13

Kala’s family had stopped downtown to pick up coffees for the road.

Now they stood around their open car doors in the frosty afternoon, having one last chat with Elliot and his friends.

‘Good time to set off,’ Shelby said, glancing up at the darkening sky.

‘Isn’t it perfect?’ Kala’s father agreed with bitter gusto. He tilted his head towards Kala’s little sisters. ‘Couldn’t miss their ballet classes, could they?’

At once the little sisters began to dance on the street. Their mother scolded one for not wearing her jacket in this weather, and the other for pirouetting like soap stuck down a drainpipe.

Kala leaned against the car, examining the woven bands on her wrist.

‘Sell your jewellery to those rich kids at Demshield,’ Gabe advised. ‘Make yourself a fortune.’

‘You’re coming back for the holidays, right?’ Cody squinted through his cigarette smoke.

‘If you put out that cigarette I will.’

Cody took another drag. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Too cold.’

‘We should get going.’ Kala’s mother reached her hands towards Elliot, as if she was thinking of hugging him, and then let them fall. She smiled instead. Then she scolded the little girls into the car.

Nikki tugged on the rope that was holding luggage to the roof racks. ‘Mind if I just retie this for you?’ she asked, ‘Seems a little loose,’ and Kala’s dad nodded, ‘By all means.’

Kala stepped towards Elliot a moment. She tilted her head, and her hair, which was loose, caught the streetlight.

Elliot touched the light in her hair. He took her right hand, turned it upside down, studied it a moment, then let it go—raised his eyebrows, and stood back.

Kala and her family got into the car.

At the intersection down the street, the car stopped behind a pick-up truck, and Kala and her sisters lowered their windows, leaning out from either side of the car to wave.

Then the lights changed, the pick-up truck gunned it, and the car disappeared in a cloud of exhaust fumes, windows shooting closed.

Shelby wound her arm around Elliot’s neck. ‘Let’s go blow something up,’ she said.

Two blocks east on Broad Street, Jimmy Hawthorn, Deputy Sheriff, was opening his front door.

Isabella held up one hand; with the fingertip of her other hand, she was writing her name in the mist of his front-door glass.

‘Done?’ he said.

‘It’s a long name,’ she explained.

Her cheek felt cold when he kissed her.

They were a couple now, Jimmy and Isabella. The Red had brought them together and they’d stayed.

In the living room, the fireplace was glowing, the coffee table scattered with papers.

‘You’re working again?’ She stood with her back to the fire, holding her hands behind her to warm them.

Jimmy opened a bottle of wine and poured them both a glass.

‘It’s those missing persons reports, the ones that Central Intelligence sent.’ He gathered the papers together. ‘Look at this.’ He was leafing through them. ‘There’s a man went missing in Golden Coast. There’s a woman in Golden Coast, too. A teenage boy in Nature Strip. A teenage girl, Golden Coast again. And a little boy in the Magical North. A whole heap of witness statements, and I’ve followed every path I could, but I haven’t got a single one. Five missing people, you’d think I’d have got one by now.’ He glanced at her. ‘I’m usually okay at this sort of thing.’

‘I know.’ Isabella smiled. She sat down, sipped from her wine, closed her eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if Central Intelligence sent them to you, it means they can’t figure them out, right? And if they can’t do it, maybe they just can’t be solved. How did they end up with Central anyway?’

‘That’s the thing.’ Jimmy sat beside her, returned the neatened papers to the coffee table. ‘There’ll be some reason—it’ll be drugs or witness protection or foreign affairs or something. And darn if I can figure why a seven-year-old boy in the Magical North could be connected with any of that.’

‘No wonder you can’t solve them,’ Isabella exclaimed. ‘You’re missing vital information. The drugs or whatever it is, it’s probably pivotal. They’re wasting your time! Am I allowed to look at them?’

‘Go ahead.’

Isabella leafed through the files.

‘I see why you keep trying, though,’ she murmured. ‘This is a thirteen-year-old girl—and the seven-year-old boy—I suppose they have parents.’

