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Cecelia Ahern There’s No Place Like Here

 

 

Copyright © 2007 by Cecelia Ahern

 

For you, Dad-with all my love.

Per ardua surgo.

 

 

“A missing person is anyone whose whereabouts are unknown

whatever the circumstances of disappearance.

The person will be considered missing until located and his/her

well-being, or otherwise, established.”

An Garda

 

 

 

Jenny-May Butler, the little girl who lived across the road from me, went missing when I was a child.

The Gardaissing person I, at ten years of age, had ever seen, and it seemed to affect everyone.

Jenny-May Butler was a blond-haired blue-eyed beauty whose smiling face was beamed from the TV screen into the living rooms of every home around the country, causing eyes to fill with tears and parents to hug their children that extra bit tighter before they sent them off to bed. She was in everyone’s dreams and everyone’s prayers.

She too was ten years old and in my class at school. I used to stare at the pretty photograph of her on the news every day and listen to them speak about her as though she were an angel. From the way they described her, you never would have known that she threw stones at Fiona Brady during recess when the teacher wasn’t looking, or that she called me a frizzy-haired cow in front of Stephen Spencer just so he would fancy her instead of me. No, for those few months she had become the perfect being and I didn’t think it fair to ruin that. After a while even I forgot about all the bad things she’d done because she wasn’t just Jenny-May anymore: she was Jenny-May Butler, the sweet missing girl whose nice family cried on the nine o’clock news every night.

She was never found, not her body, not a trace; it was as though she had disappeared into thin air. No suspicious characters had been seen lurking around, no CCTV was available to show her last movements. There were no witnesses, no suspects; the Gardang picket fences, weeding the flowerbeds, and mowing lawns on Saturday mornings while surreptitiously looking around the neighborhood conjured up shameful thoughts. People were shocked at themselves, angry that this incident had perverted their minds.

Pointed fingers behind closed doors couldn

I always wondered where Jenny-May went, where she had disappeared to, how on earth anyone could just vanish into thin air without a trace, without someone knowing something.

At night I would look out my bedroom window and stare at her house. The porch light was always on, acting as a beacon to guide Jenny-May home. Mrs. Butler couldn’t sleep anymore and I could see her perpetually perched on the edge of her couch, as though she was on her marks waiting for the pistol to be fired. She would sit in her living room, looking out the window, waiting for someone to call or come by with news. Sometimes I would wave at her and she’d give me a half-hearted wave back. Most of the time she couldn’t see past her tears.

Like Mrs. Butler, I wasn’t happy with not having any answers. I liked Jenny-May Butler a lot more when she was gone than when she was here and that also interested me. I missed her, the idea of her, and wondered if she was somewhere nearby, throwing stones at someone else and laughing loudly, but that we just couldn’t find her or hear her. I took to searching thoroughly for everything I’d mislaid after that. When my favorite pair of socks went missing I turned the house upside down while my worried parents looked on, not knowing what to do but eventually settling on helping me.



It disturbed me that frequently my missing possessions were nowhere to be found and on the odd occasion that I did find them, it disturbed me that, as in the case of the socks, I could only ever find one. Then I’d picture Jenny-May Butler somewhere, throwing stones, laughing, and wearing my favorite socks.

I never wanted anything new; from the age of ten, I was convinced that you couldn’t replace what was lost. I insisted on things having to be found.

I think I wondered about all those odd pairs of socks as much as Mrs. Butler worried about her daughter. I too stayed awake at night running through all the unanswerable questions. Each time my lids grew heavy and neared closing, another question would be flung from the depths of my mind, forcing my lids to open again. This process kept much-needed sleep at bay and left me each morning more tired yet none the wiser.

Perhaps this is why it happened to me. Perhaps because I had spent so many years turning my own life upside down and looking for everything, I had forgotten to look for myself. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten to figure out who and where I was.

Twenty-four years after Jenny-May Butler disappeared, I went missing too.

This is my story.

 

 

 

 

My life has been made up of a great many ironies; my going missing only added to an already very long list.

First, I’m six foot one. Ever since I was a child I’ve been towering over just about everyone. I could never get lost in a shopping center like other kids, I could never hide properly when playing games, I was never asked to dance at discos, I was the only teenager that wasn’t aching to buy her first pair of high heels. Jenny-May Butler’s favorite name for me, well, certainly one of her top ten, was “Daddy-longlegs,” which she liked to call me in front of large crowds of her friends and admirers. Believe me, I’ve heard them all. I was the kind of person you could see coming from a mile away. I was the awkward dancer on the dance floor, the girl at the cinema that nobody wanted to sit behind, the one in the shop that rooted for the extra-long-legged trousers, the girl in the back row of every photograph. You see, I stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone who passes me registers me and remembers me. But despite all that, I went missing. Never mind the odd socks, never mind Jenny-May Butler; how a throbbing sore thumb on a hand so bland couldn’t be seen was the ultimate icing on the cake. The mystery that beat all mysteries was my own.

The second irony is that my job was to search for missing persons. For years I worked as a garda. With a desire to work solely on missing persons but without working in an actual division assigned to these, I had to rely solely upon the “luck” of being assigned these cases. You see, the Jenny-May Butler situation really sparked off something inside me. I wanted answers, I wanted solutions, and I wanted to find them all myself. I suppose my searching became an obsession. I looked around the outside world for so many clues I don’t think that I once thought about what was going on inside my own head.

In the Garda far beyond my call of duty. I would investigate cases long after they were closed, stay in touch with families long after I should have. I realized I couldn’t go on to the next case without solving the previous, with the result that there was too much paperwork and too little action. And so knowi

The families always wondered what drove me to do this. They had a reason, a link, a love for the missing, whereas my fees were barely enough for me to get by on. So, what was my motivation? Peace of mind, I suppose. A way to help me close my eyes and sleep at night.

But all of this begs the question: how can someone like me, with my physical attributes and my mental attitude, go missing?

I’ve just realized that I haven’t even told you my name. It’s Sandy Shortt. It’s OK, you can laugh. I know you want to. I would too if it wasn’t so bloody heartbreaking. My parents called me Sandy because I was born with a head of sandy-colored hair. Pity they didn’t foresee that my hair would turn as black as coal. They didn’t know either that those cute pudgy little legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, for so long. So Sandy Shortt is my name. That is who I am supposed to be, how I am identified and recorded for all time. But I am neither of those things. The contradiction often makes people laugh during introductions. Normally I respond to their amusement with a shrug and a smile. But not now. You see, there’s nothing funny about being missing. I also quickly realized there’s little difference between being missing and looking for the missing: every day I search. Same as I did when I was working. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

What bad timing to realize such a thing. The biggest irony of all.

