CHAPTER 24
Ella
There’s panic in Immi’s voice and rightly so. She holds my phone close to her face as though the distance will make it easier to understand. I draw the duvet over my knees, a chill spreading through my limbs.
Henry wasn’t stalking me. Or Henry wasn’t the only one stalking me. He’s dead, and there’s still someone out there who knows. Someone who killed Henry.
Jude rubs her forehead, moving to stand next to Immi, who paces the length of the room.
“What does it say again?” Jude leans to catch a view of the phone as Immi passes by.
“That he did something Ella should be thankful for.” Immi pushes her lips together. “And that the ‘game’ can start now,” she adds.
I press my face into my knees, pushing the rounds of my eyes into them until I find that comforting pinch of pain.
“That’s…” Jude quiets, but we all fill in the gap. Terrifying. Horrific. Intimidating.
There are too many questions. Immi’s footsteps grow louder, her words reaching my ears as a tangled mess. I ignore them and turn in on myself, my fingers digging little moon crescents into my thighs. This is a mess. Something rumbles near my shoulder and the bed sags to the left. I shake my head.
“Ella?” It’s Jude now, gentle and patient by my side, but I can’t look up. I focus on my breathing. A loud whooshing fills my ears, the sound of my blood moving around my body. There’s a heavy pulsing behind it and the world pushes down on me.
Immi speaks again, but I can’t make out the words. All I can see is Dad. My lips close tight. I let him down just as I let Nate down.
“My sweetheart, you have so much life ahead of you,” Dad had said. Tear stains form across my pyjamas where they’ve managed to push past my lids. I grip myself tighter, trying not to slide back in time. But it yanks at me.
“Dad, I don’t understand,” I had said, sitting at the table with my bag on my lap, worrying at the handle.
“I want what’s best for you. And Nate will always…” There was a catch in his throat. I gave him a second to compose himself. Since Nate disappeared, Dad had changed, withered into a shell of the man he was. Everything looked cracked, worn or broken.
“I can’t have your life ruined. You can’t have your name tied up in what happened. You deserve a career, a home, a life.” There were tears in his eyes and I had to look away. He grabbed my hand.
I draw in more air now, filling my lungs until they ache and holding it until they burn.
The noise subsides after a while and there’s a heavy silence in the room.
I don’t know if anyone is still here. It would be no surprise if Jude and Immi left.
But I keep filling my lungs in slow desperate gasps until the pulsing fades.
I raise my head to find Immi and Jude at the end of the bed, looking at each other with the same mixed expression.
There’s a path I’ve been running down, the one that kick-started the day I met Jude, which led to a home, a career and a life.
Everything my dad wanted for me. Yet somewhere along the way, the bushes along the path turned to ominous lumbering branches, the sky darkened and the dream twisted into something rancid.
I’ve let Dad down.
“My name’s not Ella,” I say, the words coming out dry and chipped.
Both women turn to look at me and I step off one path and move to another, into the dark unknown.
They are patient with me as I start and restart the story a few times. Trying to find a way around something I have never said before.
“Years ago, my brother,” my tongue runs over my teeth, “Nate…”
I blink, catching a glimpse of him and his crooked smile. My jaw aches.
“My family used to spend our summers in Dorset. A friend of my dad’s had a holiday home and we used to go every July. It was great down there, the beach, the countryside, the freedom. While there, Nate made friends with a local boy, Henry.”
Henry.
“Nate was” – is – “three years older than me, but he always let me tag along with them. We’d swim in the lake or take the dinghy out on the sea.
It must have been, oh, the third or fourth summer there when we met Robbie.
He was a year younger than Nate but he was witty, and I think the other boys liked having him around. ”
I can’t help but smile at the memory of us four. The laughter as we’d drink warming beers that Henry snuck out for us or ride bikes up the steep hill until the backs of our necks glimmered with sweat.
“We became a mismatched crew, the four of us,” I say. There’s a memory on the tip of my tongue, of a girl a similar age as me. Lanky and bug-eyed, she was there for a short time, but the memory fades as soon as I turn to look at it.
“As we grew older, the boys didn’t want me around.
They moved through their teen years and grew away from me.
Even though Henry was the oldest of the group, he and I were inseparable.
One night, there was a fight at Househill Manor, an abandoned place at the top of the hill that we would sometimes go to.
Robbie died that night and Nate went missing. ”
I skip over the details that itch at me. Immi sucks in her breath and Jude shakes her head. My eyes drift away from their pity.
“Nate is…” I rub my temple. “Nate was only eighteen when he disappeared but he was everything. God, he was funny, witty and kind. But also the glue to my whole family. Without him…”
The rancid smell of stale smoke and musky clothes hits the back of my throat.
“How old were you when you lost him?” Immi asks. There’s worry in her brows and her lips are set in a thin line. It hurts to see her without her bubbly energy tumbling from her every move.
