Everything is Beautiful by Eleanor Ray (best classic romance novels txt) 📕

cut your hours at Trapper.’ He looked around. ‘Shall we open another bottle to celebrate?’

‘Yes!’ said Chantel.

‘Better not,’ said Jack. ‘We’re up early, training again. Aren’t we, Chantel?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘None for me.’

‘You’re looking very svelte,’ said Amy. ‘Isn’t she, Tim?’

‘No offence, Chantel, but I hadn’t noticed.’ Tim leaned over to Amy, and planted a kiss on her cheek.

‘Eyes only for each other,’ said Jack, with a glance towards Chantel. ‘Adorable.’

Amy sat in her bedroom, holding the box. It was as if she’d got the heart of her hoards in her hands, bloody and pumping. It was where it had all started.

Taking a deep breath, Amy opened the box.

Inside was her sketchbook. She’d taken to carrying it around with her when she worked at Trapper, Lemon and Hughes and watercolours were not an option. She couldn’t use it for the abstract colours that she loved, but drawing at all had been better than nothing. She flicked through and found a sketch of Mr Trapper’s second baby, its mouth wide open in an angry scream. Amy could almost hear the sound now, and remembered the afternoon when Mrs Trapper had brought the baby in and handed her round to the cooing girls in the office, before the baby had decided enough was enough and started shrieking. The next drawing was of a rose bush in winter, its stems pruned so they just protruded from the ground. Then a picture of a robin, perched on a bird bath. Amy turned the page.

The drawings stopped and notes took over. That was when they’d disappeared. Scrawled ideas of where they could be. Hopeful at first. She remembered. Tim hadn’t come home that night, and the next day she’d discovered Chantel was missing too. She looked at what she’d written. ‘Tim said he was meeting Simon.’ She remembered being angry; she was recently back from Italy and hadn’t wanted him to go.

When he hadn’t come home that night she had been even more upset, thinking he’d broken his promises and gone on a bender. But when he was still missing the next morning, she’d started to worry. She’d phoned Simon, but he hadn’t seen Tim for weeks and denied they’d had plans for that night. She’d tried Chantel, but couldn’t reach her. Of course. And then she’d scribbled notes from her phone calls to everyone she could think of who Tim might have been in contact with. No one knew a thing, but a few people hazarded a guess and they all included drugs and alcohol. She’d tried Chantel again, but still no answer. She’d rung their house phone, and Jack told her Chantel hadn’t been home either, but he wasn’t worried. They’d had a row and he was sure she’d be back soon. Then she’d rung Chantel’s mother, who had heard nothing from her. She called Jack again, worried for her friend. He told her not to be paranoid, she’d show up soon.

Except she never did.

Amy frowned at the notebook. Something didn’t feel right. She left it open on that page and looked at the other documents in the box. Tim and Amy’s shared calendar; it used to be pinned to the fridge and was illustrated with pictures of guitars from around the world. She’d bought it for Tim that Christmas. The day he disappeared was marked by Tim. Out, it just said. That was the understatement of the century. The next day was circled in red. The start of his new life, thought Amy, trying not to let bitterness spread throughout her body.

She shuffled through newspaper clippings. At the beginning, she’d scoured the papers for relevant articles, and here they were, neatly trimmed with her kitchen scissors. She’d been saving them, hoping to discover more about what had happened. Of course she hadn’t. Once Jack accepted that Chantel was not coming home, he’d decided that she and Tim had run away together. With no leads to go on and no sign of foul play, the investigating officers seemed inclined to agree with him.

Amy found an interview with Jack in the local paper. Chantel and Tim had always been close, it said. But neither Amy nor I were suspicious by nature. Chantel and I had a disagreement and Chantel stormed out, saying she was going to stay with a friend. I thought nothing of it, at first. It wasn’t till days later when she didn’t come back that I realised this was more than a tiff. She’d betrayed me with her best friend’s boyfriend.

Stay with a friend, thought Amy. That should have been her. She was the only real friend Chantel had. But Jack knew Chantel wasn’t with Amy. He knew she wasn’t with her mother either; Amy had told him that. Why hadn’t he been worried those few days earlier? Could that have made a difference?

Amy got up, finding her legs had cramped where she’d been sitting on them. Gingerly, she shook them out, carefully clambered over her things and went downstairs. Jack’s business card was sitting next to a pile of mugs, a little splattered with the sausage juice from the slow cooker. She dialled his number and left a message asking him to call her. She said she just wanted to check on a few details of when Chantel disappeared and when he raised the alarm. It didn’t quite make sense to her.

Amy went back upstairs afterwards, back to the box. There must be more to it, she thought. Something that would give her the lead she needed.

Amy sat at her desk at work the next day feeling exhausted. She hadn’t been able to face clearing the mess off her bed, and had slept on the sofa again. Not that she’d slept much at all, and when she had it was a fitful sleep filled with dreams of a robin trapped inside a guitar, flapping its little wings desperately in an attempt to escape. She