 

 

 

 

I was born and reared in County Leitrim in Ireland, which with a population of about 25,000, is the smallest county in the country. Once the county town, Leitrim has the remains of a castle and some other ancient buildings, but it has lost its former importance and dwindled to a village. The landscape ranges from bushy brown hills to majestic mountains with yawning valleys and countless picturesque lakes. Leitrim is all but landlocked, having a coastal outlet to the Atlantic only two miles long. When there, I feel it brings on a sudden feeling of claustrophobia and an overwhelming desire for solid flat ground.

There’s a saying about Leitrim and that is that the best thing to come out of Leitrim is the road to Dublin. I finished school when I was seventeen, applied for the Guards, and I eventually got myself on that road to Dublin. Since then I have rarely traveled back. A few times a year I would visit my parents in the three-bedroom terraced house in a small cul-de-sac of twelve houses where I grew up. The usual intention was to stay for the weekend but most of the time I only lasted a day, using an emergency at work as the excuse to grab my unpacked bag by the door and drive, drive, drive very fast on the best thing to come out of Leitrim.

I didn’t have a bad relationship with my parents. They were always supportive, ever ready to dive in front of bullets, into fires and off mountains if it meant my happiness. The truth is, they made me uneasy. In their eyes I could see who they saw and I didn’t like it. I saw my reflection in their expressions more than in any mirror. Some people have the power to do that, to look at you and their faces let you know exactly how you’re behaving. I suppose it was because they loved me, but I couldn’t spend too much time with people who loved me because of those eyes, because of that reflection.

When I was ten-after Jenny-May went missing-my parents began to tiptoe around me, watching me warily. They had pretend conversations and false laughs that echoed around the house. They would try to distract me, create a false sense of ease and normality in the atmosphere, but I knew that they were doing it and why and it only made me aware that something was wrong.

They were so supportive, they loved me so much, and each time the house was about to be turned upside down for yet another grueling search, they never gave in without a pleasant fight. Milk and cookies at the kitchen table, the radio on in the background, and the washing machine going, all to break the uncomfortable silence that would inevitably ensue.

Mum would give me that smile, that smile that didn’t reach her eyes, that smile that made her back teeth clench and grind when she thought I wasn’t looking. With forced easiness in her voice and a forced face of happiness, she would cock her head to one side, try not to let me know she was studying me intently, and say, “Why do you want to search the house again, honey?” She always called me honey, like she knew as much as I did that I was no more Sandy Shortt than Jenny-May Butler was an angel.

No matter how much action and noise had been created in the kitchen to avoid the uncomfortable silence, it didn’t seem to work. The silence drowned it all out.

My answer: “Because I can’t find it, Mum.”

“What pair are they?”

The easy smile, the pretense that this was a casual conversation and not a desperate attempt at interrogation to find out how my mind worked.

“My blue ones with the white stripes,” I answered on one particular occasion. I insisted on bright-colored socks, bright and identifiable so that they could be easily found.

“Well, maybe you didn’t put both of them in the linen basket, honey. Maybe the one you’re looking for is somewhere in your room.” A smile, trying not to fidget, swallowing hard.

I shook my head. “I put them both in the basket, I saw you put them both in the machine and only one came back out. It’s not in the machine and it’s not in the basket.”

The plan to have the washing machine switched on as a distraction backfired and was then the focus of attention. My mum tried not to lose that placid smile as she glanced at the overturned basket on the kitchen floor, all her folded clothes scattered and rolled in messy piles. For one second she let the fa

“Perhaps it blew away in the wind, I had the patio door open.”

I shook my head.

“Or it could have fallen out of the basket when I carried it over from there to there.”

I shook my head again.

She swallowed and her smile tightened. “Maybe it’s caught up in the sheets. Those sheets are so big; you’d never see a little sock hidden in there.”

“I already checked.”

She took a cookie from the center of the table and bit down hard, anything to take the smile off her aching face. She chewed for a while, pretending not to be thinking, pretending to listen to the radio and humming a song she didn’t even know. All to fool me into thinking there was nothing to be worried about.

“Honey,” she said, smiling, “sometimes things just get lost.”

“Where do they go when they’re lost?”

“They don’t go anywhere.” She smiled. “They are always in the place we dropped them or left them behind. We’re just not looking in the right area when we can’t find them.”

“But I’ve looked in all the places, Mum. I always do.”

I had; I always did. I turned everything upside down; there was no place in the small house that ever went untouched.

“A sock can’t just get up and walk away without a foot in it.” Mum false-laughed.

You see, the way Mum gave up right there, that’s the point when most people stop wondering, when most people stop caring. You can’t find something, you know it’s somewhere, and, even though you’ve looked everywhere, there’s still no sign. So you put it down to your own madness, blame yourself for losing it, and eventually you forget about it. I couldn’t do that.

I remember my dad returning from work that evening to a house that had been literally turned upside down.

“Lose something, honey?”

“My blue sock with the white stripes,” came my muffled reply from under the couch.

“Just the one again?”

I nodded.

“Left foot or right foot?”

“Left.”

“OK, I’ll look upstairs.” He hung his coat on the rack by the door, placed his umbrella in the stand, gave his flustered wife a tender kiss on the cheek and an encouraging rub on the back, and then made his way upstairs. For two hours he stayed in my parents’ room, looking, but I couldn’t hear him moving around. One peep through the keyhole revealed a man lying on his back on the bed with a washcloth over his eyes.

On my visits in later years they would ask the same easygoing questions that were never intended to be intrusive, but to someone who was already armored up to her eyeballs they felt as such.

“Any interesting cases at work?”

“What’s going on in Dublin?”

“How’s the apartment?”

“Any boyfriends?”

There were never any boyfriends; I didn’t want another pair of eyes haunting me day in and day out. I’d had lovers and fighters, short-term boyfriends, men-friends and one-night-only friends. I’d tried enough to know that anything long term wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t be intimate; I couldn’t care enough, give enough, or want enough. I had no desire for what these men offered, they had no understanding of what I wanted, so it was tight smiles all round while I told my parents that work was fine, Dublin was busy, the apartment was great, and no, no boyfriends.

