The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

Sleeping in either single bed would be a depressingly solitary experience, but a less loaded, less incriminating one than last night’s choice. The door to the honeymoon suite had remained firmly closed ever since she had scurried in and straightened the sheets—beat the clefts out of each of the pillows—earlier that afternoon.

Now, at the top of the stairs that led back into the Hall, Effie glanced up to see Charlie in the corridor, bed-ready in T-shirt and boxer shorts, rumpled and weary. There was a new dash of salt and pepper in his hair, she noticed, but he looked as boyish as ever. When he saw her appear, he beamed and strode toward her.

“Effie—” He took her arm just below the elbow and bent his dark head to look deep into her eyes.

A swirling of memories dormant for so long. For years. Silt in water stirred up again. But rather than dredging up any sort of romantic feelings for Charlie, Effie simply felt a throb of guilt and fear course through her. Guilt that she might have ruined what she had with Ben; fear that he might find out.

“Effie.” Charlie’s voice was hoarse, an urgent whisper, and she suddenly knew how it would have played the previous night between two people so drunk it seemed the right thing to do. Guilt-edged desire, all the more charged and less rational for its secrecy, its swiftness. Its unexpectedness.

Charlie’s breath was warm on her cheek, and she cringed from his closeness, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Sorry I was so drunk last night,” he said hurriedly, checking the corridor anxiously in case anybody else appeared. “Hardly my usual suave self, eh? Thanks for a fun time though, Eff. G’night.”

He walked away from her before she had time to even open her eyes again, and closed the door to his room—his and Iso’s room—before she could even register what he meant. Disappeared before she knew quite what had happened. Again.

The scream was so short and so sudden Effie wondered whether it had come from her.

Immediately, Charlie was replaced in the corridor by another shape. Steve in a dressing gown, ejected from a nearby room on the left as forcefully as if he had been shoved out from someone on the other side of its door. When he was joined by Anna seconds later, Effie realized he had been.

His expression was stricken, his wife’s eyes wide with fear.

The scream had come from the kitchen. Suddenly the landing was full of people again.

By the time Effie—rooted in place—had hurtled down the stairs and reached the others, they had done the gruesome work of discovery for her. She looked at the scene in the scullery through eyes that had deliberately lost their focus, sparing her the details of it. Ben pulled her to him as she entered the room.

“I—I—I was just looking for some ice,” Iso stammered.

Charlie wrapped her in his arms, eyes fixed in wide consternation on the spot in front of them, the open freezer chest. Next to them, Steve reeled backward when he saw what was inside it.

Some way off, Anna pressed her fingers over her mouth. Her eyes made an inquiry of her husband. Effie tiptoed forward.

Inside the freezer, the pale pink of flesh, wrinkles of skin.

“What the f—” Charlie swallowed the contents of an unbidden gag.

Two cloudy, lifeless eyes looked back at them from the head lying on a pillow of ice. A gaping mouth and teeth bared in a limp, dark, silent scream, matched by a savage slit and empty cavity in the abdomen.

The body was eerily bloodless, drained of its life force before it had been dumped.

Delivered, Effie corrected herself, not dumped.

Bertie staggered in to join them, and then Lizzie pushed wildly through the crowd they had formed, a specter in a white nightgown with a blanched, frightened complexion to match.

“Oh,” she said in a dull monotone, her fear turning to a tired grimace. “The hog roast did turn up.”

Two Days After

23. Anna

“Shall we go out today?” Lizzie asked that morning, spacey despite having woken up well after the rest of them. Sleeping pills again. She dug her hand into the brown paper bag of croissants Steve had brought back from the village for their breakfast.

They had assembled slowly at the outdoor table again, fetching china and cutlery, glasses of orange juice and pastry crumbs now scattered where they had sat over dinner only twelve hours before. Steve sipped from a short mug of black coffee, standing on the lip of the hill overlooking the plain below. Iso, freshly showered after having gone for a run when she woke up, had wet hair and an enviable sheen.

“Only half a croissant for me,” she protested, loading up a bowl with berries and freshly cut peaches.

Effie seemed distracted, if less twitchy; she and Ben had come down to breakfast together—sheepish but quite sweet, Anna thought.

Charlie arrived downstairs still bleary with sleep; Bertie had been the second to last to join them, rumpled but nevertheless in smart chinos and shirtsleeves, pleading jet lag; but Anna felt alert. After the night’s adrenaline shot, she had lain awake into the small hours trying to riddle out what she had seen on the wedding night.

Who she had seen.

She was also trying to reason with her emotions, to figure out how she felt about the man asleep next to her. Deep, deep resentment matched by an equally profound and fierce sense that they were two parts of the same person, she and Steve. Pushing him away felt like pressing a hand on her own chest and heaving herself out of the frame too. This was why she had come away and left Sonny behind: to remember who she was in her own right.

Anna felt in her bones that what Steve had told her—that nothing had happened with Iso—was true, and she believed the other woman’s explanation. She thought briefly