The Housewarming: A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by S. E. Lynes

  Now, it frightens me more.

  It’s after quarter to nine. The police. I need to call the police. We’re too far along now. I need to call them. There is no sign of Matt and I cannot wait any longer.

  Legs pumping, lungs filling and emptying, I run back. She can/she can’t possibly… she could/there’s no way… she’s a little minx/she wouldn’t wander so far without me.

  The road is busier. Windscreen wipers swipe over tinted glass. The bulbous bonnets of shiny cars curve hugely, their wheels enormous, their occupants elevated like lords and ladies in horse-drawn carriages. One speck of rain and they’re all driving their children to school. These children are orchids. I can’t ask these people anything through their smoky windows; they can’t hear me over the blast of their surround-sound stereos.

  I dip into the car park of the Oasis, the private leisure centre on the river. Eyes darting across the manicured lawns, I run up to the entrance, back to the main gate. No sign. I head back to the road. Abi must have toddled into someone’s back garden. It is the only answer. She’ll be on some neighbour’s kid’s slide, having the time of her life, oblivious. Or hiding, beginning to worry now that I’ll never find her.

  ‘Boo!’ she’ll shout, head thrown back, giggling with relief.

  It will be all I can do not to yell at her.

  Matt is outside the house. He must have cycled past while I was in the car park. He’s wearing his lightweight raincoat, his helmet, his cycling gear. He looks down to my legs, to where Abi should be, her little hand in mine. Concern wrinkles his brow. Rain falls black on the pavement. I know it’s time to call the police. It is almost nine, my God.

  I burst into tears and run to him. ‘Matt.’

  ‘Hey.’ He pulls me to him. ‘Come on, she’ll be somewhere. She can’t have just disappeared.’

  I wrestle myself out of his arms. ‘She has though. She’s just wandered off or… someone’s snatched her off the street. Someone’s just pulled up and thrown her in a van.’

  ‘Don’t say that. That’s not… that won’t have happened, come on.’

  ‘She’s been gone too long. Too, too long! We need to call the police. Oh my God, where is she, where the hell is she? This is my fault. I left the door open. I thought I’d closed it but I didn’t. She was in her buggy but she’s never undone the clasp herself before. Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.’

  He holds me by the arms, holds me up while I sob into his chest. ‘People leave their front doors open all the time. An open door is not going to kill a kid, not in this neighbourhood, Ave. Come on – this is a safe, safe place. Let’s just try and think calmly.’

  I can tell by how quietly he speaks that he is rattled. He’s keeping his tone level for my sake but I know him too well to be fooled.

  ‘Matt?’ My voice is a whimper. ‘We need to call the police.’

  His bottom lip pushes out. He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t say don’t be silly. I don’t want him to agree. But he is nodding. He has agreed. My throat blocks. My scalp shrinks against my head.

  ‘You’re sure you’ve checked the house?’ he says quietly, but he is pulling out his phone.

  ‘I’m going to check again.’ I unlock the front door and fly upstairs, clearing the laundry in one great stride, taking the stairs three at a time, calling her name, her name, her name. ‘Abi? Abi. Abi. Abi. Abi.’

  I look under the beds. I look in the laundry basket – empty. I emptied it. In the wardrobes. The bath. The shower cubicle. I have already looked.

  ‘Abi?’ I run downstairs, grab the banister and lever myself over the last few steps. ‘Abi? Please come out, love. Mummy’s getting worried.’

  Matt is striding from room to room, phone at his ear. ‘Abi?’ he calls out. ‘Abi, come out, darling. If you’re hiding, it’s time to come out now, Mummy and Daddy are getting worried.’ Then, ‘Yes, hello. Yes, police, please.’

  The thump, thump, thump of my heart. Everything is white – bleached out, strange. Everything is slow.

  Matt steps out of the house, stops on the square porch. I am cringing and sobbing in the bright hall. The back of my husband is a silhouette. How thin he looks, bent over his phone in his black kit.

  Second by second. Beat by beat. A clock. A metronome. A heart.

  His head twitches.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Hello, yes, I need to report a missing child.’

