The Imposter, Anna Wharton [romantic story to read TXT] 📗

a box of tissues, and a pair of reading glasses, and beside that, a tiny charm. Chloe picks it up. It looks like a pendant, as if it should belong on a chain, but instead it rests here, next to Maureen’s pillow. Etched into the metal is St Anthony and there is a picture of the saint cradling a child who Chloe presumes is Jesus. She turns the pendant over in her palm. On the back are three words: Pray for us. Chloe puts the pendant down exactly where she found it.

Patrick must sleep on the other side of the bed, nearest the window. Silently – and quickly – she crosses the room, around the bed, until she’s standing in front of where he sleeps, feeling the cold of the wind at her bare shoulders. On his side of the bed there is a lamp, nothing else. She feels disappointed, as if this intrusion owed her a better insight. She opens the door to his bedside table: there’s a nail file, a pair of reading glasses, an out-of-date slim green horse-racing diary. She closes the drawer quickly, flinching at the sound it makes. There must be more to him than this. She looks around, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary that she can see. She goes to walk back around the bed and that’s when she hears it, a footstep out on the landing, a sigh she knows as someone reaches the top step of the stairs – Patrick. She looks about her frantically. She’s standing, clutching the towel around her, stuck between the bed and the window. If he comes in here now, that’s where he’ll find her. What would she say? She can’t go out. Not now. She’s trapped.

She throws herself down on the floor at his side of the bed just as the door starts to open. She rolls on her side, the towel coming undone, but more than half of her body disguised under the bed. She moves silently, shuffling an inch or so further under the bed. She lies on her back. Holding her breath, breathing with the very apex of each lung. There’s less than an inch between the valance sheet and the floor. She sees his feet at the door. To her right, the towel trails out under the bed. If he walks around, he’ll see it. But she can’t risk moving a muscle. She holds her breath, her nose almost touching the underside of the mattress between the wooden slats. Patrick’s feet start to move slowly round the bed. The valance sheet has caught on her bare shoulder, exposing it. She wriggles, only a little, and feels the sheet loosen, dropping towards the floor. She can’t see his feet now, he must be at the very bottom of the bed. Then suddenly, she hears a faint sound from downstairs. Maureen calling him. Please say he hears it too.

‘Yeah?’ Patrick shouts downstairs to his wife.

Chloe’s whole body tenses.

But there’s no reply. He sighs, she hears a foot shuffle on the carpet, although she can’t see it. Another sigh, this one longer. And then the creak of a floorboard as he walks out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

Chloe lets out a long breath. But she doesn’t move, not until she hears him going down the stairs.

‘What is it, Mo? I’d just gone to get my . . .’

What had she been thinking? Chloe knows she has to get out of the bedroom quickly. She shuffles back the way she came, only as she does, she sees what she disturbed when she launched herself underneath here. She can’t tell how many there are, but there are dozens of them, more books than she’s seen anywhere else in the house. But why would they keep them here under the bed?

She rolls out, dragging one with her. She rearranges the towel around herself and turns over the book so the cover is facing up. There’s a black and white picture of some police tape on the front. It’s a true crime book. Chloe picks up another, another, they’re all the same: true crime, forensics, all real-life crime scene investigations – just like the programmes Patrick watches so obsessively.

Chloe stands up. She needs to get out of this room. She throws the two books in her hand back under the bed. The duvet cover is slightly askew where she has leant on the bed to get up and she quickly – frantically – tries to smooth it out, but she sees that her hands are shaking. She needs to get out of this room.

She opens the door to the landing. All is quiet. She takes three short steps and she’s in the bathroom, she’s closing the door, she’s turning the shower on and she’s leaning against the cubicle. Chloe steps under the water and its only then that her breathing returns to normal. She turns the dial hotter until her feet are pink and the air is thick with steam. She breathes deeply until she feels her pulse start to steady. She imagines the steam sterilising her from the inside, right down to the very core. She stands under the shower until the hot steam permeates her lungs, until she feels new again. She steps out and opens the window, and her day hurries away into the night.

She dries quickly with a rough towel, agitating her skin until it stings. She has been in the Kyles’ home for almost five weeks now. The smells of the place have embedded themselves in her clothes; the scent of Maureen’s washing powder is tucked in every cotton weave of her shirt and knitted into her jumpers. She sniffs at her hair. She has her own shampoo but recently she’s preferred to use Maureen’s. Two months ago she wouldn’t even have known the toothpaste brand she uses, now they squeeze from the same tube. But who knows how long this will last? How much longer she can carry on paying