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

all people? It could only have been a test. Had she passed or failed? She hadn’t even had time to react. Had it been her talking about the park which had prompted him to correct her? Does he want her to know that, whatever Maureen says, he knows she is not his missing daughter? But how can he be so sure?

Chloe looks down the road as she waits for the bus to appear, but as she does so another thought swirls around her mind. She tries to dismiss it, she’s not ready for that. But as the bus pulls up alongside the pavement, as she buys her ticket, sits down, the thought takes its place beside her and follows her back towards town.

She gets off at the stop before the bus station and hurries through the underpass to the sound of her echoing footsteps. She takes the back streets, up and down kerbs, until finally she is there, standing outside a very familiar front door – one she hasn’t visited for almost two months, but she has to see something for herself. She knows until she checks the cuttings she mustn’t jump to any conclusions.

She takes a set of keys from her pocket, struggling to find the one that fits Nan’s door. She pushes it into the lock and feels the click, that little resistance, and by the time she opens the door, it is all coming back to her.

Nan’s house feels more like a museum these days. The air is stiff, the front door heavier than she had remembered. She looks down at the floor and understands why: envelopes and flyers, greetings cards and free newspapers have collected on the doormat.

She shuts the door behind her and starts collecting the junk mail from the floor. The curtain still hangs off the back of the door where she left it. She wanders through the house as if she has never been there before. She is scared to disturb it, afraid even for her feet to leave an impression on the carpet. Stopping in the hall and looking up into the mirror, in that split second she reminds herself that she has every right to be here. She quickly looks away from her reflection.

In the living room, everything is as she left it. Nan’s mahogany sideboard has gathered more dust, but the freeze-framed faces smile as they always have. She picks up one photograph that she recognizes, the black and white photo of Nan and Stella on the beach. It had once been her favourite, and yet now, the faces in it are more like those of strangers.

Her eyes flit from one framed photograph to the next, but she feels nothing, like she is simply flicking through a magazine filled with models. Interesting how time makes strangers of us all, eventually.

She remembers then the reason she is here. She leaves the living room and takes the stairs, two at a time, hauling herself up by the handrail. She pauses on the landing, briefly glancing into Nan’s bedroom, the light falling on her fitted wardrobes and the mirror inset within them reflecting an empty bed. She imagines Nan still here, shuffling round on her own, no one here to keep her company, to sit beside her watching television, to get up and make her a cup of tea. No one to take away that sting of loneliness. She imagines Nan dying on her own in the very same bedroom. Things could have been so very different if it hadn’t been for Chloe.

Inside her own room, the curtains are drawn, her bed is unmade. Blu-Tack still clings to the wall in places, and in others, the corners of A4 paper hang clumsily. Chloe drops to her knees and starts feeling underneath her bed, pulling out the cuttings that she had left there, that she had taken time to hide just in case. They come out, a bunch in each hand, and she turns and leans her back against the bed frame. She discards the first two – they are stories from later on in the enquiry. She even discards the update interviews that Maureen and Patrick did over the years. It’s another story she’s looking for, and as she sieves through them, Maureen and Patrick’s faces fall on the bedroom carpet in a haphazard fashion. But then, finally, she finds it. The cutting is not on top of the pile in her hands, but the edge of it sticks out of the middle. She recognizes the photograph, even photocopied, even though so many pixels blur into one another; even with the blotches of newsprint, even with the age of the original, she recognizes it, because this photograph – this location – has been so vital to every single news story, every part of the investigation, that has followed since that day Angie disappeared. She is not mistaken.

She holds the cutting up. It’s in two pieces so she grasps one page in each hand and fits them together into a jigsaw that at one time might have offered hope. Because right in the middle of both pieces of paper is the photograph she remembers. The one of Maureen and Patrick, her hand held tightly inside his, her head resting on his shoulder, the long grass around them almost obscuring their bodies. And in the background, just over their shoulder, the unmistakable landmark that was the park in Ferry Meadows that Angie had disappeared from. She reads the picture caption.

Devastated: Parents Patrick and Maureen Kyle join the search for Angie.

Her eyes scan the cutting, and there it is, mentioned over and over again.

Play park where Angie disappeared from

Ferry Meadows Park

Only left her for a minute

Visit to the swings

The words start to move around on the page. She drops the two halves of the cutting and they flutter down either side of her legs. She tips her head back on the mattress, staring up at the artex ceiling. The thought she had on the bus