Every single time I left the house, even when I cut my visits short, Dad would announce proudly that I was the best thing to come out of Leitrim.

The fault never lay with Leitrim, nor did it with my parents. They were so supportive, and I only realize it now. I’m finding that with every passing day, that realization is so much more frustrating than never finding anything.

 

 

 

 

When Jenny-May Butler went missing, her final insult was to take a part of me with her. The older I got, the taller I got, the more that hole within me stretched, an abyss that continued to grow as I got older. But how did I physically go missing? How did I get to where I am now? First question, and most important, where am I now?

I’m here and that’s all I know.

I look around and search for familiarity. I wander constantly and search for the road that leads out of here, though there isn’t one. Where is here? I wish I knew. It’s cluttered with personal possessions: car keys, house keys, cell phones, handbags, coats, suitcases adorned with airport baggage tickets, odd shoes, business files, photographs, can openers, scissors, earrings scattered among the piles of missing items that glisten occasionally in the light. And there are socks-lots of odd socks. Everywhere I walk, I trip over the things that people are probably still tearing their hair out to find.

There are animals, too. Lots of cats and dogs with bewildered little faces and withering whiskers, no longer identical to their photos on small-town telephone poles. No offers of rewards can bring them back.

How can I describe this place? It’s an in-between place. It’s like a grand hallway that leads you nowhere, it’s like a banquet dinner of leftovers, a sports team made up of the people never picked, a mother without her child, it’s a body without its heart. It’s almost there but not quite. It’s filled to the brim with personal items yet it’s empty because the people who own them aren’t here to love them.

How did I get here? I was one of those disappearing joggers. How pathetic. I used to watch those B-movie thrillers and groan every time the credits opened at the early-morning crime scene, the murdered body lying on the ground in workout clothes. I thought it foolish that women went running down quiet alleyways during the dark hours of the night, or during the quiet hours of the early morning especially when a known serial killer was on the prowl. But that’s what happened to me. I was a predictable, pathetic, tragically naive early-morning jogger, in a gray sweatsuit and blaring headphones, running alongside a canal in the very early hours of the morning. I wasn’t abducted, though; I just wandered onto the wrong path.

I was running along a canal, my feet pounding angrily against the ground as they always did, causing vibrations to jolt through my body. I remember feeling beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, the center of my chest, and down my back. The cool breeze caused a light shiver to course through my body. Every single time I remember that morning I have to fight the urge to call out and warn myself not to make the same mistake. Sometimes in that memory, on more blissful days, I stay on the same path, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. How often we wish we’d stayed on the same path.

It was five forty-five on a bright summer morning; silent apart from the music from my iPod spurring me on. Although I couldn’t hear myself I knew my breathing was heavy. I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop, I made myself run faster. I don’t know if it was a daily punishment or the part of me that was keen to investigate, to go new places, to force my body to achieve things it had never achieved before.

Through the darkness of the green-and-black ditch beside me, I spotted a water-violet up ahead, submerged. I remember my dad telling me when I was a little girl, lanky, with black hair and embarrassed by my contradictory name, that the water-violet was misnamed too because it wasn’t violet at all-it was lilac-pink with a yellow throat-but nevertheless, wasn’t it beautiful and didn’t that make me want to laugh? Of course not, I’d shaken my head. I watched it from far away as it got closer and closer, telling it in my mind, I know how you feel. As I ran I felt my watch slide off my wrist and fall against the trees on the left. I’d broken the clasp of the watch the very first moment I’d wrapped it around my wrist, and since then it occasionally unhooked itself and fell to the floor. I stopped running and turned back, spotting it lying on the damp estuary bank. I leaned my back against the rugged dark brown bark of an alder and, while taking a breather, noticed a small track veering off to the left. It wasn’t welcoming, it wasn’t developed as a rambler’s path, but my investigative side took over; my enquiring mind told me to see where it led.

It led me here.

I ran so far and so fast that by the time the playlist had ended on my iPod I looked around and didn’t recognize the landscape. I was surrounded by a thick mist and was so high up in what seemed like a pine-covered mountain. The trees stood erect, like needles at attention, immediately on the defensive the way a hedgehog bristles under threat. I slowly lifted the earphones from my ears, my panting echoing around the majestic mountains, and I knew immediately that I was no longer in the small town of Glin. I wasn’t even in Ireland.

I was just here. That was a day ago and I’m still here.

I’m in the business of searching and I know how it works. I’m a woman who packs her own bags and doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going for a whole week. I disappear regularly, I lose contact regularly, no one checks up on me. I come and go as I please and I like it that way. I travel a lot to the destinations where the missing were last seen, I check out the area, ask around. The only problem was, I had just arrived in this town that morning, driven straight to Shannon Estuary, and gone for a jog. I’d spoken to no one, hadn’t yet checked into a B &B, nor walked down a busy street. I know what they’ll be saying, I know I won’t even be a case. I’ll just be another person that’s walked away from her life without wanting to be found; it happens all the time. If this had happened to me last week they probably would have been right.

I’ll eventually belong to the category of disappearance where there is no apparent danger to either the missing person or the public: for example, persons aged eighteen and over who have decided to start a new life. I’m thirty-four, and in the eyes of others, have wanted out for a long, long time now.

This all means one thing: right now nobody out there is even looking for me.

How long will that last? What happens when they find the battered, red 1991 Ford Fiesta along the estuary with a packed bag in the trunk and a missing-persons file, a cup of, by then, cold not-yet-sipped coffee, and a cell phone, probably with missed calls, on the dashboard?

What then?

 

 

 

 

Wait a minute.

The coffee. I’ve just remembered the coffee.

On my journey from Dublin, I stopped at a closed garage to get a coffee from the outside dispenser and he saw me; the man filling his tires with air saw me.

It was out in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of the countryside at five fifteen in the morning, when the birds were singing and the cows mooing so loudly I could barely hear myself think. The smell of manure was thick but sweetened with the scent of honeysuckle waving in the light morning breeze.

This stranger and I were both so far from everything but yet right in the middle of something. The mere fact that we were the only two people around for miles was enough for our eyes to meet and to feel connected.

