‘Delicious,’ Lara said.
‘So you want to see something special, Jack?’ Betty said, squatting down so she was level with him.
‘The fish?’ Jack said, his eyes expectant.
‘Even better than the fish.’
Jack nodded and took Betty’s hand. She led him inside to a recess under the stairs.
‘Look,’ she whispered, leaning on the banister to kneel. Jack sank to his knees, craned forward to see, then gasped with delight.
There, tucked away in the shadows, was a basket of kittens in full fluff. Betty picked one up and held it out for Jack, who looked up at Lara for permission.
‘One minute.’ Lara rummaged in her bag for his antihistamines and a bottle of water. ‘He’s allergic,’ she said to Betty.
‘Oh God, sorry,’ Betty said.
‘Don’t worry.’ Lara handed Jack the pill. ‘I always carry these. They keep him safe for ten hours.’
Dosed up, Jack turned back to the kitten and took hold of it as if it were a piece of thistledown. It nestled into his arms like it had been born to be there. Jack looked up at Lara with such a smile on his face that she felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. This then was innocence.
‘Coyote got the mother,’ Betty whispered to Lara. She turned to Jack. ‘It’s feed time. Do you want to do it? Let me show you how.’
Betty went to the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a teat pipette and a small jug of milk. She showed Jack how to tease the kitten with the milky glass tube and gently push the bulb to let the milk come down as it sucked.
‘That should keep him amused for a while,’ Betty said. ‘Now then,
Mamacita
, come and sip ice tea and tell Betty everything.’
Lara sat at the kitchen table and handed Betty the malevolent note. Slipping on a pair of leopard-print reading spectacles, she read it, smelled it, and put it down on the table between them, wrinkling her nose.
‘So. You need to be told to leave Stephen alone?’ she said, not unkindly.
‘Nothing’s happened …’ Lara said. ‘But, as you said to me yourself, the only important thing in this life is love.’ She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes. She should shut up. Talking about it just brought her one step closer to committing to it.
‘Oh Lara,’ Betty said. ‘You and I are of a piece. We’re both romantics. Do you want me to tell you about this note?’
‘Yes,’ Lara said into her hands.
‘You’ve no doubt heard most of it. It’s hardly been a secret. You see, things happened in LA that made poor Stephen very sick. If you’re in the public eye, you attract a lot of attention and he was no different. But there was this one particular person – this Elizabeth Sanders – who became so convinced he was the one for her that, when he failed to respond to the barrage of messages she sent him, she went berserk. At first it was innocuous things like eggs broken on his car, or items turning up that he hadn’t ordered. But it got worse, and then the threats started coming.’
‘Threats?’
‘It was awful. Real physical threats.’
‘Why didn’t he go to the police?’
‘He did at first, but it was so slow – she covered her tracks well and it was hard to prove that it was coming from her. She kept herself hidden and they never found her, never got a description. It drove Stephen crazy. She went into hiding and continued to wage her campaign against him. Then his management, freaked by the amount of publicity the case was attracting – not good, they said, for his hard man image – made him drop his complaint, in the hope she would just disappear. But of course it just got worse. Stephen started having these “accidents”. It got so he didn’t dare go out. All he could do was sit and drink away the fear.’
‘I thought he didn’t drink.’
‘Not any more. James and I were in New York at the time. When we got back to LA we were shocked at how we found him. It’s hard to imagine, seeing him now, but he looked
awful
. So we smuggled him out of town and into three months of rehab in Utah, which had the added bonus of hiding him away from Elizabeth Sanders. Then he more or less came straight out here to stay with us while he searched for a place to buy. We hid all our booze at the back of the barn and only drank when he was away. Can you imagine? Like two naughty teenagers.’
‘And the chick? And the note?’
Betty leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t know how she’s done it, but she’s tracked him down.’ She picked up the note and waved it at Lara. ‘This is completely her style, if that doesn’t dignify it too much. We’ve done everything we can to hide him, but she’s found him. Did your kids let anything out?’
‘No,’ Lara said, hoping she was right. ‘They’re good kids. They wouldn’t do that. They understand Stephen has to be discreet.’
