The Vanishing

by Gabrielle Lord

  Quietly she unlocked the front door. With Phoenix close behind her, she stepped inside.

  They made their way upstairs and then into Anika’s room where Jazz closed the door with relief.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jazz. ‘Let’s see if I’m right.’

  ‘Hey, be careful!’ he said. ‘You’re about to tread on the squeaky floorboard.’

  ‘Help me shift the rug,’ she said. ‘The squeaky floorboard is the clue!’

  Phoenix got it straightaway. ‘It’s loose! That’s why it squeaks, right?’

  Together they pushed back the bed and pulled out the rug, revealing the bare floorboards underneath.

  ‘Look,’ pointed Jazz. ‘There are no nails fastening it down.’ She lifted the edge of the floorboard easily, while Phoenix shone his phone’s torchlight into the small cavity underneath. Jazz reached in and felt around. Her hand touched something square and solid. She carefully lifted the box out of its hiding place. It was wooden and the initials LT could still faintly be seen, pencilled on the top of the lid.

  ‘Open it!’ Phoenix whispered.

  Cautiously, Jazz lifted the lid.

  They peered into the interior. A stained envelope lay at the bottom of the box and written on it, in round handwriting, was the name ‘Linda Taylor’.

  Jazz froze.

  ‘What are you waiting for? We have to see what’s in it,’ urged Phoenix.

  ‘But Sinclair’s instructions were not to touch anything inside it. He said to just describe what could be seen in the box. If we open the envelope, he’ll know, and Anika might . . .’

  As Jazz tensed up, it seemed Phoenix’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I know what to do,’ he reassured her. ‘He won’t know that we’ve looked inside, I promise.’

  ‘You got a portable X-ray machine in your backpack?’ Jazz said dryly.

  Phoenix smirked. ‘Not quite. Like you said back at Sinclair’s—let’s go old school. Come on.’

  Clutching the jewellery box, Jazz followed Phoenix as they crept back down the staircase and into the kitchen.

  Phoenix put the electric kettle on.

  ‘You’re making tea?’ asked Jazz as she perched on a stool near a bench. ‘White with one, thanks.’

  Phoenix ignored her as he stood by the kettle. When it was steaming, he took the jewellery box, opened it, and removed the envelope. Keeping his fingers at the very edge to avoid burning them, he moved the envelope backwards and forwards along the jet of steam. Within seconds the gum had softened. He removed the envelope from the steam, shaking it, cooling it down.

  ‘Let me undo it,’ said Jazz, putting her hand out to take it. ‘I’m the one who worked out where it was.’

  Reluctantly Phoenix handed the envelope over. ‘Be really careful,’ he warned. ‘It’s got to look exactly the same as it did before.’

  Using only the most delicate pressure, Jazz peeled the triangular fold of paper back from the main body of the envelope with her fingertips.

  ‘What’s in it?’ Phoenix asked, peering inside as Jazz held the envelope open.

  She looked closely too and then pulled back in disgust. ‘Yuck! How gross!’

  Phoenix tore off a clean piece of kitchen paper from a roll on the wall, and delicately emptied the contents of the envelope onto it.

  Together they stared at the grisly items.

  ‘Nail clippings,’ said Jazz, grimacing. ‘And a lock of hair.’

  ‘With the right analysis, they’ll prove how Linda Sinclair was murdered.’

  ‘You think they’ll still hold traces of the poison?’

  Phoenix nodded. ‘This is what she was talking about in the journal—what she was going to get her sister to hand over to the police. She must have become too weak before she got the chance. Maybe Neil found out and upped her dosage.’

  Jazz paced the kitchen as Phoenix pulled an evidence bag from his backpack and started tweezering in the nail clippings and hair.

  ‘Phoenix, what are you doing?’

  ‘What do you mean, what am I doing? This is what we’ve been looking for—direct evidence.’

  ‘It’s not that simple! Don’t you see? This is also Anika’s ticket home. We have to hand over the box so the Belmonts can tell Sinclair they have what he wants.’

  ‘And let him get away with it, with murder?!’

  ‘Better than him murdering Anika!’ Jazz cried.

