Finding Grace(12)

The front door opens; a firm, reassuring hand on my shoulder guides me through into the hallway where every day Grace shrugs on her coat and puts on her shoes, then carelessly discards them again, sometimes several times throughout the day.

I stand next to the stairs, the end balustrade strong and unforgiving against my back.

The small space is full of people, yet it feels empty, lifeless, and the air is full of foreboding as feet shuffle and mouths cough. People try their best not to steal curious glances at me and fail.

They must be wondering why I let my nine-year-old daughter walk home alone. Why I chose to nap and listen to music instead of ensuring she was safe.

Thankfully, if they are, nobody is saying it out loud.

My heart yearns for Oscar. I need my baby in my arms, safe and warm. Perhaps I can ask them to call Dad and get them both back here.

‘Get that door shut quick,’ an authoritative voice growls, and it swings closed, but not before I spot a photographer near the gate.

Then a woman in a red mac appears seemingly from nowhere and springs forward with a microphone, shouting something.

It seems the local press have already arrived.





Eight





Olivia





Sue from next door had put the television on for her and made her a mug of hot chocolate, which Olivia hadn’t touched yet.

She sat in this lounge every night with her mum and dad, but right now, with Sue here, it felt like she was in someone else’s house.

Everything was upside down since Grace had gone missing on her way home. It was like someone had messed up a completed jigsaw puzzle and now the picture looked all wrong.

Sue was chattering on and on about her grandchildren, Elsa and Niall, who lived in Spain and visited her twice a year. Usually Olivia liked Sue’s stories about the stuff Elsa and Niall got up to. And she’d usually laugh when Sue explained how she was trying her best to learn Spanish but kept pronouncing all the words wrong and getting them in the wrong order so her sentences made no sense.

But today, she wished Sue would just turn off the television and stop talking, because Olivia was trying very hard to think.

She stared out of the window, Sue’s voice and the television both fading away into the background.

Their usually quiet street was buzzing with people, and lots of them were police officers. Men, women and even children walked in groups, heads turning, necks craning this way and that, as if they expected to find Grace hiding under a hedge or even in one of the wheelie bins that people had put out for the council’s scheduled rubbish collection tomorrow.

Her friend wasn’t in any of those places, Olivia could have told them that. Grace wasn’t stupid; in fact, she was one of the cleverest in Miss Barr’s class, proven by a recent test they’d all had to sit.

There was no way Grace would hide somewhere or run away. If she was planning on doing either of those things, she would definitely have told Olivia. Olivia was Grace’s best friend, after all, and they told each other all their secrets. Like at Christmas, when Olivia had taken half a cooked ham out of the fridge and the girls had smuggled it to the park. While their mums chatted, they’d dodged into the small copse and left the meat there, so the local stray cats could have a festive feed too.

Grace had never told on her, despite both their mums ganging up together and demanding the truth from them. That was what best friends did for each other, and if Grace had been planning anything daring or exciting, Olivia knew she’d have been the first person she’d have told.

Yet if Grace hadn’t disappeared on purpose, then what could have happened?

Olivia swiftly pushed the shadowy thoughts away. She didn’t want to think of what else might have happened to her friend. On Violet Road, people knew each other, spoke in the street and often got together, like they’d done for the royal wedding street party in May.

The girls often complained that nothing exciting ever happened to them like on the programmes they secretly watched on Netflix upstairs in their bedrooms. They both wished some sort of a crime would be committed so they could investigate it like in the Nancy Drew books that were in the school library.

But nothing ever did happen. Until today.

And now, it didn’t feel exciting at all. It felt horrible to think Grace had somehow disappeared after leaving here, and it made Olivia’s hands go all cold and clammy when she thought about her friend screaming on the rides earlier that day.

Sue was still droning on, something about what she planned on cooking when her grandchildren flew in from Spain next week. Olivia stared at her before turning her attention to the window again. Didn’t she know this stuff wasn’t important right now?

Grace was missing. It didn’t matter that Sue was cooking all her family’s favourite meals.

There were familiar faces in the crowd searching the street outside. Her mum and dad were there, and Olivia spotted that man Jeffery with them, who lived next door to Grace.

Sometimes, in the warmer months, they played out in the garden, and they’d spotted Jeffery watching from his upstairs window on more than one occasion. They’d stuck out their tongues and wiggled their ears at him and he’d soon disappeared. It had been so funny to see him scurry back from the glass.

But there were also lots of people out there that Olivia didn’t recognise at all.

The adults had all banded together, trying to solve the mystery along with the police.