Little Girls Tell Tales Page 3

  ‘Tell her the rest,’ Dallin said. There was a bright excitement in his eyes that he tried to hide.

  ‘There was a possible lead,’ Cora said. ‘Someone thought they saw Simone getting onto a ferry at Heysham. The police checked the CCTV at the time.’ She looked away to conceal the haunted look in her eyes. ‘They told me it showed a girl who was about the right age, right height, wrong clothes, but that doesn’t prove anything either way, does it? She could’ve changed her clothes easily enough. And the camera was pointed the wrong way. The police said they couldn’t see her face. And, of course, they didn’t bother keeping the footage on file, so I have to take their word for it.’ She blew on her tea to cool it. ‘Anyway, the footage wasn’t enough for the police. They looked into it – at least, they said they did. But they never found her here. Or anywhere else.’

  I glanced at Dallin. From the look on his face, he was expecting something from me. But I couldn’t see what Cora’s story had to do with me.

  Cora also frowned, looking hesitant again. ‘Did … did Dallin tell you this? He told you, right?’

  Dallin said, ‘I sent you an email, Rose. Did you get it?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘What on earth made you think that was the best way to get in touch with me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everyone does everything by email.’ Dallin raised his hands in weak apology. ‘I figured it might be a bit much for me to call you out of the blue.’

  ‘But turning up on my doorstep, that’s fine?’

  Cora set down her mug. ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea … I thought you’d invited us here. I wouldn’t have … I’m sorry.’ She picked up her bag from the chair when she’d left it.

  ‘Wait. Cora, wait.’ Dallin intercepted her before she could walk out. ‘It’s okay. Rosie, it’s alright that we’re here, yeah? I’m sorry you didn’t get my message. But we’ve both come a long way. You need to hear what Cora’s got to say.’

  He looked at Cora, expectant. He was still hanging onto her hand, like he’d hung onto mine at the door. Cora had her bag on her shoulder. It was obvious she wanted to stay, for whatever reason, but she was also reluctant to intrude where she wasn’t welcome. I knew how she felt.

  Cora sighed. ‘I think you found my sister,’ she said to me.

  ‘I—?’ I frowned. ‘You think she’s living over here somewhere?’

  ‘No, I—’ Cora tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. ‘I think you found her. When you were a kid, when you were out in the marshes.’

  Realisation dawned. ‘Oh my God.’ I looked at Dallin, aghast. ‘You told her about that?’

  ‘It was on a website.’ Cora rooted in her bag for her phone. ‘I can find it for you. I read about the skeleton you found. Just near here, right?’

  ‘Um. Right.’ I couldn’t get my brain back in gear. ‘It was in the curraghs …’ I half-turned to gesture through the kitchen window, but lost what I was trying to say. ‘You read it on a website?’

  ‘It’s more of a forum,’ Dallin said. ‘There’s a lot of stuff about myths and urban legends and, y’know, that sort of stuff. Big cat sightings. There’s a page about your story.’

  Cora held her phone out to me. The screen showed a black screen with white text that wasn’t formatted properly for mobile phones. It made me immediately think, I’d love to show this font to Beth, she’d hate it. Beth had been a keen blogger, right up to the end, and nothing wound her up more than white text on a black background.

  I almost smiled, until I remembered what I was reading.

  I skimmed the text. As if reading it fast might protect me. The page consisted of several long paragraphs and a few stock photos of the curraghs – at least, I figured that’s what they were, but the pictures were loading one line at a time on Cora’s phone. I sped-read through a slightly glorified account of how I’d found the body. It matched the story I’d told dozens of times to dozens of people over the years, with a few embellishments that hadn’t happened, and a few that I myself had forgotten. It was shocking to see it all written down in white and black.

  ‘People … people believe this?’ I scrolled up and down the page. ‘They believe me?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they believe it?’ Cora asked. A brief flicker of anguish crossed her face. ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

  ‘No, no. It’s just … no one ever believed me.’ I couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief. ‘Fifteen years I’ve been telling this story. No one ever believed me. And now apparently there’re people talking about it on the internet.’ I scrolled to the bottom of the post and skimmed the comments. ‘People believe me.’

