In My Mother's Name: A totally addictive and emotional psychological thriller by Laura Elliot

Author:Laura Elliot [Elliot, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838880774
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2019-10-23T18:30:00+00:00

36 Adele

For three days she was unable to leave her room at the Loyvale Hotel. She ordered room service when she was hungry and spent most of her time in bed. Her short, fitful periods of sleep were filled with nightmares. Larry organised new tyres for her car and, having managed to retrieve the memory card from the broken fragments of her smashed phone, arrived with a new one. He reckoned he knew who the vandals were.

‘Shitty little river rats,’ he called them. ‘A toe up the arse would soon sort that lot out.’

He was referring to the teenagers who gathered by the river at night. Pills and weed, needles also. Local youths who knew their terrain and blended into the shadows at the hint of a Garda raid. Adele had often heard them when she was closing her bedroom window before going to bed, their raucous laughter, their raised voices, the slap of their running footsteps. She didn’t believe they were to blame. Her gunman, the leader of the trio, had been older, more adept at terror. He had been sent with a message and had every reason to believe it had been successfully delivered. She was seized by dread every time she recalled the crash of glass, the footsteps on the stairs, the rasp of their breath, their inane squeaks and giggles.

She had known the risk she was taking by retaliating with that last entry. Believing that Sergeant Darcy had released her mother’s statement without contacting her first, she had been consumed with rage as she tried to cope with the immediate online reaction. The screen on her laptop should have been fogged with bile by the abuse she had received, the name-calling and death threats. She was convinced there was a concerted effort behind the negative reaction; an echo of the verbal campaign orchestrated against her mother all those years ago. The message didn’t change, just the medium for its delivery. But Sergeant Darcy had not leaked the statement. Adele had realised this as soon as the intruders burst into the bedroom.

She was not physically hurt, yet the pressure her attacker had used felt like an intolerable ache; his intentions clear as he pressed the gun closer, closer, and in that clenched instant, she had sought desperately for her mother’s comfort. She had willed Marianne to tear aside the veil that separated them. If such a connection existed between them then that was the moment it should have been made manifest. But there had been no ghostly voice exhorting her to be brave. Three blind mice… they had smashed the tenuous bond she had formed with her mother and laughed ─ like those others had ─ as they did so. One by one… laughing… sometimes their laughter is the only sound I hear. She no longer needed the diary to understand the subjugation Marianne had endured. Her ordeal had been subsumed into her own experience, her own encounter with evil.

Her grandmother had been right. Nothing except scorched memories came from stoking the past.

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