Jimmy stood. ‘I’ve got some nice cheese and bread,’ he said, heading to the kitchen. ‘Let me know if you solve them while I’m in here,’ he called.

‘What I want to know,’ Isabella called back, reading fast, ‘is whether this waitress ever found her earring. And why she thought she should include that in her statement.’

‘That’s the seventeen-year-old boy? Went missing from the restaurant in Nature Strip, right? Yeah, and the waitress says something about how the back of her earring fell off, and she was crawling around on her knees looking for it?’ Jimmy leaned out of the kitchen door. ‘They get them to include every little thing cause you never know what might be relevant. But the earring, that’s what you call irrelevant.’

He returned to the kitchen, got the bread board and started slicing bread. It was soft on the inside, gold and crunchy on the outside, flakes of crust scattering as he sliced.

Then he put the knife down.

He walked into the living room.

‘You think it’s going to snow tonight?’ Isabella wondered. She was sitting on the couch again, the files high on her lap. ‘Because if it is, I’ve got this experiment I’m working on at school, and—’

‘Wait a moment,’ said Jimmy.

He took the files from her.

He flicked through one, stopped, put it back.

He flicked through a second, paused with the same narrowing eyes, then replaced that too.

Then the third.

The fourth.

The fifth—and back to the first one again.

He looked at Isabella.

‘I know where they are,’ he said.

It was late and cold, and the banks of the Sugarloaf Dam were scattered with cigarette butts; also with the charred remains of explosives. The field nearby was torn up with tyre marks, from motor-scooter racing.

The others had gone home now, but Elliot and Nikki sat on the darkening grass. They were rolling an empty bottle back and forth between their feet in a slow, idle game; leaning into each other against the cold.

‘What’s up with your Butterfly Child anyhow?’ Nikki said. ‘The sycamore bark didn’t cheer her up?

‘Nope,’ said Elliot. ‘She ate it all, though.’ He gazed across the water of the dam. ‘Which is weird enough,’ he added.

‘It is,’ Nikki agreed. ‘But she’s got to do more than sit around eating bark.’

‘Well, she heads out with her insect buddies now and then.’

‘Okay, more than that, too. She’s gotta fix the situation here in Bonfire, I mean. Get the crops going and so on. Isn’t that her job?’

‘That’s what I hear,’ Elliot agreed.

‘Cause everyone’s hanging by a thread. You know the bank moved in on the Whittakers last week? And I hear that Marcy Tam’s closing up and moving out.’

‘You sure are helping my state of mind here, Nikki,’ Elliot said.

Nikki had a giggle that was low and unexpected, rolling across the air between them like marbles.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’ll be okay. The farms’ll come good eventually, with or without the Butterfly Child’s help. Maybe crops are not her thing. Who said they all had to have the same tricks?’

Elliot looked at Nikki sideways, blowing on his hands. It was getting colder.

Nikki held her own hands towards him. ‘Blow on those for me too.’

They shifted closer and Elliot took both her hands into his and rubbed them hard.

‘But if she can do it,’ Nikki added, thoughtful, ‘but she’s not, because she’s just depressed, well, I guess we’ve got to cheer her up. You tried telling her any jokes?’

He laughed a breath of mist into the air.

‘Okay, what’s she need?’ Nikki was getting determined. ‘A self-help audiotape? Or maybe it’s more of a practical problem. It’s school vacation in a couple of weeks—you and I could spend the time renovating her doll’s house. A new coat of paint can do wonders for your mood, is what I hear.’

Elliot wound a finger through Nikki’s hair. It was that pale, it shone like milk under the moonlight.

‘Or could it be boyfriend troubles?’ She leaned forward, and the hair slipped out of Elliot’s fingers.

‘Boyfriend troubles,’ Elliot repeated. ‘You never noticed the “child” in “Butterfly Child”?’

‘How do we know she’s a child? People just call her that because she’s small, right? Or maybe it’s cause she’s supposed to be the child of a butterfly? You ever asked her how old she is? Come to think of it, you ever asked her why she’s not happy?’

