‘Mummy, phone!’ Finn stands at the kitchen door, waving the handset. I’m fetching the washing in. I dump the clothes in the basket and take it from him. ‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Maddox?’
‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Dawn Jeffreys. I’m Lori’s friend, in Chengdu.’
‘Dawn, yes.’ My pulse speeds up – there’s drumming up my spine. I move to sit on the bench, willing her to say, Don’t worry, she’s here, I just spoke to her, everything’s OK.
‘I heard about Lori, that she’s missing. I’m so sorry.’ The line is clear but her Australian twang is unfamiliar so I have to concentrate hard to follow.
‘You haven’t seen her? Or heard anything? You don’t know where she is?’
The sparrows are fighting over the bird-feeder, jostling for purchase.
‘No, I’m sorry.’ There’s a slight delay between one of us speaking and the other person hearing it.
‘When did you see her last?’ I say.
‘Thursday, the third of April.’
After the blog. Suddenly that seems good. We thought that the Wednesday was her last contact. But Dawn saw her on Thursday. I feel giddy. So it’s not twenty-one days now, it’s twenty.
‘Didn’t you think it was odd,’ I say, ‘that there was no word from her?’
There’s a pause and I hear a muffled sound, gulping. Dawn is crying. ‘We broke up,’ she says, her voice choked, ‘that Thursday. I thought she needed some space… I…’
Oh, God. The racket from the sparrows drowns her out, forcing me inside through the kitchen to the stairway, far enough from the kids’ television to hear her.
‘Everybody here is doing what they can,’ she says. ‘The police have been talking to us.’
‘Was she OK about the break-up?’ Could this be the reason for Lori’s silence? A broken heart triggering a crisis? I’m shaken, then feel a flicker of anger that Dawn rejected her.
‘It was her decision,’ Dawn says.
Lori ended the relationship. Why? I struggle to reorient myself. ‘Right,’ I say.
‘And she was around on the Friday – there was a party,’ Dawn says.
The Friday. Nineteen days. ‘Do you think she might have gone away somewhere?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dawn says. ‘No one here has heard anything from her.’ She gulps again.
I can’t think what else to say, still trying to process the new information. ‘Dawn, can I take your number so we can talk again?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll just get a pen.’
She reads it out and gives me her email address as well. Our goodbyes are clumsy, speaking over each other, my timing disrupted by all the new questions crowding behind me. And at the core of them, like a heartbeat, driven and relentless:
