Lara felt like a baby after its dunk in the font.
‘Where are we going?’ she said.
‘Into the woods,’ Stephen said. ‘We’ll take this.’ He picked up a torch from the boot store on the deck. ‘It might be dark by the time we get back.’
‘Do you think it’s wise to go out there?’ Offset by the glistening grass, the trees looked especially black to Lara.
‘Despite what Lady Betty might think, I am more than capable of looking after us.’ Stephen put his arm around her, turning her and pointing to the trees. ‘I know these woods as if they were my wife. As I know you.’ Lara reached up and drew his mouth down towards hers. They kissed, and she felt his hand move up inside her red vest top, on to her breast.
‘Come on,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘We’d best get moving. Or it really will be dark.’
‘And I said I’d be back by eight.’ It was already six thirty and the drive back to Trout Island was a good half-hour.
‘I’ll make sure you’re back on time,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘I know.’
They climbed up through the woods, just like they did when they went blueberry picking, except this time there was no Jack and they had their arms wrapped around each other. The rain had left the undergrowth and canopy soaking wet, drenching their legs and showering their heads as they stopped from time to time to kiss.
‘What if she sees us?’ Lara said. ‘What if she’s watching?’
‘Let her. Do you know? For the first time since she started plaguing me, she has lost the ability to scare me. I feel …’ he said, breathing in the washed air around them, ‘… I feel invincible.’ He turned to her, picked her up and swung her round, laughing. ‘You have made me a Superman!’
Lara believed him. How could she be anything other than safe by his side?
They moved on, up towards the summit of the hill.
‘You couldn’t guess,’ he said, helping her over a large branch that the storm had brought down across the path, ‘how unable I’ve been to buckle down to anything since we parted yesterday.’
‘I think I have some idea,’ she said.
‘I kept on thinking I should be preparing for your arrival, building a bower, putting on a feast. But I also know, you and me, we don’t need any props.’
He paused to pick a small wild strawberry he had spotted at his feet. He turned and put it on her tongue.
‘So I’ve been outside, almost all the time. I’ve done two long runs. I chopped wood, weeded, and harvested my tomatoes. I did a bit of coppicing, mended a drystone wall. I kept myself busy to stop myself spontaneously combusting. And then I thought I’d go out and try and find that bear again. See if I could get a picture or two.’
‘See if you could face him down again.’ Lara squeezed his hand.
‘Now then, you. I just wanted to take photographs,’ Stephen said. ‘But he wasn’t around. So, while I was up there, I thought I’d go on, perhaps take a swim in my pond – I’ll show you that very soon – and on the way I checked in on that derelict house – the one I told you about.’
They reached the blueberry clearing and stood silently for a few moments. There was no sign of the bear, or anything else untoward: no crashing in the undergrowth, no twigs cracking on the forest floor. As far as they could tell, they were on their own.
They moved on, back into the trees at the other side of the clearing, where the path zigzagged down a steep hill.
‘Another half-mile and we’d be at the best swimming pond in New York State,’ Stephen said as they scrunched down through decades of leaf-litter. ‘Spring-fed, it’s the sweetest, clearest water you’ll have swum in.’
He held back a low, heavily leafed branch. ‘This is what I found,’ he said as he revealed a single-storey stone house on an earth terrace. There were gaps where the windows and doors had been, but the roof was still intact. A drystone wall made a perimeter around the building, and this had kept the undergrowth at bay, although a maple sapling was working its way out of one of the window holes.
‘Brr.’ Lara shivered.
‘Look inside,’ Stephen said, flashing his torch through the doorway.
Peering in, Lara saw a stained sleeping bag, an old hearth with the remains of a recently built fire in it, a litter of empty food containers and wrappers, and a half-full gallon-sized water container. On the floor, spelled out in large twig and leaf letters, and enclosed within the outline of a heart made of small stones, were the letters ES + SM. It was the dolls, though, that made the goosebumps rise on Lara’s neck. Fashioned out of bird skulls, bone bits and root fibres, the bigger one had material from Stephen’s shirt wrapped around it – the shirt that had had been stolen from the launderette. The other wore a piece of Lara’s green top. Lara looked up at Stephen, who had come in behind her.
