Past Secrets Read online

  ‘Oh,’ she said in horror, her only lead gone.

  Her anxiety finally transmitted itself to the guy on the other end of the phone.

  ‘All right. They were staying in the Arizona Fish Hotel over beside the Port Authority,’ he said. ‘You didn’t hear it from me, OK?’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Faye with gratitude.

  It was the sight of the Arizona Fish Hotel that made Faye begin to feel really worried. Her own hotel was hardly a palace, but it was Trump Tower compared to this run-down place with its tawdry cloak of hip.

  It might have boasted a lobby full of retro chic furniture and framed yellowing sheet music of hit songs allegedly penned in the penthouse suite, but Faye could see the seediness seeping from the walls.

  No amount of trendy furniture or psychedelic prints on the walls, or even the neon sign for the hotel’s own nightclub, A Fish, could hide the dirt.

  It reminded her of The Club in her previous life: a dump dressed up as a cool hang-out by virtue of the fact that some band or other played there once, partying till the LSD or the heroin was gone. Not that she’d ever travelled anywhere with TJ, but she knew that if she had, she’d have loved the decayed glamour of the Arizona Fish. To a girl like Amber, raised in the quiet of Summer Street, hearing of the songs allegedly written in room seven, or the bed that had probably fallen through the roof in room eleven during an unbelievable party after a rock festival, would have made her feel a part of it all. This was excitement, this was life. And she was in the middle of it.

  Faye knew exactly how excited Amber would be to be living this life, because she’d been just as excited twenty years ago to find herself in the world of The Club. But that life was like being in the eye of the storm. You thought you were safe, untouchable, when the storm was actually raging inches away. Then, nobody could have told Faye Reid that. She’d had to find it out for herself.

  Faye wanted to get her daughter out of that storm before it hurt her. She wouldn’t stop searching for Amber until she found her. And if she had to stay in New York for ever, she would. She’d get Amber back.

  Amber looked at the cockroach and the cockroach looked back calmly. It wasn’t as big as a rat, as some people claimed they were in this part of Utah, but she wouldn’t have minded a rat. Furry was infinitely preferable to scuttling, crackly insects.

  Breathing deeply, she backed out of the room, past Karl and the man with the dirty T-shirt, and stood in the hallway, feeling her skin crawl.

  ‘I am not sleeping in there,’ she said.

  The man moved into the room, banged about a bit, and emerged smiling.

  ‘He is gone, you can go in now.’

  ‘Where is he gone?’ demanded Amber, looking around the floor in the hallway with distaste. ‘Into the corner he hides in with his eight million relatives until we’re in bed asleep and he comes out to dance the Macarena?’

  ‘No Macarena. He is gone,’ the man repeated.

  ‘It’s all we can afford,’ said Karl, sighing and hauling his stuff into the room. He’d stopped hauling Amber’s stuff days ago.

  It was hard to imagine that she’d once felt that the Arizona Fish Hotel was a bit on the grubby side, Amber thought wryly. The Arizona’s dust balls and smeary windows were nothing to the squalor of this joint, a place where health inspectors clearly feared to tread.

  Karl was right: it was all they could afford. The band were travelling across the country in a rent-a-wreck van, which was the cheapest way to get them all to LA, and staying in the most inexpensive motels around. This way, Karl had worked out, they’d have enough money to survive in LA for a few months in order to set up another production deal with somebody hot.

  ‘Screw Stevie,’ Syd muttered every day they climbed into the van and set off on the interstate. The suspension was not what it might have been and it took a while each day to get used to the bumpiness of the ride.

  ‘Like a roller coaster,’ said Lew the drummer happily.

  ‘You must have a stomach of steel,’ Syd replied in disgust.

  When Demon had decided against producing the band’s album, Stevie’s big talk had dried up along with the meals out and the free-flowing booze.

  Citing problems at home, Stevie had hopped on a plane back to Ireland, saying he’d work on a new deal for them and they’d talk when they were all back in Dublin.

  ‘Crap,’ said Syd succinctly. ‘We’ll never see him again.’