“I was fifteen and the first few years were awful. We had no idea where he was or what happened. The police were no hope, they were so focused on Robbie that by the time they realised Nate wasn’t just a teenage boy running from what happened, it all felt too late.”
A chill traces over my body. The assumptions the police made about a young mixed-raced boy will forever haunt me. Nate was always “in connection to the crime” and never a victim. I look up and there’s still confusion on their faces.
“It wasn’t until someone came forward and said they saw a young Black boy getting into an old Mustang-style car that night that the police even acknowledged something bad may have happened to him.
They put out a missing persons report, got some news coverage, even did door-to-doors, but by then it was over a week since he had gone.
It was all…” The tears start, pooling at the corner of my eyes until I wipe them with the back of my hand.
The feeling rising again, the hopeless anger that has nowhere to go.
Immi’s hand flies to her mouth. “Wow.”
“I’m so sorry, Ella.” Jude nods. “You say you and Henry were close, but were you dating?” Jude’s pity spreads across her face, reaching out to touch me. I set my chin, pushing my shoulders back. I don’t need it.
“Dating is a loose term for it, but essentially, yes. He was nearing nineteen and I was fifteen. I didn’t realise at the time or understand what it meant.” Despite clinging to the covers and sucking in the air that is tinged with Immi’s sweet perfume, I’m dragged back there.
“He’s my age!” Nate roared, whirling into my room as I stalked away, my jeans swinging at my ankles. I had outgrown them and had been begging Mum for new ones.
“So what?” I rounded back on him so that Nate had to stop in his tracks, leaving him standing lank and tall in my room. I was catching up to him in height, despite the three-year age gap, and I took every opportunity to remind him of that. I stepped forward, drawing my shoulders back.
“Do you think Mum and Dad would like this?” Nate says.
“You’re going to tell them, are you? Be a tattle-tale?”
“Elsie, grow up. It’s not telling on you. He’s too old for you,” Nate said.
“So? He loves me. We haven’t even done anything, we’re dating.”
“You’re fifteen!”
When I looked down, Nate’s hands were clenched into fists, trembling. He had stalked out shortly after, slamming the front door as he went. When we sat at the table the next morning, he had a bruise forming on his right cheekbone.
“Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry,” Jude starts but I raise my hand.
“No, don’t. I don’t need that. I need to find out who is sending me all this sick stuff.” I glance down at the phone.
There are so many other things Immi and Jude deserve to know.
Like why Robbie was in that house that night, what Henry claimed would happen and the part I played in it all.
But I can’t go there. I am forever haunted by the sensation of sitting on the cold bare floors at Househill Manor, waiting for the night to begin as Henry lounged lazily in a chair, pupils dilated.
The haphazard flicker of tea lights that scattered across the coffee table, placed there to give the room a cosy feel but leaving ominous shadows on the bare walls.
The pink glittery nails I painted clinging to my yellow clutch bag.
Or the cold spread of fear when Robbie finally arrived, Nate appearing behind him, angry and tall.
And finally, the panic that spreads across the room when Henry lays the weapon on the table, the sharp edge of the knife shining in the candlelight.
How, even then, if he had kissed me and promised me everything was OK, I would have believed him.
“We still have the PI,” Jude says, turning to Immi, who nods slowly now.
“Yes, you can still contact him,” Immi says.
“Someone knew Henry enough to get the information from him about Househill, to kill him after your visit and to clear your evidence from the scene. The question is, who?” Jude says.
Three very likely people would have both the means and the motive to do this. And every one of them is closer to home than I’d like.
I look at Immi. “Benji, Rufus and Colin.”
“What?”
“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just–”
“You think this is Benji?” Immi blinks, her mouth wide.
“No, I think that he has a pretty good reason to want to hurt me.” I choose my words carefully, waiting to see how they land. The anger flashes across her face.
“Oh?” There’s a hitch in her voice, mocking me with her empathy. “Please, tell me, darling, how my boyfriend could stalk you. Murder for you.”
“I’m just listing people with motive,” I say.
“Motive?” Her shoulders shake as she spits out the word, the volume deafeningly loud.
“After everything he did, the… threats.” I can’t look at her, so I land my gaze just shy of her right shoulder. She steps into my line of sight.
“Pathetic.” Immi strides forward, grabbing her bag from beside the bed. “After everything we’ve been through, you think Benji would do this to you because you defended me?”
I open my mouth to explain but she’s gone before I get the chance, her footsteps loud and fast down the stairs.
“Benji?” Jude says after a moment and I nod.
The fierce anger on Benji’s face as he pinned me to the wall at Immi’s summer party.
He was drunk, again, his eyes darting, but he spoke in short, sharp, sentences through gritted teeth: “Stay away from Immi. You need to stop meddling before you regret something.”