‘I washed it and hung it out to dry the day after you first came here,’ he said, reading the question in her eyes. ‘It disappeared. Thought a bear had got it. I’d done a great job on the wine stain, too.’
Lara looked back down at the dolls. Each had six big thorns stuck into its torso.
‘Spines from the devil’s walking stick. Grows all the way through my forests,’ Stephen said.
‘Ouch,’ Lara said. ‘So she’s playing Witch. How long do you think she’s been in here?’
‘I dropped by about ten days ago, on my way for a swim. It was completely empty. This is all new. Fuck her.’ For a second he seemed to lose control, kicking at the stone heart and the bird-skull dolls, the sleeping bag and the water bottle.
‘Steady.’ Lara laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re spoiling our evidence.’
He looked at her, fire in his eyes.
‘She’s trying to destroy us,’ he said. He broke away from her and stormed outside to the gloom of the forest.
‘Come out, Sanders,’ he yelled, holding his gun ready. ‘Come out and face us.’
But only silence answered him.
‘I want to go back to the house now,’ Lara said, placing a calming hand on him. The light was fading fast – the patches of sky between the trees turned from pink to grey. Even with Stephen by her side, even with a torch, she didn’t fancy being out here when the final tint of light dissolved and they were slung into pitch black.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking around in a way that told her he, too, wanted the shelter of four walls.
Silently they picked their way through the brambles and vines that seemed to have grown up behind them since they started out.
Stephen held his gun ahead of him like a soldier moving through a jungle, like he had in his award-winning role in that Vietnam movie. Lara lit their way with the torch. Time was moving on. She should think about setting off back to Trout Island. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay with Stephen and she didn’t want him to be on his own with
that woman
somewhere out in those trees, watching him.
Also, she didn’t think she could drive down that dark mountain on her own, in that unreliable car, with that fear of hers of evil eyes popping up in the rear-view mirror. It was bad enough back home, night-driving through benign, leafy Home Counties English lanes. But here, in a landscape used for thousands of celluloid nightmares, with the additional threat of an authentic madwoman on the loose, she didn’t see how she would get back to the village without collapsing in dread.
So, when they reached his porch and he drew her to him and asked if she would stay a bit longer, she was quick to agree.
He unlocked the door and they both went in, but he didn’t put the lights on. Using the torch, he led her to the living room and drew her down on to the big leather sofa. She held herself close to him, pressing her head against his chest.
‘Tell me about her. Tell me what she did to you.’
She stretched her legs along his and listened to the rumble of his voice.
‘I started getting these text messages from someone. They weren’t so sinister to begin with. Flattering stuff about my work, that sort of thing. A bit weird, you know, coming from someone you don’t know. But it happens. It’s part of the deal you make with the devil in this game. Like not being able to walk down the street without people wanting your autograph or to talk to you. Sometimes you want them to go away, but you have to be civil. You have to be polite.
‘Then the messages started getting personal – about my body, about what this person would like to do with me. I ignored them, thinking the sender would get bored and stop, but my silence only seemed to egg her on. I started finding these handwritten notes pinned to my door, written in green capitals, with the unique prose style and questionable spelling that told me they were from the same sender. I also found them on my trailer door if I was working, or tucked behind my car windscreen wipers.’
‘Scary,’ Lara said, stroking his beautiful forearm. Each slender muscle was distinct. The real fibre of him under her fingertips.
‘Exactly.’ He put his lips to her hair. ‘But then the messages began to get proprietorial – the shirt I was wearing didn’t suit me, I shouldn’t be ordering that for my dinner at Ugo’s. Things started turning up on my doorstep: bottles of whisky, boxes of chocolates, bunches of flowers, teddy bears. Teddy bears! Deliveries of pizza, books and clothing would arrive – stuff I never ordered. I changed my phone number three times, and employed a security guard at my gate, but she always managed to find a way to get to me. And by trying to block her way of course I made her angrier and angrier. The messages took a nasty turn, the gifts were less benign – tons of rotted manure dumped in my driveway, two dozen dead roses, what looked like a human turd in a Godiva box.’
