Page 114 of The Boathouse By the Loch

Marnie said, ‘Can you tell me what you mean by that, Bonnie?’

She nodded. ‘I felt like I’d just stepped into a movie, having tea with a girl with an English accent, not questioning what I was doing there, and the other girl, who’d been sitting with her, letting me take her seat, and serving us drinks. Suddenly I didn’t want to be me anymore. When I was alone in the caravan, I’d stand in front of the mirror and talk to myself as though I was one of those English ladies with a proper education from university. It’s silly, I know, but it kept me going when Logan ... when things got bad.’

‘Not at all,’ said Marnie.

There were whispers of agreement around the room.

‘I was making plans. I didn’t know how I was going to do it or where I would go, but I sat in that bookshop, and I thought,no way am I going back to Logan. No way.’ She hesitated. ‘It was my chance.’

‘Your chance?’ Marnie said.

‘Yes. I just wanted to be like her, be like the girl in the window, be educated and know about books and not be me. We felt like kindred spirits, us three girls, all there on Christmas Day to get away from the people in our lives, although nobody spoke of them.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Tell me what the English woman looked like,’ Jake interrupted.

‘Logan? I thought you said we were alone. Did you tell Logan where I am?’

Jake raised his eyebrows and his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

‘There’s … um, nobody here. Just you and me, and your memory of that day,’ said Marnie.

‘But I heard a man’s voice. I thought it was in my imagination before, but now I’m sure …’

Everyone in the room, including Marnie, saw her gettingincreasingly agitated. Marnie took her hands. ‘It’s just you and me, Bonnie.’

She pulled free. ‘I don’t believe you!’

Jake said, ‘Please, at least tell me her name? Do you know her name?’

Marnie swung round to Jake. ‘Quiet!’

David said, ‘I think we need to bring her out of it – right now!’

Marnie agreed. ‘Bonnie, it’s time to return to from your journey into the past …’

Chapter 41

It was just as she’d feared; she didn’t much like who she was … and she imagined that neither would they.

She wasn’t even sure she liked her name – Bonnie. She knew why. She felt she was now a different person. She wasn’t living her old life anymore – Bonnie’s life.

She looked sheepishly around the room.Oh, god – they hate me.She turned to David. She expected he’d hate her most of all after what she was about to reveal.

She’d finally remembered everything – her rubbish life before she had unwittingly stepped into someone else’s shoes; someone else’s life. But very soon, David would know who she was – the getaway driver who had been sitting outside his boathouse the previous Christmas morning, waiting for her boyfriend, Logan, who was a no-good thief, to collect his money.

She could barely look him in the eye. The trouble with the hypnosis was that although it had worked – she knew who she was: Bonnie Stewart, a young woman of no fixed abode, who had grown up in a tenement in Glasgow with a mother who was an alcoholic. She had dropped out of school and had hooked up with a young man who had turned out to be no good. Although shehad not told the whole story under hypnosis, the session had worked, and her memories were back in all their horrible glory.

From what Marnie had just recounted, she had skipped over much of her life to her and Logan’s arrival in Aviemore and her escape from him. But there were pieces of that day she had not described. She hadn’t recounted in the session what had led up to her arrival at Wilbur’s Bookstore. Doing so would mean she had to tell her friends things she’d really rather not. It meant they would have to hear things they didn’t want to know. But she’d made a promise to herself that she would tell them everything.

Marnie said, ‘Bonnie, are you all right?’

She looked at Marnie sharply. Of course she wasn’t all right. She could see the way they were all looking at her, in shock. But she was determined to finish what Marnie had started – telling them what had happened the previous Christmas in Aviemore – all of it.

‘Logan promised me he wasn’t stealing again. He hadn’t long got out of prison after that attempted robbery at your dad’s store two years before.’

Duncan sat forward in his seat. ‘What are you saying? It was your boyfriend who broke into my store and shot David?’

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