Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(86)

The first room is the kitchen. There’s a sink full of dirty dishes and a wooden table with water stains. A fly lazily buzzes near the ceiling. The room smells of stale beer, of old food and rot. An empty crisp bag is balled up on the floor.

“Jack?” Holly’s voice is no more than a whisper. Where is Christopher, damn him? Perhaps she should have waited after all. But she pushes on.

Beyond the kitchen is a tiny den, darkened by shades, and past that is where the ringing is coming from. With a deepening sense of dread, Holly steps into what must be the bedroom. Aside from a stained mattress on the floor and a dresser scarred with cigarette burns, the room is empty. There’s a bundle of blue-striped sheets piled in a corner. She pokes them with her foot, and a sour smell reaches her nostrils.

The phone rests on the corner of the mattress farthest from her. It’s Jack’s for sure—same blue case, same chip on the edge where he dropped it after practice last year. As she’s reaching for it, she notices something beneath it. It’s a photo, the type that comes from an instant camera. Gingerly, she picks it up.

It’s a picture of a boy. He’s wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, and his face is turned away from the camera. It looks as if he’s asleep, asleep on blue-striped sheets, on a bed pushed against a wall like this one. She stares at the photo, her heart pounding. The photo is ever so slightly out of focus, but it’s Jack, she’s certain.

The phone has stopped ringing, but a message appears on the lock screen. It’s a new address. Below it are the words Tell no one.

Holly stares at the phone. The message disappears as the screen goes blank. She enters Jack’s passcode, but the screen doesn’t unlock and she gets an error message. Her hands are shaking—she must have entered the code wrong. She tries again and the same thing happens. Has Jack changed it? And how many chances does she have before she’s locked out?

Before she can try again, the phone rings, and Holly jumps. A message appears, asking for permission to video call. Holly accepts, and the screen fills with the image of a boy in jeans and sweatshirt, just like the photo. He’s sleeping, and once again his face is averted. But the shape of his head and the hunch of his shoulders . . . Jack.

She scans the video, looking for clues. The room has cream-colored walls. There’s a window over the bed, but Holly can’t see anything framed in it, only sky. The light is early morning, the same as it is where Holly is standing.

“Jack?” she calls. “Jack? Can you hear me? Wake up!”

Immediately the connection ends. Holly tries to call back, but the phone’s screen fades to black. She pushes the home key, tries to restart it, but a message pops up, telling her the phone is being remotely wiped.

“No,” she says, shaking it. “No, no, no.”

Within moments, the message is gone, as is Jack’s screen saver. It’s as if she’s just taken the phone out of the box.

“Shit,” she says. “Bloody, sodding shit.”

She scrabbles in her bag for a pen and piece of paper, afraid that she’ll forget the address. She’s finishing scribbling it when she hears tires squeal outside, followed by footsteps on the front steps.

“Holly?” Christopher calls through the door, his voice guarded. “Holly, are you in here?”

Tell no one.

Slowly she looks at the paper with the address, the photo she found on the mattress. She doesn’t want to do this alone. Not again. She can’t.

“Holly?” Christopher calls again. He’s in the kitchen now, coming along the hallway. His footsteps are careful, deliberate, but quick. He’ll be in the room in a second. As she turns to answer him, a spot of color near the door catches her eye. A red feather. She freezes.

Tell no one.

“Holly?”

There’s a split second left, and Holly chooses.

“I’m in here,” she calls. “I’m okay.” She leaves the feather where it is. She doesn’t want to touch it. But she puts the address and the photo in her pocket as Christopher rushes into the room.

“I’m fine,” she says again. “I think it was . . . a prank. Jack trying to get back at me.”

Somewhere outside, a rooster crows.





Chapter Thirty-Three



Tell me again,” Christopher says for the umpteenth time, his voice unnaturally patient. Holly has to take a deep breath, has to will her body to be still, so she can match his tone. She exhales as forcefully as she dares.

“A prank,” she says. “A stupid prank. Jack’s been pushing for more independence for months, and he decided to take the chance while I was away to seize it.”

Even to her own ears, it sounds pathetic. How much worse must it sound to Christopher? It’s a terrible story, but the best she was able to come up with in the seconds she had. Even so, Christopher insisted on searching every corner of the dismal flat, and the only thing Holly can thank her stars for at the moment is how very small the place is. She needs to get to that address as fast as she can. But when the inside turned up nothing, Christopher moved on to the yard, where he found enough rusty cans and bottles to start his own junkyard but nothing else.

And still he wouldn’t leave. He insisted they look through the bedroom again, that she show him exactly where she found the phone, as if knowing would somehow miraculously make Jack appear. Now he stands, arms crossed, blocking the bedroom door. With his black motorcycle boots, leather jacket, and smudge of dirt under his eye from crawling about in the yard, he looks like a modern pirate. An angry, obstinate pirate. It reminds her of how little she knows him, how trusting him could be dangerous. Of who he could be, and not just in his dreams.