The Finder Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But there’s a thought process behind gelling your hair up like Elvis or choosing to wear combat boots—it says something about a person, just like any other action they might do. And why would anybody act like a tool unless that’s exactly what they are?

  WHEN LINDSAY MEETS ELIAS, the signs aren’t promising. She’s a grungy introvert who doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He’s a teen fashionista who can’t shut the hell up. But since Lindsay tracked down a young runaway, word has got around that she knows how to find people. Elias is looking for his birth mother and he thinks Lindsay can help. The thing is, Lindsay wasn’t actually trying to find anyone.

  It’s just how she approaches the world. Scanning every house, every face, every car. Looking for her identical twin, Frankie, who disappeared when they were seven. In Elias, despite their differences, she might have found someone to look with.

  Praise for Kate Hendrick’s The Accident

  ‘The writing is powerful and insightful, without being maudlin or clichéd…it’s perfect for those looking to sink into something thought-provoking and meaty.’ West Australian

  For Lucy Winter and Charlie Finn

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  Vogue bloody Fontainbleau.

  You would have thought that someone who was trying not to be found would have made more of an effort. Like seriously. If you’re running away from home and your face is being splashed all over the news, social media and telegraph poles, the obvious thing is to make yourself as invisible as possible.

  Not this kid. She was stretched out flat on the bus shelter bench, a skinny thing in micro denim shorts and a loose leopard-print T-shirt and enough bling flashing in the afternoon sun to be a hazard to passing traffic. She had her knees up, legs crossed, and dangled an iPhone casually in one hand. Cables snaking upward, headphones built into a black faux-fur headband with two fluffy cat’s ears. She had a bag—a handbag maybe, dark with metallic highlights—wedged under her head like a pillow and her eyes shut, oblivious to the world around her.

  She didn’t even move as our bus pulled up at the stop and people loaded on and off. She just kept basking.

  The bus pulled away from the kerb again and turned a corner; she was gone from my sight. It had been long enough, though. Vogue Fontainbleau.

  I wasn’t surprised to see her like that. Everyone had been making such a fuss about her going missing—abduction, blah blah blah—but I’d seen her photo on the TV. She clearly had attitude. She looked like exactly the sort of kid who’d run away because Daddy wouldn’t buy her a pony.

  Nobody else on the bus had noticed. It was a bus full of teenagers so nobody was paying attention to anybody other than themself and whoever they were trying to impress. Nobody pointed or started yelling, Hey, there’s that missing kid or anything. Business as usual.

  I pondered it for the rest of the ride home. I didn’t get off and backtrack—I really didn’t care that much—but I thought about it. I tried to remember if there was a reward. I pulled my jumper sleeves up over my hands and gnawed on the cuffs, my gaze fixed out the window during the thinking.

  It wasn’t an idle gaze; it never is. I was looking. Scanning. Every house, every face, every car. I guess that’s why I saw her in the first place.

  The kids were playing outside when I got home. I could hear them yelling at each other from the top of the driveway. I sidestepped the scooters and skateboards and cricket bats, shook off the kids’ pleas for me to join in whatever they were playing, and let myself in the house. It was cooler inside, but not by much. I snuck past the kitchen door, not wanting to get snagged in any of Mum’s questions, and shut myself in the alcove under the stairs. Dad converted it to a study a few years ago, but it’s so stupidly cramped that there’s room for a single chair and built-in desk, and that’s it.

  The computer was on but asleep and took forever to crank up. Then it took another few minutes to load the news. Bombings in the Middle East, political sex scandals…but she was still the top story.

  SEARCH WIDENS FOR VOGUE FONTAINBLEAU

  There was a picture of her, looked like a selfie. Only eleven, but she had bright red lipstick and artistically splayed curls, which was depressing. Now even eleven-year-olds were dressing better than me.

  The article talked about how she had gone missing from her bedroom Sunday evening, two days ago. There were ‘grave fears’ held for her safety and her parents were ‘worried sick’. Police were searching the area and talking to family and friends. Standard stuff. At the bottom they had the contact details for Crimestoppers.

  Just as I reached the bottom of the page I heard Mum’s footsteps on the tiles outside. Sprung. I hit the backspace button to take me back to the news page, hoping it didn’t make me look guilty of something.

  The study door swung open and Mum stood in the doorway. She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Lindsay, when did you get home?’

  ‘Two minutes ago. I was just checking something for school.’

  So much for sneaking in unnoticed. This time of day is usually pretty busy, between the kids’ after-school stuff and homework and getting dinner ready. Chaos, though Mum wouldn’t call it that. She’d look at you calmly and tell you she’s got a handle on all of it. She always knows exactly what needs to be done and who needs to be where, like she’s got some sort of mental spreadsheet with things entered almost by the minute.

  ‘Grace has swimming later so we’re having dinner early. Can you do the potato salad?’ It wasn’t really a request.

  I don’t think Mum was always an overachiever. She was always organised, but as the size of our family increased, the organisation needed to be more and more precise. Colour-coding, labelling, routines, rosters. She knows the exact date each of us took a first step, said a word, lost a tooth. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s logged the number of hairs on our heads.

