The Key to Finding Jack by Ewa Jozefkowicz (best classic books to read TXT) 📕

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The more I read, the more my heart sped up.

‘Call them,’ I said to Simon, before I noticed that he’d already picked up his phone.

‘No connection. They’re pretty far outside the town, look,’ he said, enlarging the online map of the local area. ‘And they could be quite high up in the mountains. If there are a lot of fallen trees their access to the roads might be blocked. I imagine the phone signal is usually patchy, let alone now.’

‘Shall we contact your guy at the community centre to see if he knows anything?’

Simon checked his watch and called the number.

For ages nobody picked up. Then I heard a sudden ‘Buenas tardes’ on the other end of the line.

Simon started speaking in Spanish and I waited, frantically picking at the skin around my fingernails, like Mum when she was stressed.

Then, the man’s voice went quiet, although Simon still held the phone to his ear.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Wait,’ he mouthed at me.

Then the voice returned and Simon’s eyebrows shot up.

‘Gracias,’ he said, ‘muchas gracias.’

‘There’s a backpacker at the centre from Oro,’ he told me, as soon as he’d disconnected. I noticed that he was trying hard to keep his voice steady. ‘He came into town last night. He says that he remembers a British guy who turned up just as he was leaving Oro. He matches Jack’s description. They’ve had charity food aid delivered by helicopter at the community centre – the trucks would have taken too long to get there because the place is so far out. Apparently the same charity had been to the nursing home and made a delivery there. It sounds like the people are OK. They have no electricity, their access is blocked off and the phone lines are still down, like I guessed, but they’re otherwise fine.’

‘Oh my goodness. What do we do now?’ I asked Simon. I could feel my arms shaking.

‘I think your parents need to tell the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They’ll know who to contact on the ground in Peru.’

‘But we still don’t know for certain that it’s him,’ I said, struggling to contain my excitement.

‘No, we don’t, that’s true,’ said Simon carefully. ‘But his physical description matches almost exactly.’

I ran home as fast as I possibly could. When Mum opened the door, I could barely breathe.

‘There’s been a sighting of somebody who looks a lot like Jack,’ I told her, ‘I think I know where he is.’

I told my parents what Simon and I had managed to find out and within minutes, Dad was on the phone to the FCO. He had me on speakerphone so that I could add in any information that he’d missed. The woman on the other end said that they would let us know as soon as they had news.

‘But Flick, how in the world did you find this out?’ Dad asked, amazed, after he’d put down the phone.

‘Just by piecing together the clues, one by one – like Jack taught me. It was through Grandma and Jack’s friend Manfy that I found out about him playing guitar at St Austin’s and I took a gamble that he might want to do something similar in Peru. As for why we searched in that part of the country – well, that’s a longer story.’

‘I still think you should tell us about it. I’d like to hear.’

The three of us gathered in Jack’s room and I talked Mum and Dad through my latest research.

‘I can’t believe he went to play to the elderly residents,’ said Dad. ‘And Grandma knew about this? Why didn’t she tell us?’

‘Maybe she thought we knew?’

‘Why didn’t Jack tell us?’ Mum asked.

‘That’s the main question,’ Dad agreed. ‘It’s because he thought we had a certain opinion of him, and he’d given up trying to make us change it. But he has, without knowing it, in the biggest way possible.’

It must have been around three in the morning when we finally fell asleep – me and Mum in Jack’s bed and Dad on the floor.

The sunshine was already streaming in through the window when we were woken up by the phone ringing downstairs.

I leaped up and ran down to the kitchen.

‘Hello, can I speak to Mr Chesterford?’ the voice asked.

‘Have you found Jack?’ My voice came out in a croak.

Dad gently took the receiver from me, introduced himself and repeated my question. He put the man on speakerphone.

‘Yes, we believe we have. We can’t be one hundred per cent certain, but one of the Peruvian rescue teams has located a young man who matches your son’s description in the Oro resort. We’ve transported him to the nearest hospital in Cusco. He’s being treated for some minor injuries, but we should be able to speak to him later today. If we ascertain that it is Jack, we will of course get him to contact you right away.’

‘He has haemophilia. The doctors need to know that he has it. His blood doesn’t clot properly, so it’s very important that he has regular injections.’

‘Ah OK, I do believe that the doctors may already be aware of this. I will confirm though.’

My heart raced against my chest. If they were aware, then it had to be him.

‘Who is it?’ I heard Mum’s frantic voice behind me.

‘They think they’ve found Jack.’

There it was. I’d said the words that I was scared I would never say.

I still couldn’t believe they were true when I sent them in a message to Keira, to Simon and to Manfy, and later when I repeated them to Grandma on the phone.

But I needed to hear Jack’s voice to make sure that it was real.

‘Please can I be the first to speak to him if he calls?’ I begged Mum. After all, I’d been the one to find him. It was only fair.

Mum and Dad let me take the day off school especially. The phone rang after lunch. Every part of me believed that