Betty sat back, crossed her arms and looked at Lara. They could hear Jack cooing at the kittens in the hallway.
‘Besides,’ Lara said, ‘there was this woman watching us just after we left your party, just after we met Stephen. And you remember that strange person in the diner? I think it might be her.’ Lara told Betty about the laundromat incident. ‘You thought there was something odd about her too, didn’t you?’
‘I never actually saw Sanders,’ Betty said, frowning. ‘And you’re right. I didn’t exactly get a nice vibe off that diner woman. But I didn’t expect …’ She fell silent, her eyes closed, their long spidery lashes casting shadows on her cheeks. Lara could almost hear her brain working.
‘OK, honey,’ Betty said at last, examining her beautifully manicured fingers. ‘There are two things you have to do now.’
‘What?’
‘First, and this is most important: Stephen must not know Elizabeth Sanders has followed him out here.’
‘What good will that do?’
‘He is more delicate than you think, honey. If he finds out, it will kill him. I saw how desperate he got last time.’
‘But she’s not going to go away, is she?’ Lara said.
‘No. And that’s where you come in.’ Betty leaned forward again. ‘She’s obviously on your trail. I want you to see if you can work out who she is, what she looks like. Gather the evidence like a detective. And then, when we’ve built our case, we can go to the police and get the whole thing quickly cleared up before Stephen even knows about it.’
‘But isn’t she dangerous? What about us?’
Betty fixed her with a stern look. ‘Lara, this is for
Stephen Molloy
’s sake.’
Lara frowned, taken aback. Betty had said his name as if he were some sort of deity, as if she should sacrifice everything for him.
‘And the other thing,’ Betty went on.
‘Other thing?’
‘I said there are two things you have to do, remember, honey?’
‘Go on,’ Lara said, feeling her cheeks burn.
‘It’s vital that
Macbeth
goes well. For the theatre, for James, for me, for Marcus. In addition to not telling Stephen about his little nemesis turning up, I urge you to exercise some caution in your dealings with him.’
‘Dealings?’
Betty turned to look at Lara. Every ounce of warmth had drained from her face, so, for the first time, she looked her age. ‘I don’t want you to upset Marcus
in any way
until the end of the run. Is that understood? If you do, you will have me to answer to, and, believe me, I do not take prisoners.’
Lara pushed her half-drunk glass of iced tea away from her and looked at Betty. So she had been rumbled, and, as punishment, her autonomy and safety had been stripped from her. She remembered how it had been when, as a child, her views had never been taken into account about anything, when her parents, looking down at her from their adult platform, viewed her as an entirely different species to themselves, something on an altogether lower branch of the evolutionary scale. That was exactly what was being done to her now.
‘So then, honey,’ Betty said, standing up and clapping her hands together, her beautiful kimono flapping like the wings of a large raptor. ‘Let’s go and see how dear little Jack is doing with the fluffy little kits.’
SEAN PULLED THE NISSAN OFF THE TRACK AND SWERVED ON TO THE
spongy grass at the side of the pond. He cut the engine and turned to smile at Bella.
‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ he said, pulling her close and kissing her.
‘Swim?’ she said.
‘Sure thing.’
They got out of the car and Sean fetched the blankets, the beer and the picnic from the boot. Hand in hand, they walked round to the other side of the pond, which in England would have been called a lake. Sean shook the blanket out on to the leaf-littered ground at the edge of a jetty with a round inflatable dinghy tethered to it. On their first visit to this, Sean’s cousin’s pond, they had drifted out on the dinghy to the middle of the water, where they had spent the whole afternoon, lazily making love, sunbathing, and swimming in among the trout and bullfrogs that inhabited the cool, stone-lined pool.
Initially Bella had been worried about being discovered, but Sean reassured her no one ever came up to the pond on weekdays. It was also five miles out of the village, two miles off the main road, and right in the middle of privately owned land, so there was no chance of anyone accidentally coming across them. By this, their fourth visit together, she was completely relaxed about being up here, lying naked on the blanket on the ground with her boy, spending the whole afternoon kissing, touching and whispering with him. It was like Eden for her.
