The Imposter Anna Wharton (e novels to read .txt) 📖

with Stella. She’ll leave her there for another day – after all, she’s not hurting anyone.

Chloe takes a familiar path. She knows both the curve and the camber by now. When she reaches the park she pushes through the short yellow metal gate and it whines a greeting back. She sits down on an empty bench, surprised to feel the cold through her coat. A mother watching her little boy on the slide looks over at her. From her bag Chloe pulls a Tupperware box; inside are two cheese sandwiches. She smiles as she remembers Maureen handing them to her this morning.

‘Well, I was making them anyway for Patrick,’ she’d said, excusing her fussing.

‘I could get used to this,’ Chloe said, and they’d laughed. She and Maureen had anyway. Patrick had taken his clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches from the worktop without saying a word. Maureen hadn’t seemed to notice.

Chloe takes a bite of her sandwich – nothing tastes better than a sandwich made by someone else and Maureen has a particular way of spreading the mayonnaise on the top slice that makes it really perfect.

Chloe smiles to herself and the woman moves her child over to the swings.

The park is quieter than usual. Chloe has watched the toddlers playing in here while eating her lunch before. They race around with their wobbly gait, often falling onto their knees, their mums rushing to pick them up and wipe them down, sending them off again with a kiss in their ear. Chloe has pictured Maureen doing the same with Angie many times. She must miss having someone to make a fuss of. Perhaps that’s why she’s been making fewer and fewer excuses for fussing around Chloe. She’s stopped pretending she’d made too much food by accident and now just serves up Chloe a plate of whatever they’re having each night. Chloe and Maureen take their time at the small kitchen table, chatting about this and that. Patrick eats faster now, excusing himself to the television. Maureen notices less and less. Chloe helps her tidy up – she washes while Maureen dries – her small way of saying thanks. She likes to be extra particular about washing dishes, especially as it buys them more time together. Anyway, she knows Maureen enjoys the company, it must have been lonely for her with it just being the two of them all these years. She’s often looked up from the soap suds and caught Maureen’s eye in the glass that is made a mirror by the black night.

As she takes a bite of her sandwich, the child cries out from the swings, his fingers twisted in the cold metal.

Chloe finishes her sandwich and puts the Tupperware away. She pulls a packet of ready salted crisps from her lunch box – she’d only had to mention to Maureen once that she liked them – and opens the bag. She watches as the mother kisses her son’s fat little fingers. Before Low Drove, Chloe would have felt lonely sitting here. She wonders if this mother knows what happened in this park all those years ago. People forget about Angie now. Perhaps they’ve never even heard of her. Or Maureen and Patrick. School teachers, neighbours, priests, public, people quoted in the newspaper articles Chloe’s read – they cared once but then life moved on. Not for Maureen and Patrick. Not for Chloe. Not now.

She walks across the playground and puts the empty crisp packet in the bin. On the way back she sees the woman with the toddler watching her. Chloe checks her watch – it’s almost three. She’ll have a slow walk back to town and then it’ll be time to get the bus home with all the other commuters.

Chloe arrives back to an empty house.

‘Hello?’ she calls. Then remembers Maureen telling her they always go supermarket shopping on a Thursday afternoon.

She’s got used to their routines in the last week or so. Patrick has a part-time job at a local seed factory. He works on the production line there – just for pocket money, Maureen says. Some weeks he works days, others evenings. Chloe likes those shifts the best, the nights when she and Maureen get to eat alone at the little kitchen table and then chat in the living room until they hear his car pull up on the drive, his headlights illuminating the back garden. Then Maureen will get up and leave her sitting in the living room, and Chloe will listen as she dishes up Patrick’s dinner and sits with him at the table while he eats. She goes up to her room then and from underneath her bed, buried way back behind a short pile of magazines and a pair of trainers, she’ll pull out the shoebox in which she keeps a selection of the original cuttings from her bedroom wall and, of course, her pale blue notebook. She’ll write everything down in there. And when she looks at those cuttings, she barely recognizes the Maureen she sees in the pictures. She is sure some of those frown lines have been ironed out already, and she has wondered how much of that she could put that down to her own arrival.

She goes through the kitchen and out into the hall. The house feels still. She stands at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Hello?’ she calls again.

Nothing.

Maureen told Chloe that Patrick took early retirement from an engineering firm in the city before they moved out here, and coupled with the sale of their house and a decent pension, they have enough to live on. Renting this room gives them a little extra so they can afford treats, and when she’d told her Chloe had resisted the urge to look around their shabby kitchen and wonder what they might be. It’s not a glamorous place, she knows it never will be. A little sign hangs on the wall beside the clock, in the kitchen. Another hope sign. This time it’s an acronym: H.O.P.E. Hold On Pain Ends. She’s