Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough

Author:Lindsey Barraclough [Barraclough, Lindsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780763661083
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2011-10-11T07:00:00+00:00

I watched Auntie Ida adjust her brown hat in the hall mirror.

“Edith Shardlow and I were at boarding school together,” she said. “We see each other once a year or so, just to keep in touch.”

She picked up an old comb off the small table and ran it through the ends of her hair, then wiped a smudge from her cheek. Who would have thought that Auntie Ida had a friend? I realized how little I knew about her, except that under that chestnut hat, her head was full of secrets.

“Though Edith’s had a better life,” she added quietly.

Auntie Ida would know quite well who the child in the newspaper was, the same little girl who had reached out to me in the graveyard: The Missing Child. Anne Swift.

“We’re meeting at Wren’s Coffee House in Lokswood at eleven thirty.”

Anne Swift. Two sisters. Mum was Susan Swift before she married Dad. Susan and Anne. Dad and Auntie Ida had talked about them in the sitting room that night last week. But surely it wasn’t Mum, that older girl whose arm was still in the photograph in the newspaper, hooked through her little sister’s. If she’d had a sister, I would have known — surely someone would have said.

It couldn’t have been Mum, the girl who’d had to go back to London on her own, whose mother had died not long after — Agnes Swift, Auntie Ida’s sister. Dad always said her husband, One-Eyed Jack, thought he’d get rich marrying her because the Guerdons had loads of money, but he didn’t reckon on Agnes’s father disowning her for marrying him. Agnes Swift — the black sheep. Old Guerdon never gave them so much as a penny.

“I’m going to treat Mimi to a banana split,” Auntie said. “They are very good in Wren’s, smothered in chocolate sauce. Then, as it’s early closing, we might take her to the seaside on the open-top bus, if the weather stays fine.”

Auntie never even asked me if I wanted to go, too. I wondered whether she didn’t want me to come because she’d be ashamed of me in front of this friend from her smart boarding-school days, of the way I spoke or where I came from, or because Edith Shardlow might ask me about my eye, from which the purple bruising had faded to a spreading yellow stain. Maybe Auntie hadn’t asked me because she didn’t want to run the risk of my saying yes.

It was possible she didn’t want to take Mimi, either, and was just suffering her because she didn’t trust me to keep an eye on her properly.

I’d never had a banana split smothered in chocolate sauce or been to the seaside.

Auntie had smartened herself up for the occasion. When Mimi, in the little white dress with the pink and green smocking, came into the hall from the kitchen and Auntie bent down to do up her shoe buckles, I caught the whiff of mothballs.

“I’ll take Mimi up to the bathroom,” said Auntie. “Father Mansell is giving us a lift to the station in Daneflete.

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