Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson

Author:Maureen Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2024-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

15

The jump from someone who can’t be found to someone who is missing is long and short at the same time, because nothing has changed except your perception of the distance.

April finished her tour and joined us. We sat, the four of us, trying to make sense of what kind of a situation we had here. Liani seemed calmer now that she knew Dr. Henson wasn’t at the bottom of the lagoon. The problem was, she also wasn’t on its surface. Or in any room or building I looked in. Her texts went unread and calls went to voice mail.

“What should we do?” Tom asked. “She could have just gone off on the board. She could have gone to town.”

“She told me she doesn’t like going out in the open water,” Liani said. “But she’s gone, and the board is gone. And the longer we wait . . .”

Liani stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the grass below her feet. I looked out at the St. Lawrence. It was so wide and strong. So much water, dotted with boats and Jet Skis and islands.

“Wouldn’t someone have seen her?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Tom said. “There’s no way of knowing.”

April now had a frightened, quivering bunny energy as she played with the zipper of her fleece.

“We should check the house again,” she said. “She has to be in there somewhere. You probably just missed her. We’ll all look at the same time. Should we put a hold on tours?”

Holding the tours meant something was wrong. We looked at each other. Was something wrong? The level of wrong that we needed to put a halt to a day’s worth of admissions?

“I can look again with Riki,” I said. “That’s two of us. You and Van can do the tours.”

“I’m going to close the lagoon for swimming,” Liani said, “and I’ll take the Jet Ski and have a look around the island and out on the water. We meet back here in an hour. If we haven’t found her, we call the police.”

Makoto was still sitting in the window seat. She had stretched out a bit with her laptop. I ran around to another entrance to avoid her and went upstairs using the back staircase, taking the stone steps two at a time.

“What is going on?” Van said. “And who is that person who’s been sitting in the hall all morning? Every time I walk past she looks like she wants to jump on my back.”

“That’s the grad student from Yale who’s here to see Dr. Henson.”

“You still can’t find her? Maybe she went to town?”

“And missed her appointment?”

Van cocked his hip against the wall and chewed pensively at the antenna of his walkie-talkie.

“That doesn’t sound like our Belinda,” he said. “Not that I know her that well, but she doesn’t seem like someone who misses appointments with people from Yale.”

He didn’t sound convinced.

“I’m going to search the house one more time,” I said. “But keep an eye out?”

I returned to the gift shop, where Riki was reading at the counter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.