The Keeper of Lost Things Read online

  I felt every eye in the room staring at me. They were all googly-eyed monsters, ready to laugh at me with any excuse. “It’s thirteen hundred and two. May I please go the restroom?”

  Mrs. Keating wasn’t happy about it, her reluctance found its way into a loud sigh. Still, she couldn’t legally deny me my basic rights as a human being.

  The right to pee.

  It was very important.

  “Yes, okay, go on. Be quick,” she said.

  All the googly eyes followed me to the door. I left them there as I ran down the corridor.

  I didn’t need to use the restroom, at least not for the purpose it was designed for. I needed to get out of the classroom, away from all prying expressions so I could process the kiss in private.

  The stalls were all empty as I entered the female restroom in A block. I hurried into one and closed the lid of the toilet so I could use it as a seat. Locking the door, it was my own private space in the otherwise very public school.

  I’d never been kissed before. I guessed that was the last time I would be able to say that. I was now very well kissed, accustomed to the feeling of lips upon my own.

  Frankie’s lips had been wonderful–warm and tasting a bit like chocolate. When I licked my lips now they had the faint trace of Frankie attached to them.

  The one thing I knew for sure was that I would never, ever forget that kiss.

  I wanted more.

  That single kiss was addictive, making me crave more and more. My cheeks flushed pink with the thought of sharing more kisses with Frankie.

  Would he want more with me?

  Was he regretting it now?

  My stomach was twisted with knots so tight that it was possible they’d stay that way permanently. Only one person could untie them and he was still sitting in class.

  I both dreaded and looked forward to seeing him alone again.

  My cell phone suddenly pinged in my pocket. I pulled it out to see what had made the noise. It wasn’t the usual text message sound or a ringtone.

  It was a search alert.

  When my father first went missing I had set up an alert for any mentions of his name on the internet. So far all I’d had were a few articles about his initial disappearance. They hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.

  With the kiss pushed to the back of my mind momentarily, I followed the link to the site in question. It was a streaming news site, reporting events from all around the world.

  My father was mentioned in an article posted only half an hour earlier. It was in connection with a property that had been burned down to the ground last night.

  I couldn’t see the connection, skimming through the article until I found the details I was looking for. When the fire inspectors were sifting through the rubble and looking for the cause of the inferno, they found an item belonging to one Marshall Gabrielle.

  His wallet.

  They were positive it was his as his driver’s license and credit cards were still in the holders. It wouldn’t make sense to belong to anyone else.

  I read with more investment into the details now. I scanned the words, trying to find the ones that I didn’t want to know. Like whether they found the charred remains of a body in the fire. Or whether they suspected that something shifty was going on in the property.

  They mentioned neither.

  That was a good thing, right?

  If they found remains they would have reported it, right?

  My heart was beating faster than it should have. It wasn’t for the good reasons now. I was filled with the dread of something horrible happening to my father.

  Marshall Gabrielle wasn’t just a name to me. He wasn’t an inconsequential part of the article about another building that had been burned to the ground because someone fell asleep with a cigarette in their mouth.

  He was real.

  He was my father.

  No matter how many times I had told myself he didn’t deserve to be a part of my life, the knowledge underneath it all said that I would have run back into his arms if he opened them for me. I would have turned back into that six-year-old little girl and squealed with delight, never to let him go again.

  To stop the panic quickly building, I laid out all the explanations I could think of for his wallet being in that building.

  Someone robbed him and then that criminal’s house had burned down. He was now walking around without his wallet but with his life.

  He had been in the house when it caught fire. He had escaped so quickly he lost his wallet and couldn’t go back for it because of all the flames.

  He had been in the house when it burned down and he couldn’t get out. The police were withholding the details of his body being found.

  My father had planted the wallet so people would think he had perished. He could have burned the house down himself to fake his own death.

  It was a different man named Marshall Gabrielle who was also missing. It was just a big coincidence that he shared a name with my father.

  None of the options seemed more plausible than the others. I just had no idea of what could have happened. The creeping feeling of only one person being able to explain it all washed over me. My father could tell quite the story if he was ever found.

  I’d been staring at the article for ten minutes before I remembered where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I left the restroom and ran back to class, earning myself a dirty look from Mrs. Keating in the process.

  I ignored all the snickers coming my way.

  A pee shouldn’t have taken that long.

  Frankie gave me a quizzical look when he caught my eye. I shrugged like there was nothing wrong and backed it up with a nonchalant smile.

  I didn’t know if Frankie and I still had the same friendship we did before the kiss. While exceedingly wonderful, it blurred the lines of our relationship now. It was going to be awkward for a while yet.

  If he was still talking to me.

  Focusing on the class was now all but impossible. I tried to push the fire from my mind but it always pushed its way back in. There was only one thing I could do.

