The Girl Who Heard Maggots by Abby Davies

Author:Abby Davies [Davies, Abby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I hurried over to the bed and smoothed Wren’s hair back from his forehead. He was burning up. I wondered if Ping had given him any medicine yet. Probably not.

“Ivy?” Wren’s eyes were wide open. “I wasn’t asleep. I was pretending.”

I smiled to hide my shock.

“How’re you feeling?” I said helping him sit up.

He shrugged. “Weird.”

“It’s okay. You need to do exactly what I tell you -”

“I need to tell you now,” he said, brow furrowed, eyes moist.

“Tell me what?”

“I lied before. I lied to the police officer.”

I helped him stand and hurried to the wardrobe. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You can tell me all about that later, but we need to -”

“But it was about Lucinda,” he whispered.

I looked back at him, hands frozen on his coat, “What about her?”

“I should’ve told him, but I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”

“Told him what?”

Wren’s eyes filled. “Told him that it was her. The lady in the picture. Her hair was a different colour and it was really long, but it was her.”

“What?” I said taking a moment to process what he was saying, “Are you saying that Beatrice Giles is Lucinda?”

They all knew. Maddock, Ping, Mrs Waters. They’d all lied to Sergeant Zachery. All of them knew Lucinda/Beatrice was dead. The horror of it sent another lash of dizziness whipping behind my eyes. I steadied myself against the wall as image after image bombarded me and the reality hit: I’d been living with a pack of murderers. Why hadn’t they killed me yet? Was it because they still thought I didn’t know about Carl?

With quivering hands, I grabbed his coat and hurried over to him. “Hey. It’s okay. You wanted to protect her. We can tell the policeman when we get out of here.”

He looked up, puzzled.

“We need to leave. Now,” I said helping him into his coat.

“We do?”

“Yes. I’ll explain everything later. But right now, I need you to let me carry you downstairs and out of the house. Okay?”

He glanced around the room. His eyes landed on his house model. “Can I bring my models?”

I shook my head. “I can’t carry them too and we need to be quick.”

I picked him up, bent over, grabbed the cuddly bee from the bed and tucked it between our chests. He wrapped his arms around my neck and buried his face in my shoulder.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Don’t be scared. Everything’ll be fine. Trust me.”

I opened the door and peered out. The corridor was dimly lit by candles and as silent as the grave. I inched out of the room, pulling the door but not shutting it, then crept along the corridor. There was no time to grab any of my stuff and besides, carrying Wren across the snowy moor to the outer fence was going to be hard-going as it was. I was exhausted from searching the wood. Hungry too. And I wasn’t very strong. I knew I could carry Wren to the outer fence though. I had to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.