The Keeper of Lost Things

by Jamie Campbell

  He wound down the window of his ancient brown car, the effort of the manual handle making him puff. “What are you doing here, you stupid girl?”

  I stood up and trudged toward the car, hoping nobody was watching our pathetic exchange. “I was going to get you a lamp for your birthday. But I guess that surprise is now blown.”

  “Get in,” Uncle Marvin replied. He fixed his gaze forward and didn’t look at me again while I climbed into his rust-bucket and secured my seatbelt.

  He didn’t believe me but he didn’t interrogate me any further. Even that was out of my uncle’s usual behavior. He was usually nosey when it came to what I was up to.

  Perhaps he was also up to no good?

  Was he staying quiet because he didn’t want me asking him the same questions he wanted from me?

  It was possible. It seemed like my grumpy Uncle Marvin was full of surprises these days. After all, he didn’t mention dinner once on the drive home.

  I went straight to the kitchen and cooked up some beans on toast for our gourmet dinner. The meal was on the table in under ten minutes, quite the effort on my behalf.

  Matilda meowed at me until I fed her too. Kicking up more of a fuss than the grump glaring at me across the table. My whole world was turning upside down.

  I had to know why Uncle Marvin was acting so strangely. The last thing I wanted to do was suspect him of having something to do with my father’s vanishing act but in all the time I’d known him, he never altered his routine like this.

  Something was going on with him.

  Really, there was only one option left for me to pursue. I needed information and Uncle Marvin wasn’t exactly lining up to offer it to me. It was easier getting money out of him and that was really saying something.

  “Would you like some ice cream for dessert?” I said to the quiet room.

  Uncle Marvin grumbled something under his breath which I took as a yes. I cleaned up the plates and scooped some chocolate ice cream into a bowl. Before I gave the serving to my uncle, I had one more ingredient to add.

  A sedative.

  I’d seen him use them before when he claimed the idiot doctor didn’t know what had given him the flu and was trying to knock him out instead of fixing him. So I knew they weren’t dangerous. I hoped they didn’t have much of a taste.

  I stirred in the capsules until they melted and then added some sprinkles on top just to be sure they were well and truly disguised. Crossing my fingers, I placed it in front of him.

  He guzzled it down in no time.

  While I did the dishes, Uncle Marvin retreated to his usual place in front of the television with a beer in hand. He flicked on the news and sighed with all the effort of a long, hard day.

  Was it good to mix alcohol with sedatives?

  I hoped it would be okay.

  My homework had to wait while I discreetly supervised the effects of the prescription drug. A check every five minutes made sure he hadn’t stopped breathing.

  On the second check, he was fine.

  On the seventh check, he was sound asleep.

  It was time to go snooping.

  Chapter 17

  Uncle Marvin’s bedroom was like a horrible dentist’s office. It wasn’t somewhere you really wanted to go but sometimes you just had to.

  It had been years since I had cause to enter his personal realm. The last time was when I nine and he confiscated my library book. It wasn’t so much that I wanted the book back, more that I didn’t want to pay another fine at the public library.

  I hadn’t got caught the last time and I hoped I wouldn’t this time either. Uncle Marvin had seemed out for the count when I last checked on him. He wasn’t likely to wake up in the next twenty minutes, at least.

  Not unless he’d developed superhuman powers recently.

  Because I was forbidden from entering this room, it meant I didn’t have to clean it either. Leaving Uncle Marvin to clean anything was always a dangerous game. There could be any number of deadly bacteria growing all over the place.

  Like E.coli lingering under the piles of dirty clothes.

  Or cholera hiding in the empty used glasses of water gathering like it’s a party on his bedside table.

  I didn’t even want to think about the stray underwear dotted across the floor.

  My feet were planted carefully with every step I took, making sure not to disturb or accidently touch something I didn’t want to. The closet was practically a cornucopia of secrets so I carefully made my way there.

  The double doors could almost swing all the way open before they caught on some stray clothes. With most of his articles on the floor, it didn’t leave many hanging on the racks.

  Which worked in my favor.

  On the shelf above the hanging racks was a box that was ringed by a layer of dust that hadn’t been disturbed in a long time–at first glance.

  At second glance, there was a disturbance in the dust. The box had been moved recently, a new layer of dust not having time to settle just yet.

  I pulled out the box that was only as big as a shoebox and set it on the floor. It felt like I should be wearing gloves to hide my fingerprints or something but figured Uncle Marvin would never go to those extremes to work out who had been in his room. If he noticed at all–which I was counting on him not doing–he would automatically call me guilty and apply punishment as he deemed fit. There would be no trial by jury, no presumption of innocence. If Uncle Marvin was a Supreme Court judge, there would be nobody left on the outside.

  The box was full of personal items, mainly photographs in amongst his birth certificate, old driver’s licenses and a… marriage certificate?

  When on earth was Uncle Marvin married?

  Who would have agreed to that proposal?

