The House Guest - Mark Edwards Page 0,28
of my clothes, and ran down the stairs. I didn’t want to face Jack and Mona, but she was there in the hallway, turning towards me with concern on her face. Fake concern.
I now knew what she and Jack really thought of me, and it burned. I had built up our friendship in my head, but we were virtually strangers, weren’t we? We’d spent a week together on the cruise, and Ruth and I had seen them briefly when they handed over the keys to this house. We didn’t really know them, and they didn’t know us.
I had thought they would be on my side. But they thought I was a liar. They thought I might be capable of murdering my girlfriend.
‘Everything all right?’ Mona asked as I reached the foot of the stairs.
I was tempted, for a moment, to tell her I’d heard what she and Jack had said. But I realised that would make me appear even worse: an eavesdropper, desperately trying to defend himself.
‘I need some air,’ I said, slipping past her to get to the door.
‘Wait, Adam,’ she said.
I turned.
‘I know you must be disappointed by what Dennis said. But I’m sure Ruth is okay. I can feel it. I have every confidence she’ll be back.’
‘And you’re not concerned about this woman who came into your home pretending to know you?’ I wanted to see how she would explain her lack of worry without revealing any of her and Jack’s theories and suspicions.
She opened her mouth. Shut it again. Finally, she said, ‘Of course I am. But nothing is missing. She doesn’t seem to have accessed our computers.’
‘In other words, you don’t care about what she might have done to Ruth.’
‘What? Why do you think this Eden person has done something to her?’
‘I’m going to look for somewhere else to stay,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to do that.’
‘No, I think I should. I don’t want to be under your feet.’ I didn’t want to get drawn into a debate about it so I said, ‘I really need to go out.’
‘Okay. Well, maybe we can chat later.’
‘Maybe.’
I slipped through the door and ran down the steps, not pausing or looking back. Perhaps it had been a rash thing to do, but I didn’t want to be under the same roof as these people who didn’t trust me.
The police wouldn’t do anything. Jack and Mona wouldn’t believe the truth.
I was on my own.
I walked up Bedford Avenue, the same route I’d taken just a few days ago with Eden when we’d gone to the swimming pool. That had been Friday afternoon, when I thought all I had to worry about was Ruth outgrowing our relationship. Now I knew she had been concerned about it too, and it made me feel sick to think she might have felt sorry for me. Mona was wrong, though, about this being a male-ego thing, wasn’t she? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was something that was hardwired into me.
Still, right now it didn’t matter very much. All that mattered was finding Ruth and making sure she was okay. When I found her we could have that talk. Figure out how to go forward. And I was more concerned about her career right now than mine. Hoping Sally didn’t have much sway in Hollywood; that casting directors weren’t putting a big black mark next to Ruth’s name.
As soon as I reached the park I took out my phone and called Jayne, Ruth’s agent. It was lunchtime in New York, making it just after 5 p.m. in London. Jayne’s phone went to voicemail so I left a message and went and sat on a bench.
I checked Ruth’s Facebook page, just in case she had updated it, and did the same with Instagram. I tried to call her again, then sent her another text asking her to call me. Then I spent an hour going down the Google rabbit hole, searching for women named Eden across all the social media sites. I put ‘Eden Bakersfield’ into the search engine but the only result was a bar that had once existed in that city, also called Eden. I searched my memory, trying to recall something, anything, that Eden might have said, anything that could tell me where she might be. She had said she didn’t know anyone else in New York. She certainly didn’t have her own place . . . although even as I thought it, I remembered that I couldn’t trust anything she had told me.