  Phoenix put the tweezers back on the bench. ‘Jazz,’ he said, his voice unexpectedly soft, ‘there’s no guarantee that Sinclair will let her go. Just think about it. She is a key witness against him. If we take this evidence for analysis we will have something concrete for the police.’

  ‘But if he suspects . . .’

  ‘He won’t. Look, I’ll probably only need a small amount of the sample. I’ll put the rest back.’

  He returned most of the grisly items to the envelope which had contained them for over twenty years, pressing down the gummy seal again and replacing the whole thing back in the jewellery box.

  The sound of car doors slamming startled them both.

  ‘Anika’s parents, they’re back!’ hissed Jazz.

  They heard the front door open.

  Phoenix pocketed his samples as Jazz stared guiltily at the kitchen door. What were the Belmonts going to think when they walked in and found them there?

  <07:55>

  Anika’s parents came into the kitchen. Jazz saw the usually poised and elegant Mrs Belmont looking dishevelled and wretched. The anguish of the last day and a half was etched all over her face. She barely registered Jazz and Phoenix, and simply slumped onto a chair at the table.

  ‘Jazmine!’ said Mr Belmont, sharply. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Jazz picked up the box. ‘Mr Belmont, Mrs Belmont, we found the jewellery box.’ She held it out to them.

  Mr Belmont squinted. ‘Where did you find that?’ His tone was far from friendly. ‘We tore the house to pieces and couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘In Anika’s room,’ Jazz stuttered. ‘We—’

  ‘In Anika’s room?’ Mr Belmont cut her off. ‘What were you doing in there?’

  ‘I, we—’

  ‘My wife said you told her you knew nothing about the jewellery box! Why did you lie to us?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Belmont, please believe me! I didn’t lie! All I knew then was that the kidnapper wanted some box I’d never even heard of!’

  ‘What are you two up to?’ demanded Mr Belmont, the anger on his face mixed with grief and bewilderment. He suddenly noticed Phoenix, standing awkwardly in the corner of the kitchen. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘This is Phoenix Lyons—’

  Mr Belmont cut her off. ‘Give me that box immediately!’

  Jazz passed it to him but Mr Belmont just seemed to get angrier. ‘Did you have something to do with my daughter’s disappearance?’ he demanded, glaring at Phoenix.

  ‘Mr Belmont,’ Jazz pleaded, ‘you’re getting things all wrong! We’re trying to help. Anika is my best friend in the world and Phoenix is helping me. Please listen to me. I can explain everything.’

  Mr Belmont glared at both of them. ‘Has this whole thing been a set-up—some sort of vicious prank? That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Stop blaming them, Harvey!’ interrupted Mrs Belmont. ‘They didn’t do it. We need to tell the kidnapper that we have the box. Now!’

  ‘Fine. I’ll deal with you two later. For the moment, let’s look in the box.’

  Phoenix and Jazz watched as Mr and Mrs Belmont opened the jewellery box and peered in. Jazz was relieved to see that the envelope looked exactly as it did when they’d found it.

  ‘It’s only an envelope with a name written on it,’ said Mrs Belmont. ‘Is this what they want in exchange for my daughter?’

  Her incredulous question went unanswered. Mr Belmont pulled out his phone and clicked on the link to the blog the kidnapper had sent and started typing.

  > BELMONT <

  I’ve located the box. Inside is an envelope
with the name Linda Taylor written on it. How do I get it to you? Is my daughter safe?

  An anxious minute passed as they waited for a response.

  > IDENTITY WITHHELD <

  This is what you must do if you value your daughter’s life. Go to Monash Park at 20:00 hours tonight. Place the box on the floor of the summerhouse in the middle of the park. Your daughter will be returned to you then. NO POLICE. Any police and the deal’s off. You’ll never see your daughter again.

  ‘That’s hours away!’ cried Mrs Belmont. ‘Oh, please, please let my darling Anika be OK.’

  ‘I’m sure everything will be fine now, Mrs Belmont,’ Jazz said reassuringly. ‘You have what the kidnapper needs, there’s no reason for them to hold Anika any longer.’