  Three

  Ava

  Almost a year ago and yesterday all at once. No matter how much time passes, that day will always be yesterday and I will have to make my peace with that somehow. Yesterday and everything I should have done, would have done differently, exists in my every moment, its shadow dark and long. I’m fighting off yesterday every second of today and tomorrow and forever. The laundry tumbles from my arms. I fall after it. The pushchair is empty. The front door is open. I left it open. Me. Over and over again. My ignorant self. My stupid self. My selfish, selfish self. I have to watch myself, her. I have to stare at her from the other side of a glass wall, fingertips white: myself that morning – ignorant, stupid, selfish. I push my hands to that glass and I shout: ‘Ava! Forget your online life, just today. Forget how lonely you feel. Go downstairs. Go now. Be with your little girl. She is enough.’

  But she doesn’t hear me shouting. She doesn’t hear my fists pounding on the glass wall.

  ‘Close the door. Close it, Ava. Please! Close the door.’

  Tears are endless. I am a woman who has a daughter. I am a woman who had a daughter. Both those things are true. I live in the past; I survive in the present. I was she; I am me. My daughter is alive; she is dead. She is simply lost; she is gone forever. Her heart is the tick, tick, tick of the metronome on my piano top, stopped still in my silent living room now that all music has stopped. My daughter is a perfect cadence. My daughter is the dissonant devil’s chord, that jarring combination of notes played deliberately to unsettle, to leave the listener tense, hanging. So I have been left, waiting for resolution that never comes. I am hanging – yesterday, today, forever.

  The neighbours are coming out of their houses. They fold their arms. They look about. The seconds. The beats. A black weight gathering in my gut. Thickening there. Lodging there.

  Each day is new. If today goes badly, tomorrow will be new again. And so on. I was ill for a time. That’s the favoured term. When you were ill. Then I was in a clinic, my belly rounding with new life while I tried to hold on to my own. Now I am at home. My therapy sessions are down to once a week. Trauma counselling. CBT. Stop checking the door. Stop, if you can. Yesterday is a long, dark shadow. I’m trying to see my way forward in this darkness.

  Fred is three months old. He keeps me alive; this is not an exaggeration. It’s possible he’s all that keeps me alive. His sister is a two-year-old girl in a picture frame. Matt tells me we must try to move on. He tells me that Fred will help us because we have to be strong for him. New life brings new hope, that’s what Matt says. He clings to these aphorisms because he has to, and mostly I forgive him. He doesn’t want me to be this sad. No one does. But if anyone else tells me that God only gives us what we can handle, or that everything happens for a reason, I swear I will punch them in the jaw. I will knock every tooth from their head. I will spit in their stupid face.

  I never used to have thoughts like that.

  I used to be kind, witty. Kindness has melted, wit become sarcasm. If I met me now, I would hold me at arm’s length. Something edgy about her, I would think. Not sure I can trust her. I never used to understand why anyone would be mean about or to another person. Now I do.

  Fred is smaller than Abi was at this age, but he will soon transfer to a buggy. His pram is the one I used for Abi before she was ready for the pushchair. I wanted a new pram for Fred, but prams are expensive and Matt is right when he says that’s not how you forget the past, by throwing away everything that belonged to it. The past is a reminder, good or bad. To destroy it is to destroy its lessons. This is what he says. Fo
r me, it’s not that easy.

  ‘Thing is, I don’t want to forget,’ I tell Barbara, snivelling my way through entire boxes of tissues. ‘I just don’t want to remember every second and feel like it was my fault. I want to be able to look at her picture and stop hoping the doorbell will go and that someone will be there with her in their arms saying, here, I found her. She’s safe. She’s well. She was existing this whole time in some alternative reality, free from harm.’

  Even as I say all this, the images come, hazy and pastel-shaded pink and blue. Abi throws back her head and laughs – how she laughs with the warm sun on her hair. How she collapses with giggles into my arms. Unharmed, untouched, happy as the day she left.

  ‘I want to imagine her into reality,’ I say to her, poor Barbara, paid to listen to all this. ‘I want to stop imagining where she might be… because if she didn’t die, then someone took her. If I could just remove that possibility, I could at least grieve.’

