Afraid to take the bracelet back into the house with everyone inside, I scour the shed for a suitable hiding place until I can return and remove it safely. Carefully, I wrap it back up in the bin liner and slide it down behind the old metal filing cabinet. It wedges about halfway – easy for me to retrieve, but not visible unless you move the cabinet. As it’s been here, in this same position, for the best part of five years and is filled with tools, I’m confident it’s a good place to conceal it for now.
After stepping lightly over the grass and back around the side of the house, I slip through the front door, wiping my damp, muddy feet on the mat. The harsh bristles hurt my soles, but I can’t walk mud through the house. If Mark sees I’ve been outside again – muddy again – too many questions will be asked. Although, maybe claiming a blackout is the cause of my state might be a good plan. I can’t answer any questions then, and Mark wouldn’t force it because he knows I have no awareness when I’m experiencing one.
It’s still preferable to avoid him seeing me at all, so I manage to sneak into the en suite just as Mark’s alarm wakes him. I get in the shower, the jets of water loud in my ears, drowning out Mark’s muffled words through the locked door. My heart pounds as the hot spray washes over me. I tilt my face up into the stream of water, my eyes screwed tight as thoughts scramble around in my head. The fact Olivia’s bracelet has been left, not another dead animal, is a massive deviation if it’s from the same person. So, why the animals first and not simply the bracelet? It seems a lot of trouble to go to, to get my attention. Unless … Is it possible they were testing me? Before leaving potential evidence of an abduction – even murder, although I’m very much hoping that’s not the outcome – perhaps they were making sure I didn’t go to the police with the first bin liners. Confident I didn’t, they’ve now left this, knowing I’m unlikely to hand it over to police in fear of somehow implicating myself.
Which makes me think it really is someone who knows who I am. Because being the daughter of an infamous serial killer puts me firmly under the microscope. And I can’t, with one hundred per cent certainty, say where I was the night Olivia was taken, which means I daren’t take an item belonging to the missing person to the police saying I happened to find it on my doorstep.
I know, though, that my plan to hide it, alongside the other things I keep hidden from Mark, is only a short-term solution. Destroying it all is the only way to protect myself. I’m guessing whoever is doing this to me is doing it for a reason – the most obvious now being to frame me for Olivia’s abduction – and the more I think about it, likely murder. Because, I reckon that’s the next development. Olivia’s body will be found and the police will be led to me. That’s their plan. I feel it in my gut. Olivia’s murder will be pinned on me, like the butterfly pinned to the animal corpses. I’ve been marked.
I have to find out who is behind this before they destroy my life.