SPOILERS!!!
The parts in which Rita remembers her life with her husband are terrible. What a horrible man! What an unbearable life! I can’t understand how Rita stayed with him for fifteen years and didn’t try to run away sooner. The mystery of the babygros is now solved. Rita was pregnant once. Even though she knew Harry didn’t want children, she stopped taking the pill because she needed to have someone to love. When Harry found out, he beat her up and threw her down the stairs, causing a miscarriage. Rita keeps a pink and blue babygro, and she laundries them in the anniversary of the baby’s death.
I find Rita too weak and easily scared. She sees dangers everywhere, and her problem is that she doesn’t trust anybody. She finally discovered what happened to the previous tenant, Vivian. At the Samaritans she meets Blossom McGee, the cleaner, and she tells her that Vivian disappeared one day, and nobody knew where she went. Rita finds the letter from Vivian, which had got stuck in the drawer, and there is a string of the same sentence “I will follow St Catherine of Sienna”, and then in a smaller envelope, she finds three photographs of a woman in different parts of the house, and there is a sheet in which the woman writes about a man stalking her and feeling very scared.
Now Rita wonders if the same man who left the note on her car windscreen and who phoned her at the Samaritans is the one who stalked Vivian. Is it Bram, Dan Madden or someone else?
One day the neighbour, Maud Gilhooley, calls to tell her that she is going to the shops and whether she needs anything. Rita thanks her, but she is okay apart from a migraine she is feeling. When the woman goes, Rita decides to go for a walk behind the house. She sees Maud’s back door open and makes a mental note to close it when she returns. Then she comes to the a house and finds a boy kicking a ball which bounces against the fence. Rita asks the child, Ryan, to stop because she has a headache. Then the boy gets angry and says she will tell his mother on her. Next the woman, Mrs Glacken, comes out, guns ablazing, and she is threatening, telling Rita that she will hear from her again.
The next day Rita wakes up to find her downstairs hall in a disarray, clearly showing that someone had snuck into the house and turn the room over. From the window he sees Bram go into Maud’s house, so she decides to tidy everything. She thinks that this is the deed of Ryan and his mother. When Bram comes, he tells her that something terrible has happened. While Maud was in town, someone entered the house, stole some jewels, and killed her dear budgie, Polly. When Maud returned, she was so upset that she collapsed, and Dan Madden found her. So now she is in hospital.
Rita gets nervous because the police want to talk to her, and she fears that they will discover that she has lied about being single. The police come and they see in her driving licence that she is a Mrs, and Rita says that she is separated now. Someone has told the police that Rita was seen near Maud’s house, and she explains that she saw the back door open and she simply closed it. One of the officers wants to search the house, and when he opens the boxroom, where Bram keeps some of his things and there is a strong smell, he is shocked. The room is in total disarray, and it has clearly been turned over by someone trespassing, but then Rita says that she hasn’t been in the room for a while, and she thinks that the wind must have opened the window and disarray everything. The police can’t do anything.
Pearl goes to the doctor because she needs her tablets for her migraines and insomnia. While she is there, the gas meter guy comes, and when nobody answers, he calls Bram to tell him that he needs to let him in to read the meter. Bram does so reluctantly because in the tenancy contract it is stipulated that he can’t enter the premises without notifying the tenant. When the meter guy goes, he remembers the photo album from his grandfather which is in the boxroom. So he goes there, and he is shocked to find the room in disarray, and he also sees a bag with several jewellery pieces which are the same as the ones Maud had and were stolen. So now Bram thinks that Rita robbed Maud, but we know she didn’t. So who entered the house and left the jewels? Who is stalking Rita and why?
As for Dorinda, she has met some strange old woman who takes her to her home and offers her tea. The woman says that she can feel the dead when they are troubled, and she says that she has the sensation that Dorrie has a sister even though the young woman says she is an only child. I wonder if Dorrie and Rita are sisters. Rita told Bram that she had a twin sister who died as a baby, but from Rita’s reflections we learn that her mother, who didn’t treat her much better than Harry, told her that she sold the other baby. So maybe Dorrie is her sister. Bram has invited Rita to accompany him to Portaluce when he goes to book the holiday for his mother, so maybe the two women might meet, and if they look alike, it will be a shock for both of them.
My Reading Journal 