Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

  The third was a bra: gray jersey with small black polka dots. The label inside said “Atmosphere.”

  The fourth was a pair of jeans. Pale denim. The label inside said “Top Shop.”

  The fifth was a pair of scruffy white trainers.

  The sixth was a plain black hoodie with a white drawstring. The label inside said “Next.”

  The seventh was a set of house keys. The fob was a small plastic owl with eyes that lit up when you pressed a button on its stomach.

  The eighth was a pile of exercise books and textbooks, green and rotten with damp.

  The ninth was a pencil case: black and red polka dots, filled with pens and pencils.

  The tenth was a packet of tampons, swollen and obscene.

  The eleventh was a tiny leather purse, purple and red patchwork, with a zip that went around three sides and a red pompom on the zipper.

  The twelfth was a small laptop, old-fashioned and slightly battered looking.

  The last was a passport.

  She pulled the photo closer; Paul leaned toward her and she pushed it so it lay between them.

  A passport.

  Ellie had not taken her passport. Laurel still had Ellie’s passport. She took it from the box of Ellie’s possessions from time to time and gazed at the ghostly face of her daughter, thought of the journeys she’d never take.

  But as she stared at the passport she realized it was not Ellie’s passport.

  It was Hanna’s.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “This is my elder daughter’s passport. We thought she’d lost it. But . . .” She stared down at the photo again, her fingers touching the edges of it. “. . . it’s here. In Ellie’s bag. Where did you find this?”

  “In dense woodlands,” Dane replied. “Not too far from the ferry port. One theory we’re looking at is that she may have been on her way to Europe. Given the passport.”

  Laurel felt a burst of anger, of wrongness. They were looking for evidence that backed up their long-held theory that she’d run away from home. “But her bag,” she said. “With just the things she had when she left, when she was fifteen? And you’re saying that she took the same things with her to leave the country? All those years later? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Dane looked at her almost fondly. “We’ve analyzed the clothing. There’s evidence of intensive wear.”

  Laurel clutched her chest at the mental image of her perfect girl, always so impeccably clean, so fresh-smelling and fragrant, stumbling around in the same clothes for years on end. “So . . . where is she? Where’s Ellie?”

  “We’re looking for her.”

  She could sense that Paul was staring at her, that he needed her to engage with him in order to process this jumble of information. But she could not face his gaze, could not give him any part of herself.

  “You know,” she said, “we were burgled a few years after Ellie went missing. I told the police at the time that I thought it was Ellie. The things that were taken, the lack of forced entry, the sense of . . .” She pulled herself back from talking about unsubstantiated feelings. “She must have taken Hanna’s passport then. She must have . . .”

  She trailed off. Was it possible that the police had been right all along? That she’d run away? That she’d been planning an escape?

  But from where? To where? And why?

  At that moment the door opened and another policeman walked into the room. He approached Dane and he whispered something in his ear. Both men looked toward Laurel and Paul. Then Dane sat straighter, adjusted his tie, and said, “They’ve found human remains.”

  Laurel’s hand instinctively found Paul’s.

  She squeezed it so hard she felt his bones bend.

  9

  THEN

  “What shall we do this summer?”

  Theo, whose head was in Ellie’s lap, turned his face up to her and smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “Let’s do completely nothing.”

  Ellie put down her paperback and rested her hand on Theo’s cheek. “No way,” she said. “I want to do everything. Everything that isn’t revising and learning and studying. I want to go paragliding. Shall we do that? Shall we go paragliding?”

  “So your plan for the summer is basically to die?” Theo laughed. “You are so weird.”

  She punched him gently against his cheek. “I am not weird. I am just ready to fly.”

  “Literally?”

  “Yes, literally. Oh, and Mum says we can use Grammy’s cottage for a few days if we want.”

  Theo beamed at her. “Seriously? Like, just us?”

  “Or we can take some friends.”

  “Or maybe just us?” He nodded, eagerly, playfully, and Ellie laughed.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  It was Saturday afternoon, May, a week before GCSEs. They were in Ellie’s bedroom, taking a break from revision. Outside the sun was shining. Teddy Bear the cat lay by their side and the air was full of pollen and hope. Ellie’s mum always said that May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived. Ellie could feel it all calling to her from the other side of the dark tunnel of exams; she could feel the warm nights and the long days, the lightness of having nothing to do and nowhere to be. She thought of all the things she could do once she’d finished this chapter of her life, all the books she could read and the picnics she could eat and the funfairs and shopping trips and holidays and parties. For a moment she felt breathless with it all; it overwhelmed her and made her stomach roll over and her heart dance.

  “I cannot wait,” she said. “I cannot wait for it all to be over.”

