Page 16 of If Anything Happens To Me

I called the police, and two patrol officers came over. The officers asked me, Gram, and Noreen a few questions, and they learned that Eloise wasn’t the type to go running off. So they called Detective Tyrone.

She was very calm. She had wide brown eyes and dark brown hair, and she wore a navy blue blazer that made her look very official. We stood in the kitchen while Noreen tidied up and Gram dozed in the living room.

The detective watched me with a neutral gaze as I started to lose it.

“You have to find her!” I shouted. “It’s dark, it’s been dark for over an hour, and Eloise is missing! She must be hurt, lying somewhere. She’d call if she could!”

“Breathe, Oli,” Detective Tyrone said. “You can’t help Eloise if you pass out.”

So I did—I breathed.

“Tell me about the day,” she said. “Were you and Eloise getting along? Did you have a fight?”

“No,” I said. Why was she asking me that? But I thought of the blip of disagreement Eloise and I had had, over her going out with Chris, and the detective noticed the look in my eyes.

“A little fight maybe?” the detective asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Just sister stuff. And we hugged—no one was mad.”

“You sure it wasn’t more than that? Maybe she was upset at you and took off?”

“Why are you asking me these things?” I wailed with frustration.

“It’s just procedure, Oli,” Detective Tyrone said. “We have to talk to everyone, even family members—people who love Eloise.”

“But I don’t know where she is,” I said, my voice wobbling from the terror building inside me. “Can’t you stop all this now and look for her? Please, go out and find her!”

“We are looking for her, Oli,” the detective said. “Pretty much the whole force is out. But the more you can tell me, the better chance we’ll have of finding her. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you last see her?”

“Here, at home, this morning,” I said. “We were getting ready for school. We were rushing because we didn’t want to be late. We’d been out earlier . . .”

“Out where?”

“In the Braided Woods,” I said. “Birding.”

“And what about after that? Did you go to school together?”

“No,” I said. “We had different class schedules. I went on the early bus, and she was going to get the later one.”

“What about after school?”

I shook my head. “No. She didn’t come home.”

“Tell me more about birding,” the detective asked. “Who was with you?”

“We went with our friends. We always do—it’s our nature group.”

She asked me their names, and I gave them. But when I got to Chris, I felt a huge jolt, and Detective Tyrone noticed.

“What is it, Oli?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I really didn’t want to tell. It seemed completely far-fetched that Chris could have been in any way involved with Eloise disappearing. Or what if he was—not in a guilty way, but in a romantic way? Maybe the two of them had made a plan to run away together. But no, Eloise would never do that without telling me. She would never make Gram and me worry.

“You had a reaction when you said Chris Nicholson’s name,” Detective Tyrone said.

I blurted it out: “He asked Eloise to go out tonight. To look for owls. And that . . . that’s what our fight was about. I didn’t think she should go.”

“Why not?”

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