The Life and Second Life of Charlie Brackwood (The Brackwood Series Book 2) (10 page)

She suddenly dropped my hand and I stared after her as she calmly walked to the edge of the rockface and dived through the large sheet of water into the deep pool beyond. I could see her head bob in and out of the water as she came up for air, her arms outstretched as she swiftly made her way to the shallow end in the distance. I carefully lowered myself down the rocks and into the water, breathing heavily. I knew that without Lucy’s calming presence the swim to the edge of the pool would be difficult for me.

Before I could talk myself out of it I began to strike out slowly, keeping Lucy in my line of sight at all times. By the time I’d reached the middle of the pool she was already climbing out. Droplets of water glistened on her long legs. I watched as she returned to the ledge where we had enjoyed our lunch. I saw her retrieve the sandals that had been left lying at odd angles, an indication of the eagerness with which they’d been abandoned earlier in the day.

As I swam I felt the pull of the undercurrent beneath me and would often feel as though I was being dragged backwards towards the waterfall. Lucy had tackled the pull of the water with ease; she had always been a strong swimmer, unlike myself. When I finally reached the shallow water I was breathing heavily.

Lucy ran to meet me. “Are you OK? You’re not asthmatic, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked confused for a second and then pulled me on to to a nearby rock to rest. As my breathing slowed and became normal again I noticed that Lucy’s body language had changed. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest once more and she had positioned herself as far away from me as possible. She had shut herself down. When she spoke next her voice was full of regret.

“I want to apologise for earlier, behind the waterfall. I shouldn’t have been so forward.” Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her over the thunder of the water. “It seems I have a bad habit of leading men on.”

“You didn’t lead me on. I didn’t think anything of it. I saw nothing but friendship in your actions.”

She continued as though she hadn’t heard me. “My husband’s in hospital in a critical condition and here I am, laughing and joking with a man who has come to offer me his help.” She made a noise that was part exasperation and part disbelief. “What kind of human being am I?”

“Not the one you believe yourself to be.”

I knew that Lucy had acted the way she did because Adam reminded her so much of myself. My false persona was filling her subconscious mind with thoughts of me and, as easily as a flick of a switch, we were slotting back into each other’s lives again.

Should I tell her who I really was?

No, I had made my promise and I heeded God’s warning against revealing my identity.

I thought about the scene in the hospital earlier, the conversation I’d had with the doctor. The excitement of the day had temporarily made me forget the suspicious circumstances surrounding Jamie’s mystery visitor.

I shifted so that I was facing Lucy. “Listen,” I began. My tone was serious and it grabbed her attention. “When we were in the hospital earlier the doctor revealed to me that Jamie had a frequent visitor, a man posing as Jamie’s father.”

“How do you know it wasn’t his dad?”

“Because this man had left just before we got there and the time of his visit would’ve clashed with his parents’ call on your house this morning. Also, the description the doctor gave of him was all wrong.”

“So who is he?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, but I would suggest you be extra-vigilant. Do you regularly review the footage on the security cameras at the house?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed it.”

I took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on. We need to get you home.”

Chapter Nine

On the way back to the village Lucy’s driving was erratic; she narrowly missed many parked cars and failed to stop for other road users who had the right of way. I calmly told her to be careful but she continued as though she hadn’t heard a word I was saying. Her body was completely still and her eyes squinted at the windscreen in concentration. I knew that her mind was distracted and that she was focusing more on Jamie’s mystery visitor than on the road ahead.

When we arrived at the house it was early evening and the temperature had dropped slightly. My clothes were still a little damp from our impromptu swim but I found myself grateful for the cool material against my hot skin.

Lucy led me through the house to a small bedroom laid out as an office, with a computer on a desk. A room that used to be my study when I was alive. I noticed that most of my things were still in the same places I had left them, as though they were waiting for me to come back. She logged on to the PC and accessed the video recordings that collected footage around the perimeter of the house.

We spent the next thirty minutes trawling through weeks of footage to identify anything out of the ordinary. I watched as an image of Russ appeared on the screen several times and noticed the small, digital clock at the top right of the screen read past midnight each time he left.

“How often does Russ visit the house?”

“He comes most nights and cooks for me, why?”

“Just wondered. You two must be close.”

“We are. It’s good to have his company, it can get lonely at times, especially when your husband is a doctor.”

I nodded and continued to search for anything peculiar on the screen. It showed images from four different cameras.

“You don’t think he had anything to do with this, do you?” Lucy asked.

“No,” I said firmly, “the description the doc gave doesn’t match up.”