He was tall but not as tall as I am; they never are. Five eleven, with a round face, red cheeks, strawberry-blond hair, and bright blue eyes I felt I’d seen before, which looked tired at that early hour. He was dressed in a pair of worn-looking blue denims, his blue-and-white-check cotton shirt crumpled from his drive, his hair disheveled, his jaw unshaven, his gut expanding as his years moved on. I guessed he was in his mid to late thirties, although he looked older, with stress lines along his brow and laugh lines-no, I could tell from the sadness emanating from him that they weren’t from laughter. A few gray hairs had crept into the side of his temples, fresh on his young head, every strand the result of a harsh lesson learned. Despite the extra weight, he looked strong, muscular. He was someone who did a lot of physical work, my assumption backed up by the heavy work boots he wore. His hands were large, weather-beaten but strong. I could see the veins on his forearms protruding as he moved, his sleeves rolled up messily to below his elbows as he lifted the air pump from its stand. But he wasn’t going to work, not dressed like that, not in that shirt. For him this was his good wear.

I studied him as I made my way back to my car.

“Excuse me, you dropped something,” he called out.

I stopped in my tracks and looked behind me. There on the tarmac sat my watch, the silver glistening under the sun. “Bloody watch,” I mumbled, checking to see that it wasn’t damaged.

“Thank you.” I smiled, sliding it back onto my wrist.

“No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

A familiar voice to match the familiar eyes. I studied him for a while before answering. Some guy I’d met in a bar previously, a drunken fling, an old lover, a past colleague, client, neighbor, or school friend? I went through the regular checklist in my mind. There was no further recognition on either side. If he wasn’t a previous fling, I was thinking I’d like to make him one.

“Gorgeous.” I returned the smile.

His eyebrows rose in surprise first and then fell again, his face settling in obvious pleasure as he understood the compliment. But as much as I would have loved to stay and perhaps arrange a date for sometime in the future, I had a meeting with Jack Ruttle, the nice man I had promised to help, the man I was driving from Dublin to Limerick to see.

Oh, please, handsome man from the garage that day, please remember me, wonder about me, look for me, find me.

Yes, I know; another irony. Me, wanting a man to call? My parents would be so proud.

 

 

 

 

Jack Ruttle trailed slowly behind an HGV along the N69, the coast road that led from North Kerry to where he lived in Foynes, a small town in County Limerick a half-hour’s drive from Limerick city. It was five A.M. as he traveled the only route to Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick ’s only seaport. Staring at the speedometer, he telepathically urged the truck to go faster while he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Ignoring the advice of the dentist he had seen just the previous day in Tralee, he began to grind his back teeth. The constant grinding was wearing down his teeth and weakening his gums, causing his mouth to throb and ache. His cheeks were red and swollen, and matched his tired eyes. He’d left the friend’s couch he was sleeping on in Tralee to drive home through the night. Sleep wasn’t coming easily to him these days.

“Are you under any stress?” the dentist had asked him while studying the inside of Jack’s mouth.

An open-mouthed Jack had swallowed a curse and fought the urge to clamp his teeth down on the white surgical finger in his mouth. Stressed was an understatement.

His brother Donal had disappeared on his twenty-fourth birthday after a night out with friends in Limerick city. Following a late-night snack of burger and chips in a fast-food restaurant, he had separated himself from his friends and staggered off alone. The joint was too packed for any particular person to be noticed; his four friends were too drunk and too distracted by their attempts to bring a female home for the night to care.

CCTV showed him taking ˆ30 out of an ATM on O’Connell Street at 3:08 A.M. on a Friday night, and later he was caught on camera stumbling in the direction of Arthur’s Quay. After that, his trail was lost. It was almost as if his feet had left the earth and he’d floated up toward the sky. Jack prepared himself for the fact that, in a way, maybe he had. His death was a concept he knew he could eventually accept if only there was a shred of evidence to support it.

It was the not knowing that tortured him. It was the worry that kept him awake and the fear that drove him from his bed at night to the toilet to be physically ill. But it was the inconclusive search of the Garda He wanted to shout at him, yet console him for his loss of a friend. He never wanted to see him again, yet he didn’t want to leave his side in case he remembered something, something he’d previously forgotten that would suddenly be the clue they were all looking for.

He stayed awake at nights looking through maps, rereading reports, double-checking times and statements while, beside him, Gloria’s chest rose and fell with her silent breathing, her sweet breath sometimes blowing the corners of his papers as her sleeping world crept in on his.

Gloria, his girlfriend of eight years, always slept. She had slept soundly through the entire year of Jack’s horrid nightmare, and still she dreamed. Still, she had hopes for tomorrow.

She had fallen into a deep sleep after hours spent at the garda station, the first day they worried about not hearing from Donal after four days of silence. She slept after the Gardanty years in this life without him.

It frustrated Jack, but he knew it wasn’t a lack of caring that caused Gloria’s lids to close. He knew this because she held his hand when they sat through the questions at the garda station that first time. She stood beside him as the wind and rain lashed at their faces, by the river, watching the divers appear on the surface of the gray murky water with faces more gloomy than when they had disappeared into the world below. She had helped him stick posters of Donal to windows and poles. She had held him tightly when he cried the day the Garda

She cared all right, but one year on, she still slept at night during the longest hours of his life. The hours when Jack cared most about everything but the hours when deep in her sleep, Gloria didn’t and couldn’t care at all. Every night he felt the distance grow between her sleeping world and his.

He didn’t tell her about coming across the woman, Sandy Shortt, from the missing persons agency in the Yellow Pages. He didn’t tell her he had called her. He didn’t tell her about the late-night phone calls all last week and the new sense of hope this woman’s determination and belief had filled his head and heart with.

And he didn’t tell her that they had arranged to meet on this very day in the next town because…well, because she was sleeping.

 

 

Jack finally managed to overtake the long vehicles, and as he neared home he found himself alone on the now quiet country road in his twelve-year-old rusting Nissan. The interior of his car was silent. Over the past year he found he was intolerant of unwanted noise; the sound of a TV or a radio in the background was merely a distraction to his pursuit of answers. Inside his mind was manic: shouting, screaming, replays of previous conversations, imaginings of future ones all leaped around his head like a bluebottle fly trapped in a jam jar.

Outside the car the engine roared, the metal rattled, the wheels bounced and fell over every pothole and bump in the surface. His mind was noisy in the silent car, his car clattered in the quiet countryside. It was five fifteen on a sunny Sunday morning in July and he needed to stop for air, for his lungs, and for the front deflated wheel.

He pulled over at the deserted gas station which would be closed until later in the morning, and parked beside the air pump. He allowed the birdsong to fill his head temporarily and push out his thoughts while he rolled up his sleeves and stretched his limbs from the long journey. The bluebottle momentarily settled.