‘She doesn’t talk.’

‘Well, the time I saw her, she didn’t look like a child. More like a young woman, maybe. Only freakishly tiny. Maybe that’s what’s got her down—her own freakish smallness.’ Nikki leaned back again, resting her head on Elliot’s shoulder. ‘Or, like I said, boyfriend troubles.’

‘She does go out a lot,’ Elliot said. ‘Could be she’s got lovers all over the province. Never thought of that.’

‘Ah,’ Nikki nodded, her hair scraping against Elliot’s jacket with the nod. ‘Trying to juggle them all. Tricky.’

Their hands were intertwined now, their faces so close their cheeks were touching. An owl murmured nearby, and in the distance there was music. Somebody in Sugarloaf was having a party. Behind the music was the high-pitched sound of an ATV engine, and behind that was the sound Elliot kept hearing, that faint, low fluting. People always shrugged when he mentioned it, so he’d stopped asking. It must be in his head—maybe some residual Colour poison in his ear canals.

A stray touch of icy wind, and he and Nikki tried to shift even closer, coats pressing together, and then they were kissing.

It felt so much like a natural part of their shifting, or like the next step in the conversation, like defence against this cold, dark night, that they almost didn’t notice what they were doing. Then they noticed, and it felt so good his hands reached around her waist, rotating her towards him, and she followed the trajectory he’d started, climbing onto his lap, and then, abruptly, she stopped.

She climbed right off him, sat herself a good distance away, and said: ‘What are we doing? She won’t even be out of the province yet.’

Elliot scratched his head.

‘We’re drunk, I guess.’

‘We are.’ Nikki jumped to her feet, offering her hand to pull him up too, but he stayed. He looked at his watch.

‘If they’re not out of the province yet,’ he said, ‘they drive too slow.’

Then she did drag him to his feet, and as he stood, he looked for his own reflection in the water. Couldn’t see it there; the water was too black. Moon must have slipped behind a cloud.

The telephone rang and the Sheriff regarded it a moment.

He was working late at the station, trying to get through the Red Wave Damage Fund applications.

Drinking whisky, eating crackers, lost in paperwork, and that shrill, repetitive sound took him by surprise.

He answered it anyway.

‘You there? I tried you at home first.’ It was Jimmy.

‘I am here,’ confirmed Hector, nodding.

‘Well, I know where they are.’

Hector waited. ‘Who?’ he asked, eventually.

‘Those five missing people. The Central Intelligence reports. There is a connection, Hector. Guess where they are? Guess where they all are?’

Hector waited again.

Jimmy sure wanted to draw out the suspense.

‘Where?’

‘They’re in the World. All of them. All five of them—they’ve gone to the World.’

Hector swung himself into his chair, holding the phone closer to his chin. He was grinning. ‘How do you figure that?’

‘I remembered World Studies classes from school—something Isabella said made me remember. Back in the days of cracks big enough for people to go through, there used to be a kind of displacement when they went. A tremor in the air. An adjustment of reality. Small things would go wrong. A picture would fall off a mantelpiece. Or a branch would shift its position in a tree. It stayed in my mind because I liked the idea.’

‘Sounds familiar, I guess. Yeah. And?’

‘Well, every one of these reports gets me nowhere. I’ve never seen such a series of dead ends. There is no explanation. Or there wasn’t. But tonight I realised that in every one of these reports, there’s something. A waitress loses her earring. A guy has to retie his shoelaces. Somebody else says the radio switched itself on so she turned it off. There’s even a guy says the commas in the letter he was typing suddenly fell down a line. That one I dismissed as plain craziness; the rest I paid no attention to, thinking they were just asides—those irrelevant details people stop and look at when they’re making their way to the point.’

‘Okay.’ The Sheriff scratched at some dried white-out on the edge of his chair. ‘But seems to me you’re drawing a heck of a long bow here. There haven’t been cracks big enough for people in hundreds of years. Just a handful of tiny cracks all this time, and those get closed before you can take a breath. Penalty for not reporting a crack is death. Penalty for even suspecting a crack and not reporting it is banishment. What are the chances that there are five people-moving cracks across the Kingdom and nobody knows? Seriously?’