The footage was pretty monotonous: Lucy reading in the garden with Snoop at her side, Russ visiting the house or carrying out some odd jobs in the garden, lifting plant pots or digging in the soil. I saw a few different deliverymen carrying parcels as well as the postman delivering letters.

Lucy let out a long sigh. “I need to feed Snoop. I’ll leave you to it,” she said after nearly half an hour of screen-watching. She gave my shoulder a light squeeze as she left.

I continued to stare as the monotonous activity unfolded. I saw the Mercedes Jamie’s parents had arrived in that morning pull up on the drive on numerous occasions, as well as noticing a few visits from Lucy’s sister and nephew. I watched the screen particularly closely as one scene played out in the back garden of the house.

Russ and Lucy were sitting on the lawn; the clock showed that it was five o’clock on a Saturday evening. They appeared to be discussing something. Lucy was laughing and hitting Russ playfully on the arm. I found myself diverting my gaze from the scene, not wanting to see the happiness in her face.

Suddenly, Russ stopped laughing and began to stare intently at Lucy. It was a look I’d seen on his face before, and one that was always directed exclusively at her. To my surprise she returned the look and they held eye contact for the next few seconds. I watched their mouths closely to see if there was any dialogue to accompany their intense stares but their mouths remained closed. Their bodies were so still that I checked the clock was rolling on the screen to confirm it hadn’t frozen.

I peered around the door to see if Lucy was on her way back but sudden movement on the screen caught my eye. I turned around in time to see Lucy lunge towards Russ. Her hands were clasped around his neck and her lips were pressed eagerly to his. He held her body against his with one hand while he twisted the other in her loose curls. I found the scene hard to watch but my eyes stayed fixed on the screen. Eventually they pulled away from each other, breathing heavily. After a few words were exchanged, Russ followed Lucy into the treehouse.

I hadn’t noticed it before but a head of hair could be seen at the bottom of the screen. I could just make out the back of a blond head, cut short in a men's style. I studied the area surrounding the mystery observer and realised he must’ve been standing on the patio behind a large beech tree, which would have hidden him from their view. The man began to turn around. The lower part of his face couldn’t be seen as only the upper half was in the shot. However, I still recognised him. I had seen the same clean-cut, boyish features only hours earlier, lying against a hospital pillow.

I paused the frame on the screen to try and determine the expression on his face. His eyes were narrowed and shallow wrinkles appeared at the corners. Without seeing his mouth I couldn’t tell whether he was scowling in anger or smiling in happiness.

That image of Russ and Lucy together had become imprinted on my mind and a sense of betrayal caused the hairs on my neck to rise. Lucy had kissed Russ, which meant it was her decision; she had made the first move this time and that was something I found hard to process.

I didn’t have long to think about what I’d just seen as I could already hear her returning. She had always treated stairs like an obstacle in a race, running up them with as much speed as she had the energy for, which made it easier for me to hear her approach.

“Found anything?” she asked hopefully.

“I’m afraid not.”

I decided to keep quiet about what I had just witnessed on camera and I guessed Lucy had forgotten about it, otherwise she’d have been too embarrassed to let me watch the footage. We heard the front door slam then and Russ’s thick Yorkshire accent calling Lucy’s name.

“I’d better go,” I said, getting up to leave.

“Please stay for dinner,” Lucy said, looking disappointed.

“Thanks for the invitation, but I don’t want to ride back in the dark.”

She nodded. “Thanks for today, Adam, it really took my mind off things.”

“No problem.” I smiled at her. “Any time you need me.”

I let the statement hang in the air for a moment. I saw Russ in the hall below and he looked at me questioningly. Instinct told me to lie.

I gestured towards the staircase behind me “I just needed to use the bathroom, I’m heading off now.”

He nodded, and when he touched me on the arm as I passed him my body stiffened with apprehension. He moved closer as he spoke, his voice barely audible.

“How’s she doing? Anything out of the ordinary?”

I told him about the mystery visitor at the hospital and Russ’s expression filled with concern.

“Do you have any idea who it could be?”

“None, but if I were you I’d keep a close eye on her. Never let her out of your sight. Does the house have a good security system?”

“The best,” he confirmed.

“Good. Best not to panic her too much but be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”

Russ nodded and patted me on the back as I left.

The ride home seemed longer than usual. My mind was distracted with thoughts of what I’d just seen. By the time I got to the cottage I felt exhausted and dizzy. I made myself a pasta dinner and turned on the TV. A familiar programme was showing. It was a paranormal show. The kind in which the host picks an audience member at random and proceeds to communicate with a dead relative. Usually to tell them things like: “Your father forgives you,” or “Your mother wants to tell you she really detests your new curtains.” Silly things that seemed to cause small ripples of shock to run through the entire audience. The host looked familiar and I suddenly remembered the recorded episodes that I had stumbled across days before. I began to wonder why Adam had such a strong interest in the supernatural.