  Barbara nods and listens. She knows I’m working towards a past tense. When I say the same to Matt, he listens too. But then he pushes harder. He says: ‘We have to accept the facts, darling. We have to move on or we’ll be living our lives in limbo.’

  I don’t reply. It is not a conversation I can stand to have. And I will be buying a new pushchair for Fred. There’s a limit.

  Fred was already on the way when Abi disappeared. I thought the foggy brain and the nausea were exhaustion from disturbed sleep and the endless activity of life with a small, bright, curious child. I took the thickening of my waist as a sign that, post-baby, it was harder now to keep the weight off, that perhaps my shape had changed. But then my period was late and so, the day before she went missing, that Sunday morning, I snuck into the bathroom and did a test and there he was: two blue lines on a white stick. I yelped, my stomach fizzing as I ran downstairs. The kitchen already smelled of the slow-roast pork Matt had put in before dawn; the vegetables were chopped and waiting in pans in cold water, the table set for Neil and Bella coming for super-late lunch. Abi was in the back garden, helping Matt with his bike, which was suspended on a stand on the lawn. It was sunny but cool outside. He had fixed her up with a bucket of soapy water and a cloth and she was washing the wheels with deadly serious intent.

  ‘Matt!’

  Our eyes met over Abi’s little head. I held up the test, felt my eyes fill at the smile that spread across his face.

  ‘What’s that?’ Abi was pointing at the stick. She had on her yellow wellies and pink shorts, and the front of her stripy jumper was soaking wet where she’d spilt the filthy water. Her face was a little grubby too, smudged with dirt from the bike wheel.

  I shoved the test in my pocket. ‘Just a toothbrush that broke,’ I said, rolling my eyes, but she’d already gone back to her task.

  I glanced again at Matt, saw in his eyes the promise of a snatched celebratory hug later, an excited conversation that evening after Neil and Bella had gone, lying in bed guessing at when we thought it might have happened, because back then, there were so many possibilities.

  But mostly I remember that I felt joy. And if I remember it, it means I was capable of feeling it.

  We were supposed to be having a barbecue that day, but September had brought a chill to the air so Matt decided on a roast dinner instead. He always took care of the food. I’m the table-setter, the washer-upper. He lets me peel and chop, but that’s about it. We had drinks at the breakfast bar while Neil and Bella showered Abi with the usual attention.

  ‘What’ve you got there?’ Neil pointed to her chest. When she looked down, he flicked his finger up, catching her on the nose. She laughed, even though he did this every time.

  ‘Come, NeeNee.’ She grabbed his hand and dragged him off to the living room – him all eye-rolling, mugging like he was under arrest, even though we all knew he loved her wanting to monopolise him in this way. She wanted him to build her train track. He always used to make a figure of eight for her, then sit on the floor pushing the Thomas the Tank Engine set along the tracks, making choo-choo noises. He was so much better at playing with her than I was. All he needed was a bottomless supply of lager.

  We weren’t going to tell them so soon. But when we sat at the table and I refused a glass of red wine, Bella asked: ‘Aren’t you even having a glass with your meal?’

  No flies on Bella. I had declined a pre-dinner fizz on the excuse of a poor night’s sleep, which was part of the truth.

  ‘Ah, no,’ I said, feeling myself blush.

  Bella’s eyes rounded. She glanced at Matt, back at me, and smiled. ‘Are you?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Oh my God, you are!’ She had tears in her eyes, which I took for delight.

  ‘Congratulations, guys,’ Neil said, his glass raised. ‘Really delighted for you both.’

  A silence fell. I couldn’t pinpoint what had happened. I still can’t. But it was awkward, definitely. At the time, I thought perhaps they were offended that we’d left them to guess like that when they were our closest friends.

  ‘We were going to wait till I was further along,’ I said. It was almost an apology.

  Eventually Neil made some comment about how delicious the meat was, Matt answering him hastily with some inane reply about how many hours it had been in, at what temperature, while Bella drained her glass and poured herself another. And when I think back to that day now, the thought of them coming over at all seems so alien. They haven’t been to the house since that day, not like that. I was ill and then not up to it, then they came over briefly when Fred was born but I wasn’t able to face polite conversation, and now, perhaps, too much time has passed.

  Tragedy is like an infectious disease. People avoid you. They don’t want to catch it.

  Thankfully, Fred is an easy baby, easier than Abi was. Sometimes I think he was sent to heal us, that some higher force knew we would need him. And he sleeps, hallelujah! It’s as if he knows that he has to tread carefully over the eggshells his parents have become.

  New life brings new hope, Matt says. But it is hope that will kill me in the end.

  From the pram, Fred coos softly, as if to call me back to him.

  ‘Hey.’ Matt is on the stairs. He has on his kit, ready to cycle to work, and is staring into his phone, thumbing a text. ‘You were miles away.’

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes, you?’

  ‘Just texting Neil,’ he says. ‘Might go for a run with him later if he’s up for it.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  This is what passes for a conversation between Matt and me these days – careful exchanges in the Abi-less rooms of our home. He and Neil are training for a triathlon – childhood friends trying to stay close in the aftermath of unspeakable disaster. Not that Matt has said this; that now their friendship requires a concerted effort where once it was as natural as family.

  ‘What’s that?’ Matt says.

  I follow his gaze to a thick cream parchment envelope on the welcome mat. No stamp.

  Mr and Mrs Atkins, it says, in an elegant purple hand.

  Matt is at my shoulder by the time I’ve picked it up. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t got X-ray vision.’ I’m harsh with him. I don’t mean to be, didn’t used to be. I tear open the envelope.

  ‘An invitation?’ Matt asks.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Dear Neighbour,

  Join us Saturday, 31 August for a housewarming party at 90 Riverside Drive.

  There will be food, drink and, hopefully, merriment. From 8 p.m. (No kids, sorry!)

  RSVP

  Best regards,

  Johnnie, Jennifer, Jasmine and Cosima Lovegood

  Under the typeface, Jennifer has written in the same flowing script as the envelope, Hope you can make it, love, Jen.

  ‘Next door,’ Matt states the obvious.

  The paper crunches in my grip.

  ‘A week on Saturday. We’ll be able to have a nosy at the
ir new kitch— What’re you doing? Hey, don’t screw it up!’

  ‘What? You’re not actually going to go?’

  ‘Ava.’ Gently he takes the ends of my fingers, prises them open and lifts the crumpled ball out of my hand. His soft brown eyes are on mine as they were that morning. It’s no one’s fault, Ava. People leave front doors open all the time. ‘Come on. It might be nice. A nice thing to do.’

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  He puts the screwed-up invitation on the side before returning his gaze to me. Palms open and hovering at his waist, he leans his head a little to one side before he speaks.

  ‘Look,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t look me.’ My words cling, trembling, to the artificially flat tone of my voice.

  He raises his hands higher. ‘I’m not. I’m just… I know it’ll be tough; I’m not saying it won’t be. I’m not saying it won’t be hard, all right? All right? But just for one second, try to believe it might be… if not fun, then interesting? It might allow us to think about something else, just for a short time. I mean, it’s not a trendy underground bar opening, but it will be the party of the year, you know, in suburban terms. Everyone’s desperate to see inside. This whole street has been talking about the Lovegoods’ refurb for months. Pete Shepherd’s going to have some sort of embolism. Honestly, he’s been giving me a running commentary on it since it started; he knows more about their kitchen extension than Neil does. I bet he’s started getting ready already, probably got his tie on.’

  He smiles but even in his smile I can see that he’s disappointed not to have made me laugh even a little.

  ‘Honestly, hon. This could be good for us. Everyone will be going.’

  ‘Exactly! That’s exactly my point. I can’t face the neighbours as it is, let alone all of them in one room. What the hell am I going to say to them? What the hell are they going to say to me? What can anyone say to me? Surely you can see that?’

  ‘I can – of course I can. But we have to talk to them sometime. Might be good to get them all out of the way in one evening. This way we can show our faces and then next time you see them it won’t be so bad.’