It is a week since Sarah went missing. A whole week.
Kate has come with a stack of posters, and we are going around the streets putting them up. I’ve never met Kate before. She doesn’t look like Sarah. She is much shorter, and her face is narrower. Her hair is dark, and Sarah’s is fair. She has lines on her face. She looks much older than Sarah.
“Hi, Jemma, nice to meet you,” she says, smiling a little awkwardly. I jolt at the way she speaks. Her voice is so similar it could be Sarah’s.
Dad wasn’t sure about all of us coming, but Olivia was determined to help.
I am “parked” in front of a streetlight where the first poster has been attached. It is weird seeing Sarah’s face smiling down. Is she smiling somewhere now? I can’t picture what she’s doing, where she might be. It’s just a blank. Kate seems so confident that the sightings were really Sarah and that she’s alive. Could it be true? Could it?
Dad asks Kate if the police have followed up on the sightings and the ATM.
“They’re still not sure if it was her,” Kate admits, “but there’s no proof that it wasn’t either.”
“And Ruby Jones saw her too!” Olivia pipes up.
“Yes, so you said,” says Kate. “Any sighting might help. It’s good that she told you.”
Once the posters are up, I am disappointed to see most people going past without even looking at them. If they look at all, it is such a quick glance that they can’t really take in her face—can they?
Sheralyn is with me and is supposed to be watching Finn too. To make him feel useful, Dad has given him a wad of posters to hold, while Olivia is handing Dad pieces of tape. Sheralyn is watching Olivia. No one apart from me has noticed that Finn is now lining up his posters neatly on the sidewalk against the fence. He has more than I thought—at least ten faces of Sarah staring up from the ground—and I can see what’s going to happen. It’s not that windy, but it will only take a little bit of a breeze. Please, Sheralyn… Look back! Look at Finn!
She does—but too late. A gust lifts the corner of one sheet, then another, and suddenly they are all fluttering up into the air, spreading across the sidewalk.
Finn lets out an anguished cry and starts flapping his arms, his neat work undone.
“Oh! Finn!” Sheralyn exclaims.
He makes no effort to pick up the posters, just watches as Sheralyn, Dad, and Olivia quickly try to gather them. Some are flapping into the street like injured birds. Olivia runs to the edge of the curb.
“Olivia—not in the street!” Dad yells, and to my relief, Olivia stops.
A car runs over a poster, and even from here, I can see tire marks on it.
“I could have gotten that one!” Olivia tells Dad angrily. Mom and Kate are farther down the street. I can’t see them, but I hear Kate’s voice. They must have seen and come back to help. I only see Kate when she steps into the street and retrieves the poster with the tire marks. She stands on the sidewalk in front of me, staring at it and brushing it with her hand, as if the tire marks might rub off. Tears run down her face.
As we head home, it begins to rain—just to make everyone more miserable—and no one has an umbrella. Although they are in plastic sleeves, the posters will be dripping and bedraggled before anyone even sees them. Mom and Sheralyn struggle to get my shower-proof cape over me, but I am already very wet. The chilly dampness has seeped through to my skin, making me shiver. Raindrops tickle my face like insects, and I wish I could wipe them away.
When we reach the house, Mom says Kate can’t go all that way home on the train when she’s soaked through. She insists on lending her some clothes and invites Kate to stay for dinner.
Once I am in dry clothes, Sheralyn leaves me in the living room with some music playing, saying she’s going to take a shower. Kate, Mom, and Dad are in the kitchen, and I wish she’d taken me in there.
I’m sitting here, almost asleep, when Olivia slips in, unusually quietly for her. She goes over to Mom’s purse, which is on the sofa, opens the zipper, and starts digging in it. I wonder briefly if Mom has asked her to fetch something from her bag—but it’s unlikely. Olivia keeps glancing toward the door, so she’s obviously doing something she shouldn’t.
She doesn’t seem to have realized that I’m here. I watch as she pulls out Mom’s wallet and takes out a ten-dollar bill. She folds it and presses it quickly into her pocket. She zips up Mom’s bag, then glances up at me. She meets my eyes, but then looks quickly away and hurries off.
What does Olivia want ten dollars for? Then I remember Mom saying money was missing from her purse. It was Olivia all along.
* * *
“Sarah was a little on the wild side as a teenager. She had a string of hopeless boyfriends,” Kate tells us over dinner.
“Not much change there,” I want to say.
“And like I said,” Kate continues, “I tried to warn her about this one boy, and she got annoyed and went off with him for a few days.”
“But she hasn’t gone off with Dan—or with Richard,” Mom points out. “They’ve both been here and are clearly worried about her.”
“I know,” says Kate.
There’s a silence, and I feel them all thinking about the other possibilities that no one wants to mention—the bad things that could have happened to Sarah.
When Kate leaves after we’ve eaten, I miss her voice. I miss her voice that sounds so much like Sarah’s.