Read an excerpt from The House in The Woods, the new thriller by Zoë Miller, published by Hachette Books Ireland.
When actress Evie Lawrence is injured in a shocking hit-and-run accident, she wants nothing more than to retreat to her woodland home in Wicklow to recover. But when she's forced to admit that she needs help, she reluctantly opens up her solitary life to allow her grand-niece Amber, practically a stranger, to move into Heronbrook to take care of her.
Evie, who has been estranged from her sister’s family for many years, vows to keep Amber at a distance so her secrets – and the truth of what happened at Heronbrook years ago – stay buried.
Amber is initially preoccupied with the recent implosion of both her career and her love life, the details of which she’s keeping to herself, but soon becomes very curious about the rift in her family. And when unsettling incidents begin to make Evie’s secluded home feel less peaceful and more dangerously isolated, Amber starts to suspect that what happened to Evie wasn’t an accident at all – and the person responsible still has Evie in their sights. But can Amber persuade Evie to confront the past and get to the truth before it’s too late?
Summer, 1964
The woods are full of secret things. They are alive with the rustle of small animals scurrying through tangled undergrowth, the buzz of insects, the call of birds fluttering through the branches, the soft coo of a wood pigeon. Outside on the lane that comes up from the beach, the sun beats down and white heat shimmers in the air, but under the brown-green shade of the trees, all is cool and secretive. The leafy canopy is dappled with patches of blue where the sky peeps through. Shimmering beams from the slanting sun turn the greenery to iridescent glitter. A gurgling brook runs over a weir onto a bed of ancient stones.
The child is sleeping in the pushchair, lulled into a doze by the heat of the incandescent day and the rhythmic movement of the wheels as she is pushed up the lane and onto the uneven track that leads through the woods and towards Heronbrook, the small house in the glade.
Through the branches of the trees, there is movement, someone coming … two people … flashes of colour piercing through gaps in the shimmering greenery, a pink T-shirt, a white vest, a tanned arm, the glint of blonde hair in a patch of sunlight, murmuring voices, a tinkle of silvery laughter. Unaware they are being watched, they pause, half-hidden by foliage, and they come together in a long, slow kiss. Then, in the clearing, the curtains close on the bedroom window at the back of Heronbrook, the room with a view of the dazzling brook. Whispered exchanges of love swirl in the warm, trapped air. The couple melt into each other in the muted luminosity, limbs entwined; he lifts his hand to her flushed face, tracing the contours, smiling into her widening eyes and bending to kiss her as the dance between them heightens and intensifies.
The child stretches and flexes her small limbs. She rubs her eyes and opens them slowly. She looks around. She knows where she is. She's been here before. And she knows how to slide down the straps restraining her arms, how to wiggle clear, how to grasp the side of the pushchair and lever her little body over it so that she is free. She is hungry. She wants her mummy. She sets off, toddling through the woods, pine needles and windfall branches scratching the soft skin of her small chubby legs. It is a while before anyone notices that she is missing.
Evie, present day
I am not dead. Yet. I am lying on my back. My head is seized in a vice-like grip. Beneath that I am hurtling through time and space, swaying and shifting to the scream of an ambulance siren that cuts through the fog in my brain. Something clamps my mouth and nose. On the next out breath, I feel suspended between wavering life and soft darkness and I sink down with increasing rapidness, as though there is less of me to dispose of moment by moment.
A voice comes through a mist of pain.
'We’re losing her …’
Something pinches my skin, dragging me back from sweet oblivion, preventing me from dissolving further into the void beneath me.
‘Evie, stay with us …’
Shredded thoughts ebb and flow in my consciousness. I have done terrible things. But I have paid the price. The worst that can happen has already occurred. I feel the cold, hard loss of him in my brittle bones. The love of my life, Lucien, is gone. Was it last week, last month, last year, or even yesterday? My muzzy head can’t recall, but the dark realisation that I had something to do with it pours through my limp capillaries like black ink. I want to surrender and slip into peaceful depths. The screeching siren jerks me back. I am being propelled along even faster.
Heronbrook. The name rushes through whatever is left of my fragmented consciousness. It never left me. Then again I couldn’t let it go. I hear a child’s heart-rending sobs. The image of an empty pushchair slams into my head before cracking into smithereens.
My fault. All my fault.
The siren cuts out mid-shriek. All movement stops. There is a metallic clang and a rattle and I am being trundled out to where coolness sweeps across my face. Then the momentum shifts and I am being rushed along to the rhythmic click of wheels, the patter of hurrying footsteps keeping pace. More voices.
‘Blunt trauma to the head …’
‘Severe concussion …’
‘We almost lost her …’
Another thought-fragment surges, slicing through thick depths as sharp as a scalpel: someone has put me here. Someone wants me dead. Who, though? The knowledge is bobbing around in my head like out-of-reach flotsam. They have tried already. Tried to kill me. I see myself crawling along a lane, my hip hot with pain, dragging on the pitted surface. It seemed like an accident. At the time. But I survived. I remember lying in a hospital bed and Jessica visiting me. I went back home to Heronbrook.
Now I am being pushed around a corner. I hear doors clanging open, then flapping shut. A louder voice, closer to me, ‘Evie, you’re in Accident and Emergency. You’ve sustained a head injury … stay with us …’
Why hadn’t I heeded the warnings? There were warnings and from the way I feel, suspended between my bittersweet existence and a thick, soft darkness, they might just have succeeded in snuffing out my life this time.
Another seed of memory – Amber. She was with me last night, wasn’t she? Was it last night? Or yesterday? What did happen? Dear God, I need to know if she is safe.
Think, Evie, think.
Don’t go under just yet.
The House in The Woods by Zoë Miller (published by Hachette Books Ireland) is out now.