I watched the screen as the host addressed a young woman in the audience: “I’m seeing a young man of maybe sixteen… he’s sitting in a small blue car. Does this make sense, madam?”

“Yes.” The word came out of her mouth in a high-pitched yelp as she battled to keep her emotions in check.  

The host gave her an overly sympathetic look and continued. “He’s wearing a red shirt with an emblem, possibly a football shirt?”

The poor girl burst out crying and I wondered how the host could play such a cruel game with someone so vulnerable.

“He wants you to know he’s OK now.”

The girl had a meltdown and the camera quickly cut to a scene that had been filmed after the host’s revelations. The girl was being asked by someone behind the camera about the spirit who had sent her a message from the afterlife. It turned out the so-called spirit was an old boyfriend of hers, who had died in a car crash on his way home from a football match.

The show had piqued my interest and I decided to watch a recorded episode in the hope that it might give me an insight into whatever it was Adam was looking for. After the fourth episode I found something.

After a highly emotional scene involving a mother and a deceased teenage daughter, who had passed away just weeks before, the show’s producers chose to do something different. It was decided that the host would attempt to reach a larger audience by accepting phone-ins from various members of the public not able to make it to the studio.

“Hello, caller, please tell me your name and where you are calling from,” the host said with false note of empathy to his voice.

“My name is Daniel,” said the mystery caller, “and I’m phoning from Yorkshire.”

My ears pricked up at the place name. There was also something familiar about his voice and the way in which he said certain words. He had a soft, non-threatening voice that seemed to carry an undertone of sadness.

“OK, Daniel, I’m getting something.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone. The host nodded and stared into space. Obviously this was part of the act, a way to make the audience think there was a spirit in the room that only he could see.

“OK, Daniel, I’m hearing a woman’s voice, she appears to be an older lady. I can see her in front of me. She’s wearing a hospital gown. Is this correct, Daniel?”

“It doesn’t ring a bell, no.”

“OK, I will try and get some more information for you, but she is very fragile.”

I tried to place the voice on the phone, but came up with nothing.

“OK, she’s telling me she passed over while at York Hospital and that there was some negligence involved. She wants to know whether you have had justice for her death… any compensation?”

“I’m afraid I’m not following.”

“OK, she is telling me about a little dog. A terrier, she says. She is saying that you now have this dog.”

“I’m sorry but this is all wrong. I want to know about a teenage boy. He has blond hair and blue eyes, he died in Yorkshire and—”

“I’m sorry, Daniel, you cannot dictate the spirits who choose to visit me. They choose me on their own.”

“But I need him to know that I’m sorry… that it was a mistake!”

“Sorry, Daniel, but we must move on.”

“Ridiculous,” I heard myself say, and it was only then that I realised why the voice was so familiar to me.

It was my own. Adam was the caller. He had called the show but given a fake name. I’d known Daniel didn’t quite fit. I wondered about the boy he had been trying to contact.  Another mystery to unravel in Adam’s life. I looked at the clock on the wall and realised it was almost two in the morning. The paranormal show must’ve been longer than I’d thought and I had watched five of them in total. I washed the dirty dishes that had been piling up for days and then made my way upstairs towards Adam’s room.

When I was halfway up I heard a knock on the door and my mind instantly reverted to Russ and his visit here earlier in the week. As I pulled the door open I half expected to see him there under the porch light, accusing me of taking advantage of Lucy at the waterfall earlier on. But instead of a furious-looking Russ I found a frightened Lucy, who kept looking behind her anxiously.

“Lucy?”

“Hi, I hope it’s OK for me to be here.”

“Of course” I said, waving her inside and closing the door behind her.

“Sit over there and I’ll start a fire.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she protested.

“You’re cold, there’s no other way of heating this place.”

I could see her watching me as I kneeled down in front of the hearth. Once the flames started to lick the carefully arranged log pile, I sat down next to her.

“I hope you don’t mind my being here… it’s just that you pointed the cottage out to me earlier and I needed to see somebody. I wasn’t going to come... I know Russ would react badly and…“

“Lucy, I don’t mind your being here.”

She nodded gratefully.

“What’s happened?” I noticed her hands were shaking slightly.

“Well, after you left I found myself watching the footage for a while. At first it was just everyday stuff… me gardening, a few visits from Russ… and then I saw something strange.”

“What?”

“The outline of a man. He climbed over the fence and then hovered around the French doors to the kitchen for a while.”

“Which day was this?”

“Well, it was over a number of days.” Her voice sounded strained.

“Which days, Luce?”