  ‘Don’t ever read the comments, Rose-Lee,’ Dallin said. He took the phone off me and gave it back to Cora. ‘But sure, yeah, of course people believe you. They always did.’

  I could only laugh again. Did he really think that? Wasn’t he paying attention when people were quietly shaking their heads and catching each other’s eyes over the top of my head? Had no one told him about the months when our dad had kept me out of school, when I was having bad dreams every night?

  ‘The timelines fit,’ Cora said then. ‘Simone disappeared in June 1999, and you found the skeleton in August 2004. That’s right, yeah? It could be her.’

  ‘You think …?’

  ‘I think you found Simone, yes. Possibly.’ Cora was trying hard to hold back the hope, I saw. How many years had she spent chasing fruitless leads and false hopes? ‘There’s a chance it could be her. I mean, it has to be someone, right?’

  I examined my hands because I couldn’t look at either Dallin or Cora. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. It was so long ago.’

  ‘You don’t remember it at all?’ Cora asked.

  I couldn’t bear how the woman was staring at me. ‘I remember, sure. But it was fifteen years ago, and I was a kid. I don’t think I can tell you anything that isn’t on that website there. I’m sorry.’

  Dallin started to say something else, but I turned away quickly and walked to the back door. I was overwhelmed – by Dallin coming back into my life, by Cora, by the past getting dredged up. I couldn’t deal with any of it.

  I opened the back door and stepped outside.

  Chapter 3

  The sun was going down, casting long shadows into the back garden. I followed the path to the rear wall. There was a bench, sheltered beneath the sweet pea trellis, which only caught the sun at this late stage of the day. I rarely came down here anymore. Weeds had sprung up between the flagstones. I laid my hands on the rough limestone of the wall at the back of the garden; felt the coolness of the day against my palms. The smell of the curraghs was strong but not unpleasant, just a warm green scent that slowed my heartrate and smoothed out my tangled thoughts.

  How many times over the past few years had I come here to calm down? Whenever I’d woken in the early hours and been unable to get back to sleep. Whenever me and Beth argued. On the day Beth got her diagnosis, when I’d realised I couldn’t cope. I had come here. Looking for something that could root me to the ground.

  On those occasions, when nothing in the real world made sense, I would stand with my palms on the cool stone wall, and whisper to the ghost of the skeleton I’d found.

  It’d started when I was still young, maybe three or four months after I found the skeleton. No one else would listen to me. Beth went to a different school, so I only ever saw her outside term time, and I missed her support desperately. It felt like the only person who might possibly know what I was going through was the person who’d got lost and died out there in the wetlands. When it got too much for me, I would beg my dad to let me stay with Mum for a few days, and then I would come down to the end of her garden like this.

  I’d often imagined who the person in the curraghs had been. They’d had a life, a name. In the absence of the truth, I’d invented details. I pictured a girl my own age, wild and windblown, barefoot, running through the curraghs. I’d even given her a secret name: Bogbean, like the tiny wh
ite flowers that had blossomed in abundance around the gravesite. Sometimes I’d whisper the name aloud, into the silence of the evening air, but I’d never told it to anyone.

  Good thing too. Otherwise it’d be on that stupid website right now.

  My mouth twisted. Bogbean, the lost girl in the wetlands, had always belonged just to me. For fifteen years, whenever I needed to ground myself, I would speak my fears, aloud or inside my head, to Bogbean. Sometimes I imagined I heard the whisper of her answer.

  ‘Simone,’ I murmured now. ‘Is that your real name?’

  There was no answer except the wind in the trees.

  Everything had become so weird and so different, in the space of an evening. All of a sudden, Bogbean had a possible name, a possible life, family, friends. She was no longer a figment of my imagination.

  ‘Who are you?’ I murmured. If I half-closed my eyes, I could imagine Bogbean at my side, just beyond my peripheral vision, leaning her bare forearms on the top of the wall. But she said nothing, not even a whisper or a faint shrug. Right now, no one had any answers.

