It Could Have Been Her(95)

Claire was my favorite. She wasn’t like the other au pairs. She was soft and sweet, naive almost, like me in some ways. And she wasn’t scared of Patch the Clown; she enjoyed my tricks and my mimes. She could play the guitar and at first, when she was still in the upstairs secret room, I’d bring her the tiny guitar my parents had bought me when I was a child, and she’d play to me on it, making up songs as she went along. I did desire her, sexually. I did think things and feel things when I was around her. I did touch myself and think about her while I was doing it. But I would never have hurt her, never have scared her.

But Jessamine hated Claire. She hated her because, in my opinion, Claire was better than her. She was prettier than Jessamine, cleverer than Jessamine, better at playing the guitar than Jessamine, more special than Jessamine, and, as I think of my sister’s hatred toward Claire, I take another step into the basement in my mind’s eye, aware somewhere in the background of Dr. Twist’s soothing, encouraging voice, and I see her there, in the half darkness, my sister, holding a small knife in her hand. It is, I know immediately, the knife that I smuggled in for Claire last week, hidden inside my sleeve. I see my father slumped across the bed and there is blood still leaking from a hole in his throat even though he is clearly dead, and my sister has the baby in her blood-soaked arms, and I see that Claire is also dead, that the wall behind her is a scarlet screen of her own infinite blood.

“She killed Daddy!” Jessamine cried. “Claire killed him! I heard noises and I came down and she had the knife in her hand, and she’d stabbed him. She was about to escape, with the baby!”

I look at the dead glassy eyes of Claire, rolled up toward the ceiling, and hear myself whisper, “Why didn’t you let her escape, Jess? Why didn’t you let her?”

I hear the sound of my mother’s voice from the study above calling out our names, a hint of annoyance in her tone: “Where are you all? What are you all doing down there?”

My sister, a streak of blood across her left cheek, turns to me with those wild, wild eyes of hers and says, “I didn’t have any choice! She was going to escape. I had to. I had to!”

I say, “No, no, you didn’t have to! Daddy was dead! You could have let her go! We could have called the police and Claire and the baby could have been free! We could all have been free! And now you’ve killed her and we’re stuck again! Why did you kill her, Jessamine? Why?”

The look on her face turns then from indignation to fury and her voice is ice-cold when she says, “She killed Daddy. She deserved it!”

The sound of the baby crying, my hands over my ears, my eyes screwed shut; in that moment, there, came the knowledge, blinding, penetrating, all-consuming, that my sister was as evil as my father, that we, this family, were made of bad things, sickening things, that it ran through all of us like a virus, and that I had it too. And even though it was over, and my father was dead, it would never be over, not while those girls lay down here in this animal pit, not while my spiteful sister lived and breathed, not while my mother spent fortunes on her hair and her fingernails and pretended that none of this was happening. It would never, ever be over.

In my mind’s eye, I turn once more and look at Claire: beautiful, innocent Claire.

“I’m sorry!” I hear myself whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”

“Are you there?” asks Dr. Twist. “Have you found the place?”

I gulp and nod. “Yes,” I say, “yes, I’m there.”





acknowledgments


I can barely believe that I am writing my twenty-fourth set of acknowledgments! It makes me feel unimaginably old to realize that some of the folks who work on my books these days weren’t even born in 1999 when I wrote my first set.

I don’t do any research, so I don’t have reams of fascinating people to thank for giving me their time and their knowledge. I don’t have early readers or people I come to during the writing process for help. I struggle through alone for as long as it takes me write the book and then suddenly it is off my desk and with my editors and that is when the real magic happens.

So thank you to my amazing publishing teams across the world and my amazing agents here in London. Particular thanks to Selina Walker, Kaitlin Olson, and Jonny Geller for their unique and always invaluable input into the editing process. I am blessed to have three such wise and brilliant people behind me.

Thank you to every other member of my publishing teams in the UK and the US. I know that publishing my books is not a one-and-done mission, that you work hard all year round, coming up with fresh, exciting, and downright brilliant ways to build my sales and build me. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve you all. Especial thank to Liv Thomas at PRH for organizing all my amazing book events in the UK, to Ali Hinchcliffe at S&S for organizing all my amazing book events in the US, to Ania Gordon for her mind-blowing imagination when it comes to marketing ideas for my books, and to Dayna Johnson in the US for being an equally brilliant marketeer. Thanks to Dana, Karlyn, Libby, Ife, Katherine, and Jessica in the US, and to Mary, Joanna, Venetia, Helen, Lizzy, and Viki in the UK.

Thanks to Viola, Natalie, and Sophie at Curtis Brown for taking care of business; to Emma and everyone else in Curtis Brown’s translations department; and to Mark and everyone in the finance department for making sure I get paid!

Thank you to Nick and the rest of the film and TV team at Curtis Brown, and to Jason and Addison at UTA in the US.