Page 75 of Beautiful Ugly

ABBY

“I was Charles Whittaker’s agent long before I was yours, as you know,” I tell Grady. “But for a while I was also his wife. We met on a plane—he thought I was sitting in his seat, I wasn’t—and at first I was affronted by the very being of him. I guess I changed my mind because one year later we were married. Genius doesn’t deserve special dispensation but tends to get it anyway.

“I was a young agent and he was an author most people had never heard of back then. I made him into who he was. He’d been writing beautiful books, literary fiction, but they weren’t selling. I became his agent, persuaded him to try writing thrillers, and he became one of the most successful writers of all time in the genre. I don’t think he ever forgave me.

“Our relationship worked well in the beginning. He was busy writing books, I was busy selling them, so we didn’t see each other often but when we did, it was wonderful. He was the most interesting man I ever met, and it was by far the most intense relationship I’ve ever experienced. Things were great. Until they weren’t.

“I was born on Amberly. It was my home, but unlike most people who live here I spent my whole childhood dreaming up ways I could leave. Piano lessons resulted in my mother sending me away and I gotmy wish. I moved to London and was raised by a woman who worked for a large publishing house in the city. She wasn’t very motherly, but in many ways, the situation couldn’t have been more perfect. I was sent to an expensive school—where I met Abby’s mother—and given the kind of education I would never have had on a tiny island. I even had elocution lessons. My Scottish accent only comes out to play when I’m around Scottish people these days. When I was eighteen, I got myself a job as an assistant in a literary agency. Worked my way up from the bottom. I didn’t have any real desire to come back to the island, ever, but then my mother got in touch after decades of not speaking to me. She wanted to see me before she died. And she wanted to confess that she once chopped off a man’s hand with an axe.

“Charles came with me to visit her—he’d never even heard of Amberly until then—and I was glad of the support. She died a couple of weeks after we arrived, but there was a lot to sort out afterward, and Charles was already in love with the place so we stayed for a while in my mother’s thatched cottage. He loved it so much he renamed it Whit’s End.

“We had only been here for a couple of months when Abby’s mother, my best friend back in London, died too. She killed herself, and the news came as such a shock so soon after losing my own mum. Abby was only ten and she was my goddaughter. She was named after me and I’d known her since she was a baby. I wanted to go back to London. I missed the city and my work, but Charlie was so happy living and writing here. He insisted that Amberly would be good for Abby—a change of scene and a distraction from the grief—so she came here to live with us and we stayed a while longer. He renovated this old cabin to write in because things were a little crowded with the three of us all living in the cottage you just visited. Charles was fond of Abby, but he never really wanted children and we spent more and more time apart. He needed quiet to write, so hid himself away here at The Edge, and Abby and I learned to stay out of his way at the cottage.

“You might have noticed the piano painted with birds when you were there? Well, the man who tried to teach me to play it when I wasa little girl was a bad man. He did bad things. That’s why my mother cut off his hand with an axe. I believe you found the bones beneath these floorboards—a little welcome gift. Thirty years later he was an out-of-work teacher and an alcoholic, so when an agency called him to see if he could fill in at the last minute on a remote Scottish island, he said yes. I think he came here for revenge. He came back to Amberly, he went back to that same cottage, but this time there was a different little girl living there.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Grady asks, and just for a moment, I feel sorry for him. But the feelings of pity soon pass. This is my story now and I plan to finish telling it.

“Abby was always fearless and brave. Even as a child. Not like me. When that man tried to hurt her, she shoved him away so hard he fell and hit his head on the fireplace. She thought she’d killed him so she ran away. She took her most prized possessions: a harmonica, a book, and a Magic 8 Ball, and ran to the church looking for me. But she overheard me talking to someone I always thought of as the ‘woman in black.’ I was confiding in the Reverend Melody Bates that I wanted to leave my husband. Abby thought that meant I wanted to leave her too, so she kept running. She ran here to find Charlie, but he was writing so told her to go away. Then she ran to Darkside Cave and I think you know what happened there.

“I blamed myself for what happened to Abby, and Abby blamed herself for what happened to those children. But it washisfault. All of it. That man. Abby thought she’d killed him when he hit his head. But it was Sandy who did that, once she found out what really happened, and why her daughter was dead. Charles helped Sandy move the body and bury the music man in an unmarked grave behind Saint Lucy’s. They bonded and became best friends after that. What they did might sound extreme, but you have to remember that all the children on this island died because of one bad man.

“Charles blamed himself for all of it. He was the one who persuaded me to stay on the island after my mother died, he was the onlyreason we were still here, and he turned Abby away when she needed his help because he loved his books a little bit too much. He never forgave himself and I think that’s why he stayed forever. And why he donated a large percentage of his income to the Isle of Amberly Trust set up by Sandy. It was a tight-knit community even then. Nobody wanted any more outsiders coming here, and Charlie’s success meant the island needed to allow visitors for only a few months of the year. When Charles figured out that all the men on the island were being replaced with women, he thought that was a step too far. He and Sandy fell out over that, and Charlie refused to sell any more books.

