(1990) Sweet Heart by Peter James

Author:Peter James [James, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2010-11-03T13:00:00+00:00

Tom

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sunlight streamed in the window, as Mr Budley had solemnly told them it would, and she felt good for a moment, for a brief moment, smelling the sweet air and listening to the early morning chit-chit-chit of the birds before the memory lying asleep inside her began to stir.

There was a smell of burnt paper in the room.

She sat up, disoriented and drenched in sweat. Tom’s pillows beside her were still plumped, undented, his side of the bed undisturbed. A swell of gloom rolled through her.

Darling, I love you very dearly.

She had dreamed it. It was a bad dream. Everything was fine. Tom was in the bathroom shaving, brushing his teeth.

‘Tom?’ she called out. There was no answer. Her hands were stinging and she pulled them from under the sheets and looked at them. Her eyes widened.

They were caked with mud and covered in lacerations.

A cut ran right the way down one finger and there was muddy, congealed blood around it. The skin was scraped off the top of three of her knuckles. More cuts criss-crossed the backs of her hands. They were hurting like hell. She turned them over. More cuts on the palms. Tension pulled her scalp. Ben? Had Ben attacked her? Never. A dream. Just dreaming. Just —

She swung her legs out of bed, put them on the wooden floor and then blinked in astonishment as she noticed her feet. A squall of undefined fear blew through her veins. Her feet were caked in mud, dried mud packed between her toes, spattered up her legs. She leaned over, touched them. The mud was damp; some came away on her finger. Her nightdress was filthy too, mud-spattered, sodden and streaked with blood.

She tried to think, think back to last night. Sitting at the dressing table; she had been sitting at the dressing table. Then — nothing. Blank.

A muscle twitched inside her throat. She stared hopelessly around the room as if somewhere in it she might find an answer. Dressing table. Hours. Crying. Maybe she had broken something, a mirror, a glass, was that why —? She shook her head. The mud, where had the mud —? Her hands and feet so sore, painful.

She looked at the dressing table, and it was then she noticed the small muddy object next to her hairbrush.

She staggered over. Rusty tin showed through the mud. She put her hand out slowly, hesitating, as if she were reaching out to a poisonous insect, and picked it up.

Something inside it rattled, slithered, clanked. She scraped away the mud with her raw fingers, ignoring the pain, until she could see enough to know what it was, to be certain what it was.

She waited, afraid, numb, then she pressed her thumbs up against the lid of the tin. It came off with a quiet pop, and there was the heart-shaped locket nestling inside. The same locket she had dug up then reburied at the Wishing Rocks.

Ben came over and stood beside her. The locket rattled as her hands shook.

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