  Stevie hadn’t bothered with the last outstanding two days of their hotel bill, either, so when he left for JFK, reception were on the phone asking if the band were moving out or not, because with Stevie’s credit card gone, they had to pay up or pack up.

  Everyone had return flights home, a precondition of their entry visas, so following Stevie’s yellow belly seemed like a sensible option.

  ‘We can’t go home with our tails between our legs,’ Karl said furiously. ‘I’m not anyway, I don’t care what you guys want to do. This is my dream. I don’t need guys like Stevie. I’ll do it in spite of him.’

  Amber waited for him to put his arms round her and say that the two of them would make it one way or the other, but he didn’t. This was a band discussion, it seemed.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ Amber said abruptly. She grabbed the room card and was halfway to the lift when Karl caught up with her.

  ‘Baby, don’t go,’ he said.

  ‘You were talking as if I wasn’t there,’ she accused, tears stinging her eyes. She brushed them away with her sleeve. She would not cry.

  ‘That was band stuff,’ Karl said, pulling her into his arms. ‘Course you’re staying with me. Aren’t you?’

  And he’d looked worried, as if there really was any chance of her leaving him.

  ‘I’m staying,’ she said, leaning against him with relief. For one awful moment there, she’d thought she didn’t mean anything to him. She’d given up so much too: home, Mum, Ella…so many things, really. If Karl went off without her, she’d have done it all for nothing.

  ‘Let’s go out on our own, to dinner and a club,’ he murmured against her ear.

  ‘Can we afford it?’ asked Amber, ever practical.

  ‘Anything for you, baby.’

  That evening had been the last romantic moment they’d shared, Amber reflected now as she pulled her case into the now allegedly cockroach-free motel room in some truck-stop off the Utah interstate. They’d rented the van, left New York and were now driving hundreds of miles every day through the vastness of America. It should have been a dream trip, like the kooky road trips of teenage movies, but those movie-star kids had dollars to spare, while the band had none.

  Their mobile phones didn’t work here, even Syd’s, which was a super-duper thing his girlfriend had bought him. He’d spent so long messing with it that it had locked itself and was now useless.

  Karl was relentless in his quest to reach Los Angeles with the minimum number of nights spent in motels (‘every night on the road is another few days in LA renting,’ he insisted), so they couldn’t dawdle in pretty towns off the interstates or take trips to places that caught their eye.

  Karl was a man with a mission, and Amber and the band were following in his wake.

  ‘I’m beat,’ he said now, lying down on the bed cover. ‘Three hundred and fifty miles today, it’s got to be a record.’

  Amber didn’t reply. She was looking at the stains on the carpet and wondering what had made them. If only she had a vacuum cleaner and maybe some carpet stain remover, and cream cleaner…It could have been her mother talking.

  Look at the state of this place! Amber, get the antiseptic wipes out of my bag.

  They hadn’t gone on many holidays: the money hadn’t been there. But Mum had always packed cleaning materials so that if the place they stayed didn’t come up to her standards, she’d clean it herself.

  Amber felt a lump in her throat at the memory of the laughs they’d had in the places they’d stayed.

  Turning to the bathroom, she
went inside and shut the door. There was no tub, just a lived-in shower with a curtain beaded with other people’s dirt. Amber sat down on the toilet seat and buried her face in her hands.

  This was so not what she’d expected when she’d left home.

  She’d thought she was running off to experience life and become a woman: instead, she was enduring life on the road with an obsessed boyfriend and staying in a series of dumps. She mightn’t have minded if only Karl was obsessed with her but he wasn’t.

  He hadn’t called her his muse in a very long time. We are not amused, she thought. And then she did cry.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Monday after Faye had left the country, Christie came home from school to find a disturbing message on her answering machine.

  ‘Hello, my name is Heidi Manton and I’m phoning on behalf of Carey Wolensky. He’s trying to locate a Mrs Christie Devlin to invite her to the private viewing of his exhibition in Dublin in two weeks’ time except he’s not sure if she still lives at this address. If Mrs Devlin could phone me, I’d be most grateful. And if she’s moved, any information on her whereabouts would be marvellous.’

