by Dani Atkins
I swallowed noisily as I read and then reread the note in my hand. I was shaking so much, the large, childish script was hard to decipher.
‘Alex, come here! I’ve found something,’ I yelled.
Seconds later, the note was in Alex’s hand, which if anything was trembling even more than mine.
‘Shit,’ he cried, his fingers raking through his hair, giving him a manic look that matched the expression in his eyes.
‘What does it say?’ asked Barbara, who along with Mac and Jamie had followed Alex up the stairs on hearing my cry.
Alex was staring at the sheet in his hands as though it was a ransom request. His eyes were darting over the crayoned words as though searching them for a hidden meaning.
‘Gone to see Mummy,’ I read out loud, my voice unnaturally high.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Barbara, as bewildered as the rest of us. All except Alex.
He pushed past us and ran back down the stairs. We followed in his wake like rats trailing a piper.
‘Where are my fucking keys?’ he yelled, racing from kitchen to lounge as though one of us had deliberately hidden them. ‘Where the hell are my car keys?’
While the others started to look for them, I made a grab for Alex’s wrists. In the state he was in, the last thing he should have been doing was getting behind the wheel of a car.
‘Molly, please let go of me,’ he snapped, pulling away roughly enough to break one of my nails. I didn’t even feel it.
‘Not until you tell me where you’re going.’
There was a terror on his face that was going to haunt my nightmares for a long time to come.
‘Isn’t it obvious? I know where Connor has gone.’ Everyone froze in their search for the missing keys and turned towards him. ‘It’s bloody obvious, isn’t it? He said he’s “gone to see Mummy”. He finally got tired of waiting for me to take him there.’
‘Where?’ asked Barbara.
‘The cemetery. To Lisa’s grave. It’s the one place I’ve never let him go.’
His words took the wind out of our collective sails, and in the ensuing doldrums Alex finally spotted the missing car keys in a small ceramic bowl, which I suspected was where they always lived.
‘Alex, please take a moment to think this through,’ I implored, trying to grasp the back of his shirt to slow him down. The fabric slipped through my fingers, but at least he paused on the threshold of the open front door. It was hard to hear him through the thundering rain and with the wind shrieking in the background, urging him to hurry.
‘Does Connor even know where the cemetery is?’ I asked.
‘We’ve driven past it. He probably thinks he knows how to get there.’
‘But isn’t it miles from here?’ said Jamie, clearly as upset as the rest of us.
‘It is,’ cried Alex, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘So the sooner I set off to find him, the less likely he is to step out into a busy road or get picked up by some goddam pervert.’
His words stunned us into the silence he needed to run from his own front door. He stopped just once before hurling himself into the car. ‘Stay here, all of you, in case he comes back. I’ll call you as soon as I find him.’
The squeal of his tyres on the slick tarmac sounded like the wail of a banshee. It curdled my blood and left me standing in the rain long after Alex’s tail lights had disappeared into the storm.
An arm slipped around my waist and gently pulled me away from the open door, shutting it firmly behind me. ‘Jamie and I are going to search the nearby streets. Connor might have gone outside and then taken shelter from the rain somewhere.’ It was a reasonable suggestion, but I could tell from Mac’s eyes that he didn’t put much store in it.
‘If Alex phones to say he’s found him somewhere en route, just give me a call.’
‘He won’t be phoning,’ said Jamie from somewhere behind us. We turned around to see him emerge from the kitchen with something slim and metallic in his hand. ‘Alex left in such a hurry he didn’t pick up his phone. He can’t get in touch with us, and we can’t reach him either.’
I stared mindlessly at Alex’s forgotten phone, as though this was one problem too many for me to cope with. Fortunately, the man I’d fallen in love with was made of sterner stuff.
‘Okay. That doesn’t alter things. Alex is still going to drive to the cemetery to look for Connor, and we’re still going to search much closer to home.’
‘Shouldn’t we… Shouldn’t we call the police?’ I asked, hating that this would turn Connor from a temporarily lost child into one who was ‘missing’.
