Cold in the Earth Read Online Free Page B

They had lived almost estranged under the same roof until her father died, uncomprehending and sad, eight years later.
    Laura hadn’t believed the accusation then, of course, and even now, looking back with the suspicious eye of a professional, she thought it was most unlikely. Dizzy had borrowed her mother’s car without permission and stayed out all night; the violent row which followed was a perfectly plausible explanation for her flinging out of the house in a fury, even if not for so cruelly disappearing out of their lives for ever. What her mother believed – well, again as a professional Laura could recognise a subconscious temptation to lay the blame for such a catastrophic estrangement on someone other than yourself, and she did remember her mother saying hopefully, when Geoffrey Harvey died, ‘Perhaps Dizzy will see the notice and get in touch.’ She hadn’t, of course. How sad to think that Laura’s father’s death might have meant to his wife only a barrier removed!
    Had there been later attempts at tracing her? Laura didn’t know: certainly during her brief visits home from the States Jane Harvey had never mentioned Dizzy’s name, and neither had Laura, shrinking from the thought of upsetting her. She was ashamed now of her moral cowardice, of never having defied the comfortable conventions of their relationship to talk about things that mattered. For instance, had Laura’s decision to live in New York been seen as another loss, another rejection? They hadn’t discussed it. Her mother had never complained, never been other than bright and brave, and Laura had never actually said, ‘I love you, I miss you, I wish I wasn’t so far away.’ If only she had perhaps she wouldn’t feel quite so guilty now.
    But then, of course, suffering from guilt was one of Laura’s personal vices. Had her sister been immune to such qualms of conscience? Had she simply put her family firmly out of her mind? Had she seen the notice of her mother’s death and ignored it, telling herself perhaps that it was too late now? There were so many questions unanswered, unanswerable.
    There was no record of her death, in Britain at least; lawyers were checking registers overseas while advertising for Diana Warwick now in all the major world newspapers. The executors had agreed with Laura that the house should be put on the market immediately. The estate, divided equally between the sisters, was a very substantial one and with her share Laura could take her time to work out what to do with this new, empty life. She had come to feel an exile in the States; it was a bitter irony that having returned she should find herself rootless, a displaced person in what she had thought of as home.
    If only Dizzy had been here! Faced with the grim task of sorting through their mother’s intimate possessions, they could have cried and laughed together over the memories they invoked – though of course that was an idealised picture. She couldn’t really remember much of her sister, beyond her glamour and her careless kindness.
    She’d been self-centred without a doubt. Thinking about it now, it was possible too that her parents’ divorce had made her to an extent self-destructive like her father. With that heredity, she could have been vulnerable to alcohol abuse and her daring, try-anything mentality might have led her into drugs – into prostitution, even. Yet somehow Laura couldn’t see Dizzy as human flotsam. It didn’t fit: she’d been tough-minded, a rebel, not a drop-out.
    So where was she? Happy, busy, absorbed in her own life and indifferent to the havoc she had wrought in the lives of her mother, her stepfather, of Laura herself? Even now, all those years later, she still dreamed of Dizzy – sometimes vibrant, exciting as she always had been, sometimes in a context of horror from which Laura would wake sweating and with her heart pounding. Always, afterwards, there were tears.
    There had been one of those dreams last night,