Anything for Her (6 page)

She flinches and looks down. Her journal. She had completely forgotten about it – and the secrets she left inside it. She snatches it up from the floor and checks the contents, flicking the pages in quick succession. The writing is hers, and the words are hers, too: damning secrets pressed into the paper.

She clutches the journal to her damp chest, wondering how she had been so stupid as to record her crimes in her own handwriting and then leave it around to be found.

Once she has slipped into the nightgown, she takes the journal downstairs. She makes a fire in the fireplace, pours a glass of wine and begins to read.

Louise began to write in the journal after deciding to follow her own advice as a therapist. She would often prompt her clients to keep a private journal and use it as an outlet for any emotional turmoil they might have festering within them. By writing about their fears and resentments, they could pour their pain onto the pages
and then close it shut and leave it there, which allowed them to feel relieved for a time. After that night, she felt lost and alone with her overwhelming feelings of guilt and trepidation. She needed to talk to someone, but couldn’t. She needed help, but couldn’t ask for it. Her journal became her confidant.

She reads over every sentence, reliving the anguish she felt back then and still feels to this day. Her past self had craftily written about that night without incriminating herself or Brooke – until she reached
page 136
.

When I was pregnant with Brooke, I wanted to protect her – from the moment she entered the world – and keep her safe from all the evil in it. I wanted to lock her in an embrace and never let go. I would do anything for her. I wanted to keep her safe from all the fake, destructive friendships she would fall into, all the heartbreaks, all the bullies, all of her future regrets. But I knew I couldn’t. I knew I had to let her make her own mistakes. I had selfishly brought her into this world because I wanted her. She was to become whoever she wished to be, moulded by her own experiences, with me to help her if she needed me. But I never thought she would do this. I never thought she would put us both in so much danger. I never thought my beautiful, mesmerising, intelligent daughter could kill…

She slams the journal shut.

Reading the entry had transported her back to the time she had written it, when she and her family had stayed in the country during the renovation of the townhouse. It had taken a month to complete, which should have been a treasured retreat from reality, but instead it had been a nightmare. Brooke was always crying and Louise was verging on catatonic. Dominic was bored without their interaction, so spent the month playing by himself, becoming such a recluse that he was almost feral when in company again: plagued by anxiety when faced with loud noises and interaction, aggravated when spoken to, craving to be left alone. Michael had responded to their behaviour with anger. He called them rude. He called them selfish. He stayed in the Cotswolds for just a week before returning to London, where he stayed in a hotel and returned to work. Louise hardly noticed he had left: she was too traumatised to think of anything else other than that night.

She reads over her previous fears. A year ago she had been afraid that she and Brooke would be incarcerated or dead by now. She had never imagined they would both be free.

I have to burn it
, she tells herself, looking down at the journal and then towards the fireplace.
I have to destroy these foolish, condemning confessions
.

She flicks the pages with her thumb. There are still
fifty or so pages without secrets stained into them. She needs a confidant. She needs to unfurl her pain. She needs to free her mind, if just for one night.

I’ll write in the journal tonight. I’ll write about Michael, his betrayal and everything else that is festering inside. Then I’ll burn it. I won’t take my eyes off it until it is nothing but ash and smoke
.

Chapter Fourteen

Brooke can’t sleep. She can’t stop thinking about the argument with her mother, and how selfish she had been in trying to manipulate her mother to return home. Even so, she is hurt by the way that Louise ended the phone call. She keeps listening to their conversation in her mind, obsessing over every wrong on her part, as well as every wrong on her mother’s. She continuously hears Louise passionately spitting the words ‘fuck you’. Worse still, she can’t stop thinking about the glove; and she can’t stop thinking about that night and what might happen next.

After their confrontation in the morning, Michael ignored Brooke for the rest of the day, and refused to speak a word to her at the dinner table. Dominic sat silently in between them, looking lost and confused.

