Page 95 of The Vanishing Place
“Tia,” said Effie. “And the picture. What about Tia’s body? And Hana?”
Morrow pressed her hands together in front of her face.
“Look,” she sighed. “My team were all over that hut for a day and a half.”
Effie knew what was coming; she knew, and yet she wasn’t ready.
“They didn’t find a trace of your sister, or anyone else,” said Morrow. “No clothes, no sanitary items, no personal belongings, no pictures. Nothing. We need to wait on DNA, of course, butthat could take months. And even then, any female DNA could belong to Anya.”
“What about the notes?” asked Effie. “The pages I found under the floorboards?”
I’m terrified that I’m losing her to him.
“Tia wrote those,” said Effie. “Tia was there.”
You escaped. You lived.
“Yes.” There was a softening to Morrow’s face. “But they weren’t dated. They could have been written years ago.”
The reality ached in the center of Effie’s chest, stabbing at her like a hot needle. But she wasn’t ready for it.
“Effie, we think your sister has been gone for a long time. And that, most likely, the girl has invented her. That, essentially, Anya has been imagining a mother figure. That she’s created a parent as a way to survive. It’s possible that Anya invented this Hana person too. As a friend or a companion perhaps. Someone to talk to.”
Morrow touched her fingers to her lips.
“We’ve been through the missing persons records, going back years, but there’s no mention of anyone called Hana.” She looked at Effie. “Do you have any idea who it could be? Growing up, did you come across a Hana in Koraha maybe, or did your dad ever mention her?”
“No.” Effie sank back into the chair. She’d asked herself the same question a hundred times. “I never knew a Hana.”
“I see.” Morrow gave an unsurprised nod.
Effie kept her expression even and focused on the weight of Lewis’s hand on her leg.
“The hut was flooded with evidence of the girl and Four,” said Morrow. “It was just the two of them living there.”
“But,” Lewis ventured, “someone else had to have tied Anya up. When your colleagues found her, she was in that crate, secured.”
“The knots around her wrists were slack,” said Wilson. “And the ones around her ankles were sloppy at best.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lewis.
“She’d tied herself up,” Wilson continued. “As punishment.”
“For what?”
“For leaving him, perhaps,” said Morrow. “Or…”
She paused, her expression unreadable, then she slid another piece of paper onto the table. It was the drawing Anya had done—two bodies with two sentences scrawled underneath.
Mum broke his rules. Mum wouldn’t say sorry.
Morrow didn’t need to say anything. She tapped the pieces of paper with her fingertips—the suicide note, then Anya’s picture. The writing was unmistakably similar. The tightness of thes. The curl to they.
“The other possibility,” said Morrow eventually, “is that Anya poisoned her uncle…and wrote the note.”
Effie shook her head, but the words fired through her.
Morrow pulled the paper back. “Obviously, there are still a number of things we need to follow up on, and it will be a bit of a wait until we hear from the lab, but we’re pretty confident that we’ve got everything we need.”
