North of Nowhere (18 page)

I stared at him. The way he was talking, he sounded like us!

The man moved away. “Anyway, see you, then,” he said.

“Wait!” I called before I could stop myself.

“What are you doing?” Sal hissed. “He’s more crazy than
we
are!
And
he’s drunk!”

“I don’t think he is,” I whispered. “Just bear with me, OK?”

The man swung around. As he did so, something flashed just above the V-neck of his sweater. A necklace.
An anchor pendant.
The thing Dee’s dad always wore when he went fishing!

I was right! I swallowed hard, took a breath, and said, “I think we might have found your boat.”

“What?” the man said.

“What?”
Sal said.

“It’s in the first bay around the corner from here,” I went on. “Tied up on a mooring ring. The key is in the usual place.”

The man took a step closer to me and looked into my eyes. “Are you making fun of me, young lady?”

I shook my head hard. I wasn’t going to try to explain. He’d
definitely
think I was making fun of him if I did. “I promise I’m telling the truth,” I said. “Just go.”

The man looked at me a moment longer, and then he nodded his head. “All right, then,” he said. “I will.” And he turned to leave.

“Wait!” I called again. I grabbed Dee’s diary from inside my bag and turned to Sal. “Have you got a pen?”

She rummaged around in her bag before pulling out a ballpoint pen. “I don’t know what you’re —” she began.

I cut her off. “I’ll explain later.”
If I can,
I added silently. And then I scribbled a quick note.

I closed the diary and held it out to the man. “Here, take this with you,” I said.

He looked at the book and took it from me. And then, without another word, he set off toward the bay where we’d left the boat, and we made our way back to the pub.

As we arrived at the pub, I realized I was shaking.

“What will we tell them?” Sal whispered.

“The truth, as we agreed,” I said, hoping she hadn’t heard the quiver in my voice. “We tell them everything.”

I pushed the door open and we crept inside. The lounge was almost empty. Three men sat at the bar, drinking pints and talking in gruff voices. A couple was at a table in the window, drinking coffee and eating cookies. How could they sit there calmly doing that while our world had been turned upside down and inside out?

The pub felt so normal. Suddenly I realized what a mess I must look like in comparison.

I still had Peter’s oversize fisherman’s coat on. And my hair was all over the place. I’d put it up in a ponytail this morning, but the storm had pulled half of it out, and it had stayed like that ever since. Fixing my hair had hardly been a priority. Sal looked pretty bedraggled too.

“Let’s go and freshen up a bit,” I said to Sal. “Come up with me, and then we’ll find the others.”

Sal started to follow me, but we had only gotten halfway across the lounge when the door behind the bar opened and Gran came in.

She didn’t see us at first. She was looking behind her, calling something over her shoulder as she swung through the door. Then she nodded to the men and took the pint glass one of them was holding out to her. She turned toward the tap at the end of the bar.

And then she glanced across at us, and froze.

As she stared, I met her gaze and realized, for the first time ever, that she looked old. Her skin seemed to sag on her cheeks. Her eyes were dark and hollow. Her neck was creased with tiny lines.

And now, on top of that, her face had turned gray.

She put down the glass she had just taken from the fisherman, without taking her eyes off me. Then she lifted the flap at the end of the bar and walked toward us.

Still staring at me, she crossed the lounge and came to stand in front of me. Her eyes were shining and wet. What was going on?

Gran reached for my arm, feeling the coat I still had on. She touched it as though it were the first time she’d ever seen a yellow fisherman’s coat. Then she reached up and stroked my matted, sodden hair. She smoothed back a strand that had been plastered to my forehead, and in a voice husky with emotion, she said, “It was you.”

What was she talking about?
What
was me? Was I in trouble? Did she know about us taking the boat?

Before I had a chance to think of a reply, she went on, “Was it? Am I right? Tell me it was you,” she said. “Or have I gotten so old, so desperate, and so confused that I really am losing my mind?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Maybe she
was
losing her mind. I knew that stress could do that to people, and Gran had certainly been stressed for the last week.

“Gran, I don’t —” I began.

She put a hand to my lips. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t say anything else.”

Then she turned and walked away. Flinging the door behind the bar open, she called to Mom, “Take over at the bar for a minute, will you, dear?” and ran upstairs.

I looked at Sal.

“What on earth was that about?” she asked.

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Do you think someone’s told her about us taking the boat? She wouldn’t report us or anything, would she?”

“No way. Gran wouldn’t do that.”