  I had to go to the scene of the fire.

  Chapter 16

  Frankie wasn’t in my last class of the day. I managed to survive the afternoon without any impromptu visits to Principal Moore’s office. The moment the final bell rang, I was out of there.

  The burned ruins weren’t far from the house my father shared with his new family. It made the possibility of him being in the house with his wallet all that much more plausible.

  If Marshall Gabrielle was taken against his wishes, it could have been someone from the same neighborhood. Didn’t they say most murders are committed by someone the victims knew?

  I didn’t like to think of the possibility of murder.

  Or kidnapping.

  The most likely reason for my father’s disappearance was his decision to run away voluntarily. A large part of my heart suspected that was what had happened.

  But this new discovery?

  It made me sick to my stomach. My father was good at disappearing. He had proven to me that he was a regular Houdini. One minute he was in my life, the next he wasn’t. It was that simple and not a far stretch of the imagination to think he’d done that again.

  But he wouldn’t have left his wallet.

  That was sloppy.

  Crews were still recording their pieces for the nightly news when I found the scene of the fire. It was cordoned off with police tape, declared a crime scene until they knew more. The smell of smoke was still lingering heavily in the air.

  The whole scene made my stomach bubble with bile and knock on my back teeth with its acidity. The lumpy black items in the area used to be someone’s house. They lived there, never imagining it could all be gone in the blink of an eye.

  I really hoped there were no bodies.

  The property was probably once a house. All its neighbors were, so it would have been out of place to be anything else. A h
ome seemed to make it all that much more devastating.

  While the afternoon wore on, I sat in a bus shelter down the road from the site. It was close enough to see what was happening but not close enough to be accused of loitering. The last thing I needed was to end up on the six o’clock news as the devastated daughter.

  The site grew quieter as the sun disappeared. By five, everyone had left–including the police and fire inspectors. I waited a bit longer to be sure before I ducked under the police tape and stepped onto the site.

  It could have been my imagination but it instantly felt hot, like the site remembered the blazing heat of the fire and kept replaying the traumatic incident in a loop.

  Most of the items were just lumps, indistinguishable from what they once were. I imagined all the items being swept up by a hard machine, dumped at the tip with all the other things that no longer served their purpose.

  There would be nothing for the Keeper of Discarded Things to rescue. Once items were charred down to ash they no longer meant anything to anyone. They were the true lost things, forever unable to be found once again.

  The whole scene made me blue with melancholy. Fire didn’t just burn things, they destroyed their souls. As much as I looked, I didn’t find any lost thing that I could rescue.

  Either the police or fire department had done a good job in going over the place. They had cleared a path through the lumps, allowing me to wander through the whole area without having to step over things.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. If my father was in the house he certainly wasn’t there now. If there was a body, they had extricated it to the morgue by now and handed it over to the coroner for further inspection.

  All I knew was that I had to be there. Something belonging to my father had been lost there. It was something tangible, something he owned and kept on him at all times of the day. It was a link to him that I hadn’t had for a very long time.

  I wanted to tell Frankie about it. If he were there he would reassure me that everything would be okay. He would come up with some incredible reason for his wallet being here that it would blow my theories out of the water.

  Everything was better with Frankie around.

  Always.

  Everything.

  But it was different now. I couldn’t hang around him without thinking about the kiss and it agonized me to wonder whether he was having the same thoughts.

  Right now I couldn’t think of the kiss. My head was filled with thoughts of my father that I couldn’t vanquish. He might have been standing exactly where I was now. What was he here for? What was he doing?

  The world was filled with questions that never received their corresponding answers. It seemed like mine would jumble with them all and get swallowed up in the giant mass of them.

  I walked right to the back of the property where the fire didn’t seem to have burned so harshly. Most of the items here were recognizable. I could see a lamp, a chest of drawers, and something looking like a chair. They were all black and charred but maintained their original shapes–even if only half of them were hanging together.

  After trying to open the chest of drawers, I only had blackened hands to show for it. After that, I didn’t use my hands for anything else. It was my feet that rifled through the rubble now. It didn’t matter if my black school shoes got blacker.

  I kicked around for a while in the dark. The streetlights worked surprisingly well but they also highlighted my presence on the off-limits site. Trying to explain what I was doing there to the police and Uncle Marvin would be tricky.

  My foot moved some burned books and I froze. There was something small underneath them. I bent over to pick it up, examining it in my hands while I tried not to get it black too.

  It was a business card.

  Either it was shielded from the fire by the books or it was indestructible. I would place my money on the former rather than the latter.

  I turned it over in my hand, reading the details until I had them memorized.

  I also tucked it into my pocket to add to my shelves.

  It was lost, after all.