‘Small as the toenail on a Butterfly Child,’ Jimmy agreed, at once. ‘But there must be, because that’s where these missing people are.’

‘And what’s more,’ Hector continued. ‘If these people went through the cracks, why didn’t they turn around and come straight back?’

‘I think somebody’s moved them across. Without their choice, I mean. Maybe closed them up right after they went.’

Hector sighed. ‘I’ll tell Central your theory.’

‘It’s not a theory,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s a fact.’

‘I’ll also tell Central to solve their own darn missing persons reports from now on,’ Hector continued. ‘In fact, I’m telling police departments right across the Kingdom- I want my deputy back. I’m at the station working and it’s nearly midnight!’

There was a smile in Jimmy’s voice. ‘Don’t want to be the one to say this, Hector, but . . .’

‘I know, I know.’ Hector sighed again. ‘I asked for them in the first place. You’ve been patient with all this, Jimmy, which makes me feel even worse about the truth of the matter. I’m just about to admit that truth, Jimmy, but before I do, can you promise you won’t make too much noise? When you hear it? I’m too tired for noise.’

‘Can’t promise anything,’ Jimmy grinned. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘When I asked them to send in their missing persons reports, I only wanted a specific kind. I wanted missing people in the electronics field. Remember the first few? That electrical engineer? The sound technician? Where it went wrong was, you solved them so fast, word got around you were genius at it. So they started sending anything and everything.’

‘All right,’ said Jimmy. ‘Why’d you ask for missing people in electronics?’

‘Because of Abel Baranski.’

‘Ah, Hector.’

‘Well, now, I’d almost prefer you to make a lot of noise than to go all soft-voiced like that.’

Jimmy blew air out of his cheeks and it came down the phone line like a breeze.

‘I knew it wasn’t a Purple,’ Hector admitted. ‘Purple got Jon, sure, but if it’d taken the others, we’d have found their bodies. They’d have turned up nearby, and they didn’t. Thing was, I didn’t want it to be the alternative—those two running off together, Abel running off on his wife and his boy. Leaving his brother to tell the truth, and getting his brother killed for it—not intentional, of course, but still. What a shameful thing for a man to do, and I liked Abel. He was my friend.’

‘I liked him too,’ Jimmy said.

‘So I stuck to the Purple—the idea that it had taken them alive, and in the end they’d find their way back. At the same time, I looked for a third explanation. Got to thinking about the fact that Abel was in electronics and Mischka in physics—sort of related, right? Maybe some Hostile group was snatching up people with those skills. Maybe we’d find a pattern if we looked at unsolved cases in that field across the Kingdom. That’s why I asked for the reports. Trouble was, like I said, you solved them, so they weren’t being snatched by Hostiles after all. No big conspiracy. I was wrong.’

‘Ah, Hector,’ Jimmy said again.

‘Worst thing,’ Hector continued, ‘the worst thing is, my Purple story gave Elliot false hope. Should never have done that. It’s cause of me he’s been off across the Kingdom, putting himself in danger everyplace he turns. Never figured he’d do that.’

‘You know, if Abel and Mischka went off of their own free will, they’re not even technically missing, Hector. It’s not police business.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m thinking,’ Jimmy said, ‘that any strange disappearances from now on, we should consider that they might have been sent across to the World like these five people. But Abel and Mischka? That wasn’t strange. I’ve told you this before, but I’ll say it again. The night before they disappeared, I saw Abel and Mischka walking out of the Toadstool Pub together. The strap on Mischka’s dress fell from her right shoulder, and Abel reached over and fixed it for her. His hand reached out like the next step in a dance. The way he did that, the way his eyes fell on her shoulder as he did so, well, it seems to me there was nothing strange at all about the two of them being gone the next day.’

Jimmy’s last few words disappeared into a cough.

‘Coming down with a cold,’ he explained.