‘One step at a time. We could find him sheltering in someone’s garden a few houses away,’ Mac said. He pulled me towards him, pressing a hard and urgent kiss upon my lips. ‘You stay here with Barbara in case he comes back on his own.’
42
Molly
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ said Barbara, her voice brittle with concern as she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. It was the panacea of her generation, and if keeping busy helped her, I was happy to drink gallons of the stuff.
‘Okay. I’m just going to take another quick look in Connor’s room,’ I said, unable to shake the feeling that I was somehow missing something.
I surveyed his bedroom once more, but all it revealed was that he loved astronomy, the moon – and his mum. There were framed photographs of the two of them on either side of his bed. They were laughing in both pictures: one in the snow; the other on a beach, eyes crinkled against the sun as they faced the camera. I liked how Alex had made sure Lisa’s face was still the first thing Connor saw each day.
She lived on in other vital ways than simply the organs she’d donated. She was certainly here in the shelves housing Connor’s favourite possessions, I realised, as my hand travelled along a unit where books, models, and toys relating to space were crammed tightly together. I paused when I reached a gap where two tell-tale shapes were visible in a light film of dust; one round, one cylindrical. What had sat there, I wondered?
Convinced there were no answers to be found in this room, I headed for the door, pausing to pick up the photo of Lisa and Connor on the beach. ‘Can’t you help me?’ I asked the smiling woman in the frame. ‘I’m trying to find him for you.’
From the ground floor I could hear Barbara calling my name, presumably telling me the tea was now ready. I bent to replace the photograph on the bedside cabinet, but it wouldn’t stand up straight. I frowned, turned it over and saw the problem. A small square of paper had been forced into the back of the frame, which I’d dislodged. It fell to the carpet.
My fingers were trembling as I bent to retrieve it, as though I already knew it was significant. I unfolded it carefully, noting the creases that revealed it had once been crumpled into a ball. To my shame, I didn’t stop to consider whether this was prying or invading Connor’s privacy. All that concerned me was that somewhere out there, in the worst storm we’d had in years, a young boy was lost, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to find him. Nothing.
Despite the creases, the image of the eclipse was still striking. I could see why Connor had wanted to keep it. But the reason he’d wanted to hide it was on the reverse side of the flier. A soft gasp escaped my lips as I realised I was holding an invitation for Lisa to attend this year’s Astronomy Fair, and then a much louder gasp followed when I read the date of the event. Today. The Astronomy Fair was happening today. Was that where Connor had gone?
Above the sound of the wind rattling the window frame, I heard an echo of a conversation I’d had with Alex months before: It was the last thing Lisa said to Connor on the day she died. She promised they’d go on the train to the Astronomy Fair next year. I think that’s why he won’t accept she isn’t coming back for him – because she promised, and she never broke her word to him.
I was not one to believe in signs, portents or omens, but I did believe there was a reason why I’d been drawn back to Connor’s room. And I was pretty sure I wa
s holding that reason in my hand right then.
I ran down the stairs far quicker than I should, and almost cannoned into Barbara, who was about to climb them in search of me.
‘I know how we can find out which direction Connor took when he left the house,’ she said excitedly.
Her revelation trumped mine by a country mile.
‘How?’
‘Gordon should be able to tell us,’ she said, pulling down both of our coats from the rack in the hall.
‘Great. Erm… who exactly is Gordon?’ I asked, already shoving my arms into my sleeves.
‘He’s a curmudgeonly grump of a man with an unfortunate dislike of cats. Thank goodness,’ she added mysteriously.
I followed her out of the house and into the storm, although mentally I was still lagging several pages behind. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the drumming of the rain as we briskly crossed the road, dodging a minefield of deep puddles.
‘Alex’s neighbour complained about Connor’s cat, so I paid him a visit to give him a piece of my mind,’ Barbara said, looking embarrassed. ‘He’s not such a bad old stick; he’s just lonely, I think.’ Her smile revealed she might like Alex’s neighbour a little more than she was admitting to. ‘Not that I could get him to change his mind, though, which obviously is a blessing, as it turns out.’ She paused at the foot of a neatly tended front garden on the corner of the street.