They pulled off their clothes and ran hand in hand along the jetty to throw themselves into the water, where they made love for the first time that afternoon, the frenzied, unstoppable fuck they had been desperate for since he had picked her up from the creepy old house.
On the way, as he drove, Sufjan Stevens strumming his laid-back stuff out of the car’s old cassette player, Sean had told her about the history of the Larssen place, about the old man, the cannibal dogs and the mad sister. Bella’s eyes had grown large and round.
‘No way,’ she had said. ‘That is so cool.’
‘I love you,’ he said, as, a little later, they lay on the blanket, the glow from their lovemaking spreading through them as they sipped ice-cold beer. A dragonfly flashed iridescence across the jade-green surface of the pond. ‘I want to spend my life with you,’ he whispered in her ear.
‘Me too you.’ Bella drew him close and held him to her breast.
Sensible, sensitive, serious and totally reliable, Sean was different from any other boy she had ever known. Had someone proposed those qualities to her before she met him, she would have yawned and pronounced them boring. But in him – well, they were anything but.
Olly had always had this idea that she and he were two parts of the same person. He’d banged on about it since they were quite young. She had never bought into his theory, and as things got more complicated between them she had actively denied it, suspecting she could actually be a whole being in her own right.
Meeting Sean made her realise that while she was complete in herself, at the same time he fitted with her – not only physically, but with every part of her. He completed her in a way that Olly never, ever could, no matter how hard he pushed for it.
She felt warmed through, like caramel. The sun dappled on her naked skin between the broad leaves of the trees around the pond and, with the still heat, the slight wooziness from the beer, and the scraped-clean feeling of making love in the water, she found herself dozing off.
‘What was that?’ she said, sitting bolt upright. Something had moved in the trees, crashing through the undergrowth, startling them both awake.
Sean sat still for a moment, listening carefully, slowly scanning the forest. Then he relaxed and lay back down again, propping his head on his hand, looking at her. ‘A deer,’ he said, pulling her towards him with his free hand. ‘Probably.’
‘Or a bear,’ Bella said, resisting him, sitting up and hugging her legs. ‘Or a mountain lion.’
‘Very unlikely. And if it was, they wouldn’t come anywhere near us – they’re more frightened of us than we are of them, you know.’
‘Yeah, yeah, country boy,’ Bella said, turning towards him. She traced the side of his face with her finger and bent to kiss him. He lifted his hand to her breast and she shifted and swung one leg over him, straddling him.
‘I’m not scared with you here,’ she said, easing him inside her.
‘Too right.’ Sean smiled up at her.
She began to move on top of him, slowly. Sean closed his eyes and put his hands on her hips.
‘Oh, Bella …’
Then there was a great crash and four swaying figures sprang out of the trees, rifles aimed at them. It all happened so quickly it took a minute for Bella to realise that one of them was a twitching, chewing, pinprick-pupilled Olly. His face was made up with camouflage paint and his bloodshot eyes roved over the scene.
‘Tracked you,’ he snarled.
The insects in the grass and trees, the crickets and cicadas and katydids, all fell silent. A bullfrog plopped from the lily pad where he was sunning himself into the safety of the water, spreading ripples across the pond. Bella jumped off Sean and pulled the blanket over them both.
‘Olly, what the FUCK?’ she said.
‘Look what we’ve got here, then,’ Olly slurred to his companions. ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves some real good game.’ He motioned to the three others, who slowly formed a circle around them. Bella recognised them as the gang from the playground. They were all filthy, covered in dust and sweat, and quite clearly off their faces. One, a tall, lanky boy with a shaved head and bad acne, had a joint stuck between his lips and a rucksack on his back. Another, fat and missing a front tooth, was giggling, a horrible, high-pitched snicker. The third, a short, stocky, blond boy, stood right by Bella, his grubby, bulging crotch level with her eye.
She looked up at her brother.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking that of you?’ he said, reaching for the joint. His pinprick eyes bulged and his mouth worked around his words. ‘What did I say to you about seeing this creep? And now what do I find you doing? Camera!’ he barked, holding out his hand. The boy with the erection handed an iPhone to Olly, who took a photograph of Bella and Sean cowering under the blanket. ‘We got some great footage, Bella. While you were in the pond.’