The Game You Played (34 page)

TWO NIGHTS AGO

Monday night

I HEARD THE JANGLE OF KEYS in the lock of my bedroom door.

Mum always kept it locked at night—ever since we had thieves in the house in January. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.

Light spilled in as she cracked the door open. I sat up in my bed. “Mum?”

“Jess, I have the best news. We’re going on a little trip.”

“Where to?”

“Somewhere you’ve never been before. You’ll love it. We need to get you packed up and ready to go.”

“We’re going now?”

“Yes, right now. Jump up and help me pack your suitcase.”

“What about school tomorrow?”

She dragged the suitcase out of my wardrobe and lumped it on my bed. “You get a few days off school. Lucky, huh?”

“But . . . the play?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. You don’t care about it, do you? You ended up with a rotten part anyway.”

“But they’re expecting me to be Beth. I’ve learned all the lines.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie. Just imagine the look on Bossy Boots Bree when she finds out you won’t be there. She won’t get to act like she owns the whole play, right in front of your face.”

“She’s not like that,” I mumbled. Mum didn’t hear me, and it was better that she didn’t. She really dug her heels in over some things.

The floorboards were cold under my feet as I went to my tallboy to start collecting clothes. “How long are we going for? I don’t know how much stuff to get out.”

“I’m not sure. I mean, who knows?” Her voice rose, thin and kind of nervously happy. “Just bring enough for a couple of weeks. And bring lots of warm clothing.”

“A couple of weeks? Wow.”

Her eyes danced as she folded my raincoat into the suitcase. “Yes,
wow
. I knew you’d be excited. This is going to be incredible. For all of us.”

My arms, full with a pile of jeans and T-shirts, hung in the air. “All of us? Who’s all of us?”

She drew in a long breath that I could hear. “You know that I’ve been seeing someone.”

“Yes?”

“We’re going away with him.”

“The man from the navy?”

She took the pile of clothing from me and pressed it into the bag. “Well, that was a little fib. This is kind of difficult. And you’re going to find it hard to understand.”

“What am I going to find hard to understand?”

“Maybe it’s best you see for yourself. He’s here right now.”

“He’s
here
?”

As far as I knew, he’d barely been to our house. He was away all the time at sea. No, that was wrong. Mum just said that was a lie. Why did she lie to me about him?

She packed my underwear and socks and zipped up the bag.

“Bring books,” she said.

“And my iPad?”

“No, honey. There’s no internet where we’re going. Okay, let’s go.”

“I need to get dressed.”

“No, stay in your pyjamas. You’ll be going back to bed anyway. Just put shoes and your winter dressing gown on.”

Her sleeve slipped up as she bent to pick up a pair of my shoes. She had a bandage wrapped around her wrist.

“What happened?” I touched her arm.

“Oh, I just bumped it. Racing around like crazy trying to get this trip sorted.”

She didn’t insist on me making my bed as we left my room, like she normally would. I rolled my suitcase behind me, following Mum down the hallway.

Standing in our living room was a man, his back to us as he looked at our photos on the mantelpiece.

“Jessie,” Mum said in a careful tone. “I know you know Luke.”

As he turned, I was confused. This was Tommy’s father, not
Mum’s boyfriend
. But there was no other man in the room.

“Hi, Jessie.” He gave me half a smile and half a shrug.

“Hi, Mr Basko.” I sounded weird, like I was greeting a stranger.

Mum nodded at me. “I know this is going to take a little while to get used to. You know that Luke and Phoebe are no longer together. Well, now Luke and I are together.”

“Like boyfriend and girlfriend?” I managed to squeak.

“I guess so.” Tommy’s dad shoved his hands in his pockets and switched to looking at Mum. “We like each other a lot. I’ve been feeling very, very sad for a long time. Your mum has helped me feel a lot better. She’s been a good friend, and I really needed a good friend. I hope you and I can be friends, too.”

My mouth felt too dry and my head still fuzzy. I’d been asleep just a few minutes ago. “Will Phoebe be going to jail?” I hadn’t meant to say that. It just
slipped
.

