Olivia’s voice rises and falls above me as I stand in the hallway of Blossom Hill House. Silently, I close the front door and move to the foot of the stairs. I can’t make out the words, but I hear the urgency, the sharp snap of her tone. I creep up each step, avoiding the creaky ones as I go. She’s in her room, the door part-way open.
‘What am I supposed to do now?’ she says.
A pause.
‘But she knows something. She—’
Silence. A different kind of silence. Not a pause in conversation as she listens to whoever is on the other end of the phone. The kind of silence that makes the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rise.
My insides twist as the door swings open. Our eyes meet. Her surprise at seeing me quickly hardens to anger. She slams the door shut and I skitter back down the stairs. I’m pacing the kitchen, wondering how I can explain my eavesdropping, when I see a mobile on the kitchen island. I pick it up. It’s Olivia’s. The one I gave to her. So then, whose phone was she using just now?
‘What’re you doing?’ I jump at the sound of Olivia’s voice and pivot towards her. She’s standing so close; we are almost nose to nose. ‘That’s mine,’ she says and holds out her hand, palm up, just as she did with the gold-bee journal all those years ago. Back then, she was determination and sugar. Now, she is steel and ice. A stranger.
Panic and that sickening feeling of being caught swirls in my stomach as I relinquish the phone. ‘Who were you talking to?’
‘When?’
‘Just now, you were on the phone.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘I heard you.’
Her smile is cold. ‘I wasn’t on the phone. How could I be when it was down here?’
‘My question exactly.’
Deciding the conversation is over, she turns away from me and opens the kitchen drawer.
But I refuse to be dismissed. ‘Only drug dealers have two phones, Olivia.’
She turns, brandishing a knife as long as my forearm. A cold, clammy bolt of fear shoots through me as I realise I am alone with her. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ Then she takes a large bar of dark chocolate from the fridge and chops it into smaller pieces. The sound of the knife hitting the wooden board jangles my nerves. She tips the chocolate into a bowl, leaving the knife on the side. It feels like a threat. She slinks towards me and simpers with feigned concern. ‘You seem really tense, Caitie. You should go for a lie down.’ Then she pops a square of chocolate onto her tongue and smiles like she has won.
She is a completely different person to the one she was this morning. Like a switch has been flipped. An actor changing roles, swinging from damsel to villain in an instant.
As she walks away, I hear Gideon telling me to be braver. To be a person that makes things happen. ‘Our cousin’s name is Edward. Not Edmund,’ I tell her, retreating back because I want her to know I’m onto her. That she hasn’t won because the game isn’t over.
She pauses, the hand that was reaching for the door, suspended in mid-air. Slowly, she turns, and though she appears composed, I can tell I’ve ruffled her perfect feathers. She closes the distance between us. Her gaze travels leisurely over my face. Her eyes narrow. ‘If you have something to say, little sister, just come out and say it.’
It is a dare. My heart races in response, breaths coming hard and fast. But I can’t. The words stick to the roof of my mouth. Not because I’m afraid or because I think I might be right, but because I am desperate to be wrong.
Her smile is all satisfaction and triumph. ‘Didn’t think so.’
I go to bed early but can’t sleep. I toss and turn and remember Olivia reading me The Princess and the Pea when we were children, only the pea that bruises my back now is the hardening certainty that she isn’t who she claims to be. While the girl I split a crème brûlée with, who pealed with laughter repeating ‘aureolin’ in the park, felt like my sister, the woman downstairs who lied and smirked, did not. All the sisterly moments that came before the confrontation in the kitchen were an act. How far is she willing to go to keep it up? And what will she do to me if she thinks I could expose her? Is this a scam? If so, what’s the goal? Money, fame, revenge? But revenge for what? And who was she on the phone to earlier? I must find her second mobile. Maybe she was talking to the masked man. It’s possible they’re working together. But to what end? And how do I play this game if I don’t know the rules?
I could go to the police with my suspicions, but once that inevitably gets back to my parents, they’ll be devastated. They think they have their little girl back. If I try to come between them now, I won’t be believed. I need irrefutable proof. I need that phone.
