and mortgage are words that wake me up in the night. Along with overdraft and Carolyn and secret writing job, obviously. It’s amazing I get any sleep at all.

  “What loot?”

  “The loot that’s buried in your cottage,” Derrick says patiently. “Old Cecily Greville’s life savings.”

  He’s got my attention now. When Ollie and I bought our cottage it was in a really bad way – even worse than it is now, which I know you’ll find hard to believe. It had belonged to an old lady who’d lived there for donkey’s years; in fact, nobody in Tregowan could agree on just how long she had lived there. Bob the Post reckoned at least forty years because he remembered her in the cottage when he was a boy, but Penny Pengelley from the sweet shop was convinced Cecily had bought the cottage before the First World War. Whatever the truth, Cecily Greville had been quite a recluse and when she died, without family or friends, she’d left her cottage to an animal shelter.

  “She never left any money to anyone but she was supposed to be one of the wealthiest women in the village,” Derrick continues, enjoying having a captive audience. “Where did all her valuables go? The jewellery? The money she’d stashed away for a rainy day?”

  “This is Cornwall, where it rains all the time, so she’d have spent all that.” Holly pulls a face, but the landlord isn’t put off by my sister’s cynicism.

  “Mock all you like, Holly Carter, but Cecily Greville came from one of the richest families in the area. Her father was a wine merchant, and believe me she’d have been worth something in any age. Before she died she told the old vicar she’d buried her life savings under the floor of the sitting room. He didn’t take her seriously, as she was quite muddled towards the end, but maybe she wasn’t as confused as we all thought?”

  I’m staring at him. “She told the vicar her life savings were buried under her sitting room floor? My sitting room floor? And you never thought to mention that before? Not in nearly five years?”

  Derrick shrugs his plump shoulders. “Sorry, maid. Never occurred to me before. Truth be told I’d all but forgotten it.”

  Derrick might have been able to forget that there’s a fortune buried under my sitting room but I know I won’t be able to. It’s going to drive me mad! How on earth can I sit on my sofa now watching EastEnders when underneath me are squillions of pounds? I’ll never sit still again.

  It’s going to be unbearable!

  If I find the missing money all our problems will be solved! I can get the roof fixed, rewire the cottage, pay off the mortgage and not write for Throb, and Ollie won’t have to work so hard. That’s what I call a result!

  I have to find out what’s under my floor! I have to!

  “Don’t you dare,” Holly says.

  “Dare what?”

  “Dare even think about pulling up the floorboards and looking underneath. It’s all nonsense, Katy.”

  It’s scary sometimes just how well my sister knows me. Then again, she’s seen me tear my parents’ place upside down hunting for our Christmas presents.

  “It might not be nonsense though. It could be
true!” Frankie’s eyes are enormous. “Oh my God! Katy! There’s a fortune underneath your house, angel! I just know it!”

  Frankie has a fortune in his wallet and an even bigger one in his bank account, but he couldn’t look more excited as he clutches my arm and makes plans.

  “Even if there is, the money isn’t Katy’s,” says Maddy, pouring a gallon of water on my lovely sunshiny parade. “We know who it belonged to, don’t we? So it’s part of Miss Greville’s estate.”

  “Which Katy purchased,” says Derrick. “The house and all that’s in it are hers.”

  “And you said she had no family,” adds Frankie excitedly. “So it’s legally Katy’s! Finders keepers!”

  Although Frankie is a rock star and not a lawyer, he’s speaking with such conviction that I’m convinced. “Let’s go and look now! Before Ollie comes home and tells us we’re being daft!” I say.

  “You are being daft!” Holly’s practically shouting now. “It’s just a story!”

  But my poor sister might as well talk to the beer pumps because Mads, Frankie and I are now so worked up we can hardly sit still, and no matter how many times Holly tries to calm us down we’re quite unable to hear reason. By the time we leave the pub I’m one hundred percent certain I’m only metres and minutes away from financial salvation. As soon as I’ve found a way to lift the floorboards and pull out the treasure, my lottery habit, leaky roof and rewiring bill will all be history!

  “If you find anything, call me straight away,” Mads insists when we part company by the fish market.

  “And if Ollie kicks you out for being a total lunatic you can sleep on our sofa,” Holly tells me. “But you’ll have to watch Ice Road Truckers and Trawlermen with Guy when he comes in from the pub, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

  With this parting shot my sister gives me a hug and then she and Mads set off for their houses on the left-hand side of the valley. Frankie lives this way too, in a beautiful big house called Smuggler’s Rest, but he’s far too excited to think about going home. Besides, it’s only nine o’clock, the night is still young and Ollie will only just be finishing parents’ evening. I reckon this gives me at least half an hour to peek under the floor without causing him any stress.