Hector waited for the coughing to finish, then he spoke slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s still a part of me thinks Abel fixed the strap on Mischka’s dress because he’s thoughtful that way. But a bigger part is finally inclined to think you’re right. I’ll talk to Elliot. This one I got wrong.’

‘You lost your mind, Hector. It can happen to the best of us.’

‘You’re a good man, Jimmy. Occasionally you’re off your tree—people going across to the World, for example—but still, a good man. I’ll tell Central your theory about these five missing persons, and it might help to dry up the reports that keep coming your way. Meantime, I promise: any more that do come in, I’ll send them straight back.’

‘It’s a deal. Night, Hector.’

‘Night.’

The fax machine started up just as Hector put down the phone.

He reached for his whisky and watched as page after page whirred through. Eventually, he picked up the cover sheet.

To the Good Sheriff of Bonfire in the Picturesque Province of the Farms, (it began)

We here in Gwent Cwlyd, in the Startling Province of Olde Quainte, have heard tell that you there in Bonfire have a Deputy Sheriff whose skills in missing persons are like to a flower in a staple-box. Hence, we have here a missing persons report—or if not TECHNICALLY a missing persons report, it is, at least, a missing cat report—and we would be grateful beyond—’

‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ Hector murmured.

He was crumpling the fax, ready to throw it away, when he noticed a postscript to the letter.

P.S. We’re also sending through another unsolved case—a child has been missing for some time, and it is our hope that your deputy might solve it. Herewith.

Hector’s shoulders softened. He leafed through the pages.

The child was of a sweet and lively nature, said the report, and had no cause to vanish.

A few paragraphs on:

The child’s mother was known for her whistling—ah, she would go about so gaily, whistling more than she spake, and many it was that mocked her! But not now; not since the little girl set forth.

Hector stopped at that line.

He put the fax into his briefcase.

‘Shame to waste a talent like Jimmy’s’ he said to himself. ‘Just this one last one.’

Then he knocked back the last of his whisky, switched off the lights and headed home.

The clock tower was striking twelve midnight, and Elliot Baranski was knocking on a door.

It was Apartment 4 (Directly Above the Bakery) Town Square, Bonfire.

The home of Olivia Hattoway, Grade 2 teacher; formerly, also, the home of Mischka Tegan.

Elliot knocked through the striking of the clock, and then knocked again into the silence.

Silence drained the air. Then a muffled thud. Slow footsteps. A pause. She must be looking at him through the peephole.

The door opened wide, and there she stood, Olivia Hattoway, smoothing down her curls. Her flannelette pajamas were patterned with hot-air balloons.

‘I’ve woken you,’ said Elliot.

‘How did you guess?’ Miss Hattoway smiled, which made her eyes disappear more deeply into sleepy lines. She was curvy in just the right way: as if a sculptor had smoothed her at the very point before curvy becomes plump. ‘Come in, Elliot,’ she said. ‘I know we’ve never met but I certainly know who you are.’

‘You teach my cousin, Corrie-Lynn.’ Elliot followed her in, half-smiling as he remembered Corrie-Lynn’s pronouncement that Miss Hattoway had a funny name. He tried to think of her as Olivia, but found he could not. She was Miss Hattoway.

There was something else, something Corrie-Lynn had not liked about her teacher, but he couldn’t remember that part.

‘It’s small,’ Miss Hattoway was saying, holding both arms up, and pivoting slowly to display the apartment’s living room. ‘But the location’s wonderful. Right above the bakery. You can smell bread and pastries twenty-four hours a day! You smell that?’ She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes, and Elliot raised his eyebrows.

Truth was, all he could smell was coffee and burnt cheese and something vaguely fishy, maybe sardines.

‘Let me get you a glass of milk and a piece of hazelnut slice—I’ve been baking today myself.’ She ducked into the kitchen and Elliot watched as she opened the fridge. He wondered, as any good Farms boy would, why people from other provinces thought they ought to bake. It made his heart sink, the idea of her hazelnut slice.

He glanced around the living room. There was a window that looked over the square, a small table beneath it. Rugs in primary colours crisscrossed the carpet; three or four mismatched throws were flung over a short, fat couch.

