Daylight Saving

by Edward Hogan

  While the police put out search teams for a missing girl and an injured man, we were questioned by Officer Bracket, a tall, straight-backed woman from the local force, and the ridiculous Evans. I didn’t speak. I didn’t give them Lexi’s name. I pretended to be in shock. Even after the violence of the last few hours, I felt so peaceful, imagining Lexi diving toward the glass in the door. Dad, however, couldn’t hold his mouth.

  “I’m just telling you what happened,” he said.

  Officer Bracket nodded and scribbled in her notepad. “And how did you know that your son would be in the pine forest?”

  “It’s down by the soccer fields, isn’t it? He’s a big fan of soccer.”

  I stared at Dad, but he wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “This is all nonsense,” Evans said. “Safety and security is our number-one concern here, and there’s no way we’d allow this . . . man you speak of onto our premises.” He turned to Officer Bracket. “I wouldn’t trust anything Mr. Lever says. He’s been drunk for most of his time here at Leisure World. He has obstructed our attempts to secure the safety of his son, of whom he has been neglectful. And he has abused our staff, including me —”

  “That’s because you’re a tosser,” Dad said. “And if you don’t shut up, I’ll —”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Officer Bracket said. “You both need to cool down. Mr. Evans, you and I are going to go out into the corridor and have a little chat. Mr. Lever, you and Daniel keep each other company in here for a moment.”

  Evans exited with Officer Bracket, and Dad sighed. “I just feel like poking the little swine in the eye,” he said. “But I won’t.”

  For a moment there was silence in the room.

  “Dad,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “A big fan of soccer?”

  He smiled. “Aye. I hope they don’t give you a ball and ask you to prove it.”

  “Leisure World is massive, Dad. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that we ran into each other. How did you really know I’d be there?”

  “Your girlfriend told me.”

  “What?”

  “That lass. She came up to me outside the cabin the other night. After you and me had argued about . . . you know, Tash. She’s a strange girl, Daniel. She was wearing a big red coat and she had her hood up so I could hardly even see her face.”

  I thought back to that night, the flash of red I had seen moving toward our cabin. The last time she’d worn the coat. Lexi had been late to meet me. I should have guessed

  Dad continued with a frown: “She nearly scared me to death. I was having a cigarette. Don’t tell your mother.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Said you might be about to do something stupid on Saturday night. Told me to look for you down by the all-weather fields.”

  “And you didn’t talk to me about it?” I said.

  “I thought she was talking nonsense. A young lass comes up to you like that, starts spouting on . . . Well, I never gave it a moment’s thought until you went missing. I figured it must be the place where you and her hung around.”

  “So why didn’t you tell that to the police?”

  “Didn’t want to get the two of you into trouble. I couldn’t tell them you were going to do something stupid, could I?”

  My head was spinning.

  “I’ve got some questions of my own, Daniel,” Dad said.

  “Maybe we should talk about it later,” I said.

  Dad whistled and shook his head. “Well. I don’t really understand what happened out there tonight,” he said. “First it was freezing cold, then it suddenly gets warmer. And that fella! I hit him pretty hard, but I just can’t account for where he went. I don’t even know if I killed the poor bugger.”

  “You shouldn’t have any sympathy for him, Dad,” I said. I paused, but I had to say it, because it was true. “You did the right thing.”

  A few moments later, Officer Bracket came back in with Evans and an unexpected guest: my mum. She came straight over and threw her arms around me. She was wearing her blue wool coat, and the smell of it made me cry. “You OK?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She turned to Dad. “Are you?” she said.

  “Oh, aye,” he said. “Not a scratch.”

  “Thanks for calling me,” Mum said to him.

  Evans marched over. “Mrs. Lever,” he said in his old patronizing voice, “I think it would be best for you and your family if this whole embarrassing mess was wrapped up as soon as possible.”

  “It’s not embarrassing for us, Mr. Evans. How about I call the press, and then we’ll see who’s embarrassed,” Mum said. She stood and turned around. “Let’s talk to the national papers about invasion of privacy and you masquerading as some sort of social worker.”

  “Your boy has damaged our property. He threw stones at a security camera.”

  “A concealed security camera,” Mum said. “What else are you hiding, Mr. Evans?”

  “I’m not hiding anything. Your husband — sorry, your estranged husband — is making up ludicrous stories about young girls being attacked in forests. I will not have Leisure World’s good name dragged through the mud again.”

  “Again?” Mum said.

  Evans looked away.

  Beeps and static hissed through Officer Bracket’s radio. “Receiving,” she said, and walked off to a corner of the room. It wasn’t long before she returned. “They’ve found two bodies,” she said.

  Evans smashed his fist against the wall, and Dad held his head in his hands. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I killed that fella.”

  “You didn’t kill anybody,” Officer Bracket said. “These bodies were badly decomposed. Early signs indicate that they’ve been in the forest for two years.”

  “What?” Dad said. He looked at me, and I met his stare. The reality of her body, out there in the forest, hit me hard. I put my hands over my eyes and tried to imagine what Lexi would say. She’d tell me that she’d left her body a long time ago, that it was just dead cells. Just matter.

  “Daniel, are you OK?” Mum asked.

  “I will be,” I said.

  The police would still need to talk to us, they said. They’d need to talk to Evans, too. In the corridor I heard Mum calmly telling Officer Bracket that my father’s statement had been confused due to his mental state: his son was missing, and he was enduring a difficult divorce. She said he’d probably just found the body and gone into shock.

