Little Girls Tell Tales Read online

  The flush in my face deepened. ‘I’ve got the receipt for you. It’s in my pocket …’ I fumbled looking for it.

  Cora was looking at her phone. She swore. ‘I’ve run out of battery. I told Dallin I’d keep in touch. He’s probably been calling for an hour.’

  ‘I can call him.’ I was grateful for the distraction, for the chance to pull out my own phone. ‘What’s his number?’

  Cora reeled it off without having to think, which surprised me. Maybe she didn’t regard him as anything more than a travelling companion, but she’d taken the time to memorise his number. Hardly anyone did that anymore.

  Maybe it was simple jealousy that niggled me. I missed being so close to someone that I knew their number by heart. I dialled the number but, instead of speaking, passed it to Cora when it started to ring.

  Cora pressed my phone to her ear, her lip caught anxiously between her teeth. I wondered what she was worried about.

  ‘Hey! Dallin, it’s Cora. Where are you?’ Cora asked. She turned, perhaps unconsciously, so her back was to me. ‘Are you still—?’

  She listened for several moments. I could hear Dallin’s voice, distorted and tinny through the phone speaker, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. He sounded irritated.

  Cora said, ‘Yes, okay, okay, yes,’ a few times, then said goodbye and ended the call.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Not greatly pleased.’ Cora kept my phone in her hands as if it was a comfort object. ‘He says he’s texted me a bunch of times. I don’t think he guessed my phone was dead.’

  ‘Is he mad?’

  ‘At me?’ Cora smiled. ‘No, of course not. He’s just not a massive fan of the police. It sounds like he’s been giving them grief.’

  That surprised me. Since when did Dallin dislike the police? ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘He said he’s fine.’ Cora waved it away. ‘I’m sure he knows not to do anything too stupid.’

  Belatedly she gave my phone back. ‘Will the police give him a lift back to the campsite?’ I asked, although I knew the answer.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like it. I better go pick him up. He wouldn’t be stuck there if it wasn’t for me.’ Cora went to the driver’s side door.

  ‘Are you sure you want to drive to Douglas?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure I put that tyre on correctly. We can go in my car, if you rather.’

  ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘It’s no bother. I should probably make sure Dallin’s okay.’ If he got himself arrested for being rude to an officer, Mum would never forgive me.

  ‘Ah, Rosalie.’ Cora’s face scrunched into a smile. ‘What would I do without you?’

  Chapter 16

  We compromised a little. She drove very carefully to the campsite and left the car next to her tent. I followed in my car. At every pothole I expected the wheel to pop off Cora’s car and go bouncing down the road. But we got there safely, and Cora transferred to the passenger seat of my car.

  ‘That was slightly hairy,’ she laughed. ‘Still, I’m glad we didn’t have to wait until Monday for a tow-truck. Good job, us.’

  I took the opportunity to sneak a look at her tent. It was small, standard, unremarkable, showing a few signs of wear around the edges. Dallin’s, next to hers, was bright blue and very new-looking. I drove out of the campsite and back to the main road.

  ‘Whereabouts is the police station?’ Cora asked. ‘Is it difficult to get there?’

  ‘Nowhere’s difficult to get to. Unless the roads are closed.’ I turned right, towards Ramsey. ‘Not that I’ve ever had to pick someone up from the police station.’ I was doing a whole lot of new stuff that week.

  ‘Never?’ Cora laughed. ‘When I was a teenager, me and my friends were always in trouble. If one of us had to get picked up, we had a system where someone would pretend to be our mother or big sister or whatever. It worked surprisingly often. Hey, have we got time to stop for coffee?’

  I smiled. ‘There’s a flask by your feet. I thought you might need a hot drink.’

  Cora’s face broke into a grin. ‘Ha. I knew you’d have our back.’ She patted my arm affectionately.

  The physical contact made warmth spread up through my chest.

  Cora took off her woolly hat and shook out her hair with her fingertips. ‘Should we save some for Dallin?’

  ‘There’s enough for both of you,’ I said. ‘If he deserves coffee.’