The moment dinner was over, Michael returned to his study, while Brooke retreated to her bedroom to drink her father’s whisky, which she had hidden under the bed; Dominic sat quietly in the lounge on the sofa, watching television and longing for his mother’s company.

After much tossing, turning and frustrated sighs, Brooke gets out of bed, slips into her dressing gown and creeps downstairs. She avoids every creak in the
floorboards under the carpeted hallways and steps.

When she reaches the ground floor, Brooke goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of water. She splashes her face with cold water from the tap, and sighs. Her anguish is exhausting.

Brooke reaches into her gown pocket for her cigarettes and turns towards the French windows. She instantly screams and drops the glass of water, which shatters on the hard floor, splashing water everywhere like debris from a bomb blast. A man stands behind the glass of the doorway, staring at her with ferocious hate.

Brooke steals a look at the smashed glass on the floor. When she returns her gaze back to the doorway, the man is no longer there.

Michael rushes down the stairs and emerges from the dark hallway tying up his dressing gown. Brooke appears to be possessed by terror. Her body is shaking so hard she is almost convulsing. Tears stream down her pale countenance as she whimpers. She sounds tormented. She sounds terrifying.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, looking down at the broken glass and pool of water on the floor. ‘What happened?’

‘There… there was a man,’ she replies, pointing. ‘At the door. There was a man standing at the door.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean there was a fucking crazy man standing outside the door looking at me!’

‘Have you taken your meds?’

‘My antidepressants don’t suppress hallucinations – they don’t need to – because I didn’t imagine him: I
saw
a man standing on the other side of the glass!’

‘I think you need to see the doctor.’

‘I’m not crazy!’ she spits, hysterically.

‘I didn’t say you were crazy!’ he bellows back.

‘Your eyes did. You’re looking at me as if I’m nuts. Why won’t you believe that I saw a man outside? Why would I make it up?’

‘You’ve been screwed up ever since that night, Brooke. So has your mother. What happened? I went to bed the night before with a happy wife and a healthy daughter, and woke up in the morning to a wife who couldn’t bear to look at me, and a daughter who wouldn’t stop crying. What happened that night, Brooke? I deserve to know about the event that destroyed my life!’

‘You want to know the event that destroyed
your
life?’ Brooke asks, enraged.

She stares into his eyes and begins to shake even more, this time from erupting fury.

He thinks I’m crazy. He thinks his own daughter is a pathological, delusional, desperate, attention-seeking liar
.

‘You went and fucked Aunt Denise. That’s when your life fell apart. That’s when your wife left you in disgust and your children began to hate you for
destroying the family. You make me sick. I’m ashamed to have a vile man like you as my father.’

Michael’s hand strikes Brooke’s face before she has time to defend herself. Her face is thrown to the left so forcefully her hair flies with the motion.

Michael looks down at his hand, horrified. It was as if his rage took control of him and attacked his daughter without his consent.

A few seconds of intense silence elapse.

Brooke raises her hand to where he struck her. Her hair slips from her face to reveal the tears brimming in her eyes.

‘Brooke, I’m—’

Michael moves to embrace her.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she whimpers, flinching.

Michael eyes begin to fill with tears at the sight of his daughter cowering before him.

‘Okay, okay,’ he replies gently, stepping back with his hands raised.

Brooke begins to cry. Her cheek burns.

‘Brooke, I’m so sorry,’ he says, a single tear falling down his cheek. ‘I don’t know what happened. I would never want to—’

‘Don’t ever come near me again…’ Her eyes are glazed with tears and filled with hate, her hand still clutching her reddening cheek. ‘Stay the hell away from me!’

Brooke darts past her father and up the stairs,
leaving him standing in the kitchen, surrounded by broken glass, in a puddle of water that soaks into the fabric of his socks.

Michael looks at the French windows. The only man he sees is himself – his own reflection staring back at him.