  10

  THEN

  The police investigation into the burglary at Laurel’s house all those years ago had come to nothing. They’d found no fingerprints of any distinction anywhere on the property, checks of CCTV footage from the two hours that Laurel had been out of the house showed no sign of anyone meeting the description of Ellie, or of any teenage girl for that matter. The “thief” had taken an ancient laptop, an old phone of Paul’s, some cash that had been tucked into Laurel’s underwear drawer, a pair of art deco silver candlesticks that had been a wedding present from some very rich people who they weren’t friends with anymore, and a cake that Hanna had baked the day before that had been sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be iced.

  They hadn’t taken any of Laurel’s jewelry—including her wedding and engagement rings, which she’d stopped wearing a few months before and which had been sitting in plain sight on a chest of drawers in her bedroom. They hadn’t taken the Mac, which was newer and more valuable than the laptop they had stolen—and they hadn’t taken her credit cards, which she kept in a drawer in the kitchen so that if she was mugged on the street, they wouldn’t get stolen.

  “It’s possible they ran out of time,” said one of the police officers who arrived at her front door ten minutes after she’d called them. “Or they were stealing to order and knew what they could sell and to who.”

  “It feels strange,” Laurel had said, her arms folded tight around her middle. “It feels—I don’t know. My daughter disappeared four years ago.” She looked up at them, eyed them both directly and uncompromisingly. “Ellie Mack? Remember?”

  They exchanged a glance and then looked back at her.

  “I could sense her,” she said, sounding mad and not caring. “When I walked into the house I could sense my daughter.”

  They exchanged another glance. “Are any of her things missing?”

  She shook her head and then shrugged. “I don’t think so. I’ve been in her room and it looks exactly as it was.”

  There was a beat of silence as the police officers moved awkwardly from foot to foot.

  “We couldn’t see any broken locks or windows. How did the burglar gain access?”

  Laurel blinked slowly. “I don’t know.”

  “Any windows left open?”

  “No, I . . .” She hadn’t even thought abo
ut it. “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you leave a key out?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Leave one with a neighbor? Or a friend?”

  “No. No. The only people who have keys are us. Me, my husband, our children.”

  As the words left her mouth she felt her heart begin to race, the palms of her hands dampen. “Ellie,” she said. “Ellie had a key. When she went missing. In her rucksack. What if . . . ?”

  They stared at her expectantly.

  “What if she came back? From wherever she’s been? Maybe she was desperate? It would explain the fact that only things we don’t care about have been taken. She knows I don’t like those candlesticks. I was always saying I was going to take them on the Antiques Roadshow one day because they were probably worth a fortune. And the cake!”

  “The cake?”

  “Yes. There was a chocolate cake on the counter. My daughter made it. My other daughter. I mean, what sort of burglar takes a cake?”

  “A hungry burglar?”

  “No,” said Laurel, her theory solidifying quickly into fact. “No. Ellie. Ellie would have taken it. She loved Hanna’s cakes. They were her favorite thing, they were—” She stopped. She was going too fast and she was alienating the people who were here to help her.

  No neighbors had seen anything out of the ordinary: most of them had not even been at home at the time of the burglary. Nothing stolen from the house had ever been recovered. And that was that. Another dead end reached. Another gaping hole in Laurel’s life.

  For years, though, she’d stayed close to home, in case Ellie came back again. For years she’d sniff the air every time she returned home from her brief sojourns beyond her front door, looking for the smell of her lost daughter. It was during those years that she finally lost touch with her remaining children. She had nothing left to give them and they grew tired of waiting.

  Then three years ago Laurel had finally given up on Ellie coming home again. She’d accepted that it had been a simple burglary and that she needed to start again, in a new place. Three years ago she’d stepped backward out of her lost daughter’s bedroom for the last time and closed the door behind her with a click so soft that it nearly killed her.

  For three years she had put Ellie from her mind as much as she was able. She’d strapped herself into a new routine, tight and hard, like a straitjacket. For three years she’d internalized her madness, shared it with no one.

  But now the madness was back.

  She climbed into her car near the police station and as she put the car into reverse she stopped for a moment, stopped to suck the madness back down, suck it as far inside as she could get it to go.

  But then she thought of her daughter’s bones being placed at this very moment into plastic bags by strangers in rubber gloves and it burst back up and emerged into the silence of her car as a dreadful roar, her fists pounding the steering wheel, over and over and over again.

  She saw Paul then, across the road, walking toward his own car, the terrible hang of his face, the sag of his shoulders. She saw him stare at her, the shock in his eyes as he registered her fury. And then she saw him begin to walk toward her. She put the car into gear and drove away as fast as she could.

  11

  THEN

  Ellie had not thought too much about Noelle Donnelly since their final lesson.

  According to her mother she had been a “bit arsey” about it, said that had she known her time with Ellie would be cut short, she might not have taken the job and now she had a slot she could not fill, and it was not really the done thing blah blah blah. Her mother had brushed it off when Ellie had said she felt bad.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I think she’s just the type to take umbrage. She’ll be OK. And she’ll definitely find someone to take that slot so close to the exams. Some last-minute panicking parent will snap her up.”

  Ellie had felt reassured by this and removed Noelle Donnelly from the bit of her brain that concerned itself with the here and now. The here and now was oversubscribed as it was.