Beside him a car pulled up and parked. The population of the area was so small he could spot an alien car a mile away…and the Dublin license plate gave it away too. Out of the tiny battered car, two long legs dressed in gray sweatpants appeared, followed by a long body. Jack stopped himself from gawking but from the corner of his eye he watched the curly-black-haired woman taking long strides to the coffee dispenser by the door of the shuttered garage. He was surprised that someone of her height could even fit into such a small car. He noticed something fall from her hand and heard the sound of metal against the ground.

“Excuse me, you dropped something,” he called out.

She looked behind her in confusion and walked back to where the metal was glistening on the ground.

“Thank you.” She smiled, sliding what looked like a bracelet or a watch onto her wrist.

“No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?” Jack felt the pain in his swollen cheeks worsen as they lifted in a smile.

Her green eyes sparkled like emeralds against her snow-white skin and glinted as they caught the sunlight streaming through the tall trees. Her jet-black curls twirled around her face playfully, revealing parts of her features, hiding others. She looked him up and down, taking him in as though analyzing every inch of him. Finally she raised an eyebrow. “Gorgeous,” she replied and returned the smile. She, her jet-black curly hair, the Styrofoam cup of coffee, legs and all, disappeared into the tiny car like a butterfly into a Venus flytrap.

Jack watched the Ford Fiesta drive into the distance, wanting her to have stayed, and once again he noted how things between him and Gloria, or perhaps just his feelings for her, were changing. But he hadn’t time to think about that now. Instead he returned to his car and leafed through his files in preparation for his meeting later that morning with Sandy Shortt.

Jack wasn’t religious; he hadn’t been to church for more than twenty years. In the last twelve months he had prayed three times. Once for Donal not to be found when they were searching the river for his body, the second time for the body in the alley not to be him, and the third time for his mother to survive her second stroke in six years. Two out of three prayers had been answered.

He prayed again today for the fourth time. He prayed for Sandy Shortt to take him from the place he was in and to be the one to bring him the answers he needed.

 

 

 

 

The porch light was still on when Jack arrived home. He insisted on it being left on all night for Donal’s sake, as a beacon to guide his brother home. He turned it off now that it was bright outside and tiptoed around quietly, careful not to wake Gloria, who was enjoying her Sunday lie-in. Scouring through the linen basket of dirty clothes, he grabbed the least crumpled garment he could find and quickly changed out of one check shirt and into another. He hadn’t washed as he didn’t want the electric ceiling fan in the bathroom to wake her. He’d even held back from flushing the toilet. He knew it wasn’t his overflowing generosity that was causing him to behave that way and yet he couldn’t quite summon the shame in knowing that it was exactly the opposite. He was deliberately keeping his meeting with Sandy Shortt a secret from Gloria and the rest of his family.

It was as much to help them as it was to help him. In their hearts, they were beginning to move on. They were trying their utmost to settle back into their lives after the major upheaval and upset of suffering the loss of not one but two family members in one year. Jack understood their positions. They had all reached a point where no more days off work could be taken, sympathetic smiles were being replaced by everyday greetings, and conversations with neighbors were returning to normal. Imagine, people were actually talking about other things and not asking questions or offering advice. Cards filled with comforting words had stopped landing on his doormat. People had gone back about their own lives, employers had moved around shifts as much as possible, and now it was back to business for all concerned. But to Jack it felt wrong and awkward for life to resume without Donal.

Truthfully it wasn’t Donal’s absence that held Jack back from joining his family in bravely carrying on with the rest of his life. Of course he missed him. His heart ached from how much he missed him. But, as with the death of his mother, he could and would eventually get through the grief. Instead it was the mystery that surrounded his disappearance; all the unanswered questions left question marks dotting his vision like the aftermath of flash photography.

He closed behind him the door to the cluttered one-bedroom bungalow where he and Gloria had lived for five years. Just like his father, Jack had worked as a cargo handler at Shannon Foynes Port his entire working life.

He had chosen Glin village, thirteen kilometers west of Foynes, for the meeting point with Sandy Shortt as it was a place none of his family inhabited. He sat in a small caf Donal on the table before him. It had been printed in almost every newspaper in Ireland and seen on notice boards and shop windows for the past year. In the background of the photo was the fake white Christmas tree his mother had set up in the living room every year. The baubles caught the flash of the camera and the tinsel twinkled. Donal’s mischievous smile grinned up at Jack as though he was taunting him, daring him to find him. Donal had always loved playing hide-and-seek as a child. He would stay hidden for hours if it meant winning. Everyone would become impatient and declare loudly that Donal was the winner just so that he could leave his place with a proud beaming smile. This was the longest search Jack had ever endured and he wished his brother would come out of his hiding place now, show himself with that proud smile and end the game.

Donal’s blue eyes, the only similar feature between the two brothers, sparkled up at Jack and he almost expected him to wink. No matter how long and hard he had stared at the photograph, he couldn’t inject any life into it. He couldn’t reach into the print and pull his brother out; he couldn’t smell the aftershave he used to engulf himself in, he couldn’t ruffle his brown hair and ruin his hair-style as he annoyingly had, and he couldn’t hear his voice as he helped their mother around the house. One year on he could still remember the touch and smell of him, though, unlike the rest of his family, to him the memory alone wasn’t enough.

The photo had been taken the Christmas before last, just six months before he went missing. Once a week, Jack would call around to his mother’s house, where Donal lived-the only one of six siblings who remained. Apart from the small talk between Jack and Donal that lasted for no more than two minutes at a time, that Christmas was the last occasion Jack had spoken to Donal properly. Donal had given him the usual present of socks and Jack had given him the box of handkerchiefs his oldest sister had given him the year before. They’d both laughed at the thoughtlessness of their gifts.

That day, Donal had been animated, happy with his new job as a computer technician. He’d begun it in September after graduating from Limerick University; a ceremony at which their mother had almost toppled off her chair, such was the weight of her pride for her baby. Donal had spoken confidently about how he enjoyed the work, and Jack could see how much he had matured and become more comfortable after leaving student life behind.

They had never been particularly close. In the family of six children, Donal was the surprise baby, nobody more surprised than their mother, Frances, who was forty-seven at the time she learned of the pregnancy. Being twelve years older than Donal meant that Jack had moved out of the house by the time Donal was six. He lost out in knowing the secret sides to his brother that only living with someone brought, and so for the past eighteen years they had been brothers, but not friends.

