Page 9 of Then She Vanished

Please let it be anyone but him.

I scrunch my eyes even tighter, so I don’t have to look at my surroundings; so I don’t have to look at him. Come back lilies, come back butterfly and come back caterpillar. Please don’t leave me.

That’s when I feel his breath on the back of my neck.

On opening my eyes, I see the reality of my situation. I can no longer smell the flowers; all I can smell is the scent of my own gradual decay, and all I see is a damp, brick wall lit up by the shaft of light coming from the opening above.

‘Turn around without my permission and you die!’

I remain still. His dreams are now my dreams. They have to be if I am to survive.

SIX

Rona led Gina and Jacob into one of the study rooms at the back of the library. ‘We shouldn’t get disturbed here.’

Gina entered the chilly box room while Rona turned the light on. It reminded Gina of one of the cells back at the station, only smaller and carpeted. There was a desk, a computer and one chair. Rona quickly left and came back with two folded plastic chairs. She positioned them against the wall and they all sat.

Jacob got his notebook out, while Gina shifted in the chair to get comfortable. Rona’s long, honey-streaked blonde hair flopped forward as she pulled herself in a little closer. Gina introduced herself and Jacob and Rona gave them her full name.

‘I guess you want to know what I thought of him, the man on the CCTV?’

Gina nodded. ‘He was found dead this morning and we’re following up on some leads.’

‘You two are police detectives, so you wouldn’t be here if he’d had a heart attack. Does that mean he was murdered?’

Gina scrunched her brows, wondering how much to say. ‘It doesn’t look that way, but there is more to the case, which is why we’re here. Can you tell me why you referred to him as a creep?’

Rona looked down and frowned, as if trying to work out what to say, when someone knocked at the door.

‘Come in,’ Rona called. Selma entered with a tray of drinks and left them on the desk. ‘Thanks, Sel.’ Rona handed them out and sipped her coffee.

She sighed. ‘I said what I said because heisa creep. I’m going to start at the beginning: my daughter often hangs out at the library while I work – I don’t like her being alone at home all day when she’s not at school. She’s thirteen now, by the way, and I know a lot of parents don’t mind their kids being at home on their own at that age, but she’s quite sensitive and she gets lonely. She’s like me, too, a total bookworm, so quite often she’s here sitting in the beanbag zone reading. One day, I found him – the man that Selma had up on the screen – sitting next to her. He seemed a bittoocomfortable, laughing with her, telling her how much he lovedHarry Potter– that’s what she was reading at the time. I heard my daughter getting carried away as they talked about the characters and who their favourites were. To me, it sounded like he was trying to groom her, and he was sitting so close it definitely made me uncomfortable. Why on earth would a man of his age sit on a beanbag and chat to a young girl?’ Rona paused.

‘Go on.’

‘Actually, that sounds a little judgy, that’s why I gave myself a bit of an internal ticking off. I mean, just because he’s a grown man, why can’t he like books aimed at kids? In fact, lots of people love them, especiallyHarry Potter. I also thought that, maybe, I’d not seen the situation as it was; maybe he hadn’t been sittingthatclose and it was just me, thinking he had. But it did make me keep a closer eye on him from that point onwards. I noticed that he came in roughly once a month and took a few books out.’

‘You can never be too careful when it comes to your children,’ Gina said, knowing what she went through to protect Hannah, when she was a baby. She’d do it all again in a heartbeat. ‘How long have you worked here?’

Rona paused. ‘Two years and three months.’

‘And when did you first see this man talking to your daughter?’

‘About two years ago, when she was eleven.’

‘Did you see him talking to your daughter often?’

She shrugged. ‘I think it’s happened maybe seven or eight times.’

Gina wondered if anything else had happened. ‘Can you tell me about the other times?’

‘About a month or two after that first time… it was winter and my daughter was helping me make a Christmas-themed book display. The others here don’t mind her helping out. After we’d finished, she went to the back of the library to do her homework. I remember it was quite late, so it must have been a Thursday. We open late on Thursdays.’ She paused. ‘I went to check on her, to see how she was doing, and there he was again. This time he was sitting on her desk. It was our first Christmas without her dad – we lost him to heart disease, so she was pretty vulnerable at the time. We were grieving badly. Anyway, it looked like they were laughing, so I interrupted. He got off the desk when he saw me, and he said something strange like, “I was just showing her a photo of my puppy”, then he quickly left.’

‘Did you ask your daughter what else he might have been saying to her?’

‘I did, but you know what kids are like. She told me he was just showing her a photo of his puppy and some rabbits on his phone. We did have a little talk about grooming and paedophiles, but she shrugged me off, saying “gross” and that hewasn’t like that, that it was just a photo of his dog and a meme with dancing rabbits in it. She accused me of overreacting.’

Gina waited for Jacob to catch up before giving Rona the nod to continue. ‘And after that?’

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