Page 115 of The Vanishing Place
“June,” Effie murmured.
She raised her arm and her fist slumped against the locked screen door.
Nothing.
“June.” The word caught in her parched throat, and she blinked away hot tears. “June.”
Nothing.
There was a softdrip-drip-dripin the dark as water spotted on the stone steps. Then the first raindrop landed on Effie’s forehead. She slumped forward against the door, trying not to cry. She was so cold and so tired. Her eyes fluttered closed, and it took forever for her to open them again.
She had to move.
Move, Effie. Do something.
Gritting her teeth, she lifted her head and peered through the gloom. There, just a few meters away, glowing in the moonlight, was a pair of gardening shears. She crawled through the long grass, her feet too sore to hold her weight, then she clambered back to the screen door, dragging the shears behind her. With a huge effort, she lifted the long clippers and cut into the mesh. She cut and cut—the metal blades clanging off the doorframe—until she couldn’t hold her arms up anymore.
“Oh god.”
Effie turned her head to the voice, to the figure on the other side of the door in sheepskin slippers and a red checked fleece.
“Oh, my sweet girl.”
June curled herself around her, blocking the world out, and Effie let herself stop.
—
Effie didn’t see anyone except June and Lewis that week. June said there were too many wagging tongues and prying noses in a small town. Best to lay low.
It wasn’t until day three that Effie finally spoke to June, until Tia’s voice wasn’t so loud in her head.
If you tell anyone where we are, I’ll never forgive you.
Sitting opposite June and Lewis at the kitchen table, Effie settled on the half-truth that she’d decided to tell them. Not that lying mattered. Asher was already dead.
“I just needed to get away from Dad,” she whispered. “I need to get as far away from here as possible.”
From him. From the bush. From the itch to go back.
“Effie.” Lewis sat opposite her. “Can you tell us what—”
She shook her head.
Lewis was a policeman now—still supervised, he’d said, but he had a uniform and a badge. So talking to him wasn’t an option. Thepolice would cage Dad in a cement box, and the four gray walls would kill him. And Tia would die from it too.
“Effie, I don’t understand.”
She shook her head again.
Lewis was eighteen now, a man, and looking at him made her palms sweat.
He had cried the morning that Effie showed up, when June had called him and told him to come to the house with food and a first-aid kit. He had squeezed Effie so hard that her ribs hurt, and he’d kept touching her, like he wasn’t convinced she was real. Once, when they thought she was sleeping, Effie had caught June hugging Lewis like Mum used to hug Tia.
—
June and Lewis talked lots over the next week. Effie only participated when they discussed the faraway places that she could escape to.
She had found a globe and spun it halfway around, as far away as she could get, and she’d pressed her finger to a mass of land on the other side. Europe. A continent about twenty thousand kilometers away.
