Michelle had been uneasy ever since she and Nick had spoken to Andy. Now, on her way out to the Ashbourne Road, she replayed things in her head. She had to know why Lydia Davis was so reluctant to talk about Caitlin. Why it was that she’d had no contact with her niece after the accident, that she wanted no contact with her now even though she was a grown woman and probably the only relative she had?
When she neared the mobile home, she saw a lamp was burning. The soft yellow light was a beacon in the darkness of Thornton’s field. Michelle pulled up outside the gate and reached into the back of the car for the bag she’d brought with a bottle of brandy and a few groceries. It had been a while since her last visit and she hoped Lydia would be just as pliable as last time once she saw the gifts Michelle bore. She heard the television playing as she tapped softly on the door.
‘Who’s there?’ Lydia asked through the closed door.
‘It’s Michelle. I’ve brought you a few things.’
The door opened a crack and the woman peered out suspiciously. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. She eyed the bag and then stood back for Michelle to enter. As she closed the door behind her, Michelle noticed that she had a small wooden bat in her hand. ‘Can’t be too careful out here,’ Lydia told her when she saw Michelle looking. She hung the bat on a hook inside the door.
‘Tea?’ Lydia asked.
‘Sure, that’d be lovely.’
‘Kettle’s over there. You might make me one while you’re at it. Unless you’ve something stronger in that bag?’
Michelle went to the counter, turned on the kettle and began emptying out the bag of groceries. She handed the brandy to Lydia who took it and immediately screwed the top off.
‘It’s been a while since I last saw you.’
‘Yeah, my boyfriend is sick.’ She thought about telling Lydia about the transplant, but changed her mind when she saw her guzzle the brandy. What was the point in scaring her? She didn’t need to know about that anyway. She still hadn’t decided how much of the story she would tell her. She needed to keep the focus on Caitlin and see how she reacted.
They sat for a while. Michelle sipped her tea, waited for the brandy to loosen Lydia’s tongue. She didn’t want to mention Caitlin too soon lest the woman clam up and tell her nothing.
‘Did you write that article in the end?’ Lydia asked her suddenly.
Michelle shook her head. ‘No. I decided not to. What you told me, it seemed too private, and I told you I wouldn’t, not without your go-ahead. Your family suffered so much it didn’t seem right for me to exploit that.’
Lydia made some sound, a grunt of appreciation maybe.
‘How did you end up living out here?’ Michelle asked her.
The woman shrugged. ‘Didn’t feel like living among people. The neighbours were keen enough that I move on too. The way they looked at me … I stopped going out, was housebound for years, the neighbourhood pariah. Not that I’d ever belonged among them anyway. I’ve always been a private person, didn’t like to mix, if you did they’d be on the doorstep day and night. I made that mistake when I moved back. Is that how you found me, someone on the estate told you?’
Michelle nodded. ‘A woman two doors down from your old house said a man called Thornton let you live on his land.’
Lydia took another mouthful of brandy. She was drinking it too fast, the liquor making her words come easy.
‘Bill’s an old friend of mine.’ It was the smile that pulled at the corners of her mouth that suggested that Bill Thornton may have been more than an old friend, at least at one time.
‘Does he know?’
‘About the past? Sure, Bill knows everything. I’ve been close to Bill since we were kids, used to run in the fields together, wild we were. He was the only one I could turn to after it happened, the only one who wouldn’t judge. It seemed like our family was cursed, first Daniel, then Johnny and what he did to Rachel.’
‘If it’s a curse, it hasn’t been lifted,’ Michelle ventured.
Lydia Davis lowered the bottle to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A year ago Caitlin’s husband went missing. There are no leads – he seems to have just vanished off the face of the earth.’
‘How do you know Caitlin?’
‘She owns a women’s weekly. I work with the Simon Community and she ran an article I did about homelessness.’
‘Was it her who sent you up here? She wants the details about what happened to her mother. If it wasn’t for that child …’ Her anger, sudden like the flare of a match, surprised Michelle.
‘No, she doesn’t know anything about my being here.’ Michelle paused. ‘Look, I’m going to level with you, Lydia. The reason I’m here is because some people suspect that Caitlin’s husband didn’t simply go missing, that maybe something … sinister happened. This is nothing journalistic, I’m not snooping for a story here, it’s personal. My boyfriend, Nick, he owes Caitlin, there was something … between them in the past and I’m worried he may be getting involved in something he shouldn’t.’ She paused, looking down at her hands steepled in her lap. ‘Last time I was out here, you told me about the accident – when Caitlin and her brother were little. Did Daniel really fall from the treehouse? Did Caitlin do something …?’
Lydia stared at Michelle, then shook her head and looked away. ‘It’s the reason I didn’t adopt her … people wondered, thought I was a heartless bitch allowing them to take her like that.’ She stopped and swigged from the bottle, leaving the top off. ‘I saw them through the kitchen window. Somehow, she’d got him up there, he was too small to climb that ladder on his own. He was teetering at the edge and I saw her reach out … next thing he was on the ground, and I was running, but it was no good …’
‘Are you saying she pushed him?’
Lydia was crying now, her mouth jagged as she tried to suppress the tears that ran freely down her lined face. ‘I could never be sure, but yes I think she might have. I told Johnny, but of course he didn’t believe it. He thought I was saying it to take the blame off myself. That it was my fault, no one else’s.’ She took a moment to compose herself, swiping at the tears with the sleeve of her sweater. ‘Of course, they spoiled her – they were totally wrapped up in her and she in them until Daniel came along. Then they had someone else to consider and she didn’t like that – she used to pretend to be sick just to get their attention. For a whole month she refused to go to school until finally Rachel made her. She became clingy and difficult. She didn’t like anyone else being near her parents, me included. I don’t know where it came from, such a possessive streak. It wasn’t from Johnny, you might think so, given what happened, but no … he’d never been jealous before the accident. If anything, he’d probably been too laid back when it came to Rachel and Brendan’s friendship, but the way he looked at it, they’d known each other for years. If something was going to happen, it would have done so before he came along.’
Clingy. Difficult. If Caitlin’s jealousy had driven her to shove her little brother from a treehouse, there was no telling how it might have manifested itself in adulthood, was there? Michelle looked directly at Lydia. ‘Caitlin’s husband was having an affair,’ she said.
Lydia didn’t answer but gave her a sharp, knowing look and raised the bottle to her lips again. ‘That girl,’ she said, ‘is capable of anything.’