“I’m not sure,” said Mr Basko. “But when people do something wrong, then yes, they go to prison.”

Mum shot Mr Basko an anxious look. “We’d better get moving, before it gets any later.”

I noticed then that there were three suitcases and two boxes of food next to the sofa. They were already ready to go. All this had been happening while I was sleeping.

“I don’t like the look of the fog out there.” Mr Basko seemed worried.

“Once we get through it, we’ll be fine.” Stepping over to the suitcases, Mum grabbed two of the handles. “I used to go out sailing all the time with my parents.”

“Wait,” I said. “What about the puppy?”

Even though we’d had it so long it wasn’t really still a puppy, that’s what I called it. I still hadn’t even seen it, so my mind couldn’t make the leap to picturing a fully-grown dog.

“You have a dog?” Tommy’s dad frowned at Mum.

She sighed. “We don’t now.” She tilted her head at me, like she was trying to get a different view. “Oh honey, I didn’t want to tell you, but I had to give the dog away. A couple of days ago.”

I bit into my bottom lip. “It’s gone?”

“I’m so sorry. But we couldn’t keep it any longer. I promise we’ll get another one soon. A nice puppy this time.”

“Must have been a well-behaved mutt,” said Mr Basko. “I never heard it.”

“It wasn’t well-behaved at all.” Mum sounded exasperated. “It’d run itself ragged during the day until it dropped. Then it slept so heavy you couldn’t wake it. A terrible guard dog. I got it as a rescue from the pound.”

Mr Basko grinned then. “It’s just like you to be rescuing animals.”

“Okay, we’d better move it.” Mum pulled out her phone and called a taxi.

The cab came quickly. A large-size transit cab that would fit all our stuff. From the conversation Mum had with the driver, it sounded like she’d paid him a lot extra to get here so fast. He stopped at Mr Basko’s house first, and Mr Basko ran in to collect some stuff. His boat licence and keys for the yacht. Next we headed down to the docks. I didn’t believe we were really going until the cab drove away, disappearing into the mist.

We walked down towards Mr Basko’s yacht with the suitcases. The water made a lapping sound against the jetty, the air putting a briny taste in my mouth and making me feel sick. Mr Basko went back for the boxes while Mum and I boarded the yacht. She got me to help her take the suitcases down the stairs into the cabin. There were two rooms and a bathroom and a small dining area, everything bolted to the floor. Humming, Mum made the beds. She told me to go back up on deck and wait for Mr Basko to see if he needed help.

An old man moved out of the foggy air on the dock, scaring me. He was one of the homeless people, with his long tangled beard and staring eyes. I wondered if he was looking for a yacht to sleep on for the night.

He pointed towards the yacht’s cabin. “She’s one of the bad ‘uns.”

“Excuse me?” I didn’t want to be here, alone on the deck.

He kept pointing as my mother moved out of the cabin. “I been ‘round and ‘round this city longer than anyone. I seen ‘er since she was your age. She’s a bad ‘un.”

“Move along and stop talking to my daughter,” Mum called to him sharply. I wasn’t sure if she’d heard what he’d said.

The old man shuffled away, past Mr Basko, who’d returned with more of our things.

Mr Basko seemed a lot less awkward once he was on his yacht. Like he had a job to do and he had to concentrate. He jumped here and ran there, loosening and tying ropes and moving things about.

Mum helped him until the sails were up and the yacht began to tug away from the docks.

The fog crowded everything else out. Like we were about to head off into a world where there was only mist and nothing else. A world of dark, dark nothing.

Mr Basko sounded the boat’s horn every couple of minutes. Stepping up behind me, Mum enveloped me in a bear hug, telling me that he only needed to do that until we were through the fog and in the clear. Excitement seemed to run through her arms and fingers, and she could barely stay still or stop herself from squeezing me too hard.

I wanted to feel the same excitement as she did as I watched solid ground slip away. But instead I was anxious as the fog claimed the space between the land and the yacht. I lost sight of everything except for the upper-storey lights of the high-rises. There was no one in the high-rises at this time of night.

