CHAPTER 26 #2
I wait for Helena to return, her bag over her shoulder and her coat in her hand, and then I head into the kitchen.
The counters are, somehow, spotless in the fifteen minutes it took her to get her things, and I make a mental note to thank her tomorrow.
I load the dishwasher with my and Rufus’s plates, pressing the buttons wildly until the thing whirs to life.
I’ve never used the dishwasher here before.
Rufus is further up my list of suspects now.
His reasons are unclear, but I know at least that he doesn’t love me.
Is that a motive? A means to keep me quiet while he plays away from the house?
I run my hand over the cool counter. I don’t think I’d have noticed his affair before all of this started, and I wonder if that matters.
Padding down the hall to my studio, I hear Rufus move around upstairs.
Soon we’ll have to go out together and pretend that everything is OK.
I need something. I rub my hand over my eyes.
The studio door closes behind me with a gentle humph.
My podcast equipment stares at me from across the room, gathering dust. It’s only been a few weeks, but I can’t face the idea of rifling through someone else’s trauma.
Pulling apart the crime stories that I am now part of, again.
I close my eyes and sink to the floor, my shoulders dropping towards my knees.
I need a plan.
A small tap on the glass draws my attention, like the sound of a bird as it gently pecks at the window.
But there are no birds now, the sun has gone and with it came dark, ominous shadows.
The blinds are partially drawn, and I can see the yellow glow of the streetlights through them.
A branch, I conclude, although I know the only things outside our window are the large rose bushes that perimeter the walls.
The ping of glass comes again, now it sounds like a stone being thrown.
Not a large one, but a piece of gravel. Small enough to make a sound but do no damage.
I stumble towards the window and draw up the blinds in one quick motion. I don’t know what I expect to see, perhaps I’m hoping Henry will be there, perhaps I’m hoping it’s nothing. Perhaps I already know.
My breath falls from me as I’m greeted by a face, pressed against the glass. No cap, only a thin black mask covering his features. He breathes fast, faster than I, as small puffs of condensation steam up the window.
For a moment, it’s me and him, facing each other. My heart in my throat and my pulse quickening. I want to scream, but no sound comes out when I open my mouth. He blinks and the cord of the blind drops away from my fingers, hitting the wall with a thud.
Run.
My body won’t move. My feet sink into the floor and my dinner sloshes through me.
Run, Ella.
My body betrays me. “Rufus!” The words are weak and lost in the walls.
A single gloved finger wiggles. A simple but ominous gesture that makes me take a step back. He turns on his feet and walks away from me.
It takes a moment for my breathing to return and my mind to clear.
Yet by the time I race to the door, my socked feet now sweaty against the cool stone, I know he’ll be gone.
My eyes dart around our drive and find nothing but empty, darkening space.
The gravel shows no footprints. If it weren’t for the face against my window, I would say that no one had ever been here. But my racing pulse knows different.
A frustration nests between my collarbones.
I race down the drive, reaching the metal gate.
I press the buttons on the side panel concealed by the bush, the only way out.
It groans to life and slowly opens. A mechanism that, while I’m waiting for the car to heat up or putting in my destination into the navigation system, feels fast. But now it takes decades.
He was here.
But if he was here, then where is he now? He couldn’t have come down here. The gate is finally wide enough for me to slip through and has taken as much time as he had to leave.
And who is he?
I turn around, my eyes looking back at our big house: the front two rooms are illuminated, and the middle floor is dark and the third one is lit up.
I could go and get Rufus to help, but I don’t.
The trust that he’ll behave how I need him to fades.
I scan the house, before I turn on my heel and step onto the street.
It’s quiet, eerily so. The branches wobble in the wind, brushing against each other to fill the silence.
It’s just me and mother nature out here.
And whoever is watching me.
“Who are you?” The words are loud and angry. I step forward again, a small stone pushing into the ball of my foot.
“Who are you?” My scream is met with a gentle, calming silence.
Those eyes. Would I recognise a neighbour from their eyes alone? A rustle from the side of the house turns my attention. I’m stuck in time, half hanging from the front gate, shoeless and angry. I lurch back up the drive, my heart in my throat as a cat jumps from the bushes, scurrying past me.
Jesus!
I run around the back of the house, determined that if he’s not gone out the front, then he is still here.
The garden is empty and so I stand with my breath clouding ahead of me.
There are cameras around the front and the side of the house, I can take a look at them and see where he came in. Though I already know that, like before, there’ll be nothing to see.
I crunch painfully across the gravel, trying to pull together what’s happened. Perhaps there was no one there, and it was my tiredness. My eyes squeeze shut once I’m inside, only to be greeted with the vision of the face pressed against my window moments ago.
A realisation drops: he had blue eyes. A sharp blue that caught me off guard, the type of blue you described in detail in your diary as a teenager. The floor becomes unsteady, and I hit the wall with a thud, falling downwards. My palms press into the cool wood.
Breathe.
Who has blue eyes? Who else could get in and out of our house so fast?
Only one man comes to mind.
Benji.