  Cora laughed. She rummaged in the bag I’d left in the passenger footwell until she found the flask. She poured a small amount into the cup and blew on it. After she’d taken a couple of sips, she held it out to me.

  ‘You want some?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t drink coffee.’

  ‘Aw. You made coffee for us even though you don’t drink it yourself?’

  The soft teasing note in her voice made me smile. ‘I can’t have stimulants. Well, I mean, I can, but I don’t like to. It screws up my moods.’

  Mostly I threw that out again to see how she reacted. Some people clammed up as soon as I mentioned my wonky brain chemistry. Like they were scared to acknowledge it, in case I told them a bunch of details they didn’t want to hear, or because my illness might somehow attach itself to them too. I’d encountered that reaction so often when Beth was sick. People would look away or change the subject or start apologising. It had annoyed the hell out of Beth, and I guess it annoyed me too.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Cora said. ‘I have that too. The doctor put me on something different and it messed up my mood swings so badly. I was literally crying over the slightest thing. One time, this guy on the bus leaned over to ask me the time, and his breath smelled so bad I burst into tears. In my defence, his breath was really bad. Like he’d been eating cat food for breakfast. And I told him so, which didn’t make me look any less crazy.’

  ‘I think you were justified.’

  ‘I think so too.’ Cora smiled.

  Once past Ramsey, the road to Douglas twisted its way up over the hills. It was the most famous part of the TT course, the bit that was always featured on TV, showing motorbikes zipping over the hilly terrain at ridiculous speeds. Because it formed part of the racecourse, there were no metal barriers or crash protectors at the side of the road. If a bike or a car was unlucky enough to swerve off the road, there was nothing except an occasional gorse bush to prevent them rolling all the way to the bottom of the valleys. Driving the mountain road always made me edgy. I would never attempt it in bad weather, especially not in fog or high winds. But I wouldn’t drive the coast road to Douglas, which bumbled its way gently south from Ramsey, past half a dozen smaller towns until it finally found its way to Douglas. Just the thought of that road made me feel sick.

  Today we got stuck behind a Tesco van, but that didn’t bother me. It gave me an excuse to drive at a sedate pace.

  ‘It’s weird,’ Cora said as we crossed the tram tracks at the Bungalow. ‘I keep wondering if Simone came along this road. I keep thinking, did she see that building? Or those trees?’ She shook her head. ‘Like there’d be any way for me to tell.’

  ‘How did the search go this afternoon?’ It’d slipped my mind to ask.

  ‘Same. No sign of her.’ Cora sighed. Her gaze was on the hills outside the window, but it didn’t look like she was seeing anything. ‘I know I shouldn’t expect anything. All I’m doing here is crossing off a possibility. But still … every time I go into that marsh, I keep expecting some flash of recognition, like somehow I would recognise the place where Simone wound up. That sounds mad, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because it did.

  ‘I know. I don’t even believe in that stuff, psychic resonance or whatever, you know, our actions leaving echoes on places. I know there’s nothing out there that’ll jog something loose in my brain. Even if Simone did end up here … there’ll be no trace of her. And even if there is, I’m not going to sense those traces. But I still find myself trying, y’kn
ow?’

  I thought of the way she’d gone through the curraghs ahead of me yesterday, touching the trees as if they would give up their secrets through the bark. Maybe that was exactly what she’d been hoping for.

  And didn’t I do the same thing, in my own way? How many times had I run my fingers over the ornaments in the front room? There was nothing to sense from them; no resonance of times past; no echo of Beth’s life. But still I pretended I could feel something from those objects. Beth had cupped them in her hands. Shouldn’t they still contain a tiny fragment of her warmth?

  I tried to bury the thought. Already I was finding it difficult to let go of things. A few weeks ago I’d broken a mug and cried for half an hour at the thought of putting it in the bin. It hadn’t been one of Beth’s favourites, but it was an object she’d used, touched, held. And now it was broken. For a moment, I’d considered keeping the shards. Sweeping them into a plastic container to keep below the sink forever.