  The business card declared it belonged to Julia Golden Design. There was something familiar about the name but I couldn’t connect it to anything.

  My mind kept turning it over while I continued my search. The resident of the house must have enjoyed reading because there sure were a bunch of charred books in the remains. It seemed a pity that they would no longer fulfil their purpose and bring entertainment to their reader.

  Fires were horrible things.

  It was almost six o’clock when I decided I wasn’t going to find anything else in the property. It had obviously been combed over with all the good stuff already being discovered by the authorities. Now I was only risking getting caught in a place where I shouldn’t have been.

  I needed to get home and make dinner for Uncle Marvin. He was already watching me closer after my little interrogation and I didn’t really want to alter my schedule.

  But I had to know.

  The business card gave an address one bus ride away from the property. All I had to do was go there quickly and then race home. It was possible my tardiness wouldn’t be noticed.

  Unless Uncle Marvin was particularly hungry.

  I was so close, I had to risk it. The alternative was to come back tomorrow but I couldn’t wait that long. I needed to know what the business was now or it would drive me insane in the meantime.

  My feet ran for the bus stop and I caught the next F24 route the moment it arrived. My pulse was racing, urging everything else to go fast around me so I could go home before my uncle started to wonder where his dinner was.

  The bus was late.

  Of course.

  I impatiently tapped my foot on the concrete, willing it to come around the corner and put my panic at ease. Everything was going far too slowly for my needs.

  Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds was how long it took to arrive. Three minutes and fifteen seconds late. If I hadn’t counted the seconds, I would have driven myself crazy with stress.

  There was no point taking a seat on the bus so I stood by the exit doors and waited, scanning the streets for the address the entire time and willing all the cars on the road to get out of our way.

  Julia Golden Design came into view and a little spark of hope ignited. When the bus came to an almost-stop I jumped off and ran for the door. If I had taken the steps like a normal person, I would have noticed the place was in darkness sooner.

  It was closed.

  I was cursed.

  It was official.

  My fist banged on the door just to make sure nobody was still lurking within. I waited, thinking I saw a flicker of movement but not quite sure.

  My nose pressed onto the glass door, hoping beyond hope I wasn’t wasting more time. Every day that passed told me it was going to be more difficult to find my father.

  If he wanted to be found.

  The door suddenly swung open, giving me a heart attack in the process. I needed to concentrate more.

  “What is all the banging about?” The middle aged woman stared me down, giving me the impression she wasn’t one to be messed with.

  Having a plan before I got to this moment would have been handy. Pity I hadn’t thought about that earlier.

  “Well?” She waited, but not patiently.

  “I was looking for a lamp,” I blurted out–the first thing that came to mind.

  “Well you should have been here during our opening time. Nine a.m. tomorrow morning, that’s when our doors will be open.” I was losing her. I couldn’t let that happen.

  “But it’s urgent. Please.”

  She stared at me, rolling back on her heels while she thought about my plea. For a professional liar, I wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “You’ve got two minutes. Hurry up.” She stood back from the door to let me through.

  I had no use whatsoever for a lamp but I was pretending to search for one anyway. In the meantime, I sc
rambled for something to say that would help me in my quest. “I’ve been searching for the perfect lamp everywhere. My computer crashed and I lost all the research I’d done on them.”

  “You could just do a search online. It’s not like they’re particularly rare or anything.” She was leaning on the doorframe, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “But I’d done so much research. I’m sure nobody has as much computer problems as I do.” She raised her eyebrows but didn’t take the bait. It was time for some prompting. “Do you have a good computer guy?”

  “He’s alright.”

  “Would you recommend him?” I asked eagerly.

  “He’s the same as all the rest. Now, are you going to buy something or not? It’s late and I want to go home to my family.”

  “I guess I’ll have to search for a computer guy myself.”

  “You’ve got five seconds to buy something or I’m kicking you out.”

  Talk about a short fuse.

  I ran my hand along the shelves with no intention of buying. “I think I’ll keep searching. Thanks all the same.”

  She gestured toward the door and I slipped through it before she slammed it closed. The twisting of the locks were like a rude way of saying she was glad I was gone from the store.

  The visit had been a disaster.

  I sat on the steps with the fading light making my shadow long and lean. I just needed a moment to catch my breath before waiting for the next bus going in the opposite direction. Knowing my luck it would probably be early and I would miss it.

  But, instead, something even worse happened.

  My first thought was ‘hey, that car looks familiar’. My second thought was ‘hey, it’s exactly like Uncle Marvin’s car’. My third thought was full of swear words when I recognized the driver as none other than my uncle Marvin.

  Of course.

  The area where he would never be, especially near dinner time, and he was staring right at me. What had I done to the gods of the world to deserve such bad luck? Did I break a mirror sometime? Walk past a black cat?