  In fact it had taken her a moment to place Noelle Donnelly at all when she saw her on the high street that Thursday morning during the May half-term. She was on her way to the library. Her sister had a friend over who had a really loud, really annoying laugh. She needed some peace and quiet. And also a book about the workhouses in the nineteenth century.

  So, in retrospect, she could have blamed her sister’s friend with the loud laugh for her being there at that precise moment, but she really didn’t want to do that. The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind . . . all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

  Noelle’s face formed a complicated smile when she saw Ellie. Ellie scrambled around in the back rooms of her brain for a nanosecond, retrieved what she needed, and then returned the smile.

  “My best student!” Noelle said.

  “Hi!”

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s fine! It’s great! The maths is going really well.”

  “Oh, well, that is grand.” She was wearing a khaki-green waterproof coat in spite of a forecast for warm, dry weather. Her red hair was clipped back from her face with tortoiseshell clasps. She had on cheap black trainers and was clutching a cream canvas bag to her shoulder. “All ready for the big day?”

  “Yes, totally,” she overstated, not wanting to give Noelle an opportunity to chastise her for stopping her tutoring sessions.

  “Tuesday, yes?”

  “Yes. Ten a.m. Then the second paper the week after.”

  Noelle nodded, her eyes never leaving Ellie’s. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been using a practice paper with my other students. They all say it’s been superhelpful. And from what I’ve heard through the grapevine it has a lot of crossover with this year’s paper. If you like I could give you a copy?”

  NO, Ellie screamed at herself from beyond the beyond. NO. I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRACTICE PAPER. But the here-and-now Ellie, the one who wanted to spend her summer paragliding and losing her virginity, the one who was having pizza tonight and seeing her boyfriend tomorrow morning, that Ellie said, “Oh, right. Yes. That could be good.”

  “Now let me see,” said Noelle, touching her lips with her forefinger. “I could drop by this evening. I’ll be close to you then.”

  “Great,” said Ellie. “Yes, that would be great.”

  “Or . . . you know, maybe better still”—she looked at her watch and then briefly behind her—“I’m just here.” She pointed at a side road. “Literally four houses down. Why don’t you pop in now? It’ll take ten seconds.”

  It was busy that Thursday morning. People passed on either side of them. Ellie thought of those people afterward, wondered if they’d noticed, wondered if somewhere in someone’s head there lay an untouched memory of a girl with a rucksack, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans talking to a woman in a khaki waterproof with a Daunt Books shoulder bag. She imagined a Crimewatch reenactment of these moments. Who would they cast as her? Hanna, probably. They were almost the same height these days. And a red-haired female police officer togged up in an ugly green coat, pretending to be Noelle.

  “Were you there,” Nick Robinson would say afterward, eyes narrowed at the camera, “on the morning of Thursday the twenty-sixth of May? Did you see a middle-aged woman with red hair talking to Ellie Mack? They were outside the Red Cross charity shop on Stroud Green Road. It was about ten forty-five a.m. You might remember the weather that day; it was the day of an electrical storm over London. Did you see the woman in the green coat walking with Ellie Mack toward Harlow Road?” The screen would shift to some grainy CCTV footage of Ellie and Noelle walking together up Stroud Green Road—Ellie would look tiny and vulnerable, turning that last corner, heading toward her fate, like a prize idiot. “Please,” Nick would say, “if you remember
anything from that morning, if you saw Ellie Mack on Harlow Road, please get in touch. We’re waiting for your call.”

  But nobody had seen Ellie that morning. No one had noticed her talking to a woman with red hair. No one had seen her walking with her toward Harlow Road. No one had seen Noelle Donnelly unlock the door of a small scruffy house with a flowering cherry tree outside and turn to Ellie and say, “Come on then, in you come.” No one had seen Ellie walk through the door. No one had heard the door close behind her.

  12

  Paul and Laurel buried the partial remains of their daughter on a sunny afternoon at the tail end of an indolent Indian summer. They buried her femurs, her tibias, and most of her skull.

  According to the forensics report, her daughter had been run over by a vehicle, her broken body then dragged some distance through the woodland, buried in a shallow grave, and left for animals to take her bones and scatter them through the woods. For days dogs had swarmed through the woods where she’d been found, looking for more pieces of their daughter, but they’d found nothing else.

  The police trawled local garage records for cars that had been brought in with damage commensurate with hitting a body. They also leafleted the surrounding areas, asking if anyone remembered a female hitchhiker, a passenger on a bus, a young woman with a navy-blue rucksack; had she stayed in your hostel, your home; did you come upon her sleeping rough; do you recognize this face, this girl of fifteen years old, this computer-generated woman of twenty-five? Photos of Laurel’s candlesticks were circulated. Had anyone sold them, seen them, bought them? But no one came forward. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. After a twelve-week flurry of activity everything went still again.

  And now Ellie was dead. The possibility was gone. Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing. Literally nothing.