  I knew those thoughts were dangerous. Maybe not individually – what harm would it do, to keep one single broken cup? – but because if I couldn’t throw one broken thing away, I wouldn’t get rid of the next, or the next. Eventually I’d end up in a house full of useless objects, none of which I could ever dispose of, because I no longer knew the difference between rubbish and treasure. I could feel the compulsion itching inside me. It wouldn’t take much to put me on a downwards slope.

  ‘I’ve not spoken to my parents since Christmas,’ Cora said then, as if she’d been following an internal conversation without me. ‘We had a massive fight. About Simone, of course. Dad had smashed one of the picture frames of me and Simone when we were kids. Not on purpose, obviously, but he also hadn’t gone out of his way to fix it. I accused him of – well, I said a lot of stuff I regret. But I don’t understand why they don’t want me looking for Simone. It’s like they don’t want me to find her.’

  She paused to pour more coffee into the lid-mug.

  ‘When I was a teenager, I would ask them a million questions about Simone,’ Cora said. ‘Half the time they’d just refuse to talk about her. Can you believe that? Their eldest daughter, and they were happy to pretend she’d never existed. Sometimes, Ma would say she’d heard from Simone – she was in Canada, she was travelling through Asia, always places which were too far away for me to run away and check for myself.’ She sighed. ‘Later, I got Ma to admit those stories were made up to keep me quiet. Not that that worked, of course.’

  ‘Where did they think she’d gone?’

  ‘I don’t think it mattered to them. Mum saw it as an inevitable fact. Bound to have happened, sooner or later.’ Cora cracked open her window to let in a little air. The wind whistled through the gap. ‘Simone was a restless soul, my dad always said. And, of course, there was a guy involved.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘She was always hanging out with inappropriate men. Guys that were way too old for her. The night before she vanished, I heard her arguing with our dad about her latest boyfriend. Da was angry. Like, weirdly angry.’

  ‘I can imagine why.’

  ‘No, see, he never really interfered with Simone’s relationships. Even when he disapproved, he would never say anything to her face. He reckoned she would push back twice as hard against anyone who told her not to do something.’

  ‘So, why was this time different?’

  Cora sighed. ‘It was my aunt’s boyfriend. Simone was seeing him as well.’

  ‘When she was fifteen?’

  ‘Before that as well, I think. He’d been dating our aunt for a year or so. I don’t know when he took up with Simone.’

  I couldn’t keep the disgust off my face. ‘No wonder your dad was angry.’

  ‘Maybe. Da knew Simone was seeing someone, but not who it was. Anyway, by that point, the guy had dumped my poor aunt and done a runner, so he wasn’t even on the scene. I don’t know for sure why Da was so angry that night.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  Cora’s brow pinched. ‘When Simone disappeared, we didn’t realise she was missing straight away. We thought she’d gone to stay with friends. That happened a lot. Then, when we finally realised she wasn’t coming home, there was a lot of shouting in the house. Mum wanted to know who Simone’s boyfriend was, because, y’know, she figured that was the first person we should speak to. Da didn’t know who it was. Said Simone never told him. He also completely denied arguing with her about it before she vanished. But I know what I heard.’

  ‘And you’ve never confronted him again?’

  ‘Sure I have.’ Cora gave me a wicked smile. ‘I bring it up every damn time Simone gets mentioned. He only slipped up once, when I said we should track down the guy and shake some answers out of him, and Da said, “He doesn’t know anything, I guarantee it.”’

  She lowered her voice almost to a growl as she said it, and I heard a hint of what her dad must sound like. It was enough to make me flinch. He didn’t sound like the sort of person who liked to be asked the same question twice.

  ‘I’ve Googled the guy as well,’ Cora said, ‘but no luck. We reckon he must be using a different surname or something. Anyway, I figured one of three things had happened. Either Simone ran off with him, or he abducted her, or – and I think this is most likely – she got sick of us at home and decided to leave. She always talked about running away.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, you know, in that generalised way everyone does when they’re kids. We all thought about running away, right?’

