She was getting through to them now, Heather could feel it. She walked over and stood in front of them, so they were in a small triangle. ‘The last thing she would’ve wanted was to pass on her doubt to you two.’
‘She’s right,’ Rachel said. ‘Mum would hate us doubting ourselves.’
‘It’s time to start trusting our instincts,’ Tully agreed.
Heather nodded. They had to start trusting their instincts.
What choice did they have? It wasn’t as if they could ask Pam.
EPILOGUE
PAMELA
Three years earlier . . .
Pamela counted out the money. Ninety-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-two dollars.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said out loud.
Obviously her mother couldn’t hear her. Two days ago, Pam had got the phone call from her in the hospital. A suspected heart attack, Mum had said gravely, explaining that she’d been taken by ambulance to the hospital. Pam was fumbling for her keys, ready to drive to the hospital, when her mother added, ‘Oh, Pammy? Can you swing by my place and grab my hot-water bottle on the way?’
Pam hesitated. ‘I can probably find a hot-water bottle here somewhere . . .’
‘No,’ her mother said firmly. ‘I need my hot-water bottle. It’s important, Pammy.’
Her mother provided instructions for where she would find it. At the back of the wardrobe, behind the shoes. When Pam brought it to her mother’s bedside, her mother showed her its contents.
‘A hundred thousand dollars?’ Pam cried. ‘Mum, where did you get a hundred thousand dollars?’
Mum explained that for years she’d been withdrawing her pension money each week and hiding the cash in the hot-water bottle.
When Pam asked why, she explained that if the government saw she wasn’t spending it all, they’d reduce the amount she received.
Turned out her mother was quite the pension fraudster.
‘What if you’d died and never told me?’ Pam asked.
‘Then the people cleaning out the house would have got a nice surprise.’
Pam had brought the hot-water bottle home and put it in her bedside drawer for safekeeping until her mum got out of hospital. But her mother had died that morning of another heart attack. So now, she supposed, the money was hers.
Pam wondered what she would do with all this money. What would Mum have wanted her to do?
Mum was always telling Pam that she needed to get away, unwind, take a break from her life. Perhaps she and Stephen could go to one of those health retreats? One with facials and massages. She could use a massage. Lately her body hurt all the time. One too many falls, she suspected. She was always tripping here, or stumbling there.
A few weeks ago at book club, she’d commented on her aches and pains, and all the ladies had agreed. Old age, they said. Menopause, someone else chimed in. But afterward, as she helped herself to Mary’s Black Forest cake, Diana Rothschild had made a comment that rankled Pam.
‘Do you find that you are more likely to injure yourself while Stephen is around?’
Pam had been mortified. What was she insinuating? Stephen would never lay a hand on her. He was a doctor. Do no harm! She’d shrugged the question off and avoided Diana ever since. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because as upsetting as Diana’s comment was, Pam did find that she was more likely to injure herself while Stephen was around. One hundred per cent more likely.
But it got her thinking about something Fiona Arthur had said to her, years ago, right after Stephen left her.
‘He’s not who you think he is.’
A strange comment, admittedly, but given the situation, Pam had written it off as sour grapes. And yet . . . what if it was more than that? What if Fiona also had unexplained falls? What if she’d also spent her marriage wondering if she was going crazy when something more sinister was at play?
Maybe Pam would reach out to Fiona? Now she had this money, she had options. Maybe it was finally time to face the truth.
Pam got out a notepad and a pen. These days, with her memory issues, if she didn’t write things down, they didn’t happen. She wrote down Fiona Arthur’s name. Then she wrote down Tully’s name. If she got the news she feared, she’d need to pack, find a new place to live. There’d be a lot of paperwork. Her daughter may have had her troubles but if there was one role Tully was born for, it was this.
Pam heard Stephen’s car pull into the driveway. She tore the page out of the notepad, folded it in half and stuffed it inside the hot-water bottle. It was as good a hiding place as anywhere.