‘Change his mind about what?’ I asked, hurrying after her as she sped up the path and knocked smartly on the front door.
‘That,’ Barbara said succinctly, pointing to a device fixed to the roof of the porch; a device I recognised; a device that was pointing not only at the flowerbeds edging the front garden but also at the crossroads beyond it.
*
‘It’s probably not going to be of any help. That’s not what it was installed for. It’s not even that sharp a picture. I couldn’t afford the fancy models.’
Gordon Grafton had grumbled and moaned from the moment he’d answered the front door. He was like a human version of A. A. Milne’s Eeyore, all gloom and despondency. And yet I’d seen the glimmer that had briefly lit up his eyes when he recognised the woman standing on his doorstep. The fondness I suspected Barbara felt for Alex’s elderly neighbour appeared to be reciprocated.
‘There!’ I said, my finger jabbing excitedly at the grainy image on the ancient laptop. All three of us craned towards the screen, where a small figure wearing a bright yellow raincoat had just appeared. Barbara and I groaned in unison as a large dark van swept onto the screen, obscuring Connor and the opposite side of the road from view.
I was perched, quite literally, on the edge of my seat as we waited for the van to execute a right-hand turn and get out of the way. By the time it did, Connor was almost out of camera range.
‘Can you zoom in or sharpen up the image?’ I asked.
Gordon’s wiry grey eyebrows rose like a pair of levitating gerbils. ‘This isn’t bloody CSI, you know,’ he replied testily, but he nevertheless prodded at several keys before finally finding the one to freeze the recording.
‘What’s that he’s holding?’ asked Barbara, peering so closely at the screen, her nose was practically grazing it.
‘Looks like a bat and a football to me. Perhaps the lad was heading for the park?’ suggested Gordon.
I shook my head, my mind returning to the imprints on the shelf in Connor’s bedroom. I now knew which objects were missing.
‘He’s carrying a telescope and a papier-mâché model of the moon,’ I said softly. It confirmed what I’d already suspected to be true. Connor was trying to make his own way to the Astronomy Fair. He’d gone to find his mummy.
*
To say that Mac and Jamie were saturated was an understatement. Their clothes were stuck to their bodies, their hair flat against their heads as though they’d just been dunked in a pool. I found a stack of towels from the airing cupboard, while Barbara brewed up some more tea.
‘But if Connor is trying to get to the train station,’ Jamie said, rubbing at his hair with a towel until it stood porcupine straight on his head, ‘isn’t he heading in the wrong direction? If what you saw on that old geezer’s video is right?’
I frowned because he made an excellent point. Connor had been seen heading in the opposite direction of both the station and the cemetery.
‘I think it’s safe to say that Connor probably didn’t have a clue which way he should be heading,’ Mac said, accepting the mug of tea Barbara passed him with a grateful smile. ‘The only thing it does tell us is that Alex is highly unlikely to come across him on his journey to the cemetery.’
‘Then we should go after him ourselves,’ I said, leaping to my feet. ‘If we follow the road we saw Connor heading down, we’re much more likely to find him than Alex is.’
‘Agreed,’ said Mac. ‘And if—’ He broke off as the ringing of a mobile phone interrupted him. We looked from one person to the next, but no one jumped up to answer it.
‘It’s not mine,’ said Jamie.
‘Nor mine,’ said Barbara.
Mac and I exchanged glances; the ringtone was neither of ours either.
‘It’s Alex’s!’ cried Jamie, jumping up and scoping the room. ‘Where the hell did I put his phone?’ He hurried towards the hallway, but the ringing had stopped before he’d even left the kitchen.
He returned a few moments later with Alex’s phone in his hand. I was so busy looking at the mobile, I was slow to notice his healthy colour had drained to a sickly pallor.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Bad news was beginning to feel like a stack of dominoes just waiting to tumble our way.
