Wake Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t have said how it would finish or even why it should. And when it did, they could return to …
    What? Not their old house and old life, because another vet had moved into the house that had been theirs and set up practice in what had been Patrick’s surgery. Normality? This was their new normality, or so Patrick continually told her. Their life from now on would be lived out in Wake Wood. But if that was the case, why did she feel as though she were merely marking time, waiting for something momentous to happen? Something huge, life-changing.
    She crossed her arms tightly across her chest and hugged her secret close. Patrick was unaware of the black bags she’d secreted away from his prying eyes behind the door in the spare bedroom. He thought the room was empty, and at first glance it looked that way, although it held everything she’d brought from Alice’s room at home.
    Home .
    That one word conjured so many images from the past – the only place Louise wanted to live. Alice kneeling on a chair, painting pictures on the kitchen table. Alice, her back turned to the hearth, reading a book by firelight in their living room. Alice hitting tennis balls against the side of the house. Alice running ahead of Louise as she walked her home from school, so that she could call into Patrick’s surgery and see the animals he was doctoring. Alice curled in her bed last thing at night, listening to a story Louise was telling her.
    Soon – very soon – she’d recreate Alice’s bedroom in their Wake Wood house. She didn’t know why she’d waited so long. Yes … she did. Fear of Patrick’s disapproval. But once it was done, the only difference would be in the actual walls. Alice’s room would become her sanctuary here, just as it had been her refuge and sanctuary before they’d moved.
    She continued to stare at the raindrop-streaked window.
    Why did it appear that some drops were massing and moving upwards, not downwards?
    She heard the bell and the sound of the door opening and closing behind her, followed by footsteps, but she didn’t turn her head. She simply couldn’t summon the energy required to communicate with a customer. It was easier to remain where she was, dwelling in the past, concentrating on recalling every tiny detail of Alice’s room and how she would duplicate it in the cottage.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    Louise finally turned to an elderly woman wearing a brown wool cloche hat that clashed with her khaki mac. She was holding out a box of self-tanning lotion. Louise avoided eye contact but extended her hand to take the box.
    The woman spoke with a local accent. ‘Is this hypo-allergenic?’
    It was a commonplace enquiry that sparked an uncontrollable reaction. Louise dropped the box, tried and failed to stop tears starting into her eyes and rushed to the door. ‘Sorry. I …’
    Abandoning the woman and the shop, she hurried down the street, sensing rather than seeing the faces peering out of the few open businesses as she passed. Curious, unsympathetic faces. The faces of people she still considered strangers after long, weary months in the town.
    The room – Alice’s room. She had to recreate it. She needed it, needed something to hold on to. Patrick was cruel. He should never have forced her to leave their old house. She’d been close to Alice within its walls because Alice had lived there, and a part of her had remained. Alice wasn’t in Wake Wood because she’d never even visited the place.
    Why couldn’t Patrick see that mothers and daughters needed one another – and desperately? Death couldn’t alter that. She needed Alice and Alice still needed her. Now they were separated more than ever.
    The rain had lightened to a drizzle. The farmhouse and outbuildings glistened pewter beyond the sea of muck and mud, criss-crossed by tractor tracks, that covered the farmyard. Patrick was standing in a pen at the far end of the open yard, preparing a cow for a Caesarean. He dipped a wide brush into