All The Bones: A GRIPPING CRIME THRILLER (DI Tracy Collier Book 5) by Emmy Ellis

Author:Emmy Ellis [Ellis, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

* * * *

The Past

John drinks beer in the garden, sitting by her father in red-and-white-striped deck chairs on the patio. Mum is out somewhere, so she’ll be gone hours, so she’d said. Tracy’s stomach is in a state—clenching, unsettled, sore. It always is when these two men are near her.

To calm herself, she moves back and forth on the swing, her hair blowing forward as she goes backwards, draping over her face so she can’t see. She slows to a stop and uses the pink elastic tie around her wrist to put it in a ponytail, then swings again, happy now she can see over the tops of fences, right down to the bottom of the street. An ice cream van is parked there, its blue roof decorated with pictures of cones filled with swirly white mountains. A line of children and adults wait to be served.

Tracy would like to be in that line. She’d like an ice cream, too, but knows better than to ask. If she does, John will expect something in return. More than usual. She remembers the rainbow scarf day when she’d hidden from him the time he’d first appeared in her life.

She shudders.

Mrs Hillsop two doors down is in her back garden, pegging washing on the line, her portly belly distended under a cooking apron covered in cartoon cupcakes. Her pink sheets flap and crack in the breeze, and a pillowcase flies up from a bullying gust, flipping over the line a few times so Mrs Hillsop has to unravel it.

Tracy wishes she had the courage to tell Mrs Hillsop what her father and John do to her, but John says he’ll tell the social if she opens her mouth, and Tracy will be taken away to live with nasty foster parents. Her father says she’ll be hidden away in a basement if she’s not careful. Besides, Mrs Hillsop prefers to pretend the Colliers don’t exist.

As do the rest of the neighbours.

Do they know what happens behind closed doors? Do they shut their eyes to it?

John laughs, drawing her out of her thoughts. Goosebumps spring up with every undulation of the sound blaring out of his mouth, the same sound he makes afterwards—

After he—

No. Don’t. Don’t do that to me. Please.

Her father joins in, and she wonders if they’re laughing about her and what they have planned.

They always laugh before they—

Tracy scrunches her eyes shut and thinks about pretty daisies in fields with buttercups dotted in between, lush grass, and bugs crawling at the blades’ bases. She thinks of the ice cream she can’t have, a tummy that isn’t sore from anxiety, a day without The Visit to her bedroom and a million other things to keep her mind off what’s to come. She grips the swing rope hard, and it chafes her palms, reminding her of the rope they use on her to keep her from moving.

“Tracy,” John calls. “Time to go in.”

She wants to cry, wants to tell them she won’t go with them, that they mustn’t do those things to her anymore, but it wouldn’t do any good.

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