The Good Neighbour (33 page)

‘You know,’ Cath said, ‘in all my years of nursing, I’ve learned maybe one important thing, and that is that doctors don’t really know anything.’

Verna laughed. ‘That’s true, honey.’

‘Sometimes you have to really prove to them that someone’s ill, otherwise they won’t listen till it’s too late. Other times, they make stuff up, because they hate saying that they don’t know.’

‘It’s kind of a miracle,’ Verna said, reaching into the backseat to ruffle Davey’s hair.

‘It is. So, tell me about Wade. Is that girlfriend of his still messing him about?’

‘Oh glory, she is. Let me tell you what she did last week …’

Breeze broke away from the gaggle of children she’d been playing with, and trotted down the street towards them. ‘Ah, here’s my honey,’ Verna said, and Breeze snuggled into her arms. ‘What’s new, Breezey?’

‘Nothing,’ Breeze said, and began to suck her thumb, a new habit. Sandy knew she should try and do something about it, but god knows, it didn’t seem all that important in the great scheme of things. She was more worried about Breeze’s recurring headaches. She started to ask Verna how they’d go about signing up with the local paediatrician, but she’d barely said a few words when Breeze unplugged her thumb and said, ‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘England, do you mean? No, of course you don’t, lovie.’ Sandy reached across and stroked Breeze’s hair. ‘This is our home now.’

Breeze looked at Sandy with wide eyes. ‘Davey said.’

‘Milo, you mean? What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing. He said it to Nathan. He wants to use Nathan’s mum’s phone.’

The two women exchanged glances. Verna shook her head slightly, meaning don’t panic, don’t get upset. ‘I wonder who he wants to call,’ Sandy said, making a heroic effort to keep calm, though her breath was running short. ‘Did he say?’

Breeze didn’t answer. Sandy sat up straighter. ‘Why don’t you whisper it to me, lovie?’ she asked. Breeze leaned towards Sandy and said, ‘Nathan is going to let Milo send a text to Minette.’

Sandy shivered. The evening heat seemed to have cooled right down.

‘Now don’t you worry your breezy little brain about that,’ Verna said. ‘You run along and play now, let us do the worrying, OK?’

Breeze nodded, and ran back to the other children, thumb in mouth.

‘Five fucking minutes. That’s all I get.’ Sandy could feel the tears starting. To have come this far, and to fail at this final stage. ‘Five fucking minutes of peace. Christ, Verna, what am I going to do?’

‘Well you can watch your mouth to start with, darlin’. Ain’t nothing ever been solved by cursing.’ Verna put her hand over Sandy’s. ‘Is Minette that neighbour of yours?’

Sandy nodded. ‘I don’t know what to do! I don’t know how to stop Milo from contacting people, using the internet, it was hard enough before but he’s getting older, harder to control. How the hell can I stop him?’

‘You don’t try, honey.’

Sandy looked at Verna, puzzled. ‘What do you mean? I have to try!’

‘This Minette, how is she a risk? If she knows what you’re running away from, why would she be a worry?’

‘She believes Andy’s version of events,’ Sandy said quietly.

‘That ain’t too sisterly of her. I’d like to have a word with that little person. Well honey, you can’t control Milo, OK? So you give up trying now. I speak as someone with three boys and I tell you, I weren’t in charge of what they did since the longest time.’

‘If I can’t control him, Verna, I am never going to get any peace. Maybe I should talk to Nathan’s parents? Which one is Nathan anyway?’ Sandy squinted down the street but the children were now too distant to see properly.

‘If not Nathan, it’ll be someone else. Milo’s only going to get more strong-willed. You give that up now, you hear? You’re going about this wrong.’

There weren’t many people Sandy would let tell her how to manage her life, but Verna was one. ‘Let me guess. You’re going to say there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

‘I am.’ Verna took a swig from her can of Coke. ‘Look, you can’t stop Milo from talking to whomsoever he wants. In fact, I am surprised you don’t know that by now. Kids don’t want to do what you tell ’em.’

‘Except my Breeze.’

‘Yep. She’s a mommy’s gal all right. She reminds me of another little girl who always did what her mommy told her …’ Verna grinned, showing large teeth. ‘You need to go at this from the other end. You need to make sure this Minette person don’t do anything if Milo does manage to contact her. Does he even have her number?’

