“And … when is she coming back?”
“Dunno. Dunno where she is.”
“Does Alec not know either?”
“Doesn’t seem to.”
“Hal, you can’t just not know where your mother is.” It didn’t seem reasonable. It wasn’t the way things were.
“Well, I don’t.”
“Maybe she’s lost her memory,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Or been in an accident,” I said. I didn’t want to mention anything worse than that. “Or both. If you have an accident, you can sometimes lose your memory. It’s always happening on ER. Sometimes it even happens on the news, so it must be true.”
“Yeah.”
There was silence for a while. We walked on slowly. We came to my estate and I jerked my head toward our house. Hal understood that I was inviting him home to my house for a while. He nodded and we dragged on around the corner and in my front door.
“Hi, Mum!” I yelled as I opened the door. It was one of her days for being home early.
“Hi, Liv!” My mother’s voice came from upstairs.
“Will you help me to find her?” Hal asked at last, in his tiny little caterpillary voice, as we took off our school bags in the hall.
“Hal, how could we do that?”
“Will you help me, Olivia?” he said again. “Please.”
Well, what could I say? There is always no, of course, but how can you say to your best friend that you don’t really feel like helping him to find the most important person in his life? I do exaggerate sometimes, but you know, a person’s mother—that’s kind of mega, isn’t it? I didn’t really have much choice in the matter.
“Here,” I said, handing him my comb. “Do something about your hair. I can’t be seen going about with something that looks like it slept in a hedge.”
“Will you?” he pleaded again as he ran the comb through his hair.
“Well, we’ll see,” I said, which is one of those infuriating things my mother says when she doesn’t want to answer a question. Sometimes I get these worrying little moments of understanding my mother. Sometimes you just can’t answer a question.
“Have you tried ringing her?” I asked as we trailed through into the kitchen.
“What kind of an eejit do you think I am?” Hal asked.
“Well, I thought it was a good idea,” I said. I didn’t see why he had to be so aggressive.
“That’s what I mean. Of course I tried phoning her. But I can’t get her. She’s always forgetting to charge up her phone. I’ve rung her about twenty times. First she didn’t answer, then I started getting her voice mail. Now it just goes boooop.”
The way he said “boooop,” it was a very sad sound, like a wail. I suppose it would be a very sad sound, if your mother wasn’t answering her phone for days. I can’t imagine it.
“Oh,” I said.
We didn’t say anything for a long time after that, just thought and thought. At least, I did, but maybe Hal had given up thinking. He must have been worn out with thinking.
“The thing is,” I said, “you can’t … we can’t do it by ourselves. Find your mother, I mean, and bring her back. We’re only kids.”
“But what else can we do?”
“I think you’ll have to get Alec to help you.”
“Him?” said Hal.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s an adult. If you work together, you might think up a plan.”
He shook his head.
“Well then,” I said next, “in that case, we’ll have to ring the police.” That was the result of all my thinking, you see.
Hal didn’t look too impressed. “What for?” he asked.
“Well, your mother is a missing person, isn’t she? You report those to the police. It’s not like when we thought we’d lost Mr. Denham at the hospital. This is for real.”
Hal looked wretched. “I can’t report my mother to the police. What do you take me for?”
“You’re not reporting her, Hal. You’re reporting that she’s missing. That’s different. I mean, she has been gone for days.”
“But … she’s gone off and left me with a person I am not even related to, Olivia. Would you think that’s OK? It might be against the law. She might go to jail. I might get taken into care.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“I’ll get us some orange juice,” I said.
We had the orange juice, and then I said, “Look, Hal, we have to report it. I mean, she could be in a hospital or anything.”
“No!” said Hal.
Then I had a flash of inspiration. I get these sometimes. I am very lucky like that.
“Hal!” I said. “We don’t need to ring the actual police. We can ring Sonya.”
“Sonya?”
“Guard O’Rourke, with the ponytail. She’ll know what to do.”
“She is the actual police, Olivia.”
“Yes, but she’s friends with us. It’s different. She will tell us what is the best thing to do. She might have some ideas we could follow up ourselves.”
Hal brightened up a bit. He liked Sonya, I knew that.
“And she said to ring her if we were ever in trouble again,” I said. “I can’t think of any bigger trouble than this.”
“OK,” he said. “But suppose a different guard answers.”
“Oh, we won’t ring the station. She gave you her own number, didn’t she?”
“Did she?”
“Remember, she wrote it on a piece of paper, and you put it in your pocket. Are those the same jeans you were wearing on Saturday?”
They looked as if he had been wearing them since Christmas.
Hal dug into his pockets. Out came his mobile phone, with a piece of chewing gum stuck to the side of it and a lot of fluff from shredded tissues stuck to the gum.
“Yuck!” I said.
He pulled the chewing gum off guiltily and threw it in the bin. He laid the phone on the table and dug a bit more. This time he drew out a leaking pen, also with shredded tissue attached to it; half a packet of chewing gum, unchewed; a few pieces of string; a fistful of coins; some pebbles; and finally a scrunched-up piece of lined paper. Everything had sand stuck to it.