“I left him here after the tragedy at Darkside Cave without even saying goodbye and I took Abby with me. I had to make a choice, and there are no even odds when it comes to hurting the people you love. I needed a fresh start for Abby and me after what happened, so I opened a new agency in London and I called myself Kitty Goldman. Kitty was a nickname only Charles called me, because my surname when we met was Kitterick. I took his surname when we got married—Whittaker—but neither felt quite right. I decided to change my surname to Goldman, my mother’s maiden name.

“I’ve helped countless authors come up with a pseudonym over the years. I suppose I wanted one of my own, one which wasn’t tarnished by past mistakes. When I became Kitty Goldman, I became the me I wanted to be. Besides, having two people both called Abby living under the same roof was getting confusing.

“Charles was still a big deal in the book world and he was still my client—that was the one part of our relationship that did still work—but I took on new ones. Ten years after I started the Kitty Goldman Agency it was one of the biggest in the country. When Abby first introduced me to you, I was worried for her. I didn’t want her to marry a writer—I’d already made that mistake myself—but I could see how happy you made her. She asked me to represent you and I said yes, and when you got engaged I was happy for you both. Because I loved her. I loved you, too.”

“Then why are you doing this to me?” Grady asks.

“You know why, and I haven’t done anything to you. Yet. I didn’t know what really happened the night Abby disappeared until a few months ago. She didn’t want to tell me; said she was scared of what I might do. All I knew was that she was missing and I feared she was dead. Then Sandy invited me here, to Amberly. I am an honorary member of the Isle of Amberly Trust, and Sandy said there was something urgent that we needed to discuss in person, so I came back here for the first time in thirty years.

“It’s been so long since I cried I presumed my tear ducts were broken, but I sobbed like a child when I arrived at the House on the Hill and saw that Abby was alive. Then I cried again when she told me what you did to her. By some miracle she only fell a short distance when you pushed her off that cliff. She held on to the branch of a tree that was growing out of the rock—she said it was as though the branch reached out and caught her—and she climbed back up to the road. Afraid and alone. In the dark. In the rain. She had the presence of mind to throw her red coat back over the edge, hoping that someone would find it along the coast and that you would believe she was dead. But then, instead of coming to me, she came back here. To Amberly. Thirty years after I took her away, she returned to the home she never wanted to leave. When Abby introduced me to her baby and let me hold Holly I cried some more.

“Then I dried my tears and told her that I would destroy you.”

ALONE TOGETHER

GRADY

“You know I love a good revenge story,” Kitty says. “Once I knew the truth about what you did to my goddaughter, Abby and I came up with a story of our own. Your life was already unraveling, all that was required was a tiny tug on the final few threads.”

“Well, congratulations. Mission accomplished,” I tell her.

“Oh, Grady. We’re only just getting started. I think Charlie left me this old writing cabin in his will to piss me off. He said his tenth novel was his best but then wouldn’t let me read it, because he was cross that I wouldn’t do something to stop what was happening on Amberly. He was the only man left by then—Charlie contributed so much financially to the island that they needed him, and Sandy adored him so he was untouchable. But he became increasingly cranky about Amberly being ‘overrun with women’ as he put it, and I don’t know whether it was the stress, or just his age, but he stopped being able to write. Didn’t write a word for years, or if he did, refused to share anything with me. Then he hanged himself on that beam just there. You see, he genuinely lived to write and when he couldn’t...” I see something like emotion in Kitty’s eyes for the first time but it soon fades. “So when I finally got to read the infamous Book Ten manuscript afterhe died I was a little disappointed. It had potential, but it wasn’t the masterpiece he seemed to think it was.”

“So you left the book here for me to find?”

“I’ll get to that part of the story when I’m ready. The island needed a new source of finance after Charlie died. Sandy and Midge liked the idea of another writer coming to Amberly, so I sent one of my authors who’d had a big debut novel but proved to be a one-hit wonder. That little experiment didn’t work out, the results were very disappointing, and unfortunately he tried to leave and died in the process. He stole an old wooden rowboat without realizing it had a small hole in it and drowned about a mile off the coast. His body washed up months later. It really wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was anaccident, but one which nobody needed to know about. So the Isle of Amberly Trust voted to bury him in an unmarked grave in Saint Lucy’s. It’s easy to make writers disappear; it’s finding good ones that poses a challenge. He was like a rehearsal for you in some ways, but nothing that will happen to you will be an accident.”

I stare at her in horror. “Are you saying that—”

“What I’m saying is that replacing Charles Whittaker has proved to be very difficult for the women of Amberly. So I sent you here and, I’ll be honest, you surprised me. I thought you would torture yourself trying to turn Charlie’s unpublished novel into something of your own, and that you would lose what was left of your mind when you failed. But I was wrong. The new book is terrific, I think it’s your best. This novel really could relaunch your career, Grady. Well done.”

For a moment I forget everything that she said before. My agent’s opinion about my books has always meant so much to me. Too much probably. I can’t help it.

“Really? Do you mean it?” I ask, sounding like a child desperately seeking praise from their favorite teacher.