‘I don’t know, he could have, or he might be able to find it.’

‘Can you warn her off? Encourage her to keep her big nose out?’

Sandy sat up straight. ‘There is something that might work. What would be the absolute fastest way I could mail a photo to the UK?’

‘Email, of course.’

‘No, I want to send a physical photo. It will have a lot more impact.’

‘Well, USPS or FedEx, they could do it in twenty-four hours, but it wouldn’t be cheap.’

Sandy sat back. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay whatever.’

‘Also you would be giving those people kind of a big heads-up as to where you are located.’

‘True.’ Sandy thought for a moment. ‘But, you know what? They’ll only know I’m in the States. It’s a big place. That’s one of the things I like about it.’

‘OK, honey, you know these people.’

‘I hope I do. I really hope Minette takes the hint. Cos I don’t have a Plan B.’

ABE ALWAYS WENT
into work late on Fridays – one of his protests against the nine-to-five – and he was ambling about in his dressing gown when there was a knock at the front door. Minette was occupied with making French toast, so Abe went to answer it. Minette couldn’t hear who he was talking to over the noise of the radio that she still gloried in playing loudly, but she heard the door shut. Then he called out, ‘Blimey, never had a delivery from UPS before.’

‘What’s UPS?’ Minette called back, but he didn’t answer. After a moment, he came back into the kitchen and said, ‘What’s this photo?’

Minette stood at the stove, her back to him, stock still, cold ice filling her mouth. Cath had sent one of the dirty photos. It was all over. But why now? With the small part of her mind that wasn’t panicking, Minette rapidly searched for possible things she had done to trigger Cath’s revenge. For instance, Cath probably knew by now that she and Andy had been to Gina’s house. That was certainly enough to have triggered this. The bread started burning in the frying pan and she said, ‘Shit,’ and tried to prise it out but it was too stuck. She dropped the pan and bread into the sink and poured cold water onto the whole thing, splashing herself thoroughly as she did so. Then she turned round and waited helplessly for the guillotine to drop.

‘This is weird,’ Abe said. He was holding a brown envelope. ‘What do you make of this?’ Minette looked reluctantly at the picture in his hand. But it wasn’t what she was dreading to see.

It was a photo of her and Abe, taken years ago in France. She still had very long hair, and was wearing a green dress she no longer owned. They stood with their arms around each other in front of a large cream-coloured building, Chateau Chambord, Minette remembered in some distant part of her brain. The photograph was creased where it had been folded into quarters.

‘Didn’t this used to be on our noticeboard?’ Abe went over to the board, puzzled, and started looking underneath things to see if he could find it.

Minette’s heart started to beat again. She dried her hands and took the envelope from Abe, but it held no clues, other than being from an American delivery service. She shook the envelope and put her hand inside, but there was nothing else. The typed label was addressed to Abe.

‘How weird!’ she echoed. ‘It must be from Cath. So we were right that they’re in America.’

‘How do you know it’s from Cath?’

Minette realised she had rushed into assuming it was from Cath because she associated Cath with having photos. She thought quickly. ‘Well, you’re right. It might not be. But we suspected they were in America, and that’s where this is from. And I can’t think of anyone else who might have taken the picture, she was an odd fish, for sure. It’s exactly the sort of thing she might have done, taken it and forgotten to give it back. Let’s put it back up, shall we?’ She took it from Abe and pinned it on the board. Then she got out a clean pan, and started all over again with a fresh piece of bread.

She wondered when, and why, Cath had stolen the photo. And more pressingly, why she had returned it now. Was this just an opening salvo, a warning shot? Or could it be – and her heart lifted – the exact opposite, a kind of apology? This could just be Cath tying up loose ends, drawing a line under everything that had happened, returning stolen property.

Abe sat down and started tapping on his phone. ‘Just telling Andy that we might have some evidence that they’re in the States.’

Minette successfully turned the French toast over and said stiffly, ‘Yes, good idea.’

Abe had never been so slow to get to work. He behaved as if it was a Sunday morning, and Minette was just about ready to scream by the time he finally left. She couldn’t think straight with him there. She practically shoved him out of the front door, saying that she and Tilly were going to wave him off from the garden. Once he’d disappeared, she sat on the bench, Tilly on her lap, and looked up at Cath’s house.

What she would give to see Davey’s outline against the side window.