I caught the paper by the corner and shook the debris from the inside of Hal’s pocket off it. Then I opened it up and smoothed it out on the table in front of me.
The pencil was a bit faded after being bunched up in Hal’s pocket for days, and the paper was awfully creased, but I could make it out.
“It’s in a foreign language,” I said. “It says, ‘queuing ming jee.’”
I turned the paper over. No phone number, no e-mail address, nothing. Just this stupid foreign thing:
Qing Ming Jie
“Fat lot of good this is,” I said.
“I wonder what language it’s in,” Hal said.
“There’s a Korean girl in Larry’s class,” I said. “We could ask her. It could be Korean.”
“I don’t see why you think that,” Hal said. “It could be anything. Swahili or Lithuanian or anything.”
“Well,” I said, “I was trying to look on the bright side. We don’t know any Swahilis or Lithuanians, but we do know a Korean. Anyway, it sounds more like Korean than Swahili.”
Hal gave me a funny look. He must have guessed I was bluffing. We did learn the Swahili for “Happy Christmas” once at school, but I had completely forgotten it, and I couldn’t tell you from Adam what Swahili sounds like. It could be almost identical to Korean for all I know, though it probably isn’t.
Hal picked up the paper. “It’s not ‘queuing,’” he said. “It’s ‘king.’” Maybe it has something to do with my name.”
“No, it isn’t ‘kind,’” I said, peering over his shoulder. “It’s a q not a k.”
“Maybe that’s how they spell it in Swahili. I bet that’s it.”
“Or Korean,” I said.
“I’d say it’s a clue,” he said. At least for five minutes he wasn’t t
hinking about his mother being missing. “Or a secret message.”
I took the paper back from him and scrutinized it.
“That’s not ‘king,’” I said. “I knew it wasn’t. Q sounds like kw, not like k.”
“Only if there’s a u after it,” Hal said. “There’s no u after this q.”
“Maybe it’s like the airline, Qantas. You pronounce the u even though it’s not there.”
“Then it’d be ‘kwing,’” Hal said. “Not ‘queuing.’”
“Let’s face it,” I said. “We haven’t a clue. We don’t even know what it means, so I don’t see why we are bothering to argue about how to pronounce it.”
“We have got a clue,” Hal said. “This is it, this is a clue.”
“To what, though?” I asked. “It’s not going to …” I was going to say it wasn’t going to help us find Hal’s mother, only then I thought that wasn’t a great thing to say, because I didn’t want to be reminding him. But it was too late.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “You’re right. It can’t be a clue to where my mum is, because she hadn’t gone missing when Sonya wrote this.”
He suddenly looked all miserable again, and his eyes sort of clouded over. I wanted to give him a hug, but I couldn’t do that, so instead I gave him a pat on the arm, and I said, “We’ll think of something, Hal. We will. We’ll find her.”
That was complete nonsense. We hadn’t the first clue how to go about it. This thing on the piece of paper might mean something, but whatever it meant, it wasn’t a clue to the mystery of Hal’s missing mother.
Hal sniffled a bit. “I better be getting home. He’ll be wondering what’s keeping me.”
“Oh well,” I said. “Yeah. Better not keep old Shiny Face in suspense, eh?”
Hal sighed. “I wish I hadn’t done it,” he said. “The hospital thing. I really wish I had never thought of it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wished I was grown-up and could think of something soothing, but the only things that came into my head were either stupid or funny. That’s the trouble with my head, it’s always full of stupid funny stuff.
Hal kicked himself. I mean, he did literally—he kicked the instep of one foot with the toe of the other. It looked as if it hurt.
“It was supposed to solve a problem,” he said, “but it only made it worse.”
Chapter 16
I woke up very early the next morning. I don’t know what woke me, but the first thing that popped into my head was shoes, shining like polished brown chestnuts. I wondered where that thought had come from—it’s weird the way things drift into your mind when you are between sleep and waking—and then I remembered that was what Hal had said to Sonya, something about remembering his dad’s shoes. I think he meant on the day he died, but that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I mean, people don’t usually have their shoes on when they die, do they? Unless they have an accident, I suppose. Or drop dead. And why would you notice their shoes? If someone died, you wouldn’t be looking at their feet, would you? I suppose if you are only five or something, you might be closer to their feet than other people. That didn’t seem like a very convincing explanation, though.
Poor Hal, I thought, just like my mother always says, only I really meant it. I’d never thought about Hal’s dad being dead before as, like, a major problem or anything, especially since it had happened a long time ago. It was just a fact. But now I realized, all of a sudden, that my mother was right, and it was awfully sad for Hal, and that was why she always said “Poor Hal.” That was what the thing about the shoes made me think.
Then I remembered about Hal’s mother being missing still, and I lay there for a while and worried about that. Then I wondered why Alec’s face was so shiny. After that I wondered if he could deshine it by using some sort of stuff on it, but that would probably count as makeup and I didn’t think he’d be into that idea. I began to feel a bit sorry for him. I mean, not only did he have a shiny face to contend with, but the situation about Hal’s mother must be pretty terrible for him as well as for Hal. Plus he also had Hal to worry about.