The yacht speared out into the ocean. The air grew colder and colder, whipping around my face as the yacht picked up speed. Mum told me I needed to get used to the sway and pitch of the yacht before we could go into the cabin below, else I’d get seasick. She left me to go and stand with Mr Basko at the wheel. She hugged him just like she hugged me. I think she had too much excitement inside her and she had to let some of it out.

I didn’t understand the rush to get away on this trip or why Mum was with Tommy’s dad or how she could give the pup away without even telling me.

I didn’t want to look at this fog anymore.

Mum’s attention was all on Tommy’s dad right now. Deciding to head into the cabin myself, I made my way around to the cabin’s entrance.

I didn’t know which bedroom was for Mum and me and which bedroom was for Mr Basko, but my bags were in the smaller room, and so I headed for that one. If I went back to bed, maybe I could sleep all the way through this foggy night and wake up to a clear sky.

A tiny thrill sped through me: no school tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or all week. I wished I could have told the kids at school that I was going away on a yacht tonight. But I felt heavy inside when I thought about the play again. Mrs Simmons and kids were going to be disappointed with me, and I hated disappointing people.

Despite the lack of breezy air, it was cold in the cabin. Leaving my dressing gown on, I climbed into bed. Even with the blankets pulled over me, I was shivering.

PRESENT TIME

Wednesday night

THE LIGHTS WERE ALL OFF AT Pria’s house.

A sickening feeling ran along my arms and into the centre of my back. We were too late.

They’d gone.

Bernice had driven Sass in her car to the home of an old boyfriend of Sass’s earlier. She’d remained friends with him since they’d broken up years ago. Her leg was too bad to come with us, and she needed to be at a place where the police couldn’t contact her. If they didn’t know by now that I’d escaped from Greensthorne, they soon would. Bernice and I had caught a taxi to the top of our street, near Pria’s house, our identities concealed with Bernice’s disguises.

I took Bernice around to the side door that led into the sunroom. I knew how to disable the alarm going in this way. I’d seen Pria do it many times. Breaking the lock with a hammer, we entered the house.

We peeled away the wigs, hats and beards, leaving them on the chairs in the sunroom.

“Let’s go,” said Bernice quietly, whistling in awe under her breath at the interior of the house.

We crept through the corridor and past the living room.

The door to Jessie’s room was open. Jessie wasn’t in it. Next we made our way to the upper floor. Pria’s bedroom was empty also, a strange odour that I couldn’t place wafting from it. The third, fourth, and fifth bedrooms looked as they always had—full of Pria’s parents’ old furniture.

All that was left was the rumpus room. We stole along the worn carpet of the hallway.

The door clicked open when Bernice turned the handle, into the large, empty space. It smelled of strong cleaning fluid.

What was I meant to do now? Go chasing after Pria? I didn’t have any clue where she’d gone.

I had no proof she’d had anything to do with Tommy’s disappearance. Just a broken piece of a nightlight. And some incomprehensible things she’d tried to do to me—when she was sixteen and now. I still had nothing to go to the police with.

Bernice had her flashlight’s beam trained on a small section of wall, at about my head height, and she was staring intently at it.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“I’m not totally sure”—she flicked the beam up and down—“but I think I see a handprint.”

Running over, I squinted at the wooden surface. The spot was small, and it looked greasy. Bernice stepped up next to me, raising the light to get another angle. “See that?” She spread her fingers out and put her hand sideways, almost touching it to the wall. “It’s like my hand, only much, much smaller.”

“You’re right. It’s a handprint. Must be an old one of Jessie’s.” I stood back, thinking. “No, it can’t be an old print. Pria didn’t have this thick panelling on the walls last time I was up here. And that was maybe in November last year. Pria and I were playing hide-and-seek with Jessie and Tommy, and they ran up here.”

A chill ran underneath my thick layers of winter clothing. An image flashed through my mind of a small child struggling to get away from an adult, and desperately spreading their hand out on the wall as they were being carried into the room.

Could that child have been Tommy? Could he have been struggling to get away from Pria all those months ago, and she’d forgotten he’d touched the wall up here? The walls seemed to have been so carefully cleaned everywhere else, right down to the ground level.

It was still no proof. The print was smudged.

“Let’s try downstairs.” Bernice took another peering look at the print before heading out of the room.

On the bottom floor again, we entered Pria’s office.

Folders and papers were stacked high on the two desks. A desktop computer and a laptop sat together on one desk.

Bernice switched them both on. She looked back over her shoulder at me when the password screens booted up. “Know how to get past these screens?”

I shook my head. “No idea.”

We tried typing in a few different passwords—
pria,
jessie, kitty, luke, tommy
—but none of them worked.

“Going to look outside,” Bernice told me.

I continued looking through the office, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.

On Pria’s main desk, I peered at a large A3 work jotter and diary—one of those pads with dates on each page and tear-off pages that companies gave out as promotions. This one was from a society of psychologists. I flipped through the pages. The top few had appointments, doodles, and messages from Jessie’s school that Pria had written down. The page after that had nothing but a pencil drawing—of an island. It seemed that Pria had spent a lot of time sitting here and drawing this. It wasn’t that the picture was detailed, but every line appeared to have been retraced several times over. As though the image was important to Pria.

Underneath the picture, she’d written:

sanctuary

eden

refuge

ab ovo

It looked as though the island represented some kind of freedom to her.

Bernice walked in and looked over my shoulder, making me jump. “Isn’t that what we all want?”

Smiling grimly at her, I tore the page out, folded it, and slipped it into my pocket.

“Find anything?” I asked her.

“These,” she said, producing two mobile phones from her pocket. “Found them in the garage.”

I took the phones. “Those belong to Pria and Luke. Why did they leave them behind?” Seeing the phones together made it real that Pria and Luke were together—a couple.

“It’s a puzzle,” she agreed. “Pria’s car was there, too. Didn’t find anything in the second garage. Just a whole lotta furniture. Looks like someone liked making bush furniture from logs. Pria?”

“Her dad. It was his hobby.”

She shrugged, walking away again, knocking a book down from the pile at the edge of the desk.

I remembered Tommy knocking a pile of Pria’s books and stationery down from there before, the day Pria and I had played hide-and-seek with the kids. And I remembered the stationery now. Sheets and envelopes of coloured paper. Pink, yellow . . .
and blue
.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Bernice commented, picking up the book and flipping it back onto the stack.

“The blue stationery,” I said. “I’ve seen it here.”

“What stationery?”

“The paper that the kidnapper letters were written on.”

“Hell. Here in the office?”

“Yes. Near the end of last year. Tommy knocked some stuff over. Pria picked up the books. I picked up the paper and envelopes.”

“Putting your fingerprints all over it.” Bernice didn’t waste any time before she was moving about the office again, searching. “Let’s find it.”

I stared uselessly for a moment, my fingers touching. It had been an easily forgotten thing. Pria had meant it to be. Sometimes in the days or weeks after Tommy and I had left her house, she’d taken that stationery to my grandmother’s house and typed up those letters. She must have asked Nan about the typewriter, and Nan would have mentioned to her where it was. I could even imagine what Nan would have said:
Useless old piece of garbage. But it belonged to my husband, and he used it to write all his scathing letters to the newspaper editors, so it’s got sentimental value.
But it was so many months ago that Nan wouldn’t have connected it, probably didn’t even remember. And Pria had planned it that way.
What had Nan been doing while Pria was busily typing away?
Probably sleeping. Everyone knew that Nan napped during the day. Nan would have been none the wiser.

After ten minutes of trying to find the stationery, we hadn’t found anything blue.

“Maybe she’s keeping it upstairs in her room,” Bernice suggested.

I nodded. We hadn’t checked drawers or wardrobes.

We headed back upstairs. This time, I flicked on the bedroom light. It was too difficult to search for something small using just the light from my phone and Bernice’s small torch. The room smelled wrong. I’d thought so before, but we’d been moving quickly through the house.

The light illuminated a spray of dark fluid on the cream-coloured wall, spreading onto the half-open door of the ensuite bathroom.