I’m not sure what wakes me, but I am ripped from a dream I can’t remember. The only feeling worse than waking up alone in the dark is sensing that you aren’t alone at all. I lie still, blinking into the blackness of my bedroom. My phone is on the nightstand but I am too afraid to reach for it. There’s the steady rhythm of someone else’s breath in this room. I feel them in here with me. In my peripheral, a figure emerges. Heart in my throat, I whip my head towards it.
‘Olivia?’ I breathe.
Eyes adjusting to the gloom, I make out her waist-length hair and lithe limbs. She drifts closer. A silent ghost. She looms over me. A crush of fear presses down, squeezing the breath out of my body and holding me in place. She could have a knife. She could plunge it into my flesh and bone and I will bleed to death in this bed. I open my mouth to beg for my life but only a whistle of air escapes. Then she steps back. Moves towards my bedroom door and leaves without a word. When I’m sure she’s gone, I push myself onto my elbows and stare after her; my heart still pounds. The house is silent now. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t … Was it?
I climb out of bed and turn down the hall towards her room. The door is ajar and through the gap I see her sleeping soundly. Am I losing my mind?
Crawling back to bed isn’t an option, I know I won’t sleep. So I go downstairs to make a tea. I’m quiet and don’t turn on any lights in case I wake my parents, though the kettle sounds like a small rocket taking off. There’s enough moonlight streaming in through the window that I find the teabags and mugs with ease. By the time I’m filling it with boiling water, I’ve convinced myself I dreamt Olivia in my room.
I’m halfway out of the kitchen, tea in hand, when I hear scratch, scratch, scratch, behind me. I stop. Dread starts in the pit of my stomach and slowly replaces my blood pint for pint.
It comes again, louder this time.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
I need to turn around. I know I need to turn around. There is someone behind me and I need to turn around. I take a breath. And slowly, I pivot. The shock is immediate. There, pressed up against the kitchen window, is the man in the Venetian mask. Closer to me now than he has been in sixteen years. The long, curved nose and furious, furrowed brow makes that old terror yawn open inside me; it rushes up and out of my mouth on a scream. I leap back and tea sloshes over the rim of my mug, splashing across my hand. I scream again, this time in blistering pain. I drop the mug and it shatters. More scalding tea is thrown across my bare feet and up my legs. Above me comes the thunder of frantic footfalls. A moment later, my mother tumbles into the kitchen. ‘What is it? I heard a scream. Are you OK? What happened?’
The light is flicked on and I am momentarily blind. Dad pushes into the kitchen, Olivia at his heels. All three pairs of eyes, wide with panic, are fixed on me.
Mum spots the smashed mug and my red, raw hands. ‘Caitie!’ She grabs them for a better look. I yelp. ‘Cold water. Now.’
Terror still writhing beneath my skin like a living thing, I look towards the window. Towards the masked man. But he’s gone.
‘What were you doing making tea in the bloody dark?’ Dad barks at me as Mum ushers me to the sink.
I pull back, rearing like a defiant horse. ‘No,’ I burble. ‘No.’ Mum reaches for me again. ‘Stop! Listen, the masked man was here. At the window.’
‘What?’ says Olivia, backing away. ‘He’s …’ she splutters. ‘He’s here?’
Dad rips open the French door as Mum yells for him to stay inside. He barrels outside, barefoot and unarmed. Ignoring the blistering, tight skin across my burned feet, I sprint in the opposite direction, towards the police officer still stationed in a car outside the front of the house. The second he sees me stumbling up the path, he bolts into action. Soon I am back in the kitchen waiting with shredded nerves as he and my father search the garden. Olivia has shut herself upstairs in the bathroom where Mum tries unsuccessfully to soothe her. If Olivia isn’t Olivia, she deserves a fucking Emmy, but I don’t have time to dwell on that before Dad and the police officer return.
‘There’s no one there,’ says Dad, the unmistakable snap of accusation clear. And when he looks at me, I see it in his eyes too: liar.