Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Gemma
I run up the stairs ignoring Ethan. He’s now working with the team who have arrived.
Ethan calls out to me but I can’t stop. There’s no way I can face him or anyone at the moment.
That necklace in my pocket is haunting me.
Cora pulls at my hair as I open the apartment door, wrapping one of my curls in her fingers.
I flinch at the bang coming from the end of the corridor. The balcony room door must be open again. So much for Ethan locking it.
As I dash into the apartment, I pop Cora on the couch with her soft teddy blanky before turning the TV on to her favourite channel, and she’s now bouncing on the settee, laughing.
Ethan barges in. ‘Gemma, I called out but you didn’t hear me. We’re making good time with everything, and Robbie is working on the plumbing. It’s going really well. I thought you’d want to see.’
I grip the necklace in my pocket and the edge of the metal pendant sticks into my palm so hard, I’m worried it’ll draw blood. I need to ground myself. Either that or have some kind of meltdown.
‘Are you okay? What’s happened?’
‘It’s Tessa. I went over there with the chocolates.
She’s had more letters and we’re definitely prime suspects.
Everyone thinks I sent them because they mention something about her husband looking elsewhere, and we know what the last note she received said.
It was about me. Our note in the hamper wasn’t written in capital letters, everyone else’s was.
And they don’t even believe we had a letter anyway, and some idiot threw it in the bin.
’ I bite my tongue. I shouldn’t have said that.
‘Gemma, where is this coming from? Seriously. You told me to throw it all in the bin.’
‘That was before I knew all this was going to happen.’
‘So, I’m to blame all of a sudden?’
I drop the pendant and pull my hands out of my pockets.
That letter to Quinn is getting to me now and I’m lashing out at Ethan as I wonder if there’s some truth in it.
Cora looks at us with her thumb in her mouth and her blanky pressed to her cheek, so I lower my voice.
He isn’t to blame, I am. We should have kept that note.
It was all we had. Even the police think we’re making everything up.
‘I thought we weren’t going to give the neighbours chocolates. There’s no point trying to reason with these people. You saw me try the other night.’
I’m still angry at him over that. ‘I didn’t see you reasoning at all. I saw you accusing Quinn. You upset her son and look where that got us,’ I say in a hushed voice.
‘So, someone broke into our home and you said you didn’t leave the main door open.
I’m convinced I didn’t leave it on the latch and I didn’t leave the door unlocked to the balcony room.
I don’t think assuming it was Quinn was too far out there.
She had motive. She was friends with your aunt, so she might even have a key. ’
‘Or you might have just left the doors unlocked.’ Again, I’m accusing him and that makes my stomach flutter in a bad way.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Then why is the door banging in the breeze again? We have a toddler and that door is open. Did you lock it?’
He frowns. ‘Everything happened so fast.’
‘So, you didn’t lock it?’
He pauses and runs his calloused hands through his messy hair.
‘With all that’s going on…you’re right, I shouldn’t have spoken to Quinn and her son like that.
’ He hits the worktop, so I’m glad Cora is now singing along to her TV programme.
‘I feel like everything’s exploding and I don’t know how to stop it.
All I saw was how upset Morgan was when the neighbours upset her, and then I go and upset Harry in the same way. ’
We’re both tense and angry. I did try to tell him that I didn’t want to come back to Clover Lane.
This is what it does to a person. It makes you doubt yourself and sends you crazy in the process.
I think of that last day I spent here as a teen, doubting my own mind, promising to come back to visit Aunt Dorette in the next school holiday while Mum worked.
I never did. I never came back, until now.
That mistake is already costing me dearly and I don’t know how to fix the situation.
Ethan reaches out. He holds me and I sink into him. ‘What’s happening to us?’ I ask.
‘One day when we’ve left, this place will be a distant nightmare.
Think of our future and the big plans we have and little Beanie.