  I tried to imagine him in love, cavorting with a pretty lady and trying to impress her. The image in my head was wrong, all wrong. Uncle Marvin definitely wasn’t the wooing type. I shoved the certificate back in the box and tried to wipe the memory of seeing it all together.

  The photographs were safer.

  At least they didn’t conjure up nightmarish scenes.

  I flipped through each of them. Some of them were in black and white, pictures of two little boys with cheeky dimples and mischievous minds. Someone had taken the time to handwrite names on the backs of the photographs.

  Marvin and Marshall.

  Marshall and Marvin.

  They were so cute when they were little. The boys were in the playground, in front of the house, riding in the backseat of a car, playing with a shaggy dog. They looked just like perfect little happy kids.

  It was sweet to see this side of them. The only Marvin I’d ever known was cynical, never afraid to share his disappointment, and seeing the negative in everything. My father? Well, my greatest memory was watching his back as he left.

  These two little boys seemed nothing like them. They had the world at their feet and were excited about every single thing they saw and did.

  What happened to them?

  One was now raising his niece and the other had vanished into thin air one day.

  If their mother was still alive, she probably would have been asking the same question.

  I replaced the photographs in the box and secured the lid once more. I took extra care in making sure it was in the exact same position I found it and checked the rest of the closet.

  I wasn’t even sure what I was actually looking for. A smoking gun, perhaps? Maybe. It was answers I was looking for and they could have taken any form. They certainly weren’t in the old pictures kept in the shoebox.

  Rifling through his chest of drawers turned up nothing but a messy pile of clothes that I moved around with the pointy end of a wooden backscratcher.

  If Uncle Marvin hid all his secrets in the bedroom, I didn’t know where. I left the room no further ahead than when I had entered. Except now I felt sadness when I remembered the photographs.

  I really hoped he didn’t have anything to do wit
h his brother’s disappearance. The little boy in the pictures never would have harmed his brother. They were mates, friends, comrades, partners in crime. They wouldn’t have dreamed of ever growing apart or being capable of harming one another.

  Creeping down the stairs, I checked in on my uncle to make sure he was still breathing–he was. His head was leaning back on the armchair, his mouth wide open while he snored as loud as a sonic boom.

  I hoped I hadn’t used too much sedative.

  Was it possible to die from an overdose of sleeping tablets?

  It was best that I kept the poisons hotline on speed dial until he woke up.

  I did my homework in the living room, something I never did because Uncle Marvin would tell me I was turning the pages too loudly or my pencil was scratching the paper noisily. He definitely wasn’t complaining tonight.

  By bedtime he was still in the same position–but still breathing too. I reluctantly went to bed, hoping he would have died by now if the sedative was going to have a harmful effect.

  I checked on him several times in the night.

  He was alive with every check.

  In the morning I was dressed and ready to pretend nothing had happened when I went downstairs. My heart skipped a beat when Uncle Marvin wasn’t in the living room. It took a few frantic seconds to find him in the kitchen.

  He was nursing a mug of steaming hot coffee, his eyes bloodshot. It was time for my acting to begin. “Good morning,” I said happily.

  “Nothing good about it,” he replied.

  “Is everything alright?”

  “I’m tired. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

  My hand covered my slight smile. He may not have thought he slept at all but my sleepless night told otherwise. He slept like the dead, it should have been me complaining about fatigue.

  I had breakfast and got out of there before he started searching for the Berocca (we didn’t have any). My night of drug-induced peace had turned up nothing. My trip to the burned down house had turned up zilch. It felt like I was just running around in circles and not getting any closer to finding my dad.

  Mrs. Justice was in her garden outside. I gave her a wave as I passed but moved too quickly to stop and chat. At the school gate I did more avoiding as I stayed away from Frankie. I just couldn’t deal with the ramifications of the kiss yet, I hadn’t properly processed it.

  Achieving a personal best of managing to stay away from Frankie for the whole day, I was feeling pretty good about the day by the end of it.

  My feet moved to start the walk home.

  Until someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned around and came face to face with the boy who had kissed me. My face quickly blushed at seeing him again and instantly looking at his lips.

  “Hey, I’ve been looking for you all day,” Frankie said jovially, like he hadn’t even thought that I might have been avoiding him. He was so sweet and innocent, he had no business being corrupted by me.

  “I’ve been busy,” I replied. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  Understanding crossed his face. “Oh, I don’t know. I just wanted to hang out. I haven’t seen you since yesterday. Lunchtime.” At that moment, he realized what had happened at lunchtime yesterday.

  My cheeks burned deeper.

  I needed to change the subject quickly or I was going to burst into flames and instantly combust. “Did you see the news last night?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said eagerly, relieved at the topic change just as much as I was. Apparently neither of us were equipped with enough emotional intelligence to discuss the kiss.

  That epic kiss.

  That I had to forget about because clearly it wasn’t going to happen again.

  “The police found my father’s wallet in a house that burned down. I went to the place but didn’t really find anything but a business card.”

  “Was the card for fire safety?”