The next thing I thought was, they really ought to ring the police. I could see that they didn’t want to get Trudy into trouble and all, but still, there’s a limit, and I would think being missing for nearly a week was definitely it.
Then I thought, without meaning to think it, it just sort of drifted into my head as a fully formed sentence: well, if they aren’t going to ring the police, it’s up to me to do it.
Me! I thought then. I could hear my own voice in my head. It was squeaky with terror. What’s it got to do with me? I reasoned. It’s not my problem. I’m not going to go there.
I turned over and tried to go back to sleep. But having thought such a thought, I couldn’t unthink it. I knew I was going to have to act on it.
In the end, I got out of bed. It was nearly six o’clock. If I was lucky, Sonya might still be on the same shift she’d been doing on Saturday, and that would mean she’d be on in the morning. Maybe she’d be there already, if she was due to finish at lunchtime.
I put on my dressing gown and went down to the hall, where the phone book is kept, and I looked up Balnamara Garda station in the green pages where all the official stuff is. It took a while, but I found it. Then I grabbed the cordless phone off its cradle and punched in the number. I ran back upstairs with the phone while it was ringing, and I was back in bed by the time it was answered.
No, said a cross-sounding voice, Guard O’Rourke was not on duty today.
“Oh!” I said. “When will she be in?”
“I can’t be giving out that sort of information,” said the cross guard. “If it’s Garda business, you can speak to me. If it’s a personal call, you’ll have to ring her at home. Is it personal?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
I meant it was personal in the sense that it was kind of private, not that I wanted to ask her to a party or something, but he didn’t give me a chance to explain that.
“Well, then,” he said, “you’ll have to make your own arrangements. I can’t be spending Garda time talking to you. Slán.” And he hung up.
“Slán,” I said automatically, though he couldn’t hear me.
They worry a lot about their time, the guards, don’t they?
Chapter 17
The phone leaped in my hand. Well, that’s what it felt like; I don’t suppose it actually did leap. But anyway, it rang as I sat up in bed with it in my hand.
Maybe he’s sorry, I thought, that cross guard. Maybe he’s ringing back to apologize. They probably have one of those screens that tells you who’s ringing you so you can call them back if you like. We haven’t got one of those. We are very lo-tech in this family. My parents think that is a grand thing; I think it’s just a pain. We wouldn’t even have a cordless phone, only the old phone died and it was cheaper to get one of these as a replacement.
But it wasn’t the guard, it was Hal.
“Hal!” I yelped. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Not really,” Hal said. “It’s that sort of plum-colored time, about six.”
“Does it taste like plums too?” I asked.
“No, mint,” he said. “Did I wake you? Sorry.”
I wondered if six o’clock in the evening was the same color and taste, but I didn’t get a chance to ask.
“I just wanted to tell you,” Hal went on, “Alec looked up that quing-ming-jay thing on the computer, I mean, on the Internet. He’s an insomaniac.”
Alec! That was the first time Hal’d ever called his stepfather by his name. But I was a bit distracted by that other thing he had called him.
“Inso what?” I asked.
“Maniac,” he repeated. “Inso-maniac. It means he doesn’t sleep.”
“Oh!” I said. “You mean insomniac.”
“Yes,” said Hal. “That’s what I said. So he gets up early and goes surfing. We have broadband, did I tell you?”
“Hal, do you know tha
t it’s six a.m.?”
He didn’t answer, he just kept going.
“It turns out it’s not ‘queuing’ or ‘king’ or ‘kwing.’ It’s ‘ching.’ That’s how you pronounce it. He woke me up to show me this site he found, all about it. It’s dead interesting.”
“Ching?” I said.“Ching! Oh!” Something was fluttering in my brain. Things were slotting into place. I wasn’t sure exactly what things, but something was definitely going on in my head. “Hal! That must be … Hal, is it Chinese?”
“That’s right,” he said. He sounded a bit disappointed that I’d worked it out for myself. “How did you guess?”
“It’s that festival, isn’t it?” I said, finally realizing the connections that my brain was making. “That thing in China with the kites, right?”
“Oh!” he said. “You knew. Qing Ming Jie, yes, the Festival of Pure Brightness. How did you know?”
Well, of course, I hadn’t known, it was just the only Chinese thing I’d ever heard of apart from wonton soup and dragons and Beijing, and anyway, the person who’d mentioned it was Sonya, and she was also the person who’d written those words on the scrap of paper, so it all had to be connected, hadn’t it?
I didn’t say any of this to Hal. Instead, I said, “But so what?”
“So that’s what Sonya was saying to me, she wanted me to know about this festival.”
“Yeah, but what about it?”
“I don’t know,” Hal said. “I’m thinking about it, though.”
“Hmm,” I said.
My eyes were starting to prickle with sleep. I’m not usually functioning at six o’clock in the morning.
“It’s deadly,” Hal was saying now. “There’s loads of information on this site. It’s also called Tomb Sweeping Day.”
“What is?”
“The Festival of Pure Brightness.”
“Tomb sweeping! How do you mean, tomb sweeping?”
“People visit graves and sweep them.”
He’s flipped, I thought to myself. He’s finally flipped. If I thought he was weird before, that was nothing compared to this.
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