Night of the Living Head by Hanna Alkaf

Author:Hanna Alkaf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

16

Think, Alia. She’d purposely chosen Mak Jah’s, which was on the edge of town. It would take Ayu a while to get back. You have until at least two thirty before she comes home. If you’re going to figure out what she’s been up to, now’s the time to do it.

Quickly, Alia made her way to the living room—now Ayu’s bedroom. It looked the same as it always did, with its two overstuffed sofas covered in hardy, stain-resistant floral patterns, ugly but practical.

Now one of those sofas served as Ayu’s bed, and beside it, in the corner, lay a small suitcase, open and filled with neatly folded and arranged clothes, her sister’s entire life in one little bag.

Alia knelt down beside this pile of Ayu’s worldly possessions and tried to ignore the sharp pang of guilt that blossomed in her belly at the idea of rummaging through another person’s things. You have to do this. You have to figure out what’s going on.

And so she took a deep breath, and began to dive in.

She had no idea what she was looking for, and really, in the beginning, there was nothing to find. There were clothes, and scarves in soft fabrics and softer hues; everything was well taken care of, but you could tell they’d been worn over and over again. There was a pile of books nestled in a corner of the suitcase, many of them religious, some bearing titles about FINDING YOURSELF and LEARNING TO LOVE WHO YOU ARE. Alia had always thought self-help books were kind of corny and embarrassing. “Who buys these things, anyway?” she’d ask, rolling her eyes as they passed those shelves at the bookstore.

Ayu, apparently.

Alia sighed as she put the clothes back where she’d found them. This was hopeless. Nothing here was suspicious; everything bore the signs of a quiet life. Maybe she was imagining it all. Maybe she wasn’t finding anything because there was nothing to find. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

Something clinked against her hand.

Maybe she should keep looking.

She pulled out a little drawstring bag. It was full, and whatever was inside it clicked and clacked against each other as she lifted it out from where it was almost hidden beneath a pile of underwear. She opened it and poured out its contents. It was the most random assortment of things: a gold necklace with a little ice skate pendant. A blue handkerchief with the initials J. S. in one corner. A windup monkey. A pack of tissues printed all over with tiny pandas. A green-and-blue marble. One silver key. All sorts of small knickknacks that didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other at all, carried around in this bag the way a small child collects treasures that mean nothing to anyone else.

What did it mean?

Absentmindedly, Alia wound up the monkey and watched as it flipped over and over again on its little clockwork legs. What was Ayu doing with all these things?

The monkey landed on the handkerchief and fell on its side, and Alia went to pick it up and put it away.

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