The White House - Book 6, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Seventeen

She had talked about it for years; since she’d read a National Geographic at the dentist’s surgery when she was eleven. She had spoken of going to foreign places, living in different countries and experiencing other cultures. Elise had always thought it was a pipedream and that when the time came Val would do what everybody did…go to university and get a decent job afterwards. Elise had even imagined they would go to the same campus and probably get a house together in the final years. 

Val hadn’t been full of bluster though. When the A Level results came out Val announced that she was going to use the money her gran had put aside for university to get a ticket to Australia instead. She was going to explore the Southern Hemisphere and make money writing articles for a travelogue. Elise’s face had fallen and Val had laughed and asked if Elise honestly thought she would be happy at university when all she’d ever wanted was to go places and see things.

Elise had known she couldn’t lie to her best friend and that she was no better than her own mother if she tried to force Val to live someone else’s dream. So she had smiled and gone with Val to the travel agent to buy the plane ticket.

They’d parted company a few weeks later when Elise headed to her halls of residence and Val boarded a plane to Perth. Since then their friendship had been conducted through letters during the years after Val first left, emails as technology moved on and visits whenever she came back to the UK, which wasn’t as much since her parents had died. Even so, the two of them had never lost contact, despite the thousands of miles between them.

Val knew about all the miscarriages, Noah’s stillbirth and Elise’s long stay in hospital. She had been supportive throughout it all; sending chatty missives, long warm emails, presents from exotic places and the security of a constant loving friendship, even when distance separated them. Elise couldn’t help but wonder what Val would say if she told her about Oliver and the goings on at the white house, though.

Smiling, she walked back into the kitchen. Her mouth fell open and she stopped, abruptly, in the doorway when she saw the carving knife embedded in the cupboard next to the sink. Her knees sagged and she clutched at the doorjamb to hold herself up. Upstairs, as if in response to her fear, the rocking horse began its now familiar frenzied creaking.

Fury washed through her; a white hot helpless anger at whatever it was that was trying to scare her and Oliver. She stalked into the kitchen, yanked the knife from the cupboard door and turned around to face the room, brandishing it in front of her.

“Get the hell out of my house,” she growled. “I don’t care how long you’ve been here or what you want, but you don’t belong here and you need to leave now.”

The noise of the rocking horse, upstairs, ceased and a lull settled on the house. Elise stood, tense and watchful, for a couple of minutes; waiting for something else to happen, yet everything in the house remained silent and still. She relaxed, dropping her arm to her side and sighed, quietly.

Suddenly, the radio on the kitchen counter erupted with loud static noise, blaring through the room, and Elise let out a startled yelp and dropped the knife on the floor. She yanked the plug out of the wall and the radio fell silent again. In the dining room, however, the stereo also began broadcasting the same horrible noise. Elise hurried in there and pulled that plug out too. Her foot was already on the first step when the television up in the lounge started to emit the static noise. One by one the radios in every room did the same thing until Elise had unplugged or removed the batteries from all of them.

The hush that followed was forbidding and Elise stood in her bedroom, with every nerve on edge and her body poised; ready for flight. She stood for ten minutes, listening to her own heartbeat thud in her ears until finally she dropped onto the bed and exhaled, heavily.