On the wall was a huge painting of a vase, flowers spilling over its side. There was something smudged and childish about that painting, something askew about the perspective maybe, or could be the flowers were out of proportion with the vase.

‘Mischka painted that,’ said Miss Hattoway. She was standing by his side holding a tray, which she placed on the coffee table. ‘We did an art class together, back when we were at teachers’ college. Mischka got this idea that we ought to stretch our artistic minds, or some such rubbish. Everything we painted was terrible! But we both agreed that that one deserved to be on the wall.’

She beckoned Elliot to sit beside her on the couch.

‘Although now that I look at it again, well, it’s quite awful really, isn’t it? I bet that’s what you were thinking.’

Elliot smiled faintly. He was thinking that Miss Hattoway seemed soft and warm, bright and giddy, like a grade-school teacher should, but there was also something perspicacious about her. She had slid the conversation straight to Mischka. She knew, even half asleep, that this was why Elliot was here and she’d smoothed the way to the point.

He appreciated that.

(Then, too, she had guessed his thoughts about the painting.)

‘That’s where you two met?’ he said. ‘At teachers’ college?’

‘Yes, we were roommates. And when we applied for our first posts, we decided to try for the same town, which was a long shot. But we got it! Listen, is it just me or is it freezing in here?’

She stood up and switched on an electric heater, hitting it twice to make it work.

Elliot took a bite of the hazelnut slice. It wasn’t so bad. A little dry maybe, but the hazelnut flavour was rich and subtle both at once.

‘I have to tell you,’ she continued. ‘This is a super town, of course, but it was so good having a friend from home. Did you know Mischka at all? Did she teach you? No? Well, the thing about her was, she seemed very shy and reserved, but she could be so ironic and witty. We used to play board games most nights—she always won, of course. Or we’d watch The Greenbergs together and eat marzipan . . .’ Her voice faded and she gazed around the room.

Elliot also looked and caught more details. There was a bookshelf, a framed print of the Lake of Spells on the top shelf. Through the door, he could see the fridge in the kitchen, scattered with magnets, and he could just make out a handwritten note, headed: Healthy Foods You Must TRY to Eat! with a smiley face. On the window ledge was a jar of gold stars, and on the table, a scattering of papers, scissors and glue.

‘I try out all my craft activities at home,’ Miss Hattoway explained. ‘Mischka was so much better than me at crafts. Better fine-motor skills.’

A sudden memory came to Elliot. At school, he’d known Mischka Tegan’s name, and he must have seen her around, but all this time, he hadn’t had any clear memories of her. Now he recalled an announcement she’d made at assembly once. Something about a class excursion. She’d read from a small piece of paper. Most teachers didn’t do that; mostly, they just leaned into the microphone and talked, remembering what they had to say and not caring if they got it mixed up.

The paper had slipped from Mischka Tegan’s fingers while she talked and had fluttered very slowly through the air, and she’d watched it flutter for too long. Elliot remembered thinking that the fact that she’d dropped it must have stunned her. Then she’d snatched it from the air.

That’s where the memory ended. Elliot must have stopped listening.

‘I guess you miss her,’ he said now.

‘Anyway,’ Miss Hattoway continued, ruffling her voice back into place. ‘Anyway, we had some lovely nights. Although, of course, that more or less stopped when she took up with the Baranski brothers.’ She glanced over at Elliot. ‘I mean with your dad and your Uncle Jon, of course.’

‘How did they get to be friends anyhow?’ Elliot asked, just as if they were chatting about neighbourhood acquaintances.

‘Oh, Mischka borrowed some equipment from your father, for an experiment at school. I’m not sure of the details. Anyway, they hit it off, and they started going to the Toadstool Pub every other night. I suppose Jon just joined the party. I used to watch them from here while I graded schoolwork.’

She pointed to the window, and Elliot stood, moving closer so he could look out.