  She saw Phoenix giving her a look from across the kitchen that betrayed the concerns they’d shared just moments before. She tried to send ‘Be reassuring’ vibes to him but instead he cleared his throat and said, ‘So, what’s the plan for the drop-off?’

  Mr Belmont had been gripping the kitchen bench for support, his head drooping, but now it snapped to attention.

  ‘Plan? There’s nothing to plan! I take the box to Monash Park, hand it over, and we get our precious girl back.’ He eyeballed first Phoenix and then Jazz and when he spoke again his voice was gruff. ‘Look, thank you for your help with the box, and I’m sorry about what I might have said or suggested—’

  ‘It’s OK, Mr Belmont,’ Jazz interrupted. ‘We know you’re under a lot of stress.’

  ‘Yes, we both are,’ he said, walking over and putting an arm around his wife. ‘We can resolve this tonight. However, we need you both to understand that this is a family matter. We will take care of it.’

  ‘Jazz, Phoenix, thank you for your help, but we’ll take it from here,’ Mrs Belmont added.

  Both Jazz and Phoenix could read this as their cue to go.

  <07:30>

  ‘What if your mum’s home?’ asked Jazz, as they hurried towards Phoenix’s house. ‘Will she let you into the lab?’

  ‘Don’t worry about her. I’ve got it covered,’ Phoenix said mysteriously, turning up the front path.

  Phoenix bolted into his house, Jazz hot on his heels, the little packet of fingernails and hair tucked into his pocket.

  ‘Mum!’ he called. ‘Are you here?’

  ‘I’m just on my way out,’ Dr Lyons called before coming into the living room. ‘Phoenix, what is it? Where have you been? You’ve done none of the chores we agreed. We’re going to have to have a serious—’

  She stopped herself as she noticed Jazz.

  ‘Excuse me, I didn’t realise you were here . . .’ She nodded at Jazz, but her eyes were on her son. ‘Phoenix?’ she said, exasperation creeping back into her voice. ‘Are you going to introduce your friend? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your manners as well as your responsibilities.’

  ‘Mum, this is Jazmine, I mean Jazz, but that’s not important right now.’

  ‘Phoenix!’ Dr Lyons admonished.

  ‘No, Mum, you don’t understand. Jazz and me, we need your help. We need to get into the lab.’

  ‘Jazmine, it is a pleasure to meet you, but I’m afraid you must excuse us. I need to have a serious conversation with my son. Perhaps you’d like to help yourself to a drink from the kitchen?’ Jazz took a step towards the door, keen to escape this awkward family scenario, but was stopped by Phoenix’s yell.

  ‘Mum! There’s no time!’

  ‘I would say time is exactly what you do have Phoenix. You’ve had more than enough of it to write a letter of apology to your principal, which is what we agreed had to happen before you got any further work as my lab assistant.’

  Jazz tried to make herself as small as she could in the corner. She hadn’t really believed Phoenix actually helped his mum for real.

  ‘I’ve got it right here,’ Phoenix was saying, rummaging in his backpack. He pulled out a typed letter with his signature at the bottom.

  His mum took it, her look of confusion deepening as she read through.

  ‘Phoenix, I don’t understand. Your father and I have been asking you to do this since the day you were suspended.’

  ‘I was up late last night doing some . . . programming,’ Phoenix explained, winking at Jazz, ‘and I figured I may as well get it written. It says all the right things, doesn’t it? Can I go in the lab now?’

  Dr Lyons waved a hand in the air. ‘It’s beautifully written, Phoenix. I just wonder where this contrition suddenly came from.’

  ‘I did the wrong thing, I admit it. I was bored, OK? I’m good at computers, really good, and the stuff we do in class is just so easy. It was a challenge. Call it an extracurricular project.’

  ‘Hardly one I can see you getting extra credit for,’ remarked his mother, drily.

  ‘I’ve got something way more interesting to do now, thanks to Jazz. But we need to get into the lab. Please, Mum?’

  Dr Lyons sighed. ‘I feel like there’s more to this than I can immediately understand, but I can’t argue that you’ve kept your side of the deal. OK.’