  The clipped tones of the woman recited a number in London and Christie allowed herself to take a deep breath. At least Carey wasn’t in the country yet.

  ‘From next week, you can contact myself or Mr Wolensky in Dublin at this number.’

  The voice reeled off another number and Christie’s relief evaporated.

  He was coming here and he wanted to see her. It couldn’t get any worse. What on earth was she going to do?

  While the maelstrom of Summer Street relationships whirled unnoticed around her, Una Maguire had taken it upon herself to set up the ‘Save Our Pavilion’ campaign.

  ‘We can’t let our lovely park be destroyed by those developers,’ she said to Dennis and Maggie. ‘Evil, that’s what they are,’ she added, as though the developers were in league with the devil and were ripping down the pavilion as part of some satanic bargain for making loads of money out of big ugly apartments.

  ‘You don’t want to overdo it,’ said Dennis, attempting to be the voice of reason. ‘Don’t forget, darling, your leg is still broken and…’

  ‘Oh fiddle faddle, my leg is fine,’ said Una. ‘Isn’t it better to be doing something to help our community than sitting at home worrying about my old leg and thinking that I’ll be ending up in a wheelchair before long?’

  Maggie glanced over at her mother, but Una went on regardless.

  ‘Somebody needs to stand up to those developers and I’m going to call a meeting of the residents of Summer Street and the streets all around. We don’t want to use some hopeless new park three miles down the road when we have this lovely little jewel right here beside us. We will fight the council all the way!’ and she waved her crutch menacingly in the air.

  ‘Right, Mum,’ said Maggie, alarmed her mother might take someone’s eye out. It was easiest to humour her when she was in this mood. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  A printing firm would run off a hundred flyers for next to nothing if Maggie dropped by with details of the meeting. The only problem was that the firm’s office wasn’t on a direct bus route. The task would require the car.

  ‘Your dad can drive,’ Una said, then added, ‘You won’t be long, will you?’

  She didn’t like being left on her own these days, Maggie had noticed, sure it was fear of falling and hurting herself again.

  ‘Dad can stay with you. I’m sure I can remember how to drive,’ Maggie said a little wearily. If she was going to become a stronger person, she had told herself, she would need to accept life’s challenges, and trying to drive again would be the first. At least the fear of driving might take her mind off her own personal misery, the misery that kept her awake late at night, thinking about her and Grey.

  ‘There’s nothing to it, Bean,’ said Dad, delighted.

  ‘Of course there isn’t,’ she said cheerily. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve driven, that’s all.’

  ‘Any eejit can drive,’ said her father. ‘And you’re so clever, it’ll be nothing to you.’

  With both parents smiling at her proudly, clearly believing that their only child was a cross between Stephen Hawking and Condoleezza Rice, Maggie had to smile back. They didn’t have anything particularly to be proud of, but what was the point of telling them that? She’d managed to hide her misery pretty well. So well, in fact, that nobody at home appeared to see how sad she was underneath the smiling exterior.

  The family car was a Volvo, like all the Maguire cars had been. Her father felt that Volvos could tackle the world head on and still win.

  ‘Reliable,’ her father insisted.

  ‘You could hit a moose with one and there wouldn’t even be a dent,’ her mother would add. ‘Extra hard side bars or something.’

  Maggie sat in the driver’s seat, looked at all the pedals, buttons and dials and hoped that the local moose population was safely off the road today.

  The car started first thing and despite its general air of decrepitude because it was almost an antique, it moved forward smoothly when she let off the handbrake.

  Indicator, check the road, off in first gear, smoothly into second. It was like riding a bike, Maggie thought triumphantly. She was driving. Nothing to it. Pity Grey couldn’t see her now, the lying, cheating pig.

  At a sedate twenty-five miles an hour, she made it to the printer’s where they ran off her leaflets at high speed and she was back in the car within half an hour. Next, she stopped off at the supermarket and loaded up a trolley. The petrol tank was almost empty, she noticed as she pulled out of the supermarket car park on to the road.

  Emboldened by her success at driving, she decided that a trip to the garage would round off her maiden voyage nicely.

