Try Not to Breathe (26 page)

O
kay, I’m just going to say it. I think my secret might be a bit of a case.

I’ve had some time to think about it. In fact, I’ve had nothing but time, stretching out in every direction I look. I’ve run things over and over in my head from every angle until I wonder if I’ve changed their shape.

But the more I run through them, the more my memories of him sour a bit. Like, his behavior doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Not like mine does, but even ignoring why it’s obviously wrong, the situation should never have arisen. I mean, he’s a
lot
older than me. That’s for starters. When we first kissed, I was in my school uniform. A school uniform he knows only too well. That’s a bit weird. It is though, isn’t it?

I was fourteen when I met him for the first time, fifteen when we kissed, and he knew it. He knows exactly who I am.

He’s a good-looking guy. By “good-looking,” I mean crazy bloody hot. Fit too. You can tell just by the way he carries himself, tall and confident, that he’s in shape.

Why would someone who looks like that want a fifteen-year-old girl? He could have the pick of the bunch if he just wanted something easy, so why doesn’t he? He has plenty of opportunity to pursue actual women, professional women. Maybe he has gone through them all and he’s left to move his finger down the list and start on the teenagers. I don’t think so though, but maybe that’s wishful thinking. We all want to be chosen, don’t we? Want to be someone’s special one, the object of desire rather than yet another body in a barrel load. But the more I think about it, mull over it, roll it around in my brain and dissect it, the grubbier it all seems.

And he started it. Oh that sounds grown-up, Amy. But he did, and I think that’s part of the problem. If I’d pursued him, dressed up to look older and tricked him, met him under different circumstances, that would be different. But he pursued
me
. He took every first step.

From turning to me that day and starting a conversation, when no one else was in the room, holding my gaze too long and sitting too close, he started it. The way he called me pet names, really drawing out the sounds and smiling so his teeth flashed. I should have moved away, should have made my excuses and left. But I didn’t. It wasn’t just because he’s, as I’ve already said, crazy bloody hot, but it was also out of politeness and obligation. An adult talks to you and you talk back.

I guess I’m thinking along these lines to make myself feel better. Trying to wriggle out of it because the truth is, I should have stopped it before it crossed the line. He shouldn’t have kissed me but I shouldn’t have kissed him back. I shouldn’t have liked it. I should have been upset, or disgusted.

He shouldn’t have touched the fabric of my skirt like that, or run his fingers down my back but I shouldn’t have run home with a smile on my face as wide as the River Eden. I shouldn’t have run straight into my bedroom, slammed the door and lay on my bed, grinning like a Cheshire cat and running it over and over again in my head like a dirty movie.

He wasn’t some lech either. He gave me a lift home once and he could have tried anything but he didn’t. He could have driven us off somewhere else, carried on where we left off in his kitchen, but he didn’t. He talked to me kindly, brushed my tears away and took me home. And the dark, nasty truth of it is that I didn’t stop wishing he’d taken advantage of the situation. I didn’t stop wishing that another situation would arise because I knew, just like I still know, that if it had, I would have grabbed it with both hands and not given a damn about right and wrong.

So if he is a case, what does that make me?

A
lex had been putting off visiting the optimistically named “park” where Amy had been found all those years ago. It was time to brave it, but she didn’t like it on sight. The trees were tall as sin, lurching in the fierce wind. Dew hung wet and thick on the ground, twinkling on the spiders’ webs and crushing leaves into the grass with its watery weight.

It was still early on a crisp Saturday morning, but there were already several teams of Chinese families gathering early sweet chestnuts, pulling the brown bellies from the spiky green sheaths and stuffing them mechanically into carrier bags.

Mechanically?
That was the kind of sweeping racist statement her mother had frequently oozed, thought Alex.

Kent was full of chestnut trees, but it was “uncouth” to stoop down to collect them. “Floor food,” her mother had spat when she’d caught Alex stuffing chestnuts into her pockets as a little girl.

Alex had woken up today haunted by her research the afternoon before. And the feeling was enhanced in this dark, cloudy place.

The visit to Paul Wheeler had left her more confused than ever. He was shifty, and almost certainly lying about something. Was there any truth to his “older fella” story, or could this just be a cover story? Could he be the “fella” in question?

No matter which angle she approached the idea from, it was hard to imagine he could have committed a sex crime on his own daughter, and executed the attack well enough to get away with it. The question mark that throbbed brighter than ever was the consensual element, the lack of bruises in the most private of places. As unpalatable as it was, there was one possible explanation, where previously there’d been a de facto alibi for Wheeler in Alex’s head. It even had a name. Genetic Sexual Attraction.