Rushing across the plush carpet, I turned the bathroom light on.

Blood.

In the bathtub.

Bright. Watery. Dried at the extreme edges where it had splashed up the sides of the tub.

I gripped the doorframe.

Bernice looked in and drew straight back. “Jesus.”

“
Why?
Why is there . . .
blood?
”

“Don’t think the worst.”

Specks of blood dotted the white tiles and mirror and basin. There was no conceivable reason for all that blood to be everywhere.
None.
Unless something awful happened here.

A sharp knocking sounded downstairs. At the front door.

I gasped. “Oh God. I think we’ve been seen.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know. But if someone was walking up the path a minute ago, they would have seen us in Pria’s bedroom.”

“Let’s go find out,” said Bernice grimly.

We sprinted downstairs and to the front door. Whoever it was didn’t have a key. Could it be Luke?

Bernice pressed her eye to the door’s peephole then looked back. “It’s your friend, Kate.”

“No,” I rasped. “She’ll call the police for sure.”

I pulled the door open. “Kate!”

Kate was heading away down the stone steps when she stopped and turned, fear edging into her eyes. “What are you two doing here?”

I breathed out. “There’s a lot to explain.”

“Where’s Pria?” she asked nervously.

“I don’t know. Listen—”

“They’re looking for you, Phoebe.” She stepped back, barely looking around to see where she was going on the steep stairs.

“Be careful!” I called. Desperation rose inside me. “Kate, do you know where Pria went? Did she tell you?”

The wariness didn’t leave Kate’s pale eyes or voice. Not a single one of her kind phrases or
orange juice
smiles for me now. “She called me earlier. Saying she was a bit scared. She heard noises outside. Elliot and I were out at a kids’ party, but I said I’d check in on her when I got home. She’s not answering her phone, and now I find that she’s not even here.”

Kate drew her teeth through her bottom lip, plunging her hands into her jacket pockets. “I’ve already called the police, Phoebe. I’m sorry.” Spinning around, she began walking, breaking into a run.

*

I sat in the same police room where they’d shown me the image of the fourth letter. The same room where I’d watched the video of me at my letterbox. Detectives Trent Gilroy and Annabelle Yarris sat at the table opposite me. Bernice had already been taken for questioning in a different room.

Bernice and I hadn’t run when we heard the police sirens. I couldn’t guess at Bernice’s reasons, but I had nowhere to run. I didn’t know where Pria had gone or how to find her.

Trent studied my face with his intense eyes, as if he could bypass the questions and read my mind. “I’m going to ask you again, Phoebe, and I need you to give me a straight answer this time. Whose blood is it in the tub?”

In my mind’s eye, I could still see the blood, red against the white bathtub. “You tell
me
. You’re the police.”

“But we want
you
to tell us,” said Detective Yarris.

“I don’t know. I already told you. I saw it when I went upstairs with Bernice.” I tried and failed to conquer the quivering of my arms as I folded them against my chest. My voice closed to a whisper. “Don’t you understand? You’re torturing me. I need to know if it belongs to Tommy. Just tell me. Please . . .”

“Did you have one of your episodes where you do things and then don’t remember?” Annabelle Yarris lifted her eyebrows, her tone so cut and dried it was mocking.

“No. And I had someone with me. Bernice. She can tell you exactly what happened.”

Detective Gilroy gave a slight shrug, his mouth in a firm line. “What if she’s giving us a different version than you?”

“You’re just saying that.” But I didn’t sound entirely certain. I couldn’t be entirely certain of anything or anyone.

“How long has your husband been seeing Pria?” Annabelle leaned her back into her chair.

“I’m not sure. He’s been going out for walks at night since late last year.”

“And you think he was seeing Pria?”

“Yes. Certainly he has been in recent months.”

Her eyes needled me inquisitively. “How does that make you feel?”

“Shocked. But I have bigger things on my mind. I—”

“I’d be shocked too if I found out my husband and good friend were having an affair. I can imagine you going to Pria’s house in a rage, and—”