Free Sleep Sister: A page-turning novel of psychological suspense by Laura Elliot Page A

Connie. ‘Anyway, what can they do for him except prolong his agony? He wants to die here and as long as I can look after him I’ll be with him.’
    ‘Connie… Does he realise… Does he talk to you about it?’
    ‘We’ve talked about it, yes.’ Connie’s voice was slightly slurred. Lipstick stained the glass, a bruised kiss clouding the rim.
    ‘Then why won’t he talk to me?’ demanded Beth. Her eyes scalded with unshed tears but her father had not given her permission to cry. He always spoke to her about cheerful things and what he would do as soon as he recovered, meaningless plans that made her ashamed when their time together was so short. ‘He keeps pretending he’s going to get better.’
    ‘He hasn’t the words to tell you what he’s feeling. It’s different with me. We have no history, no regrets.’
    Beth reached forward and squeezed her hand. ‘Celtic Reign coming here was a terrific idea. I hope he’s carried away on a stream of music.’
    The older woman poured another drink, sipping it slowly this time. ‘Sara should be here. I can’t understand why your mother’s being so stubborn. She’s breaking his heart.’
    Stewart came into the room. He took the empty glass from her and placed it on the table. ‘You should try and get some sleep, Ma, while you have the chance.’
    Connie’s footsteps dragged wearily as she mounted the stairs and entered the bedroom where Barry dozed uneasily. It seemed so unfair, Beth thought – all that wasted time with Marjory and only a few short years with the woman he loved. An unforgivable love in the eyes of so many people, selfish in the demands it had made on their families, yet Beth didn’t resent the brief happiness they’d known.
    ‘I’m going for a walk.’ Stewart took his leather jacket from a hook on the door. He glanced at the empty bottles, the overflowing ashtrays and stale sandwiches. ‘I need some fresh air before I tackle this lot. Want to come?’
    Beth’s head throbbed from the stuffy heat in the room. She linked her arm in his as they turned without hesitation towards the estuary road. A light burned from one window in Havenstone. Peter’s studio. He sometimes slept on the floor when he was working and everything was flowing in the right direction. An animal in his lair, she thought, comfortable where he dropped, stretched out on an old mattress he kept propped against the wall. Moonlight touching the half-finished canvases as he drifted off to sleep.
    At Pier’s Point a heron, caught in the glow of moonlight, lifted its wings and glided into the darkness.
    ‘I had a dream about flying last night,’ she said. ‘I woke up thinking that that’s the way it must be when you die – flying into the sky and everything down below becoming dimmer and dimmer until you’re all alone in the dark.’
    ‘Maybe you’re flying through the dark to get to the light,’ said Stewart.
    ‘That sounds like something Jess would say.’
    ‘How is she?’
    ‘On her knees chanting litanies, I should imagine.’
    Jess still wrote every week. Serene letters brimming with descriptions of silent meals, needlecraft, woodwork sessions, basketball practice, prayer vigils, meditation and contemplation. Sometimes, in the early hours when she was in the church praying, she felt herself lifted high on a wave of bliss so powerful it made her tremble in case it was ever taken away from her.
    ‘I touch the core of my being,’ she wrote. ‘And God is there waiting for me to arrive.’
    Beth believed this was magic-mushroom stuff. Smoke some grass and see the Lord. Or a state of mind brought about by overwork. Jess’s daily work schedule read like the itinerary of a Siberian gulag.
    In her last letter Beth wrote back: ‘It must be wonderful to know yourself so well that when you feel the touch of happiness you can claim it as your right.’
    Reading over what she had written she was puzzled by the meaning in her own words. She left them there, knowing Jess