Jack wondered not for the first time whether, if he had known Donal better, he could have solved part of the mystery. Maybe if he’d worked harder at getting to know his little brother or had had more conversations about something rather than nothing, then perhaps he could have been out with him on the night of his birthday. Maybe he could have prevented him from leaving that fast-food restaurant or maybe he could have left with him and shared a taxi.

Or maybe Jack would have found himself in the same place as Donal was right now. Wherever that place was.

 

 

 

 

Jack slugged back his third cup of coffee and looked at his watch. Ten fifteen.

Sandy Shortt was late. His legs bounced up and down nervously beneath the table, his left hand drummed on the wood and his right hand signaled for another coffee. His mind stayed positive. She was coming. He knew she would come.

 

 

Eleven A.M., he tried calling her mobile number for the fifth time. It rang and rang and finally, “Hello, this is Sandy Shortt. Sorry I’m not available at the moment. Leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

Jack hung up.

 

 

Eleven thirty, she was two hours late and once again Jack listened to the voice message Sandy had left the previous night.

look forward to finally speaking with you in person, and Jack”-she paused-“I promise you I’ll do my best to help you. We won’t give up on Donal.”

 

 

Twelve o’clock, Jack played it again.

At one othan he. Tables filled and emptied around him; his head snapped up every time the bell over the door rang. He didn’t know what Sandy Shortt looked like; all she had said was that he couldn’t miss her. He didn’t know what to expect but each time the bell tinkled, his head and his heart both lifted with hope and then fell as the newcomer’s gaze flitted past his and settled on another.

 

 

At two thirty, the bell rang once more.

After five and a half hours of waiting, it was the sound of the door opening and closing behind Jack.

 

 

 

 

For almost two days I’d stayed in the same wooded area, jogging back and forth trying to re-create my movements and somehow reverse my arrival here. I ran up and down the mountainside, testing different speeds as I struggled to remember how fast I’d been running, what song I’d been listening to, what I’d been thinking of, and what area I was in when I first noticed the change in my location. As though any of those things had any part in what happened. I walked up and down, down and up, searching for the point of entry and, more importantly, the point of exit. I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to keep busy. I didn’t want to settle like the personal possessions scattered around; I didn’t want to end up like the backless earrings that glinted from the long grass.

Thinking you’re missing is a bizarre conclusion to arrive at. I’m well aware of that. But it wasn’t a sudden conclusion, believe me. I was hugely confused and frustrated for those first few hours but I knew that something more extraordinary than taking a wrong turn had occurred because geographically, a mountain couldn’t just rise from the ground in a matter of seconds, trees that had never grown before in Ireland couldn’t all of a sudden sprout from the ground, and the Shannon Estuary couldn’t dry up and disappear. I wasn’t simply lost-I was somewhere else.

I did, of course, contemplate the fact that I was dreaming, that I had fallen and hit my head and was currently in a coma or that I’d died. I did wonder about whether the anomalous nature of the countryside was pointing toward the end of the world and I questioned my knowledge of the geography of West Limerick. I did indeed consider very strongly the fact that I’d lost my mind. This was number one on the list of possibilities.

But when I sat alone for those days and thought rationally, surrounded by the most beautiful scenery I’d ever seen, I realized that I was most certainly alive, the world had not ended, mass panic hadn’t taken over, and I was not just another occupant of a junkyard. I realized that my searching for a way out was clouding my view of where exactly I was. I wasn’t going to hide behind the lie that I could find a way out by running up and down a hill. No deliberate distractions to block out the voice of reason for me. I am a logical person and the most logical explanation out of all of the incredible possibilities was that I was alive and well but missing. Things are as they are, no matter how bizarre.

Just as it was beginning to get dark on my second day, I decided to explore this curious new place by walking deeper through the pine trees. Sticks cracked beneath my sneakers, the ground was soft and bouncy, covered with layers of fallen, now decayed leaves, bark, pine cones, and velvet-like moss. Mist hovered like wispy cotton above my head and stretched to the tips of the trees. The lofty, thin trunks extended up like towering wooden pencils that colored the sky. During the day they tinted the ceiling a clear blue, shading wispy clouds and orange pigment, and now by night the charcoaled tips, burned from the hot sun, darkened the heavens. The sky twinkled with a million stars, all winking at me, sharing a secret between them, of the world I could never know.

I should have been afraid, walking through a mountainside in the dark by myself. Instead I felt safe, surrounded by the songs of birds, engulfed by the scents of sweet moss and pine, and cocooned in a mist that contained a little bit of magic. I had been in many unusual situations before: the dangerous and the plain bizarre. In my line of work I followed all leads, wandered down all paths and never allowed fear to cause me to turn away from a direction that could lead me to finding someone. I wasn’t afraid to turn over every stone that lay in my path or hurl them and my questions around atmospheres with the fragility of glass houses. When individuals go missing it’s usually under dark circumstances most people don’t want to know about. Compared to the previous experiences of delving into the underworld, this new project was literally a walk in the park. Yes, my finding my way back into my life had become a project.

The sound of murmuring voices up ahead stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t had human contact for days and wasn’t at all sure if these people would be friendly. The flickering light of a campfire cast shadows around the woods, and as I quietly neared, I could see a clearing. The trees fell away to a large circle where five people sat laughing, joking, and singing to music. I stood hidden in the shadows of the giant conifer, but like a hesitant moth being drawn to a flame. Irish accents were audible and I questioned my ludicrous assessment of being outside the country and of being outside my life. In those few seconds I questioned everything.

A branch snapped loudly beneath my foot and it echoed around the forest. The music immediately stopped and the voices quietened.

“Someone’s there,” a woman whispered loudly.

All heads turned toward me.

“Hello, there!” a jovial man called excitedly. “Come! Join us! We’re just about to sing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’” There was a groan from the group.

The man jumped up from his seat on a fallen tree trunk and came closer to me with his arms held open in welcome. His head was bald apart from four strands of hair, which hung spaghettilike in a comb-over style. He had a friendly moon-shaped face and so I stepped into the light and instantly felt the warmth of the fire against my skin.

“It’s a woman,” the woman’s voice whispered loudly again.

I wasn’t sure what to say and the man who had approached me looked now uncertainly back to his group.

“Maybe she doesn’t speak English,” the woman hissed loudly.