Tilly yawned, and Minette realised that she too was wrung out. She took Tilly up and then took off her glasses – she hadn’t got as far as lenses this morning – and quickly fell asleep. She no longer mocked the ‘nap when the baby naps’ brigade.

She woke from a dream about Davey handing her a pomegranate – confusingly, it was shaped like a banana. Feeling refreshed, though no wiser about the photo, she checked her phone. On the home screen were the first few words of a text from an unknown number, and those words made her sit up so fast she felt dizzy.

Hi Minette this is Milo (Davey) now we are

‘You are where?’ she cried out loud. Had her dream summoned him? She swiped at the message so vigorously that nothing happened. She took a breath, wiped her hand on the pillow, and tried again.

Hi Minette this is Milo (Davey) now we are in America it is quite nice. My address is 1320 East Maple Street Escondido that is in California in America see you soon.

Minette dropped the phone as if it was a spider. She put on her glasses and sat against the headboard. She knew where Davey was! She could rescue him. But then, almost simultaneously, she knew that this was why Cath sent the picture. It wasn’t an apology. It was a warning. Had it been an apology – you idiot, Minette cursed herself – of course Cath would have sent the photo to her, not Abe.

With a sick feeling, Minette realised that Cath was saying, don’t look for me. Stop trying to find me. Ignore any other messages you may receive. Or some more photos will come your way.

After lunch, Minette put Tilly in the buggy and pushed her down towards the seafront. She was too restless to stay in the house. She thought about how she had run along these pavements during triathlon training, and of that run with Liam. Everything had seemed complicated then, but it was nothing compared to now. Every time she started towards her phone, to ring Abe, call Andy, tell them she knew exactly where the children were, she thought about the shock of the photos. Every time she considered doing nothing, just deleting the message and pretending it had never come, she knew she couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine Abe’s face when she told him about Liam, and what he would say, and she did an involuntary little gasp of horror. She couldn’t do that either. Shit, shit, shit.

After half an hour Minette turned back, but was not ready to go home. She walked right past her front door, to the little park at the end of the street. She pushed Tilly on the swing, settling into the rhythmic back and forth, rocking slightly on her feet each time so she didn’t actually have to move. Push: Don’t tell. Push: Do tell. Push: Don’t tell.

Push: He loves me.

Her marriage and family, or Davey and Lola’s lives?

Push: He loves me not.

It would be better for Tilly if she did nothing.

Push: He loves me.

Could she live with herself, knowing she could have helped those children, but hadn’t?

Push: He loves me not.

But what about Abe?

‘Dud-ud, dud-ud,’ Tilly called, and Minette came to with a start. Tilly was going far too high in the swing. Minette stepped forward to grab the chain and slow the swing, then realised that Tilly was laughing, delighted.

‘More?’ Minette called. ‘You daredevil,’ and Tilly laughed still harder – ‘Dud-ud!’ – as she was pushed higher into the sky.

‘Hey Andy, seen this?’ Abe said.

Andy looked over Abe’s shoulder. ‘Yes, it’s only thirty miles from San Diego airport.’

‘No, listen, it says here that in Spanish, Escondido means “hidden”.’

‘Ah! Ruby would just love that.’

Abe and Andy high-fived each other. They were so fired up, they didn’t notice how quiet Minette was. She kept herself busy with cooking. Though both men told her not to bother, she was putting together a cassoulet and a vanilla soufflé. These were recipes which were usually guaranteed to take over her mind, but she was still constantly second-guessing whether she had done the right thing. I couldn’t have done otherwise, she told herself. You could have, and you should have, she replied. She wiped her hand across her forehead; it was boiling in there with the oven going full pelt.

‘Can I get that number Adam rang you on?’ Andy asked Minette. She handed her phone over, then thought, why does he need that?

‘You’re not going to call that number, are you, Andy?’

‘Not yet, not till I’m there,’ he said, tapping away. ‘So he knows I’m on my way.’

‘But we don’t know whose phone it is.’ Minette put her hands on the back of Abe’s chair to steady herself. I’ve done my bit, she wanted to say. I’ve already put myself at risk, over and over. As it stood, Cath wouldn’t know how Andy found out where they were. She might guess but, knowing Davey’s ability to keep quiet, it would only be a guess, nothing more. But if Andy contacted him with the number he’d called her on, it would be only too easy to work it out.