  “No, it was for Julia Golden Designs. It was the name of one of Dad’s customers.” I waited a moment to let that sink in. “So I went and visited them. Didn’t get anywhere.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  I ran over the short conversation between myself and the shop assistant. There was no point glossing over my complete and utter failure to gain any information from the woman.

  She still scared me a little.

  Even just thinking about her.

  “She wouldn’t give me any information about her computer guy,” I finished. On purpose, I left out details about Uncle Marvin picking me up. That would only make him seem a little bit more shady and I didn’t want that.

  “What information were you looking for?” Frankie asked. He was full of questions that afternoon. He only needed a spotlight and he would have been able to join the police force as their case closer.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was kind of hoping she felt either good things or bad things about my dad. If I knew what she thought, then I might be able to tell what kind of connection she had with him. If she loved his services then she probably didn’t have anything to do with his vanishing act or the house that burned down.”

  “You said it’s on Conrad Street, right?” I nodded. “Then let’s go. You know what bus to take, lead me there.”

  He was already walking when I replied. “It’s a dead end, Frankie. She didn’t think much about her computer guy at all, which means it’s probably just a coincidence that I found that business card in the house. Maybe someone else was looking for house decorations.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s worth a second shot, right?”

  At that moment I wondered what I would do without Frankie. He had bashed into my life completely without fear or judgement and was now the only thing that was keeping me going.

  And he had kissed me.

  I shook my head so the thoughts would loosen and fall out but they were determined to stay lodged in my consciousness. Frankie and I rode the bus together, all the way back to the same place I had stood almost twenty-four hours earlier.

  “That’s the place?” He pointed to the shop, now proudly displaying an ‘Open’ sign.

  “Yeah. But the woman is really mean, she won’t tell you anything.”

  Frankie just smiled. “She hasn’t met Frankie Bolero yet.” He confidently strode inside while I hid just down the street. I didn’t believe he would be very long, the woman would kick him out the moment she suspected something was off.

  The minutes ticked by.

  They turned into twenty.

  Then thirty.

  It was a large crowd of minutes by the time Frankie returned and found me sitting in the gutter. I would have gladly sat on a seat if there were any around.

  The gutter seemed appropriate anyway.

  Frankie sat beside me, silent.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  “Nobody can resist the charms of Frankie Bolero,” he said triumphantly. “I had a lovely chat with Winnie. She told me her entire life story.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Of course not! Winnie is a lovely lady, knows everything possible about home decor. We shared an ice tea.”

  I pushed him playfully, unable to believe he had spoken to the same woman I did. There was no way she had given him something to drink. “No way.”

  “Way.” He grinned with the smile of a thousand cheeky monkeys. “She said she would love to refer me to her computer guy but she was in the middle of finding a new one. If I pop back in over the next few weeks she’ll let me know who she found.”

  “Did she say what happened to her old computer guy?” Like, my father? The one who was currently missing, possibly under mysterious circumstances?

  “Said he wasn’t working out. It could have been because her current one is MIA.”

  I sighed all the air out of my lungs. “She probably heard about the disappearance and knows she isn’t going to get Marshall Gabrielle to fix her computers a
nytime soon. His business calls are probably going unanswered.”

  “Probably.”

  I was looking for connections where there weren’t any. Just because I’d found the business card in the same place the police found my father’s wallet, it didn’t mean there was something more to the relationship.

  I was grasping at straws and it was only wasting time–both mine and Frankie’s. Our time would have been better spent doing homework. At least that would have solved one problem.

  My phone beeped with a text message. I retrieved my cell from my backpack automatically while I continued the conversation. “I can’t believe she gave you ice tea.”

  “She put a slice of lemon in it too.”

  “Now you’re just rubbing it in.” My attention momentarily flicked to my cell phone. The text was from Samantha:

  Would love to catch up sometime. April misses you. Sam xx.

  I showed Frankie the text before my screen went dark. “My stepmother sure is doing her best impression of someone that cares.”

  “Maybe she genuinely cares,” Frankie said. I considered his comment. In my experience people rarely did things because they genuinely cared.

  People wanted things.

  People tried to get what they wanted.

  They didn’t actually care.

  “Hey, isn’t there some statistic that says most crimes are done by someone people know?” I threw the thought out there, tried to see if it stuck to anything.

  “I guess.”

  “What about if Samantha has something to do with my father’s disappearance? She could be being nice to me to throw me off track.”

  Frankie tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear, it had escaped with the wind whipping around us. “Or she could just be being nice.”

  Nah, nobody was nice for no reason.

  “I’ll keep a close eye on her,” I said. There was no point in corrupting Frankie further. One day he would work out the world wasn’t full of rainbows and unicorns. Until then, I didn’t want to be the person to darken the world for him.

  We didn’t take the bus home. We walked instead. It was a nice day and we weren’t in a particular hurry to get anywhere. As much as I wanted to continue my search, I had no leads. There was little I could think to do that would help.