“Ah,” the man turned back to me, “Doooo yooooou speeeeeaaaaak Eng-a-lish?”

There was a grumble from the group, “The Oxford English Dictionary wouldn’t understand that, Bernard.”

I smiled and nodded. The group had quietened and were studying me and I knew what they were all thinking: she’s tall.

“Ah, great.” His hands clapped together and remained clasped close to his chest. His face broke into an even more welcoming smile. “Where are you from?”

I didn’t know whether to say Earth, Ireland, or Leitrim. I went with my gut instincts and “ Ireland ” was all that came out of my mouth, which hadn’t spoken for days.

“Splendid!” The cheery fellow’s smile was so bright and I couldn’t help but return it. “What a coincidence! Please come and join us.” He excitedly led me toward the group with a hop, skip, and a jump.

“My name is Bernard,” he beamed like the Cheshire cat, “and heartiest welcome to the Irish contingency. We’re frightfully outnumbered here,” he said, frowning, “although it seems that the numbers are rising. Excuse me, where are my manners?” His cheeks flushed.

“Underneath that sock over there.”

I turned to look at the source of the smart comment to see an attractive woman in her fifties, tight salt-and-pepper hair, with a lilac pashmina shawl draped around her shoulders. She was staring distantly into the center fire, the dancing flames reflecting in her dark eyes, her comments flowing out of her mouth as though she were on autopilot.

“Who have I the pleasure of being acquainted with?” Bernard beamed with excitement; his neck craned up to look at me.

“My name is Sandy,” I replied, “Sandy Shortt.”

“Splendid.” His cheeks flushed again and he shook my outstretched hand, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Allow me to introduce you to the rest of the gang, as they say.”

“As who say?” the woman grumbled irately.

“That’s Helena. She loves to chat. Always has something to say, don’t you, Helena?” Bernard looked at her for an answer.

The wrinkles around her mouth deepened as she pursed her lips.

“Ah.” He wiped his brow and turned to introduce me to a woman named Joan; Derek, the long-haired hippie playing the guitar; and Marcus, who was sitting quietly in the corner. I took them in quickly: they were all of a similar age and seemed very comfortable with one another. Not even Helena ’s sarcastic comments were causing any friction.

“Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll get you a drink of some sort-”

“Where are we?” I cut in, unable to take his bumbling pleasantries any longer.

All other conversation around the fire stopped suddenly and even Helena raised her head to stare at me. She took me in, a quick glance up and down, and I felt like my soul had been absorbed. Derek stopped strumming his guitar, Marcus smiled lightly and looked away, Joan and Bernard stared at me with wide frightened Bambi eyes. All that could be heard was the sound of the campfire crackling and popping as sparks sprang out and spiraled their way up to the sky. Owls hooted and there was the distant snap of branches being stepped on by wanderers beyond.

There was a deathly silence around the campfire.

“Is anyone going to answer the girl?” Helena looked around with an amused expression. Nobody spoke. “Well, if nobody speaks up,” she wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders and grasped it at her chest, “I’m going to give my opinion.”

Voices of objection rose from the circle and I immediately wanted to hear Helena ’s opinion all the more. Her eyes danced, enjoying the choir of disapproval.

“Tell me, Helena,” I interrupted, feeling my usual impatience with people return. I always wanted to get to the point. I hated pussyfooting around.

“Oh, you don’t want that, trust me,” Bernard fluffed, his double chin wobbling as he spoke.

Helena lifted her silver-haired head in defiance and her dark eyes glistened as she looked at me directly. Her mouth twitched at the side. “We’re dead.”

Two words said coolly, calmly, crisply.

“Now, now, don’t you mind her,” Bernard said in what I imagined was his best angry voice.

“ Helena,” Joan admonished, “we’ve been through this before. You shouldn’t scare Sandy like that.”

“She doesn’t look scared to me,” Helena said, still with that amused expression, her eyes unmoving.

“Well,” Marcus finally spoke after his long silence since I’d joined the group, “she may have a point. We may very well be dead.”

Bernard and Joan groaned, and Derek began strumming lightly on his guitar and singing softly, “We’re dead, we may very well be dead.”

Bernard tutted, then poured tea from a china pot into a cup and handed it to me on a saucer. In the middle of the woods, I couldn’t help but smile.

“If we’re dead, then where are my parents, Helena?” Joan scolded, emptying a packet of biscuits onto a china plate and placing them before me. “Where are all the other dead people?”

“In hell,” Helena said in a singsong voice.

Marcus smiled and looked away so that Joan wouldn’t see his face.

“And what makes you think we’re in heaven? What makes you think you’d get into heaven?” Joan huffed, dunking her biscuit into her tea and pulling it up before the soggy end fell in.

Derek strummed and sang gruffly, “Is this heaven or is this hell? I look around and I can’t tell.”

“Didn’t anybody else notice the Pearly Gates and the choir of angels as they entered, or was it just me?” Helena smirked.

“You didn’t enter through Pearly Gates.” Bernard shook his head wildly, his neck wobbling from side to side. He looked at me and his neck continued to shake. “She didn’t enter through Pearly Gates.”

Derek strummed, “I didn’t pass the Pearly Gate nor felt the burning flames of hate.”

“Oh, stop it,” Joan huffed.

“Stop it,” he sang.

“I can’t bear any more.”

“I can’t bear any more, someone please show me the door…”

“I’ll show you the door,” Helena warned, but with less conviction.

He continued strumming and they all fell silent, contemplating his last few lyrics.

“Little June, Pauline O’Connor’s daughter, was only ten when she died, Helena,” Bernard continued. “Surely a little angel like her would be in heaven and she’s not here, so there goes your theory.” He held his head high and Joan nodded in agreement. “We’re not dead.”

“Sorry, it’s over-eighteens only,” Helena said in a bored tone. “Saint Peter’s down at the gate with his arms folded and an earpiece in his ear, taking instructions from God.”

“You can’t say that, Helena,” Joan snapped.

“I can’t get in, I can’t get out, Saint Peter, what’s it all about?” Derek sang in a gravelly voice. Suddenly he stopped strumming and finally spoke. “It’s definitely not heaven. Elvis isn’t here.”

“Oh, well then.” Helena rolled her eyes.

“We’ve got our own Elvis here, haven’t we?” Bernard said, chuckling, changing the subject. “ Sandy, did you know that Derek used to be in a band?”

“How would she know that, Bernard?” Helena said, exasperated.