But if she hadn’t gone upstairs to phone the police and tell them about her granddaughter’s antics on a boat she had no permission to use, what
was
she doing? And what had she meant? Why had she looked at me so strangely? There was something about the way she’d stared at me, and at my coat, touched my hair — it wasn’t normal. In fact, it was so
un-
normal that everything else could wait.

“Look, can you wait here for a bit?” I asked Sal. “I need to find out what’s going on.”

With that, I left Sal in the pub, barged past Mom, who was just coming in, and ran upstairs to talk to Gran.

I knocked on her bedroom door. “Gran?” No reply. I pushed open the door. “Gran? Are you in here?” I called as I looked around. Her bedroom was empty.

Then I heard a noise upstairs. She was in Grandad’s study. What was she doing in there?

I charged up the stairs and found her kneeling on the floor. She didn’t even look up when I came in. She was rummaging so deeply in a box that her head was practically inside it.

“Gran?”

“One second.” She carried on foraging in the box without looking up. “It’s here somewhere, I know it is,” she muttered, lifting out bundles of books and papers and dumping them on the floor beside her as she delved deeper.

And then she stopped. Lifting out a small cardboard box, she looked at me. “Found it,” she said.

Then, finally, she met my eyes. “It was the coat,” she said, answering the question I wasn’t asking out loud. “I recognized it. And your hair. You look exactly the same.”

“The same as what?” I asked.

“I couldn’t see your face. Not through all that rain.” She laughed softly, staring into the distance as if watching her own memories being replayed. “What if I had?” Then she turned back to me. “But the picture was etched in my mind as if it had been carved there. The wild, wet hair. The coat.” She stopped and shook her head. “Here,” she said. She took the lid off the box and held it out to me.

The box was filled with cream-colored tissue paper. I looked down at the tissue paper and the box, and I wondered, briefly, what was inside it. What was so important that Gran had charged up here to find it? What was it about this box that had made her eyes sparkle with something I couldn’t possibly define, but I knew I’d never seen before? And what was it that made her hand tremble as she pushed the box into my palms?

As I took it from her, the room fell away from us. It was as if there were nothing in the world but the two of us. Suddenly I was scared.

“What is it?” I asked.

Gran held my eyes. “Just open it,” she said softly.

I pulled the tissue paper away. When I saw what was wrapped inside it, I almost dropped the box.

It was Dee’s diary.

I shoved the box back at Gran, pushing it into her hands as though it had burned my fingers. “That’s impossible!” I said.

It
couldn’t
be real. I’d only just given it away! Minutes ago!

Gran took the box back from me and pulled the book out. Maybe it was a copy. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe . . .

“Read the last entry,” Gran said, passing the book to me.

I opened it up. As I flipped toward the end, I saw my writing. My words. The words I had written moments earlier, before giving the book to Dee’s dad. But now the ink was faded, as if it had been written years ago.

The room began to spin.

I grabbed hold of the chair at Grandad’s desk, pulled it out, and sat down, feeling as wooden as the chair itself.

“The page after that,” Gran said.

I turned the page, to see writing that in the last week had become almost as familiar to me as my own.

Dee’s writing.

The diary entry ended there. It was the last one in the book. I didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say. My mind was swimming, crammed full of thoughts, and at the same time as blank as the last pages of Dee’s diary.

I looked up at Gran.

Her eyes were shiny and misty. “I’ve got that chance, now, haven’t I?” she whispered. “However impossible it may be, it’s true, isn’t it? I can finally say thank you.”

And just like that, I knew I couldn’t handle this. Any of it. I had to get out of there.

I stood up, almost falling over in the process. The room was spinning; I was pretty sure I was going to be sick. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

And then I turned and ran down the stairs, out to the back of the pub. Flake looked up and wagged his shaggy tail at me as I came into the kitchen.

Flake. Normal, happy, uncomplicated Flake.

“I could do with having you around,” I said, and quickly clipped on his leash.

And then, before anyone could stop us, I unlatched the back door, took Flake, and got the heck away from there. Away from Gran, the pub, the diary, and everything else about my world that had suddenly gone absolutely, totally, impossibly crazy.

It had started raining. I didn’t care. I didn’t even feel it. I didn’t feel anything.

I sat on a bench and stared out to sea, Flake leaning gently against my legs as I tried to get my head into some sort of state where I could begin to make sense of my thoughts.

Where was I supposed to start?

“Mia.” A voice interrupted my attempt at thinking. I turned to see Sal running toward me.