  Dad came out of the restroom a moment later, and Mum stopped talking. We walked, the three of us, out to the parking lot. The sun was coming up, and the birds were calling. In the car park, Mum kissed me and told me she would see me soon.

  “Do you want to come back in the car with us?” Dad asked.

  Mum smiled. “Richard. I’ve got my own car. I can’t just leave it here,” she said.

  “No. I suppose not.”

  She put a hand on his arm and then let it fall. I got into the car with Dad, and we watched Mum drive away. Then we followed.

  The twisted trunks of the trees went by my window like the letters and words of a language I didn’t know. Incomprehensible yet reassuring. Through the gaps, I occasionally saw the flashing light of a police car. We passed the glistening lake, the Pancake House, the noble Dome.

  I twisted in my seat to make sure Dad had brought all my bags. On the back shelf stood the cherry tomato plant, its fruit huge and red and bursting with life.

  I found it hard to watch the news channels as the information came in. Her name was on the banners that scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen. The story filtered through over the next few weeks and months.

  The body of Alexandria Cocker was found in a covered ditch in the pine forest, close to that of Marcus Fielding, age thirty-four. Fielding had worked in the bookings department of Leisure World but had left without notice. Guests had made several complaints about his behavior toward young women, all of which had been ignored by the Leisure World management. The torc
hed wreckage of a stolen sports car found on the site around the time of the murder was thought to be the car he had used. At the time, the car’s theft had been attributed to local vandals.

  The girl in the news articles was not really the Lexi I knew and loved, and it made me strangely angry. You don’t know her, I thought, when I saw her school friends — most of them at university now — talking about her. It wasn’t that they said she was better or worse than she was, just different. Experience changes people, of course. I know it has changed me.

  I couldn’t eat the tomatoes from the plant, and Dad only ate a few. I much preferred to watch them grow, checking every day that their progress had not reversed. It never did, and Dad began to neglect the plant, leaving it out in the cold garden. I have never watched anything rot with such relief and glee. The shriveling, blackening, exploding mess was beautiful to me.

  Dad, of course, was much more disturbed by the news coverage. He had spoken to a girl on the lawn of his holiday cabin a few days before, seen her running through a pine forest, and now the TV was telling him she’d been dead for two years. Credit to him, he didn’t angrily try to explain it away, as I thought he would. And he didn’t blame me. If he’d have asked, I’d have told him everything, but he didn’t.

  He went to see a psychotherapist Chrissy had recommended. I don’t know if he talked about what he had seen at Leisure World, but I suspect he talked about Mum and about me. He’s getting better. One step at a time. He bought a new TV, but it still links up to the security camera. We can’t seem to disconnect it.

  I went back to school as soon as I could. I don’t know if I behaved any differently, but you don’t ask the fat kid (or even the “slightly-thinner-than-before” kid) if he had a holiday romance when he was suspended from school. I settled back in. I swam a lot.

  For a while, I felt pretty sad, and it seemed that every time I started to feel better, another one of those news item came up. There was something in the paper about a possible charge against Evans for obstructing the course of justice or a piece of evidence linking Marcus Fielding to another crime. But in the February after we returned from Leisure World, BBC news interviewed Lexi’s dad, Paul Cocker, outside his house. He was talking about starting a charity in Lexi’s name. I wasn’t really listening, because I was staring past him, at his other daughter. Lexi was right: she was a beauty, and behind her was the glass door, the sails of the ship coated in frost on that cold morning. I thought, briefly, about going there, to the house. I was pretty sure I could find it. But in the end, I didn’t go. I couldn’t. Not without her permission.

  In March the clocks went forward, and we lost an hour. Good riddance to it, I thought.

  Around that time, I was watching a documentary about the massacre at Wounded Knee, and I noticed a mark on the TV. I squinted hard, but it was difficult to make out. I switched the TV off and crouched down in front of the set. Burnt shapes began to emerge. For a moment, I thought Dad had used the security camera to check who was downstairs. I actually thought the person whose orange shape I could see on the glass was me. But it wasn’t. It was a girl, with her arms folded. She seemed to be wearing a feather in her hair.

  After that, every once in a while, I would be standing in a crowd or waiting in line for the bus, and I would feel a little tap on my shoulder. I would spin around and sense someone running away. It’s called a coup, and it’s a brave and difficult thing — to touch someone and then let them go.

  edward hogan is the author of two adult novels, Blackmoor, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize in the U.K. and was short-listed for both the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Hunger Trace. About Daylight Saving, his first novel for young adults, he says, “As a boy, I spent a week at a sports holiday village situated in Sherwood Forest — the original Greenwood, the former home of outlaws and wolves! A place teeming with ghosts and thousand-year-old trees, and now also a place with a tropically heated pool, a wave machine, and a choice of pizza restaurants. I found that old/new clash very interesting.” Edward Hogan lives in Brighton, England.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2012 by Edward Hogan

  Cover photograph copyright © 2012 by David Madison/Getty Images (girl swimming)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5913-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-6195-3 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Sunday, October 21

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Monday, October 22

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Tuesday, October 23

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Wednesday, October 24

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Thursday, October 25

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Friday, October 26

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Saturday, October 27

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Sunday, October 28

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright