Sleep Sister: A page-turning novel of psychological suspense by Laura Elliot Read Free Book Online

the production manager. He attended night classes in electronics and read technical manuals, propping them against milk bottles on the kitchen table and staring with fierce concentration at the pages whenever Beth sat down beside him. He blushed when he caught her eye, as if he, like Marina, hated having to speak to her. She soon realised this was shyness rather than hostility and a slow friendship began to grow between them.
    ‘Is Marina giving you a hard time?’ he demanded one day when he discovered her in tears at her machine.
    Beth shook her head. ‘I’m just homesick,’ she admitted, not mentioning the letter that had arrived the previous day from her mother. Bitter and short, the words had jumped from the page, shocking her with their venom. ‘Since you have refused my request to return home and insist on living with your adulterous father in his whore’s house I no longer recognise you as my daughter.’
    She had burned the letter, watching the notepaper blacken and curl the words into ash.

    A t night , when she tried to sleep, the bolster firmly established as a no-man’s-land between herself and Marina, she heard creaking noises from the bedroom next door. A rhythmical, boisterous sound that forced her head deeper into the pillow. She suspected that Marina was also awake, restlessly turning away from the evidence of her mother’s lovemaking.
    ‘If my father was alive he’d break every bone in your father’s pathetic body,’ she muttered one night after the sounds from next door had ceased. Beth pretended to be asleep. She knew the story of Marina’s father. How he’d drowned at sea, his body swept ashore many miles from where his fishing trawler had sunk. When Marina called her a culchie parasite it no longer hurt so much. She realised she was simply a target for Marina’s anger, nothing more.

    O ldport was different to Anaskeagh yet many things reminded Beth of home. On sunny mornings the sea had the same fierce glitter but it flowed into a calm estuary. The land around it was flat, miles of fields filled with straight rows of vegetables and flowers for the markets in the city. It had once been a fishing village, but the old harbour beyond the estuary was no longer in use, and the remains of sunken fishing boats could be seen at low tide, arching from the water, smooth and sleek as seals. The biggest difference was the sense of space. Beth could look in all directions, unlike in Anaskeagh where the headland loomed over everything.
    In the evenings, Connie’s house was filled with noise and music. Barry practised his tin whistle, Stewart played his records and Marina giggled in a high trilling solo whenever Peter Wallace entered the house. He was Stewart’s best friend, the son of Mrs Wallace, and Connie had known him since he was a baby. She called him her ‘almost son’ and treated him the same as the rest of her family, scolding him when he teased Beth or flirted with Marina.
    ‘Keep your eyes to yourself if you don’t want them scratched out,’ warned Marina one night after he left. ‘Peter Wallace is madly in love with me. He’s going to immortalise me in oils.’
    ‘Oh! So that’s what it’s called nowadays?’ said Connie, overhearing. ‘In my day it was called ‘getting a girl into trouble’. You concentrate on your studies, Marina McKeever and you’ll be far better off.’
    ‘You should know all about trouble.’ Marina cast a belligerent look towards Barry, who was watching television. ‘When’s he leaving? I’m sick of putting up with strangers in my dead father’s house.’
    ‘Stop your nonsense, Marina. I won’t have it.’ Despite the firmness in her voice, Connie looked distressed.
    ‘And I’m sick of all this.’ Marina’s chin jutted. ‘You’re the talk of Oldport… Living with a married man when my father’s hardly cold in his grave. Don’t give me any lectures about morality unless you understand what it means.’
    From the frying pan into the fire,