Bernard ignored her again. “Derek Cummings,” he announced, “the hottest property in St. Kevin’s back in the sixties.”

They all laughed.

My body turned cold.

“What was it you were called, Derek? I’ve forgotten now,” Joan said with a laugh.

“The Wonder Boys, Joan, the Wonder Boys,” Derek said fondly, reminiscing.

“Remember the dances on a Friday night?” Bernard asked excitedly. “Derek would be up there on the stage, playing rock and roll, and Father Martin would be almost having a heart attack at him shaking his pelvis.” They all laughed again.

“Now, what was the name of the dance hall?” Joan thought aloud.

“Oh, gosh…” Bernard closed his eyes and tried to remember.

Derek stopped strumming and thought hard.

Helena kept staring at me, watching my reactions. “Are you cold, Sandy?” Her voice sounded far away.

Finbar’s Hall. The name jumped into my head. They had all loved going to Finbar’s Hall every Friday night.

“Finbar’s Hall,” Marcus finally remembered.

“Ah, that was it.” They all looked relieved and Derek’s strumming continued.

Goose pimples formed on my skin. I shivered.

I looked around at the faces of the group, studied their eyes, their familiar features, and I allowed all I had learned as a little girl to come flooding back to me. I could see it now as clearly as I had then, when I came across the story in the computer archives while researching a project for school. I had immediately taken interest, had followed up on the story and was more than familiar with it. I saw the young teenage faces smiling up from the newspaper’s front page and I saw those same faces around me now.

Derek Cummings, Joan Hatchard, Bernard Lynch, Marcus Flynn, and Helena Dickens. Five students from St. Kevin’s Boarding School. They disappeared during a school camping trip in the sixties and were never found. But here they were now, older, wiser, and their innocence lost.

I had found them.

 

 

 

 

When I was fourteen, my parents talked me into seeing a counselor after school on Mondays. They didn’t have to do much convincing. As soon as they told me I’d be able to ask all the questions I wanted and that this person was qualified enough to answer, I practically drove myself to school.

I knew they felt that they had failed me. I could tell that by their expressions when they sat me down at the kitchen table, with the milk and cookies in the center and the washing machine going in the background as the usual distraction. Mum held a rolled tissue tightly in her hands as though she had used it earlier to dab away tears. That was the thing with my parents: they would never let me see their weaknesses, yet they would forget to get rid of the proof of them. I didn’t see Mum’s tears but I saw the tissue. I didn’t hear Dad’s anger at having failed to help me but I saw it in his eyes.

“Is everything OK?” I looked from one strong face to the other. The only time two people can look so confident and as though they can face anything is when something bad happens. “Did something happen?”

Dad smiled. “No, honey, don’t worry, nothing bad happened.”

Mum’s eyebrow lifted when he said that and I knew she didn’t agree. I knew Dad didn’t agree with his words either but he was saying them nonetheless. There was nothing wrong with sending me to a counselor, nothing wrong at all, but I knew that they had wanted to help me themselves. They had wanted their answers to my questions to be enough. I overheard their endless discussions about the correct method of dealing with my behavior. They had helped me in every way they could and now I could feel their disappointment in themselves and I hated myself for making them feel that way.

“You know the way you have so many questions, honey?” Dad explained.

I nodded.

“Well, your mum and I”-he looked to her for support and her eyes softened immediately as she glanced at him-“well, your mum and I have found someone that you’ll be able to talk to about all of those questions.”

“This person will be able to answer my questions?” I felt my eyes widen and my heart quicken as though all of life’s mysteries were about to be answered.

“I hope so, honey,” Mum answered. “I hope that by talking to him, you won’t have any more questions that will bother you. He’ll know far more about all the things you worry about than we do.”

Then it was time for my lightning round. Fingers on the buzzers.

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Burton.” Dad.

“What’s his first name?”

“Gregory.” Mum.

“Where does he work?”

“At the school.” Mum.

“When will I see him?”

“Mondays after school. For an hour.” Mum. She was better at this than Dad. She was used to these discussions while Dad was out working.

“He’s a psychiatrist, isn’t he?” They never lied to me.

“Yes, honey.” Dad.

I think that’s the moment I began to hate seeing myself in their eyes, and unfortunately it was when I began to dislike being in their company.

 

 

Mr. Burton’s office was in a room the size of a closet, just about big enough for two armchairs. I chose to sit in the dirty olive-green-velvet-covered chair with dark wooden handles, as opposed to the stained brown-velvet-covered chair. They both looked like they dated from the forties and hadn’t been washed or removed from the small room since. There was a little window so high up on the back wall that all I could see was the sky. The first day I met Mr. Burton it was a clear blue. Every now and then a cloud passed, filling the entire window with white before moving on.

On the walls were posters of school kids looking happy and declaring to the empty room how they had said no to drugs, spoke out against bullying, coped with exam stress, had beaten eating disorders, dealt with grief, were clever enough to not have to face teenage pregnancy because they didn’t have sex, but on the off chance that they did, there was another poster of the same girl and boy saying how they used condoms. Saints, the lot of them. The room was so positive I thought I was going to be ejected from my chair like a rocket. Mr. Burton the magnificent had helped them all.

I expected Mr. Burton to be a wise old man with a head of wild gray hair, a monocle in one eye, a waistcoat with a pocket watch attached by a chain, a brain exploding with knowledge after years of extensive research into the human mind. I expected Yoda of the Western world, cloaked in wisdom, who spoke in riddles and tried to convince me that the Force in me was strong.

When the real Mr. Burton entered the room I had mixed feelings. The inquisitive side of me was disappointed; the fourteen-year-old in me positively delighted. He was more of a Gregory than a Mr. Burton. He was young and handsome, sexy and gorgeous. He looked like he had just walked out of college that very day, in his jeans and T-shirt and fashionable haircut. I did my usual calculations: twice my age could work. In a few years it would be legal and I would be out of school. My whole life was mapped out before he had even closed the door behind him.

“Hello, Sandy.” His voice was bright and cheery. He shook my hand and I vowed to lick it when I got home and never wash it again. He sat on the brown velvet armchair across from me. I bet all those girls in the posters invented all those problems just to come into this office.

“I hope you’re comfortable in our designer, top-of-the-line furniture?” He wrinkled his nose in disgust as he settled into the chair, which had burst at the side and had foam spilling out.

I laughed. Oh, he was so cool. “Yes, thanks. I was wonde


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 868


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