  Phoenix grinned. ‘You’re the best. Just one other thing—where do you keep the books on heavy metal spectrometry?’

  Dr Lyons had a work appointment, so after pointing Phoenix to the right resources, she left them in the lab.

  ‘Ready to do some real science?’ Phoenix said to Jazz. He leafed through the lab book that his mother had given him until he found the references to heavy tests. Following the instructions, he prepared the nail clippings and the hair.

  First he rinsed them with acetone chloroform and de-ionised water, then carefully weighed half a gram each of the hair and nails, and placed the two samples in separate glass beakers. He then heated the samples on a hot plate and allowed them to cool.

  ‘Now we can put them in the mass spectrometer,’ he said, satisfied.

  Jazz looked at the machine he was indicating. It looked like a very large microwave oven minus the front window. It had a printer and another unit attached to it.

  ‘What does it do?’ she asked.

  ‘Basically you put either an electric or magnetic charge through whatever you’re testing and the heat separates all the different components in the sample. It’s kind of like trying to un-mix a cake after it’s already been mixed up.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I think I’ve read about it,’ Jazz said. ‘Detectives can use it in arson investigations, to help figure out what started the fire.’

  ‘Sure, but true crime books normally only give you the end result. Watching how it happens? That’s pure science.’ Phoenix gave a self-satisfied smile and flicked his hair.

  What a show-off, thought Jazz.

  Phoenix added an acid solution, then loaded the resulting samples into an autosampler cup. These went into the graphite furnace, and Phoenix waited for the automated process to do the rest. It was impressive-looking and Jazz wondered if Phoenix might be trying to impress her.

  ‘So what happens next?’ Jazz asked.

  ‘I’ve switched the machine on. You’ll see the contents of the tube start to heat up and glow red. It will incinerate, releasing fumes that contain the elements in the nails and hair. Then the spectrometer program will analyse and identify the elements, matching them against a database of known minerals and chemicals until a result is found.’

  Jazz waited expectantly. But nothing happened.

  Phoenix pressed the ‘Start Process’ button again, frowning.

  Once again, the samples remained exactly as he’d left them, in their small containers.

  ‘They’re not doing anything,’ Jazz said, giving him a hard look. ‘Is this a repeat of you and the DNA machine? Do you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘Of course I do! I’ve helped Mum prepare and load samples heaps of times.’

  ‘So why isn’t it working?’

  Phoenix tried to initiate the automated process one more time. To no avail. He could feel his face starting to go red.

  ‘Hey,
Einstein! Maybe you need me to help you!’

  Phoenix turned around to see Jazz holding up the electric cord and plug.

  ‘How about we switch the power on? First rule: check power supply. It must have come out from the wall,’ she said, grinning.

  She pushed the plug home and immediately the automated process began.

  They watched the samples glowing through the glass window of the spectrometer.

  ‘Once the samples have been all burned up, the computer program does its magic,’ said Phoenix, recovering his dignity as he explained. ‘The process doesn’t take long. See! It’s printing out already.’

  The print-out was a graph of peaks and valleys. Phoenix scanned the results, ignoring the usual components found in fingernails like zinc, magnesium, chromium, calcium and other trace elements. His eyes were riveted on one word—a heavy mineral that shouldn’t have been there and certainly not in such a high concentration.

  He stared at the word.

  The mass spectrometer had found something bad in the nails and hair clippings. Something very bad indeed.

  Phoenix looked up from the print-out and met Jazz’s expectant gaze.

  ‘Linda Sinclair was right to suspect her husband of murder,’ he breathed.

  <05:58>

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Jazz. ‘Arsenic?’

  Phoenix shook his head. ‘That’s what I’d thought too, as soon as I saw those nail and hair clippings. But there was no arsenic.’

  ‘What then?’ asked Jazz. ‘The suspense is killing me!’

  ‘Instead,’ he tapped a finger against the print-out, ‘the mass spectrometer analysis shows very high—lethal—amounts of thallium.’

  ‘Thallium?’ said Jazz. She flicked through Dr Lyons’ reference book until she found the right page and read out: