Chapter 23
Suzie can’t stop thinking about that receipt. At ten minutes to one, she turns the sign in the pharmacy window to CLOSED and takes her lunch out of her bag. It’s tuna salad, but she isn’t hungry. She wishes she could have a nice glass of cold white wine, wash the weird taste of this day away.
That’ll teach me to skip my morning run, she thinks as she pulls out the chair at the desk.
The weather this morning had been for temperatures close to freezing, so she’d turned on the heating in the shop, but now she takes another look at the thermostat on the wall and kicks it up another few notches.
Then, doing it almost casually, as if she has barely given it any thought, Suzie takes the receipt from her pocket and lays it carefully over the radiator.
A heat source can be anything, she reckons, and although she’d never tested their secret messages out like this before, she doesn’t see any reason why it couldn’t work.
She stirs the salad in the pot, waiting for Teddy.
They always meet up a few minutes after the hour when he leaves his practice and cycles across town to sit in the little office with her and eat their lunch together.
Sometimes they do a crossword, or a sudoku.
Teddy likes the sudokus. He likes mathematics and numbers; he says they make sense to him.
While she’s waiting, Suzie pulls up Facebook on the office computer and searches for Cathy Maddon, but there are only results in Cumbria and Bristol, a primary school teacher in Leicestershire.
She tries a combination of Idless or Cornwall, and even runs through local directories in Knox Row, but finds nothing.
She finds Hazel, but her profile is private, just the thumbnail image visible of Hazel and a man Suzie supposes must be Joe.
They are at a Halloween party, Joe dressed as Beetlejuice, all wiry hair and black-ringed eyes.
Hazel is wearing a long black wig and a low-cut dress, Morticia Addams, Suzie supposes, or the vampire one.
Elvira. She looks so happy, Suzie thinks, but then we all do on the outside, don’t we?
The clock ticks. The temperature climbs.
The receipt lies flat, revealing nothing.
Teddy will be another few minutes yet. Suzie sighs, typing in Abigail’s name as if by muscle memory, an action she performs so often she is barely aware she is doing it anymore.
The profile is public, so Suzie can see it without being linked to her own profile, which she is glad of.
She wouldn’t want Abigail to know she’d been looking, even though she did so regularly, at least once a week that Suzie would admit to.
It was a comfort, in a way. She liked seeing Abigail’s successes, the man she’d married, the beautiful daughter she had.
It made her feel better to know that Abigail was winning, despite everything that happened.
It’s called a salve to your conscience, Suzie, the little voice in her head pipes up, the one which always sounds so frustratingly like her mother. Nagging, pedantic. But it doesn’t work, does it? Not really. Because you still feel the guilt. It eats away at you like acid.
The most recent post is a photograph of Abigail in a bathing suit, smiling at the camera. Beneath it, she has posted:
As some of you know I’ll be back in hospital on the 18th for more treatment on my legs—hoping we get lucky this time around and it’ll be the end of all these procedures! Send us good wishes and wine!
Suzie hurriedly closes the laptop when she hears someone rapping on the front door.
A quick look at the CCTV as she stands up reveals it as Teddy outside, his bike helmet in one hand, lunch box in the other, squinting up at where he knows the camera to be.
She is still thinking about Abigail when she walks past the radiator and glances down at the receipt, immediately turning cold all over.
Two words are slowly appearing on the paper, seeming to rise to the surface like things long submerged.
Teddy’s face drops as she opens the door, and she immediately feels guilty. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go to Cathy’s.” She gives Teddy a weak smile. “I’m so sorry, it’s an emergency.”
“What? Who’s Cathy? Suze?”
Suzie is already pulling the door closed behind her. She’ll be late opening back up after lunch, but that can’t be helped. She doubts there will be many customers in this afternoon anyway. It’s been shocking how fast footfall has dropped off after the new chemist opened up in the shopping center.
“Hazel’s sister. I mentioned her, didn’t I?”
“You definitely did not.” He’s upset. He has that look about him, the one she knows so well—forlorn, like a kicked dog. “When will you be back? What about our lunch?”
Suzie leans up and kisses him, using his lapel to pull him closer to her. He tastes like the dental clinic; clean and sanitary, almost antiseptic. It’s delicious.
“Don’t be mad at me, Ted-Ted. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”
He calls out after her as she strides across the precinct, buttoning up her coat against the cold. “You aren’t in trouble, are you, Suzie?”
She shakes her head, keeps walking. She knows he will be puzzled—stunned, even. He’ll mope all afternoon, and come dinnertime she will have to coax him gently out of his bad mood like a tortoise out of its shell.
Suzie has never gone off without telling him what she is doing, not even when her father had his first heart attack.
Still, the idea of explaining to Teddy about the secret messages, the candles, the lemon juice, the cats in a suitcase buried at the back of the wardrobe—he would never understand.
He hadn’t grown up here, with the woods on all sides and the strange lights that sometimes flicker in the darkest parts of the forest. He doesn’t know the old stories about paths that suddenly dead-ended or turned you round, or how brambles seemed to snatch at you like grasping fingers.
People talked about how the woods put funny ideas into the minds of men like Joseph Bray, who slaughtered his whole family out there in the pines and who was buried at the crossroad with a stake through his heart.
Teddy doesn’t know any of this, so Teddy wouldn’t get it. Best kept that way, Suzie thinks.