In reply, Jamie gingerly set the phone down on Alex’s kitchen table so we could all see the message on the home screen.
Missed call. Lisa
There was a long silence as we absorbed the impossibility of what we were seeing.
‘You don’t think that she… that she found a way to…’ began Jamie, sounding genuinely spooked.
Thankfully, Mac was more pragmatic. ‘There’s a logical explanation to this,’ he said firmly. ‘This isn’t anything supernatural.’
I reached hesitantly for the phone. ‘There is an explanation, although it still doesn’t make sense.’ Three pairs of eyes swivelled in my direction. ‘Alex gave Connor Lisa’s old mobile phone. He uses it to speak to her – pretend conversations,’ I added hastily, noticing Jamie’s wide-eyed stare. ‘But Alex said the phone hadn’t been charged since Lisa died. The battery would have gone flat long ago.’
The colour flooded back into Jamie’s cheeks. ‘Erm… that’s not strictly true. I kind of gave it a quick charge last week, so he could play a game on it.’
There was a brief time-lag as we registered this information, and then four pairs of hands simultaneously pounced on the phone as though playing a high-stakes game of Snap. Mac got to it first and quickly pressed the button to return the last incoming call.
‘Pick up, pick up,’ I murmured under my breath. ‘Please, Connor, pick up the phone.’
Mac shook his head as he set the phone back down on the table. ‘It’s either switched off or flat again,’ he said with a disappointed sigh.
‘But it just rang,’ I cried, closer to tears of frustration than I wanted to admit. ‘He was trying to reach us.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jamie, peering at the phone. ‘I think he left a message.’
I wasn’t sure how much more of this rollercoaster of emotions my new heart could withstand. It felt as though we were hurtling from despair to hope every twenty seconds.
After listening to the message for the fourth time, I had to concur with Jamie’s assessment.
‘Bum dial,’ he said gloomily as we once again listened to its jumble of random, indistinct sounds.
Barbara looked confused as she considered something that sounded anatomically impossible.
‘It means it was an accidental call,’ I explained. ‘Connor must have leant again
st the phone without realising it, and it rang the last number that had been dialled. He probably didn’t even realise the call had connected.’
Mac downed the remainder of his tea and got to his feet. ‘We should go. We can cover more ground in the car than on foot, and three pairs of eyes are better than two.’ He laid one hand gently on Barbara’s shoulder. ‘Are you okay holding the fort here alone in case Alex gets in touch or returns?’
‘Or Connor comes back,’ she added hopefully.
Mac’s smile might have convinced her, but I saw the doubt behind it. ‘Absolutely.’
Barbara nodded solemnly.
‘Okay then, guys. Let’s go.’
43
Molly
Two beers and no lunch meant it was safer for me to drive than Mac. He threw his keys to me across the bonnet and I caught them in one hand. Jamie climbed into the back. Despite switching the wipers to maximum speed, they still struggled to clear the windscreen of the fast-falling rain. Even with three pairs of eyes looking for him, it was still going to be tricky to spot one small lost boy in these conditions.
I paused before pulling away from the junction where Connor was last caught on camera. Were we making a huge mistake in not alerting the police that he was missing? What if Alex’s worst fears were realised and someone had offered him a lift? Was he old enough to know not to accept? I shook my head as my imagination conjured up the kind of headlines that would strike terror into any parent’s heart. Except you’re not a parent, a voice in my head took pains to remind me. I ignored it.
‘Jamie, why don’t you take the right-hand side of the road and I’ll do the left?’ suggested Mac, who was proving to be far better in a crisis than the rest of us.
‘I’ll look straight ahead,’ I volunteered, and then proceeded to instantly fail at that when the bus in front of us pulled away from its stop and I almost drove Mac’s car right into it. For a dreadful moment I thought the brakes weren’t going to find purchase on the rain-slicked tarmac, but with a squeal of protest they brought us to a halt just inches from the back of the bus. I hadn’t thought it was possible for my anxiety levels to soar any higher off the chart, but somehow they managed it.