The Other Boy by Heidi Field

Author:Heidi Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance
Publisher: Tule Publishing
Published: 2025-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Scott

Dinner that night was the quickest meal Blair and I had ever shared. It took minutes to cook and minutes to eat. Blair and I had something tangible that we wanted to investigate, something that might lead us closer to the answers we were searching for. We were supposed to be reconnecting, communicating our feelings, dealing with our grief. Instead, thoughts were rampaging through my mind at breakneck speed about this other boy and where we were headed, what we were risking, and whether it would be safer for us just to take all of this to the police and let them take it from here. Yet all we had was a necklace, a shop, a boy in a photograph, and a secret about a drowned boy that I wasn’t ready to share.

A breeze from the utility room gave me goose bumps.

I got up and shut the back door. “Sorry, girl, you’re going to have to ask to go out from now on. It’s too cold to be leaving doors open.”

Blair fastened her chunky knit cardigan with its big wood buttons while I loaded the dishwasher. We made coffee together, a fluid dance around each other getting the mugs, switching on the coffee machine, and taking the milk from the fridge, a familiar and comforting dance that we had performed hundreds of times. Blair carried the coffees on a tray into the lounge as I followed with my laptop.

Lifting the screen, my hand shook. That niggle about not liking what I was about to discover reared its head. I ignored it and searched for jewellery shops in town and up popped Stranger Things, a quirky gift shop claiming that everything in the store was handmade by Thadley residents. A look on maps showed its location down the alley, just as I remembered, right next to the jewellery shop where I’d bought Blair’s earrings and bracelet.

“That’s the shop. We’ll need to go in and have a chat with the owner. I think we should go first thing tomorrow. We should take with us a picture of Jamie, that photo of the boy with the triangle-of-swords necklace, and a sketch of Jamie’s pendant. What do you think?”

Blair started clicking through the gallery on the screen, and I knew what she was searching for. “Looking for those necklaces?”

Every few photos she enlarged on the screen and then continued scrolling. “I don’t want it to be a waste of time. A dead end. I just want to be sure, that’s all.”

I sipped my coffee and kept an eye on the screen as Blair scoured through the images.

“There!” Blair zoomed in and pointed to a picture of the inside of the shop. In the corner of the picture was a glass cabinet laden with necklaces hanging from the bottom of its shelves.

I put down my mug and leant in to get a better look. “They look exactly like the one that boy is wearing.”

Blair nodded. “Yes, they do. Okay, we’ll go tomorrow. I’m not going to sleep a wink now.

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