  A confident woman driver with a brave new life ahead of her would know how to pump her own petrol. Why had she never had a car before? The sense of freedom was heady.

  She had to jiggle the pump nozzle a bit to fit it into the tank, and even then it leaked, but then the numbers clicked up on the pump counter in a most satisfying fashion, and when she reached twenty euros, Maggie pulled the pump out. She’d been thinking she’d make a gorgeous dinner for the three of them, nutritious, something out of a book perhaps, looking after her family and…

  The little sticker on the petrol tank flap winked up at her. Diesel. Diesel.

  With whiplash speed, she turned to the pump. Unleaded petrol. She’d just put unleaded petrol in a diesel car.

  She stared at the car in shock. Trust her parents to have a diesel car and not tell her. No. Trust her not to notice. Shit.

  She ran into the shop and stood at the back of the queue, thinking she might cry or maybe even laugh. She could feel her paper-thin happy face beginning to crack.

  Anyone could do it, right? Someone could suck it out, couldn’t they? Or something.

  The man in front of her swivelled round and Maggie realised she’d spoken out loud.

  ‘Anyone could put petrol in by mistake when it’s a diesel,’ she said, trying to put the whole ‘they could suck it out’ remark into context. ‘It’s my parents’ car and I was doing them a favour and I didn’t look at the tank. Thought it was petrol, not diesel. Could happen to a bishop.’

  There, it was better to say it and surely he’d laugh. It had to happen all the time. There was probably a special queue for people who did it.

  But the man gave her a glare that she instantly translated as All Women Are Idiots with a hint of We Should Never Have Given Them the Vote added in for good measure. ‘Of all the thick things to do,’ he grunted and turned his back on her.

  ‘But the nozzle isn’t supposed to be able to fit in,’ pointed out the woman who’d just joined the queue behind her.

  ‘Yeah, they’re different, the diesel and the petrol ones,’ someone else said unhelpfully.

  ‘I thought I was doing it wrong, so I made it fit,’ said Maggie forlornly, thinkin
g of all the petrol she’d spilled on the ground. She hoped nobody lit a match out there or the whole place would go up.

  Mr Stupid Woman Glare gave her another withering blast of it on his way past.

  Maggie tried to ignore his contempt.

  ‘You’ll never believe what I’ve done,’ she said to the impassive woman behind the counter, pleading with her eyes to be given a bit of female bonding.

  The woman blinked slowly during the story, then jerked with her thumb.

  ‘Out back. Ask for Ivan. Ivan Gregory. He owns the place. He’s busy but he might help you.’

  There was a queue waiting for the pump where the Volvo was parked but Maggie ran past it to the back of the garage. Away from the shiny forecourt, she found a small workshop.

  There were several cars in various states of disrepair suspended over pits or parked in small bays, and a radio tuned to a local station provided a backdrop to the noises of banging and welding.

  The only person not working on a vehicle was a fresh-faced young man who was leaning against a desk with a mug in his hand.

  ‘I’m looking for Ivan, the owner?’ Maggie said.

  ‘He’s under there.’

  She followed his gaze. A pair of overalled legs stuck out from under a large green Jeep, legs with big round-toed boots that a clown might wear. Were they hobnailed boots? she wondered irrelevantly.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, leaning down, ‘are you Ivan? I was told you could help me. I’ve…’ God, she felt stupid. ‘I’ve just put unleaded in my parents’ car and it turns out, it runs on diesel. Wouldn’t you know. I hoped there might be some gizmo to suck it out. Like a vacuum cleaner. Can you vacuum out all the unleaded?’

  The legs seemed to shake a bit.

  ‘Or drain it?’ Maggie went on.

  Yes, draining, that sounded like the business. They were always draining things in garages and doing stuff with stopcocks, or was that cisterns? Whatever.

  ‘I’m sure you’re busy but I’d be really grateful if you could help me. My mother’s sick and I’ve got all her shopping in the car and there’s a big queue behind me…’ Maggie didn’t say she thought she’d cry if anyone in the queue shouted at her for blocking the petrol pump. ‘They’re probably all going mental, saying they bet it’s some stupid woman who’s left her car there.’