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

above the step. He puts it down slowly, then steps into the kitchen, looking between Chloe and his wife.

‘Oh Patrick,’ Maureen says, going over and wrapping her arms around him. He pats his wife’s back, looking straight at Chloe as he does. She looks away.

‘Oh Patrick, you’re not going to believe this . . . come in, come in, sit down . . .’

She directs him to his chair; he sits down opposite Chloe. He looks again, between them.

‘What’s going on, Mo?’ he says.

‘It’s Angie, Pat – Chloe . . . oh, whatever.’ She tosses her hands up, offering them to the air. ‘She’s remembering, it’s working, it’s . . . it’s all coming back to her.’

Chloe glances up at Patrick in time, she’s sure, to see his eyes narrow a bit.

‘Don’t you see? She’s remembering, Pat, it’s all coming back. She had a dream, she said she was at the park, with you. She described it, she . . . she described it just as it was that day. Oh Pat, our Angie.’ She squeezes his hand inside hers. ‘We’re getting our girl back.’

Patrick smiles at his wife. Chloe sees how he squeezes her hand in his fist. He reaches down, kisses it. He strokes the top of her head and gets up.

‘You always knew it, didn’t you, love?’ he says, and she swells under his touch.

Half of Chloe expects he might put Maureen right then, if there had been a genuine mistake. Wasn’t this the time to finally say it? But instead he stands next to the sink and shakes his head, smiling.

‘Well, if she remembers the park,’ he says.

Maureen nods enthusiastically, and then playfully stands up and taps him. ‘And you thought we needed DNA tests,’ she laughs. ‘You watch too many of those CSI programmes, that’s your problem.’

He laughs. The two of them laugh. And Chloe sits at the kitchen table alone.

Inside she is screaming.

FORTY-FIVE

Chloe watches Patrick. This is her life now. She watches the way he holds the knife if Maureen asks him to help her peel spuds for dinner. She notices how comfortable the blade looks in his hand, how natural his grip is on the handle. Is this how he did it?

When he puffs up the cushions on his chair before sitting down to watch one of his CSI programmes, Chloe looks up from the sofa. She notices the way he grips the cushions, with two hands. Her eyes flicker to his face, searching for a moment of recognition, but it is so hard to tell. People like him are experts in deceit.

When Maureen and Patrick are out of the house, she has searched – and searched – for where he keeps his gun. But she has found nothing, which doesn’t make any sense at all. Yet again, wouldn’t he need to be a master of deceit to have kept it hidden all these years?

She can’t say she feels uncomfortable in the Kyles’ house now, not all the time. In the daylight, when the kitchen is filled with the sound of the radio, when Maureen is humming as she wipes down the worktops, when the sound of the horse racing on the TV floats up the stairs, Chloe can almost pretend that nothing has changed. And yet, everything is different.

She lies on her bed in the evening light. Maureen has left Puss on her pillow again. The clocks went forward last weekend and hope lingers at the end of each day now. Not for Chloe anymore. She could leave, she knows she could. She could just pack up her things and go. But – she looks out of the window, across the tops of the trees that disguise the garden in these desolated fields – something keeps her here. Maureen? Her unwavering belief that Chloe is her missing daughter? Or is it what had pulled her to Elm House in the first place: a search for truth? Everything is so blurred now, it’s impossible to tell.

She leans over the side of the bed and fishes underneath for her archive. Her hand sweeps dusty floorboards, a pair of old trainers, nothing else. She leans further off the bed, waiting to feel her fingertips touch the box, but instead there is a space where it should be. She slides off the bed, looks underneath, all the way back to the wall. Her heart is gripped with panic. She is on her belly now, frantically pushing aside the trainers, a few discarded magazines. There is no box. She pulls herself out. Scans her room. Did she leave it out? Might it have been found? But the shoebox is nowhere to be seen. She stands, circling the floor. Her head is pounding now. She strides back to her bed, strips off the duvet. Has it become tangled inside it? She strips the bed all the way back to the mattress, but it isn’t there. She throws the pillow onto the floor. She opens the cupboard of the bedside table, nothing. She pulls out the bed. She looks down the gap between the bed and the window. The box is gone. Her archive is gone.

Her archive is gone.

Her heart is pounding as she reaches for the door handle. The sweat on her hands makes it turn inside her palm. She’s trapped, she thinks, just for an instant. But then the door releases and the air on the landing is cooler, and downstairs the same old sounds float back up to her.

‘Is everything all right, Chloe?’ Maureen says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I heard some banging up there . . . ooh, you do look pale.’

Chloe wipes her hands on her clothes. ‘No . . . no, everything is . . . I’m OK. I mean, it’s OK. There’s nothing.’

She goes back into her room and closes the door. Inside the room is turned over. But she starts her search again, this time in places that she would never keep her archive. She checks the bottom of the wardrobe, among the spare blankets and the blouse Maureen made her. She even walks over to the door that connects her room to the spare one and