  I heard the back door open as someone else came outside, but I didn’t turn around. I shut my eyes and breathed the cool air.

  ‘Hey,’ Dallin said from behind me. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ I sighed, then turned to face him. I had a moment of disconnect, because I remembered him as a gangly teenager charging around this garden, leaping the flowerbeds like they were hurdles in his way. Now he looked awkward and out of place in what should’ve been his home. He kept his shoulders hunched, and avoided looking at the twisted trees beyond the back wall of the garden.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Dallin lifted his hands in a shrug. ‘I thought you got my email. I didn’t mean to rock up here without warning. I know you don’t like that sort of shit.’

  ‘I just … I don’t understand why you’re here.’ I gave him a shrug of my own. ‘How did Cora even find you?’

  ‘We met on the forum. I stumbled onto it a while ago, and, y’know, obviously I was interested, because there was at least one person on there who remembered,’ Dallin flapped a hand at the curraghs, still without looking in that direction, ‘all this. I ended up chatting to some of the folks. That’s how I met Cora.’ He came to stand next to me, turning so he could lean his back against the wall, facing the house. ‘I told her I knew about the curraghs legend first-hand. I mean, obviously, that wasn’t something I should’ve done. There’s a lot of crazy people on forums like that. And when Cora told me her story …’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I had to take it with a pinch of salt, you know? I was okay with messaging her and hearing her story, but I was ready to bail if it turned out she was one of the crazies.’

  ‘What convinced you she wasn’t?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt Cora’s story. But then, I always thought the best of people. Yet another thing that had consistently driven Beth nuts.

  ‘She understands it’s a longshot,’ Dallin said. ‘She’s not coming here with a burning sense of surety that this time she’ll definitely find Simone. This has been going on for a lot of years. She says she began looking seriously about three years ago, and she’s not let up since.’

  Why then? I wondered. What had kickstarted her search after so many years, rather than when she was much younger?

  ‘What she’s doing here is following one more possible lead,’ Dallin said. ‘She understands, completely understands this might come to nothing. And she’s prepared for that.’

  ‘So, if I went back in and told Cora I didn’t see anything in the wetlands that day, that I’d made the whole thing up, she’d be okay with it?’

  Dallin laughed. He leaned his head back so he could look at the dusky sky. ‘C’mon, Rose-petal. We all know you didn’t make it up. You invented some daft stories in your time, but you didn’t have that morbid sort of imagination.’

  It was a backhanded compliment at best. ‘You shouldn’t have brought Cora here,’ I muttered. ‘All you’ve done is give her false hope.’

  ‘It’s not false hope. There’s a chance she’ll find something.’

  ‘No, there’s not.’ I turned so I was facing him. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve walked the curraghs? I’ve searched every inch of that place. If there was anything to find, don’t you think I would’ve found it?’

  Dallin gave me a lop-sided smile that was so familiar I had to stop myself smiling in return. ‘Not necessarily. I’m not doubting you. I’m just saying there’s an outside chance you’re wrong.’

  My expression hardened. ‘If you won’t tell her she’s wasting her time, I will.’

  Dallin laughed again and gestured at the house. ‘Go ahead. Let me know if she listens to you, because she sure as hell didn’t listen to me when I told her the exact same thing.’ As I walked away towards the house, he added, ‘I should probably mention, she’s come prepared. Very prepared.’

  Chapter 4

  Cora’s bag was a green satchel, decorated with applique owls. From inside the satchel, she produced a wodge of folded papers, which she spread out on the table.

  ‘There aren’t a lot of maps available online, would you believe that?’ Cora said. ‘But I got what I could and I cross-indexed it with a bunch of aerial photos, so I think we’ve got as accurate a picture of the land as we’re going to get.’

  Dallin put the kettle back on. It looked like he was starting to feel more at home. I ignored another pang of distress. Everything about this situation was distressing. When was the last time there were this many people in my kitchen? My eyes watered from trying to look at both Dallin and Cora at once.

