The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

backyard. After weeks of doing nothing, I wonder what other waves of activity are spreading across the city, stirred up by Friday’s reward announcement or rising up of their own accord. Why now?

‘We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’

Detective Barbero is barely out the door before Dad deflates, the wind and puff and strength ripped out of him. He staggers to the couch.

‘Get me a Scotch, Tal,’ he says, and I do, making it the way he likes it, neat with a dash of water.

His hand trembles when I hand it to him; the whisky ripples like a miniature earthquake has rocked our house. He’s not my lion dad, the king of the dinner party, master of the golf course. He shrinks inside his clothes, and even though he sometimes gets like this, how unfamiliar he seems.

‘They asked the strangest questions.’ He presses himself into the couch, closes his eyes and sips.

‘Like what?’

‘Give your dad a moment,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll talk later.’

I give her my most cutting look, because I know with them that later never happens, and I’m not supposed to notice that.

DAY 37

Mum is heading to work early so I let her drive me to school, even if it means getting there thirty minutes before I want to. She stops the car at the student gate and leans forward, looking at the great green expanse I have to walk across to get to the main doors. It’s a misty morning, so the empty grounds look spookier than usual, and we’re the only car on the street.

‘By the way,’ she says. ‘The police have asked me to run a few things by you. Some information about the offender.’

She could not have picked worse timing. ‘Is this a secret from Dad?’

‘I don’t want to distract you before school, Natalia. We can talk tonight. I just wanted to flag it.’

‘Why bring it up at all, Mum? Tell me. I won’t be able to concentrate now, and I’ve got my French exam today.’

She’s so annoying.

‘I don’t want you worrying. I hate that you have to be involved in this.’

‘I am worried! The police ransacked our house yesterday. How can I not worry?’

Mum sighs like I’m the one being irrational. She reaches behind my seat for her handbag. ‘The kidnapper uses unusual words or phrases. You know, endearments or pet names.’

‘Like what?’

Mum pulls a slip of paper from her handbag and gives it to me. It’s been ripped off from the notepad she keeps on the kitchen bench to write shopping lists and communicate with Faith.

I read the list. Sweetpea. Honeypie. Sleepover party.

Bile rises in my throat. ‘Gross. If a grown man called me any of these I would know for sure that he’s a certified paedophile.’

‘The detectives want to know if you’ve ever heard someone use these words, a teacher who might have left the school, or a substitute teacher. Or any of your sports coaches.’

‘Why didn’t they ask me directly?’ I try to hand the note back, willing my hands to stop shaking, but Mum pushes it towards me.

‘Keep it. I don’t want you obsessing over it, but if you hear anything even remotely similar, obviously tell me or your dad.’

‘And run a mile.’ I tuck the note into the pocket of my school bag. She doesn’t smile, of course she doesn’t.

This basically reminds me of the million questions I have like, why offer a reward now? Does this mean they’ve shifted to looking for Yin dead rather than alive? They’re acting awfully like we should be scared of someone very close to us. I think of all the rumours that are trickling through our year level, rumours that are scabs we can’t stop picking at, like that Doctor Calm takes baths with his victims and pretends that a rubber duck is talking in a tiny duck voice, that he likes to sing them to sleep with lullabies, that he puts on our school uniform and pretends to be a Balmoral girl.

I start to wonder if it’s better if she’s dead.

After I get out I see Mum arrange her makeup bag carefully on the seat so she can do her face on the freeway.

The supernatural mist soup sweeps me through to reception, where I swipe my attendance card, nodding at part-time receptionist Susan, who is one of the saddest people any of us have ever seen. Whenever we study a tragic story in English, I think of Susan.

Our usual nook, the triangle of couches next to the window that overlooks the quad like an observation deck, is depressing without my girls in it, besides which it’s littered with empty chip packets and none of the corridor lights are on yet. I reverse along the corridor and try not to look at the morbid shrine that’s formed around Yin’s locker. Polaroids and origami cranes and silk flowers gathering dust, and even a handwritten Bible verse that has to have come from that happy-clapper Lisbeth.

Surely they’ll clear this up over the holidays, they can’t let it bleed into next term.

When I inch closer my feet knock into a pile of paper held together with a plastic clip in the shape of a frog. I bend down to see equations and symbols—Petra obviously couldn’t hack the heat and dumped Yin’s borrowed physics notes here.

I straighten up and I’m surprised to see Yin’s locker door is open a crack. She’s got a sticker of a sparkly clarinet on it so it’s easy to find and the darkness inside pulls my attention—come closer come closer come closer—like a black hole or a portal.

The silence in the abandoned school building is total.

I flick the door open.

A short stack of textbooks. A lone scrunchie. A neatly folded school scarf. An orange box of clarinet reeds. One picture of Yin, Claire and Milla stuck to the inside of the door.

The locker is too empty, too tidy. Yin has had a lifelong stationery addiction, so where are the sticky notes and the cute notepads and the