Down below, the square was mostly dark and quiet, but the Toadstool was still open. There were clusters of people huddled around tables, coats on, collars up. By looking out, Elliot seemed to be fishing up sounds from below. Now he could hear small murmurs of laughter, a woman’s aggravated voice, the deep voice of a man curling into a joke, another murmur of laughter.

He looked away from the Toadstool, and there across the square was Clover Mackie, rugged up in blankets on her front porch, a blue mug beside her as usual.

Elliot smiled at that and turned back to Olivia, feeling stronger.

‘It was always the three of them?’ he asked. ‘Dad and Jon and Mischka?’

‘No, on occasion it was just your dad and Mischka. I suppose Jon had work to do back at the Watermelon. When the Toadstool closed, they’d come up here sometimes. I’d usually be in bed by then, and they’d listen to music and talk and talk. I’d have to put my earplugs in to get to sleep.’

Elliot turned away again, staring at the window. The room seemed to swim with unasked questions.

‘You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you, Elliot?’

Elliot turned, startled. There was that perspicacity again. But she was smiling in her warm, grade-school-teacher way.

‘You look like your dad,’ she added gently.

He stared at her.

‘Most people,’ he said, ‘say I look more like my mother.’

‘No, no. You’ve got his eyes. And the lines across your forehead when you’re thinking hard, when there’s something you want to say, those are your dad’s.’

He asked then, and the effort was like wrenching the plug out from a huge basin of water.

‘Were they planning to run away together?’

Olivia Hattoway did not say anything. She looked at him and her eyes clouded with tears.

For a moment he felt himself swaying with heartache, then there was a hint of irritation in his chest. What was that supposed to mean? Silence and teary eyes? What did she mean by that?

He asked a different question instead.

‘There was nothing missing from her things? That’s what you said in your witness statement.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Miss Hattoway, and she sipped from her glass of milk. ‘That’s what I said. But do you want to know something ridiculous? I forgot all about her teddy bear.’

‘Her teddy bear?’

‘Yes, she had this teddy—from childhood, you know—used to keep it on her bed at college, and the same thing here. I would never have teased her because there’s the issue of my own fluffy rabbit.’ She paused, but Elliot did not laugh, so she continued. ‘Anyway, a few days after I talked to the Sheriff, I realised it was gone. The teddy bear was gone. I didn’t think it was worth wasting police time—amending my witness statement or whatever—because it was just an old teddy. Elegant in its way, and sweet too, which is just like Mischka actually.’

‘Is it,’ said Elliot, only not as a question. He looked around the room one more time. ‘I think I’ll go home now.’

‘All right,’ Miss Hattoway agreed. ‘I’m glad you came by.’ She walked towards the door and reached for the handle, then stopped.

‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘Well, Mischka always wore this bracelet—it looked a simple thing, but she once confided in me that her dad gave it to her on her sixteenth birthday. The stones in it came from the Dark Caves in the Swamp of the Golden Coast—worth a fortune, stones like that. So, she’d have been wearing that on her wrist, of course. I mean, that wasn’t left behind.’

Elliot nodded, and he reached for the door handle himself. But Miss Hattoway’s hand remained in his way, twisting the knob slowly.

‘The funny thing was, I was looking at Shopline—that network thing where people buy and sell things—I was looking at that a few weeks after the . . . the disappearance, and somebody was selling a bracelet just like Mischka’s. I thought to myself: If that’s Mischka selling her bracelet, she’ll be set up for life.’

She took her hand away from the door and half-turned to Elliot.

‘I suppose I should have mentioned that to the Sheriff, but who knows how many similar bracelets there are in the Kingdom? Could be hundreds. And if it was her, if it was them, well, I guess it was kind of clear they didn’t want to be found.’

Elliot looked at her, and she was gazing at him with something like compassion, those tears welling up in her eyes again.

Now he remembered what Corrie-Lynn didn’t like about Miss Hattoway. It was the fact that she was always crying.

Elliot didn’t much like it either.

He closed the door behind him.

He drove the truck home. He went right up to his room, pulled out his folders of research about Purples, carried them downstairs and dumped them in the trash.