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

be. Now suddenly it makes perfect sense why Patrick had started to go along with it. Why he doesn’t call Maureen crazy anymore. Why he had welcomed Chloe into his home.

She presses the bell on the bus. She stands up. Presses again. Again and again. The Bus Stopping sign flashes, but the driver continues. He looks up in the mirror as she makes her way to the front of the bus.

‘Ent no stop now til West Fen,’ he says into the rear-view mirror.

Chloe clutches her stomach and heaves.

‘Stop the bus,’ she says.

‘Ent no stop—’

‘Stop the bus.’

Finally, it slows. She feels the other passengers’ eyes on her as she makes for the front door. Her head is spinning. The doors open. Long grass disguises the step as the doors open. Chloe almost falls off the bus. She rights her balance as she lands in the soft mud. The doors close. The bus pulls away.

The thought rises along with the bile. There is a reason that Patrick is allowing Maureen to think that she is Angie. Because if she does, it’ll mean keeping his own murderous secret.

She stumbles forward a few feet, and then, alone, at the side of the road, she vomits.

FORTY-FOUR

Low Drove looks like a film set as she approaches. An unsuspecting, end-of-the-road village. Its isolation haunting. The sky presses down today, dark heavy clouds thick with rain. At the other end of the village, the red Wall’s ice cream sign flaps wildly in the wind.

Chloe had to wait almost another hour for a bus. She started walking but then pictured Patrick’s blue car driving along the road and finding her. Instead, she sat on the banks of the dyke, among the long grass, her back to the road, listening out for the heavy hum of the bus as it approached.

Now in Low Drove, she walks across the road and passes through the fronds of the willow tree. She spins around as they close behind her, stopping for a moment as the leaf curtain flickers this way and that, obscuring her view back to the main road.

She turns and continues towards Elm House. She’s relieved to see no car on the drive, and her gait quickens for a second as pictures flash into her mind: Maureen sitting at the kitchen table, a hurried explanation from Chloe, the two of them gathering their things. But she slows again as she remembers: to expose Patrick is to expose herself. She can only convince Maureen that he killed her daughter if she confesses that she can’t possibly be the missing girl herself. She can’t do that.

It’s not as if Chloe hasn’t tried to look for an innocent explanation. She wondered perhaps if the police had deliberately thrown the public off the scent. Perhaps Maureen and Patrick were somehow complicit in a cat and mouse game between the police and the abductor? But she knows enough about searches for missing children from her time at the newspaper to know that information made public is the only way of ensuring their return. That is, if they are searching in the right place to start with.

Chloe had also considered that it might have been an innocent mistake. Perhaps trauma had left Patrick with some kind of amnesia – you hear about these things, she figured. But whatever had impaired his thinking then had clearly worn off now. It didn’t add up; how could he play the devoted, heartbroken father and not tell the police something so vital that might bring back his child? She thinks about their friend Josie – did she have a hunch that he had been lying all these years? Is that why she didn’t seem to like him? Chloe wonders if she could speak to her, and then remembers how unfriendly she’d been to Chloe, too.

Whatever way she looked at it, she was always left with the most sinister supposition of all: Patrick had lied to conceal his daughter’s murder. And he was allowing Chloe to pretend to be her in order to cover up the truth.

Elm House slowly comes closer. Chloe swallows. Once, twice. Her mouth feels dry. She has tried to run through the conversation she could have with Maureen, of course she has. But what’s to say Maureen would even believe her? After Angie disappeared, Patrick was her rock. Why would she believe Chloe over a man she’s been married to for nearly four decades? Chloe tells herself that if she truly believes she is her missing daughter, then she will. She has to. And then she ties herself up in knots all over again because of course she won’t, not if Chloe tells her what she’s really thinking.

Her hatred for Patrick swells inside each step. He’s done this. If she keeps his secret, he will make her as guilty as he is. She hates him for that. Hates him and fears him because if these thoughts – these suspicions – are correct, Patrick is guilty of infanticide. He is his own daughter’s killer.

Chloe reaches the house, but it feels different now. Every one of her senses is alert to a new sound, a new smell. She arrives at the back door. Through the glass panel, she can see Maureen sitting at the table, head bowed, lost in a book. If only she could keep her that way, locked in innocence. Chloe doesn’t want to blow her world apart – has this woman not suffered enough? – but she needs to know. She deserves to know. Chloe pushes her hand down on the handle. She thought she’d come here to find out the truth – just not this truth.

‘What are you doing home at this time, Chloe, love?’ Maureen says, looking up, double-checking the clock as she does.

Chloe had forgotten for a moment that she was going to feign illness. If Patrick had been there, she would have needed an excuse for coming home early. For a split second she is unsure whether to reach for her