It was such a firm and definite phenomenon that it had an acronym. GSA. And those three letters stood for the possibility of Paul Wheeler and Amy Stevenson engaging in an intense sexual affair. The thought of it, when Alex allowed herself to think while she researched, curdled her throat.

GSA, she’d read, often happened in cases of close relatives meeting for the first time as adults or adolescents. Adoptees, long-lost first cousins…unknown parents. A few couples had even found they were father and daughter only after marriage and children of their own. It was, Alex had read with a scratchy swallow, felt more keenly when relatives closely resembled each other. Alex thought of Paul with his blue eyes shining. She imagined him fifteen years younger, tall, handsome, his sparkling eyes locking on to Amy’s identical irises. His patter irrelevant beside that unfathomable connection. A connection that maybe, just possibly, led Amy here, to this cold, damp slice of nowhere.

Alex shivered. As well as the gangs of trees sprouting haphazardly in acres of ragged wet grass, there was a little lake surrounded by big jagged rocks. With every sinking step into the muddy grass, Alex felt more nauseated. Amy’s final resting place as was intended. It wasn’t a nice place to die.

In July, the grass would have been lush and green. The trees would have been stumpier fifteen years ago, standing still in the summer air. Maybe sparing a rustle of leaves at night.

Alex imagined the search party, carefully combing the land with sticks, line by line, hoping not to find anything. How many of those trudging through the tall summer grass secretly believed Amy had run away? Until that fateful connection of wood to cooling body, meters from where Bob had been thrashing his own angry, desperate stick.

No, it was not a nice place to die.

As she reached the spot—a dark little enclave surrounded by thorny bushes and guarded over by thick chestnut trees—the wind blew Alex’s skinny legs clean from under her and she landed awkwardly in the mud, unnerved and cold. She scrabbled to her feet.

There was nothing and no one for miles around. Somewhere in the distance the hum of an A-road barely scratched the silence. An off-season wasp buzzed halfheartedly while it waited to die. The only person here today had arrived alone and would leave alone, no one else was likely to turn up. Not while there was a river to walk along in town and pretty parks tended by committees. This big block of nothingness, “saved” from development through a quirky greenbelt bylaw, was cared for by the council at arm’s length, like a step-child.

Alex took pictures, which all looked the same. Ten or so identical pictures of a dark, spiky place. No plaque, no flowers, nothing to suggest it had been anything special to anyone.

Why here?
Why not here
? It was deadly quiet, someone was unlikely to be seen assaulting someone, or dragging a body. There was a main road nearby, but not so close that anyone could see a car—maybe Paul’s borrowed car—in the car park, a generous name for a gravel patch with way more space for vehicles than needed. And not enough spaces when it mattered. Volunteers’ cars and police vans would have snaked along the hedge all the way back to the main road.

Alex stared at the horizon, the distant cough of cars still the only sound.

Where had they been when they first had sex? Amy and her “older fella.” Was it here? Had it built up for days, weeks, longer? Had their first time been that last time, or was it just one encounter in many?

If it was Paul, it all made a screwed-up kind of sense. Of course Amy didn’t tell anyone that she was seeing her birth father, if they had a secret that ran so deeply in the wrong direction nobody could hear it. Of course he hadn’t admitted to meeting her, finding himself drawn to her in a way he would never have anticipated—no one would.

Where had she been when she was beaten until blood splattered from her seams? Her father’s borrowed car? Had she changed her mind about their clandestine meetings? Perhaps she’d tried to end it and he was so enraged he just attacked without thinking. A crime of passion. Alex hated that phrase.

Had Paul brought his daughter here for secrecy as he explored a body he should never have seen like that, before laying that body on the ground as if at random? Or was there some sense of occasion as Amy lay in the grass and felt his hands on her throat and the tug of black sleep nipping at her toes? Did she stare into his eyes? His eyes that are just like her eyes?

Alex pictured Amy fetal on a gurney. Dewy grass under her nails and in her hair. Without thinking, Alex lay down on the wet grass and closed her eyes. The smell of damp autumnal soil was wrong, of course. Amy would have felt the warmth of the summer soil and smelt the stink of the nearby lake, humming with midges and thick with slime. Amy lay right here, on this spot that could be any spot, and thought her last conscious thoughts.

Paul was a sneaky, snaky liar, but he was also a bit of a buffoon. Was he really capable of this?

Alex shivered and rose carefully. She rushed back toward the car and tried to ignore her thirst, and the thought of the measuring jug and bottle on the kitchen counter.

It was time to talk to Matt again. She was a little dizzy at the thought of presenting him with a new idea. No perfectly wrapped-up case, but something fresh at least. Not criminal evidence, but evidence of her own abilities. Her ability to stay sharp and focused, to work into the afternoon. To accomplish something tangible. To accomplish anything at all.