  I thought about Dallin, who’d left it until his twenties before he’d run. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘I ran off just once,’ Cora said. ‘When I was twelve. I had it in my head that Simone was still around, y’know? Keeping an eye on me. I thought I spotted her a few times outside my school. So, I invented this whole story in my head, about how she’d left home because of our parents, but now she was eighteen she was coming back for me, to take me to live with her.’ She gave a brittle laugh. ‘I slipped out of the house and waited at the bus station with my bag all packed and ready. I figured that would be the easiest place for her to pick me up. But, of course, she never appeared. I snuck back into my house before anyone even realised I was missing.’ She sighed. ‘Pretty daft, right?’

  ‘We’re all daft when we’re kids,’ I said, which was the most diplomatic thing I could think of.

  ‘You know what the stupidest thing was? Once I figured out Simone wasn’t coming to get me, I could’ve still got onto a bus. I considered it for maybe half an hour. But in the end, I went home. I always thought I was just as strong-willed as Simone.’ Cora shrugged. ‘Turned out I was wrong. What about you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Did you do the whole running-away-from-home bit when you were a kid?’

  ‘No, I …’ I cleared my throat. ‘I never really got round to the teenage rebellion thing. I was a late developer, I guess. And then our dad died when I was twenty, so …’

  Cora looked aghast. ‘God. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’

  I suspected it was one more thing Dallin had neglected to mention. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. Then, because I knew she would ask, ‘He died in a car accident.’

  ‘That’s awful.’ Cora frowned. ‘You said your mum—’

  ‘That’s right. Same accident. Mum was driving.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Cora said. ‘And then to lose your wife as well …’

  If anyone else had said it, it might’ve sounded like they were fishing for information. But Cora’s tone was soft, subdued, as if she understood the level of heartbreak.

  Because of that I said, ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it.’

  Cora gave me a faint smile. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Cancer.’ Instinctively, I let my expression go slack as I said it. It was a trick I’d learned, to take away the power of that hideous, evocative word. It meant my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. ‘In her ovaries. We only discovered it because—’

 
; But I stalled there. Turned out some truths were more painful than others.

  I cleared my throat again. ‘She had no symptoms or anything. By the time they found it, there was nothing anyone could do. She was gone in eight weeks.’

  There. The simple, bare-bones facts. Each time I said them aloud, they seemed a little less real, like those eight weeks had happened to someone else.

  Cora nodded. I was concentrating on the road, so could only see her in my peripheral vision. It meant I didn’t have to puzzle out her expression. ‘When my gran got really bad,’ Cora said, ‘we agreed she should go into a hospice. She never forgave us for that, literally. Said it was our fault she’d ended up in a soulless institution. It was a really nice place, but to hear her talk, it was the fifth circle of hell, and we were the bastards who’d put her there.’ She shook the hair out of her eyes. ‘Mum said she was just angry. Angry at the whole unfair universe. The only people she could take it out on was her family.’ She sighed. ‘Either way, she refused to speak to any of us again. Two weeks later she was dead, and none of us got a chance to take back what was said.’

  I could understand that. ‘Beth was in the hospice for five days,’ I said. ‘But she didn’t want to stay there. She was adamant she wanted to die at home.’

  I thought about Beth, sitting on the bench at the bottom of the garden, looking out over the curraghs, on that very last day. We’d sat out there all evening. It’d suited Beth’s sense of symmetry and rightness, I think, to wait until the sun had gone down before she closed her eyes for the last time.

  I’d stayed outside till morning. I hadn’t wanted to let go of her hands, even after they went cold.

  Cora reached over and touched my arm, very lightly, very briefly, then folded her hands back in her lap. We didn’t say anything else until we got into Douglas. I liked her quite a lot for that.

  Chapter 17

  Douglas Police Headquarters was just off the main road, a hundred yards down from the huge grandstand that marked the start of the TT course. I turned off onto the lane that ran between a football field and the gravelled area where the temporary marquees were erected for the motorbikes every June and August. The crocodile of cars that’d been following me since Creg-Ny-Baa were probably happy to see me turn off the main road. I wasn’t necessarily a slow driver, but I did seem to be slower than most people.