I hurriedly logged out and gathered my things, the notepad I hadn’t written on, my pen and bag, and I left with an over-abundance of apologies that only deepened her frown. As my place was taken by an older man in a Liverpool top, I looked back from the door and saw the librarian watching me. Had she seen what was on my screen? Would she look at my search history, and perhaps remember that a woman had been arrested over that terrible murder in the woods, and put two and two together, and realise that the person who’d found Anna Devine’s body was the same one who’d been convicted of the ‘Mary Poppins Murders’? (How I hated that name. Mary would never have been as stupid as me.) Would I be recognised in the street, shouted at, spat at, unable to go to the shops or library or even work without people calling me a murderer? The same insults all over again. Slut. Killer. Hang her, it’s all she’s good for. Send her to the electric chair – I’ll throw the switch myself. Then the name Rachel Caldwell would be forever linked with that of Casey Adams, and I’d have to become someone else all over again, leave this life I had so carefully built up. It could only be a matter of time. And someone out there had been trying to find me.

Casey

Casey

SEPTEMBER 2000

After the audition there was a lull of a week or so while we waited to hear if Abby had got the part. She seemed at peace, at least. They’d liked her, she said, she’d done a good job reading for Nancy the nurse. They were just making their minds up. A few days afterwards there was a huge earthquake further north in the state, in San Francisco, which alarmed me, but nobody else seemed bothered by it. We even took the kids to Disneyland, an hour away in Anaheim, and I was as excited as Madison to go there, even though I spent most of the day trying to keep them cool as we stood in endless lines. It seemed a bit like life – a lot of waiting in discomfort for a few minutes of pleasure. Madison was quickly overwhelmed by it, bursting into tears when an adult dressed as Goofy waved at her, and Carson grizzled most of the day, feverish in the searing heat. All the same, Abby declared it ‘a wonderful memory’ and sent me to develop the roll of pictures from the day.