Chapter Fifteen

Louise managed to make it upstairs to bed for her second night at the country house. However, in her drunken stupor, she forgot to close the curtains. She wakes up to a startlingly bright room, as the sun’s rays reflect off the snow outside. She squints, and then groans, before sinking under the duvet until she is completely hidden. Even beneath the duvet, with her eyes tight shut in the burrow of bed sheets, the sun’s glare still pierces the duvet and illuminates it like a lampshade; the feathers within can be seen in their clusters like clouds across a bright sky.

She attempts to go back to sleep, but is dominated by a prominent memory from the day before: ‘Fuck you, Brooke.’

You are an awful mother. Your daughter wants you home, and you respond like that
.

Unable to shake off her torturous thoughts, she decides to get up. She must call her daughter and apologise. She must begin to put her life back together, piece by piece.

She lifts the duvet from over her head, allowing her dimly lit cave to be penetrated by the light, when something tumbles down from her pillow and lands beside her. She reaches for it with a quizzical frown,
still dazed by sleep, and takes it in her hand.

She knows what it is the second she touches it. She remembers how lightweight it is, its stillness, the softness of the feathers and its cold, pointed beak.

Louise sits up in bed, holding the dead robin in her hand, and gasps.

All over the duvet and dotted on the pillows, lie dead robins, frozen in their last poses and plagued with the musky smell of death.

She sits among them in silence, too flabbergasted to breathe.

Who did this? How did the person get in? Why?

She replays the memory of entering the house the night before, after finding the second dead robin on the doorstep. She had rushed inside, terrified, and locked every door and window. She had been certain everything had been secure and went to bed trusting that she would be safe. She even went to bed telling herself that the two dead birds were a coincidence, that they just happened to die on her doorstep, that the man she chased out of her house was just a figment of her imagination.

Now she knows that the robins couldn’t have been a coincidence. Now she knows the person she saw inside the house was real. The robins are being killed and left for her. Someone is entering the house, even when she is inside.

Louise slips out of the bed, as if not to disturb the
dead birds from their eternal slumbers, and searches around for a weapon, fearful that whoever did this may still be in the house. She cannot find anything suitable in the bedroom. The second bedroom next to the master suite has a desk with a letter opener.

Her first instinct is to call the police. Her second instinct is to keep it from them.

Is this because of that night?

She wants to call the police: she needs to be protected. But, if the birds are anything to do with that night, calling the police might not protect her, but incriminate her. It will certainly incriminate her daughter.

She moves towards the door, avoiding the floorboards that creak. She opens the door. When it squeaks on its hinges, she freezes. Her heart begins its barbarous pounding. She listens for any sounds coming from inside the house.

All she can hear is the whistling wind curling around the outside of the building, its foundations clicking as if shrinking to protect itself from the cold. The water tank begins to rumble and gurgle, as if the heart of the house is pushing hot water through its pipes like blood through veins.

She slips through the open doorway and darts to the neighbouring bedroom. Snatching the letter opener from the drawer, she holds it in a quivering hand and scans the room for any threats.

She creeps timidly towards the door, with the blade ready and erect, and walks across the landing. When she reaches the top of the staircase, she pauses and listens.

Voices whisper below.

Her breathing quickens and her palms moisten with sweat.

She begins her journey down the stairs. Her lungs are hungry for air, longing to inflate and deflate faster, but she must stay calm and in control. She must survive. She mustn’t be heard.

She takes each step cautiously, terrified of stepping on a loose floorboard. The dining room comes into view, then the living room, both dimmed from the closed curtains and blinds. A blast of cold air suddenly hits her and she notices the front door stands wide open, allowing flakes of snow to drift into the house and land on the hardwood floor. She had locked and bolted that door before she went to bed. The door sways on its hinges, knocks into the wall, and sways again.

When she reaches the bottom of the stairs, she walks slowly towards the voices. Just as she reaches the kitchen, light spills into the room from the curtains being opened in one quick motion.