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

what their friend Josie would think of him going along with this idea that she really is Angie. Chloe would go so far as to say that Josie seemed suspicious of him. And even Chloe herself has been watching him more closely lately.

At night, when she has managed to escape to the sanctuary that is her bedroom, Chloe pulls out her own dusty archive where she now keeps the photograph that Maureen gave her. She has scanned it for clues and each time returns to the haunting face of Patrick, unable to pinpoint what about it unnerves her so much. At first she had thought this was a simple case of bringing Angie home, that however ridiculous it might have sounded, her fresh eye on the case could have brought some answers for these shattered parents. But more often these days her curiosity is replaced with a looming sense of dread about what really happened, and the closer she gets to Maureen, the more protective she feels towards her. But who exactly does she need to protect her from?

She glances at Patrick from the passenger seat.

‘Another lovely day,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’ Patrick stares straight ahead at the road.

Silence.

‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ Chloe says. She leaves it hanging there, but Patrick doesn’t bite. Maureen would. She goes on, curiosity gnawing at her insides.

‘It felt so real, more like a memory,’ she adds.

Still nothing. Chloe knows if this were Maureen beside her, meaning would already have been derived from every detail of this supposed dream. She swallows. The car hits a cat’s eye and her stomach turns over.

‘I was in a park . . . it felt so familiar.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he says, face straight ahead, too hard to read.

‘Yeah, it was a play park, just a little one. It was surrounded by tall trees and long grass and nearby, there was a lake.’

Patrick’s hands change position on the steering wheel.

‘You were there,’ she says, venturing further away from safety. ‘It was actually just the two of us.’

He laughs a little. ‘Dreams are strange things, ent they?’

‘Yes, but this one, it felt . . . different,’ she says. ‘Like I said, more like a memory. I was on the swings and you were there, you were pushing me, or I was asking you to . . . it’s all a bit fuzzy. It jumped around, the way dreams do.’ She wishes that she could open the window, but she continues: ‘The swings, they were yellow, and the ground wasn’t covered in woodchip – not like you see at parks now – it was a concrete floor. There was a car park just nearby and I saw you. I watched you as you walked over to it, and then . . . and then suddenly, you were gone.’

Patrick’s knuckles whiten. She’s describing the park as it was that day, as she had seen it in the cuttings. He knows it, she knows it. She needs him to talk, open up, like he did that day in the kitchen.

‘Yeah, well, don’t pay too much attention to dreams,’ Patrick says. ‘I tell Maureen the same. Just your subconscious playing tricks on you, like.’

Chloe sinks down in her seat, her own eyes returning to the road. Why is he not asking more? Why is he not picking apart what she’s telling him? She knows Maureen would.

‘And I just thought, I mean, that’s where . . . well, that’s where Angie—’

‘Like I said, I don’t pay too much attention to dreams.’

He turns to her and smiles. But the smile stays too long, like a warning.

Chloe looks back at the road. They drive on in silence. Chloe twiddles her thumbs in her lap. She twists in her seat, rearranges her bag in the footwell. Then the news comes on the radio and Patrick quickly turns it off.

They drive across the city, Patrick indicating this way and that in silence. The atmosphere inside the car is thick with something, though Chloe doesn’t know what.

One after another they cross roundabouts. The bus stop up ahead is her cue to relax. Patrick indicates and pulls over. Her hand is already on the seat belt catch.

‘OK then?’ he asks.

‘Thanks,’ Chloe says, and gets out of the car.

She is about to slam the door when Patrick leans across the passenger seat.

‘And Chloe?’ he says.

She stops still, her hand on the door frame. ‘Yes?’

‘We were never at the play park the day Angie went missing.’

FORTY-TWO

Chloe stands at the bus stop for a long time after Patrick drives away. She is still on the pavement exactly where he dropped her. She hears a plane cut through the clouds above, the rushing footsteps of office workers; she inhales the thick exhaust fumes of a bus that waits for passengers to alight, and still she stands there, trying to absorb exactly what Patrick had said. She knows this case inside out, she has spent hours reading through the cuttings, she can’t have got something so vital wrong. How could Angie not have been at the play park that day when that was exactly the place she disappeared from? It doesn’t make any sense. Chloe feels, standing there, as if suddenly everything she thought she knew about the Kyles’ story is wrong. She wishes the cuttings were tucked inside her bag – she needs a reference point now to stop the world from spinning. But if what Patrick said is true, everything she knows about Angie’s disappearance is mistaken. She blinks and shakes her head, ignoring the stares of people hurrying past her, though she knows her stillness uneases them.

But more worrying to Chloe is not what he said, but how he said it, and perhaps why? It seems a rather large bomb to have dropped so casually. Too casually.

It is a while before she pulls herself together, before she crosses the road to wait at the bus stop on the other side. Patrick’s words swim around in her head.

How could he not have been at the park with Angie? And if they weren’t there, where were they? And why would he tell her, of