Melissa placed her hand on the door handle and paused, taking the chance to enjoy a moment of calm before the inevitable noise and rush of family life. She watched the tall pine trees swaying above her. As a child, she would contemplate the trees from the darkness of her bedroom in the small cottage in the woods where she lived with her parents, imagining those trees were alive and watching over her . . . protecting her.
Her eyes travelled to the side of her house, taking in ‘Joel’s tree’, as they called it. It was actually two trees grown into each other, crooked and bent but beautiful too with the pretty ‘tree charms’ hanging from it, colourful glass orbs that had been added over the years in homage to her first son. Melissa’s eyes alighted on the latest addition, an orb the size of her fist, sparkling with turquoise green and bright blue swirls. The twins had found it at the craft fair the other day. Melissa smiled as she remembered how excited they’d been to show her.
‘It’s green,’ Lewis had said as he hung it up on the tree.
‘Joel’s favourite colour,’ Lilly had added with a sad smile.
Melissa’s eyes filled with tears. Yes, things were a lot better than they once were. Joel would be proud of her, of all of them.
She took a deep happy breath then twisted the door handle and pushed the door open. She stepped inside, kicking off her work trainers and taking her light denim jacket from around her waist and hanging it up, noticing the nail on the coat peg was coming loose again. She made a mental note to get Patrick to tighten it up later before the dog had another pile of coats collapse on him. Speaking of which, their golden Labrador, Sandy, came bouncing down the hallway, jumping up at Melissa in his usual forceful and enthusiastic way.
‘Hello, baby, hello,’ she murmured as she buried her nose in one of the dog’s silky ears. ‘Down now, down, before you ruin my top,’ she said, taking Sandy’s paws off her chest and placing them on the floor. ‘Too late,’ she added with a sigh as she noticed a red mark above the Bodyworks Centre logo on the collar of her white top. She licked her finger and tried to rub it out. ‘Don’t tell me another jar of chilli got smashed,’ she called out as she padded down the hallway, past pale green walls adorned with family photos, and walked into the kitchen. ‘You’d better have cleaned up the glass, remember when—’
She paused. Her three children were standing pale-faced in the kitchen, blinking down at something hidden by the wooden island in the middle of the room.
‘What’s going on?’ Melissa asked, her blue eyes scouring the room, taking in more spots of red on the wooden countertops and glossy white cupboard doors. ‘Have you been trying to cook dinner on your own again? I texted Dad to suggest we have a barbecue. Where is he?’
They didn’t say anything, just continued looking down at something.
The hair on Melissa’s arms and nape lifted.
Something was wrong.
She walked around the kitchen island then froze, letting out a gasp.
Her husband was lying on the kitchen floor, one cheek squashed against the hard grey tiles, his right arm bent at an awkward angle beneath him.
Chapter Three
Thursday 18th April, 2019
4.15 p.m.
Melissa’s first thought as she looked at Patrick was that he was sleeping. It was how she was used to seeing him at night, turning in the darkness to catch him with his eyes closed in the moonlight, cheek pressed against his pillow as he softly snored.
But he wasn’t snoring. He wasn’t moving at all. And his skin, usually tanned and healthy, was now horribly pale . . . almost blue!
All her senses came alive at once.
‘What the hell happened?’ she screamed at the kids. ‘Did he slip? Have you called an ambulance? Please tell me you’ve called an ambulance!’
‘No,’ Lewis said in a trembling voice as he put a protective arm around his little sister, Grace. ‘We – we only just found him like this after taking Sandy for a walk.’
Melissa’s gaze drew back to the spatters of red around the kitchen, fingerprints of it smeared against the kitchen units, pools of it by Patrick’s head. His head, which, as Melissa realised when she crouched down to tend to her husband, was bleeding freely from a wound on the exposed side, his dark brown hair