“Huh?”
It was a knee-jerk response. The pretense of being elsewhere. It happened so often that even though she’d been listening, she couldn’t help it. She heard Topaz mutter, “Airhead.”
She looked at Brett, who was smiling warmly enough.
“What kind of films do you like watching?”
“I don’t know. Anything…where I get to see another world, I suppose. Things set in strange countries, or space, or fantastical places. I like romance, too.”
She heard Coralie snort, and wondered if she should have lied and told him she liked action movies. Topaz always pretended to be into them, and rolled her eyes at “girly girls” who only liked soppy films. Aurora had always let her do it, even though she knew Topaz’s favorite films were all period dramas or romantic comedies.
“So you must like Star Wars, then?” Brett asked. “That’s got all of that. Have you seen Return of the Jedi yet?”
Aurora shook her head. “I was going to wait till it was out on video. My parents didn’t like the last one….”
“Ah, you have to see it in the cinema,” he said, shaking his head. “All the effects, the Star Destroyers, the rumbling that comes from the speakers—and it’s going to be ages till the video. We should sort that out, Topaz.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Go as a group.”
“Sounds good,” Topaz said, and Aurora could tell from the set of her mouth that she wasn’t happy.
I shouldn’t have mentioned our parents. She told me not to talk about them.
Aurora felt a knot of tension in her stomach. She never knew what to say in front of Topaz’s friends. Whatever she came out with was always the wrong thing. And getting it wrong in front of Brett was worse. He was the older one everyone had a crush on. The star sportsman who could draw a dozen girls as an audience just by turning up to train in the school pool.
Her feelings about being here were such a mixture of gratitude and anxiety. Everyone in her year—everyone in the school really—would have killed to be sitting here. Brett Parker was right next to her, close enough to touch. And more than that, she was with the group. With Benners’s gang of strange, anarchic, brilliant, and beautiful friends.
It was a group she didn’t fit into at all; one she had only been invited into because of her sister. And, in one of those ironies, Topaz didn’t want her there at all.
She looked back at the trees and the sunshine, imagining that she could be lifted by that breeze and placed gently in a pair of strong arms. She gave the arms an owner and a head of dark hair.
She imagined him speaking to her. I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re all the world to me.
“Hey.” Coralie was leaning forward to point. “That’s where you pull in.”
She added a strange little laugh onto the end of it. It was a habit of hers. It made her seem even more childlike. Another thing to add to the pink clothes and the wide eyes and the cultivated confusion at the world.
The car slowed and Aurora watched, regretfully, as the flickering subsided into a slower rhythm and then became just the shadow of overhanging trees. She tried to hold on to that feeling of being cradled and lulled, but Coralie was opening her door, and Brett was pulling the keys out of the ignition.
Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car and watched Topaz get out and walk round toward Brett, who was unloading a few sleeping bags and backpacks. Topaz stretched upward, her crop top riding up to show her tanned stomach, and then turned round to face away from him. She leaned forward to touch her toes.
Aurora saw Brett’s eyes drop to Topaz’s backside, where some of her buttocks and the very bottom of her lace underwear were visible.
“I’m soooooo stiff,” Topaz said. She straightened up slowly, and looked at Brett over her shoulder. “Coming?”
“Uhhh…Sure.”
Coralie hurried round the car and took Topaz’s hand. The two of them swayed ahead down the forest path.
3
Jonah took Hanson with him to the Jackson house outside Lyndhurst. He could have left informing next of kin to a couple of community-support officers, but he felt a powerful need to be there. Perhaps to comfort; perhaps because he’d waited thirty years for a conclusion.
The Jacksons had never left the New Forest. It was the more common outcome in disappearance cases. Where a murder often drove a family away, an unresolved missing person bound them to the place where the missing one had been. There was always that dwindling hope that they would one day arrive back home again.
The half-mile driveway was almost impassable now. The sand-and-hardcore surface had disintegrated into a minefield of potholes. Hanson swore when the front-left tire dipped deeply enough into a pothole that the bottom of the car scraped the hard-baked mud. She pulled the wheel sharply to avoid another, and Jonah steadied himself against the dashboard.
“Doesn’t the council resurface this?” she asked.
“Private road,” Jonah replied. “The Jacksons have never believed in tarmac. They’re a bit alternative. Though I’m not sure if it’s about a love of nature or just laziness, to be honest.”
“I don’t mind nature when it keeps its hands off my car,” Hanson muttered.
She pulled up in a half-cleared area in front of a single-story house. Jonah opened his door over a dried-mud crater. Stepping into it, he felt corners of stone press into his foot through the sole of his shoe.
He had half emerged from the car when the battered front door opened. A round, uncertain figure in a thick-knit cardigan and home-dyed dress stood in the doorway, blinking into the sun.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jackson. Sorry for bothering you, but is it all right if we come in?” he said as neutrally as he could.
“I…Yes. Yes, I suppose so.” She emerged further from under the shadow of a scorched-looking wisteria. Then she stopped. “It’s not Topaz, is it?”
Jonah shook his head, but Hanson answered for him.
“Your daughter’s just fine, Mrs. Jackson.” She said it with a warm smile, and Jonah was glad he’d brought her along.
“We just wondered if we might chat about some developments in Aurora’s disappearance,” he added.
Joy Jackson’s head turned back toward the house briefly, and her hands reached for her cardigan pockets.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Why don’t you—”
She stood shifting as Jonah and Hanson navigated the overgrown stones of the path. Two of them tipped under Jonah’s feet.
Up close, Joy was ruddier and more lined than he’d remembered her. Round cheeks underscored by webs of red; eyes that constantly shifted in creased sockets.