The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

takes half of one of Raf’s pills and spends the rest of the morning in and out of sleep. She wakes and looks at her dumbphone. A message from Raf checking in on her. When she looks over to the door, she sees the tray Raf left with a sandwich on it now features a still-steaming cup of tea. Next to the tray there’s a pile of magazines, Vice, Wonderland, they look new. Raf’s at work so it must have been Amanda. But they don’t seem like her kind of thing. She removes the top two to see it must have been Amanda, because there’s a magazine called Destiny and Soul. Raf definitely wouldn’t have bought that. Erin finds herself touched at the gesture.

She grabs the tea and scooches back into her duvet-cocoon with the pile of magazines and lays them all out on the bed. She flicks through Destiny and Soul and, as expected, it’s a bunch of claptrap. Then she turns the pages of Wonderland until she gets to an interview with Rhia Trevellick, the girl who was given the part in the indie movie that she’d managed to miss out on when she was stuck in a cabin in Connemara. She’s just signed on as the lead in a big Netflix fantasy show. She looks amazing in the pictures, short choppy hair, insanely beautiful clothes but not too Hollywoodified. Erin doesn’t feel as envious as she would have done yesterday. Perhaps it’s the sleeping pill, perhaps it’s the dawning realisation that she might be having a breakdown, but she’s almost happy for Rhia – she was there, she was good in the film, she’s made good choices since and always seems nice, fair play to her.

She hears Bobby squeaking downstairs and yearns to go and see him, to hold him. But she catches her reflection in the mirror above the dressing table. She looks ill, skin translucent, greasy, hair dishevelled, and she’s worried he might be scared of her. She thinks of Amanda last night staring at her after having been accused of stealing thousands of pounds, knowing that the woman accusing her is deranged, the anger in her eyes. And yet she’s willingly looking after her son for her. Erin wonders whether she’d do the same. Probably not. Amanda shouts up the stairs to say they’re going for a walk for Bobby’s nap, taking the choice of seeing her son out of her hands.

Erin flicks through another of Amanda’s magazines, this one looks older, more heavily thumbed. The Journal of Wicca. It’s a cheaper-looking affair. All pentagrams, healing and spells. Erin laughs at an interview with a Druid in a purple robe with a beard down to his feet. It feels like the first time she’s enjoyed not having her phone since she gave it to Raf. She turns a few pages and feels a jolt, grabs a pillow to prop herself up.

There’s a picture of a jar with a hairless doll in it. The title of the article: ‘How to get the most out of your spells’. There’s a checklist of ways to ‘maximise the reach of your magick’. Erin runs down it, adding crystals, imbuing amulets and giving them to the target, urine. These people seem to be obsessed with urine, she thinks. But then she sees something has been circled in black biro. ‘The best way to increase the power of your jar spell is to hide it somewhere in pitch-darkness where no one will ever find it. Burying or a locked safe works best.’ Amanda’s moved it. Maybe whatever it was meant to do, drive Erin away, make Raf fall in love with her, wasn’t working so she’s hidden it somewhere.

She cracks the bedroom door open and creeps downstairs. She checks no one’s in the house, before putting her coat on over her pyjamas and heading out to Amanda’s studio, the wedge of magazines held to her chest like precious treasure. She unlocks the door and lets herself in. She checks under the sofa. The jar’s not there. She looks in the wardrobe. No sign. She roots around in the cupboard under the sink. She even goes back out of the studio and looks around for any signs of the earth being disturbed. There’s nothing. No sign of it. She goes into the bathroom and sees it. The little screwdriver she saw the last time she was in here, resting on the surface next to the sink. With a tiny screw next to it.

She looks around the room. Nothing in the cupboard, nothing in the shower. Then she looks up at the ceiling and sees it. A flap vent with what looks like one screw missing on the top right corner. Erin grabs the screwdriver and steps up onto the toilet. She unscrews the remaining three screws and pulls the vent out. The toilet shifts beneath her and she steps down, scared her weight’s going to crack it off the wall, but she can’t reach with one foot down so she steps back up. She puts her hand up into the hole and reaches around the recess like a periscope. She drags out stray plasterboard and dust bunnies but can’t find the jar. She pulls her hand out and looks into the hole, cursing not having the torch on her phone. But it doesn’t look big enough to house that large pickle jar. She steadies herself on the wall and tries to reach further in. There must be something in here, Amanda’s not going to be messing with a vent for fun. Then she finds something, but not what she was hoping for. It’s a book, an exercise book. She steps off the toilet and blows some dust away. It looks old, one of those classy notebooks with a marbled cover in yellow, black and cream. There’s a snapping noise outside. She goes back into the main room to make sure she’s got a view in case Amanda comes.

There’s an envelope wedged