  ‘The main paths run through here and here,’ Cora said. She drew a finger along a pale line that meandered from one corner of an A3 photo to the middle. Her nail polish was a delicate pink, chipped at the tips. ‘As I understand it, there are dozens of other paths that lead off from the main trail. Plus unofficial animal tracks and such. Is that right?’

  I startled, realising the question was addressed to me. ‘Um. Yes.’

  ‘And there aren’t any trail maps of the marshlands? Not even unofficial ones that people or tourists maybe use to find their way?’

  I dropped my gaze to the photos so I didn’t have to maintain eye contact. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If anyone’s walking around the curraghs, they either know where they’re going, or they stick to the main paths.’

  ‘Does anyone ever get lost in there?’ Cora seemed to have a direct way of asking questions which, honestly, was preferable to Dallin’s habit of skirting around every issue. She fished a pencil out of her satchel and held it poised over the maps.

  ‘Depends what you mean by lost.’ I picked up my mug of mint tea, which I’d left sitting on the side. ‘Now and again someone wanders off the trail. Last year a group of ramblers on a wildflower walk got distracted trying to follow a wallaby. It took them an hour to find their way back.’

  Cora’s lips twitched in a frown as she glanced at Dallin. ‘So there really are wild wallabies here?’

  ‘Told you so,’ Dallin said. He stirred a hefty spoonful of demerara sugar into his tea. ‘You owe me a tenner.’

  ‘Forgive me for not believing such a weirdly specific bit of trivia.’ Cora looked at me again. ‘How big are the marshlands anyway? It doesn’t look like much on the photos.’

  ‘It’s not, I guess.’ I was trying to figure out whether our house was on the photos. It was difficult to tell from the aerial shots. ‘It’s not the biggest area of forest on the island, not by a very long way. But it’s easy to get lost in there. It’s—’ My throat went dry. How to describe the curraghs to an outsider? Looking at those maps and photos, it was difficult to imagine how anyone, even a child, could lose their way in such a small patch of land.

  ‘Are you able,’ Cora asked, ‘to narrow it down at all? When you found the body, do you know roughly where you were? Even as little as, “more to the north” or “more to the south”?’

  I chewed my lip. ‘Listen, I don’t kn
ow what you’re expecting from me. But I was a kid. I don’t even know – I’m not certain what I saw.’ I closed my eyes. For so many years I’d insisted on telling the truth, even when no one believed me. Now, with a person who for some crazy reason did believe me, I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.

  But I had to try. Because, as I knew perfectly well, no hope was better than false hope.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘you have to accept that what you think you saw isn’t necessarily what you did see. Especially when you’re a child. People searched the curraghs. I searched. No one found anything.’ I lifted my chin and shook the stray wisps of hair out of my face. ‘I was mistaken. There’s nothing here for you to find. I’m sorry.’

  A few seconds passed in silence. Then Cora said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being honest. There’s been a lot of people over the years who’ve been happy to spin me a story, for whatever reason.’ Despite the way she held herself with hunched shoulders and restless fingers, there was steel in Cora’s gaze. ‘Some people will do anything for attention.’

  Dallin took a tentative sip of his tea; grimaced. ‘Rosie, you’ve stuck to your story for fifteen solid years,’ he said. ‘This is a fine time to start doubting yourself.’

  I glared at him. ‘Please stop calling me Rosie.’

  ‘Oh, right. You hate that.’ He smirked. ‘I totally forgot.’

  Cora studied the maps. ‘Is there anything you can tell us which wasn’t on forum? Any details we might’ve missed?’

  I pulled up a chair and sat down, suddenly exhausted. My heart went out to the poor woman. ‘I can’t help you find your sister,’ I repeated. ‘Even if what I saw when I was a kid … even if I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating or—’ I set my jaw. ‘—or making it up. Even if I really did find a human skeleton that day, there’s very little possibility there’s anything left of it by now. It could’ve sunk into the bog without a trace. The bones could’ve been scattered.’ I watched Cora as I spoke, anxious not to cause more upset than I had to. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find it again. I never have. Neither has anyone else. There’s every chance there’s nothing out there to find. I can’t lead you to your sister.’