‘Ugh.’
‘And by this point, the relentlessness and the nastiness of it was getting to me. I cancelled a dinner where I was supposed to talk because I didn’t want to put myself on a public stage. I started to get really paranoid about the level of security at the studios where I was working.’
‘And the police were no good?’
‘They had so little to go on. She was so clever; she was almost invisible. They never once saw her. And then—’ He stopped, and breathed in, steadying himself.
‘And then?’
‘I had a series of accidents. To an outsider each one might have looked like bad luck or carelessness – indeed that’s how the police viewed them. And I suppose I was beginning to lose it. But I’m certain she had a hand in it somehow. I mean, nothing like that had ever happened to me before she turned up.’
‘Like what?’
‘I had a tyre blow out just after I turned out of my house on to Mulholland. On a bend on the edge of a mountain. I was lucky I didn’t go over. I’ve got this high deck that comes off the second floor of my house, cantilevered over the valley.’ He used his hands to describe the layout. ‘You’ll see it one day soon. You’ll love it. One of the wooden steps leading up to the deck from the pool collapsed as I climbed it, and I fell, breaking my ankle. It could have been my neck. Then I got some sort of food poisoning that put me in hospital for three days. And one evening I lit the barbecue and this happened.’
He shifted round and Lara propped herself up to watch as he lifted his T-shirt and showed her his chest. Where it had once been smooth, taut and golden, now it was shiny, mottled white and purple. She reached out to touch the scarring. He held her hand on his damaged skin and looked at her.
‘The police advised me to take the barbecue incident to the manufacturers. And not to drink too much champagne while cooking on an open flame. The only woman they found in LA with the name Elizabeth Sanders was tiny, eighty-nine years old and with no record at all of anything untoward. It couldn’t be her. It was a made-up name, and she was untraceable.’
‘Poor you,’ Lara said, laying her head on his chest, running her fingertips along the ridges and valleys of the crackled scars.
‘“If I can’t have you then nobody can” was the message that pushed me over the edge. I was taking too many painkillers – my leg was still weak and I was undergoing skin grafts for the burns – and I was mixing them with alcohol. Very bad. I stopped going out. I became the proverbial prisoner in my own home. I felt so alone, Lara.’
‘Poor you. Poor love.’ Lara reached her arm up and held him tight to her.
‘Betty was the only person I could talk to back then. She was a rock. She came in, found me after the overdose.’
‘Overdose?’
‘She did a great job of covering it up. But I thought it had got out on to the rumour corners of the internet?’
‘I never heard anything about an overdose.’
‘Well, let’s just say I didn’t see much point to my life at that time. Betty got me into rehab in Utah. Then, when I came out, she and James suggested I move over here, disappear for a while. She even found this land for me. So I quite literally vanished. Even my management don’t know where I am. I never dreamed Sanders would find me. But now she’s here and I’ve got to leave. I’ll go to Mexico. Or Europe.’
‘And she will have won. We have to stop this, Stephen. We need to tell the police and get her arrested, for trespass at the very least. We can do that.’
‘It’s true. Over here, they view crimes against property far more seriously than crimes against the person.’
‘We have to stay put,’ she said, sitting up and looking him in the eye. ‘Whatever happens.’
‘I like the sound of that “we”.’ He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. ‘Stay with me tonight, Lara.’
‘What will I say to Marcus?’
‘Say a tree came down in the storm, say the road is impassable. It happened before, last year. I was stuck up here four days. It’s entirely feasible. I need you here in so many ways, Lara. Please.’
‘So I left my bag up here when I came up blueberry picking yesterday with Jack, so I couldn’t go into town because I didn’t have a purse, so I had to come up here to pick it up. And then there was the big storm. You did have it down in the village?’ She twirled the cord to Stephen’s office phone between her fingers.
‘Yes,’ Marcus said. His annoyance at being left on his own in charge of Jack reached her clearly through the phone line.
‘So, after the storm had passed, I set off down the mountain. But this big oak has come down about a mile away from Stephen’s. The road is impassable. I came back here and Stephen rang some emergency line and they say they’ll have it cleared by morning. So he’s offered to put me up for the night.’