’ He places his hand over my stomach. ‘I’m going to lock that door and check on the guys downstairs.
When I come back up, shall we drive into Whitby and have some lunch?
We might even get a seat with a sea view.
’ He kisses me on the forehead, and I hug him.
‘I’d love that. We need to get out of here. I’ll get Cora ready.’
After taking a few deep breaths, I lead a reluctant Cora into our bedroom and change her nappy, ready for our outing, then I get changed out of my dungarees, into a blue jumper dress. A bit of make-up and a chunky belt later, I’m ready to escape this hell for a couple of hours.
Ethan barges in. He’s holding a letter, which sends my pulse racing again. He drops it on the worktop and begins to search the room, high and low. ‘Ethan, what’s happened?’
He holds his finger to his mouth and points to the letter, which I pick up and read.
NEW FRIENDS, OLD FRIEND.
GOOD NEIGHBOURS MEAN THE WORLD, DON’T THEY?
THEY LOOK OUT FOR EACH OTHER AND THE CHILDREN.
ARE YOU FINALLY STARTING TO FIT IN? DID YOU FALL FOR CLOVER LANE ALL OVER AGAIN?
YOU ARE BLOOMING, TOO, GEMMA. BEAUTIFULLY RADIANT – BUT THEN AGAIN, NEW LIFE CAN DO THAT TO A MOTHER.
PREGNANCY AND BIRTH ARE ONE OF LIFE’S MIRACLES.
TWO LOVELY CHILDREN, SQUIDGE AND CORA, AND ANOTHER ON THE WAY.
KEEP THEM CLOSE. IT’S SO DANGEROUS OUT THERE, ESPECIALLY IN THE WOODS. XXX
Fall – that word. The person who sent our hamper is the same person sending the letters. I gasp as I think of the woods and my children at the same time. Also, no one but Morgan and Ethan knows about my pregnancy or that I call Morgan Squidge, which can only mean one thing.
Ethan is all over the room, checking high and low. He’s frantically pulling furniture away from the wall, checking our photo frames and even looking underneath the settee. I want to say so much but I keep my mouth firmly closed. ‘Ethan,’ I say in a loud whisper.
He places his finger to his mouth again as his gaze leads to the ceiling. The fire alarm looks quite new.
I hurry over and whisper in his ear. ‘Did you put that up?’
He frantically shakes his head as he grabs a chair to stand on.
Once up, he unclips the fire alarm from the artexed ceiling to reveal the mains lead and a thinner black lead.
He turns the detector towards me and I gasp.
Instead of a backup battery, there is a small microphone.
He tugs the lead. It’s coming from the loft space.
Ethan jumps off the chair, leaving the alarm dangling, and runs out of the apartment.
Before I have time to think, he’s already heading to Aunt Dorette’s office, the room where the loft hatch is, with a torch in his hand.
I grab Cora who giggles. She seems to think we’re doing something fun so I force a smile back. ‘Is it safe to talk?’ I’m almost running across the hallway to keep up.
He shrugs and shakes his head, so I keep my mouth shut. Behind the office door is a loft pole. He manages to open the hatch with ease and brings the ladders down.
I pop Cora on the rug and follow him up into the freezing cold loft space that stinks of damp.
It’s not boarded and I can’t leave Cora, so I stay on the top step, watching Ethan tread carefully on the beams. There are boxes galore full of magazines, old clothes, damp books, old pictures that are covered in mould and a million spider webs.
Ethan is too far away for me to get any hint of what he’s found.
I can’t even see torchlight because he’s so far away and the boxes act like a fortress.
What I can see is a little path through them.
Cora giggles again and looks up at me.
The torch flickers. Ethan is on his way back. My heart thrums at the thought of what he’s found. I descend the ladders and he clunks down them after me. That’s when he places a small portable storage device on the desk. I feel sick, violated.
Ethan tells me something I’ve already worked out. ‘Someone has been listening to everything we’ve said.’