Page 121 of Serenity Falls

I padded out on to the landing, quietly so as not to wake Sadie, and checked the bathroom. Also empty. I made my way back downstairs and looked in the living room and kitchen. No Nat. I frowned. Had she gone out? I ran back upstairs to check if she had taken her phone, but no. Phone still on the bedside table, charging, clothes hanging on the wardrobe door. I stood, feeling confused and worried. And then I heard a creak from next door.

Sadie. Shit. I crossed the hall and yanked open her bedroom door. Zelda looked up at me from the bottom of Sadie’s bed. The cat shouldn’t be in here. I always kept her out, which meant that Nat must have already been in Sadie’s room this morning. I rushed over to Sadie’s bed and leaned over, listening for her breathing, looking for the soft rise and fall of her chest. She turned and yawned, blinking her eyes open.

‘Daddy!’

I smiled, dizzy with relief. ‘Hey, beautiful.’

She sat up. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘I thought I heard her come in.’

I tensed. ‘Maybe you were dreaming,’ I said.

She scrunched up her face. ‘Maybe.’

I crouched by the bed. ‘How about we take a little trip to Grandma’s this morning?’

I dropped Sadie at my mum’s an hour later, explaining that Nat was having a bad day. Mum didn’t ask too many questions, but I saw the familiar shadow of disapproval cross her face. I couldn’t blame her. This wasn’t the first time it had happened.

I called the school and said I had some childcare issues but would be in as soon as I could. Then I drove towards the recreation grounds and the river. I parked up in the small car park, climbed out and started down the path by the water. Mid-morning, it was quiet. The weather was bad – drizzle and mist – and most people were at work. I couldn’t even see any dog walkers traipsing eager mutts through the wet grass.

I’d gone about half a mile when I saw a lone figure in the distance, dressed in dark clothing, possibly a hoodie and joggers. The figure stood motionless, staring out at the fast-flowing water. Very fast today. It had rained a lot in the last week, and the river was high along the banks.

I couldn’t be sure it was Nat. That’s what I’ve told myself many times since. The distance, the mist and rain, the nondescript clothing. Nat had multiple pairs of joggers and hoodies. I couldn’t have said if any were missing from her wardrobe that day. Still, I was about to call out when something distracted me. A car backfiring. I jumped and turned. When I looked back, the figure by the water had gone.

I told myself they’d probably just walked along the path and disappeared into the mist. There was no reason to believe they had gone in the water. But a better man would have run along the river path and checked. A good man.

Instead, I just stood there, rooted to the path. Drizzle soaked through my too-light jacket and plastered my clothes to my skin. My fingers and toes grew numb with cold. Still, I didn’t move. I stared at the rushing river, and I thought about my wife; about the depression and the mood swings, about the night I hid Sadie in a cupboard with Zelda because Nat was brandishing a knife, or the time I walked into our daughter’s room to find Nat sitting by her bed, clutching a pillow.

I thought about the woman I loved, or had loved, and I realized she was gone. I lived with a stranger. One I was terrified would harm our daughter. One I sometimes wished would just disappear.

Eventually, a shivering, sodden mess, I turned and walked slowly back to my car.

‘Noah couldn’t stop the flood. But he could build an ark.’

I sit back in the garden chair and take a long drag on my cigarette. Spotlights illuminate the back yard, and the pool gleams a deep turquoise. In front of me, Harold Winsom is frozen on the laptop screen.

The footage didn’t take much searching up. I googled: ‘Harold Winsom, Noah and the Ark’ and it took me straight to an old YouTube clip. An interview from the seventies, not long before Serenity Falls was founded.

It’s odd, I think. For such a famous man, not a lot is known about Harold Winsom’s personal life, although after his death, some stories started to emerge. The man was a workaholic and a control freak, obviously. He was obsessed not just with making his theme park the most magical, the most impressive, in the world, but also in creating perfect American towns. A bid to recapture a more innocent time. A 1950s apple-pie ideal of the US that probably never existed.

He never married but was regarded as something of a womanizer. And like many megalomaniac multimillionaires, he was also consumed by the idea of longevity. There were rumours he had arranged to be cryogenically frozen after death. Some even speculated that his body (or even just his head) was stored in a special chamber beneath Winsom Wonderland. This was later dismissed as an urban myth. Still, details about whether he was cremated or buried are scarce. His park and towns remain his real monument.

I skip back in the video:

‘The fact is we cannot make the world a better place, much as we might wish to. It’s too big a task. We must start smaller. Building better families, better neighbourhoods, better towns.’

But only for the chosen few, I think. Only the good people. And, of course, we all like to believe we’re the good people. Even me.

I’m about to play the footage again when the patio doors slide open.

‘Dad?’ Sadie walks out into the yard.

Hastily, I stub out the cigarette in the teacup I’m using as a makeshift ashtray.

‘Hi.’ I try to smile.