  Her own hair is always perfect, long and blonde. She doesn’t look like she’s had seven children. The older I get, the more alike we look—another five and people will probably think we’re twins. Funny.

  I followed her into the kitchen where dinner prep was already in full swing.

  ‘Make sure you put some aside for Elijah before you add the parsley. And cut the potato into strips for Josiah, not cubes.’

  I know all this, but I didn’t say anything. It was just her being in control. She only delegates when she has to; if she had the time, she’d do the whole thing herself—I always feel like I’m in the way when I help in the kitchen. Like my presence is actually hindering her swift efficiency.

  She stopped every minute to remind me to cut like this, stir like that, as if I could have forgotten.

  Nobody expects you to be perfect, Mum.

  Yeah, I could say that, I guess.r />
  ‘Once you’re done with that, you can cut up those melons in the fridge. Then you can find the boys. It’s their month to set the table.’

  The boys: Micah and Elijah. Not ever in my memory has Mum dared called them the twins. That was me and Frankie, and she can never use it again.

  Dinner was overdone, as usual. Not overcooked, but a big production, like she’d invited the queen and forgotten to tell us. I counted seven different dishes, and any one of them could have been on a Jamie Oliver cover. Mum had taken my sloppy pile of randomly hacked fruit and arranged the platter in a rainbow of neat pieces. She’s not subtle, but I didn’t say anything. Literally. Three months ago I discovered I could get through dinner without saying a word and nobody noticed.

  Micah doesn’t talk, either. Micah’s the real quiet child. I do it to make a point—even if nobody notices—but Micah really is the sort of kid who’ll sit in the back of a classroom, or at the dinner table squashed between siblings, and be happiest not making a sound.

  He and Elijah are technically identical. They missed out on the skinny gene, and they’ve both got rounded faces and freckles. Soon as they hit puberty they’ll fill out like my father, who is a broad, hulking ex-footballer. But nobody ever has trouble telling who is who. Even when they’re playing together—footy, soccer, cricket, Xbox—there’s no chance of getting them mixed up. Elijah is loud, bossy, stubborn. Micah makes a perfect playmate because he’ll do what he’s told and never argue.

  Grace is like a female version of Elijah—opinionated, rough, up for anything—only two years older. She just turned seven, and her name pains her because her left leg is an inch longer than her right, and even with the best orthopaedic inserts in the world her gait is uneven. When she runs she looks like a newborn giraffe, lopsided on long bony legs.

  ‘Grace is a gift from God,’ my mother would say, and I would secretly wonder why God was giving out defective gifts. I didn’t dare ask, though; in our house, you don’t argue with Mum about God.

  Evie’s four and Mum’s little princess. She’s got the long white-blonde hair and love for everything pink and girly that Frankie and I once had. She’s got more best friends than anybody can keep track of, and I can’t figure out how. Unless they’re all as irritating as her. Mum thinks the sun shines out of Evie’s arse. I watch her sometimes with visitors. She’ll touch Evie’s hair and describe it as ‘spun white gold, sunlight’. Evie’s current obsession is with detectives and explorers, which is perfect because she’s a little know-it-all.

  And then there’s Josey. He sits next to me at the table, in the only aspect of Mum’s regimentation—seating plans, timetables, schedules, chores—that I don’t try to sabotage. I cut up his dinner for him and pour his water and let him grab my hand with his greasy one under the table. I wouldn’t do stuff like that for anyone else. Just Josey. I don’t know why.

  I sat at the table and gazed around slowly, counting through my siblings in my head, in the same way someone might count to six.

  Lindsay, Grace, Elijah, Micah, Evie, Josiah.

  For seven years I’ve felt like I was living in an orphanage. It seemed like my mother just kept on bringing home new babies. As soon as one was beginning to walk, even before it, she announced the next was on the way. Our once-enormous house suddenly didn’t have enough room. The space and freedom I had known for my first six years was a bubblegum memory, bright and irretrievable.

  Six of us. Seven if you include Frankie. When you count your siblings, are you supposed to include the ones you’ve lost? I’ve never known the answer to that.

  2

  I didn’t see any sign of Vogue for two days. I wasn’t really looking. The buzz in the news about her disappearance had quietened down, and I figured maybe they’d worked out that her running away was a far more likely scenario than some evil paedo spiriting her off. Either way, finding her wasn’t my problem. She was safe enough by the look of it. She’d go home when she’d had enough.

  I dragged myself off to school on Friday morning with even less enthusiasm than usual. Mid-March and the summer heat was hanging on—I knew it would be the sort of day you spend unsticking yourself from plastic chairs and trying not to breathe the clouds of deodorant hanging in the air. I’m in a lot of the bottom classes at school and once the temperature hits thirty, people are even less inclined to work than usual.

  Then I saw her again.

  ‘Damn.’ I said it out loud. Once again I was stuck on the wrong side of the bus window, staring helplessly down. This time she was walking, wandering really, down the street with those stupid cat earphones on like she wasn’t in a rush, because I guess she probably wasn’t. It was afternoon and it was another hot day, the third in a row. The bus sweltered and stank of sweaty teenager and I was fantasising about sticking my head into a bucket of cold water. Maybe when I got home the kids would have the hose out and be tossing water bombs at each other. No pool for us. I’d kill for a pool.

  We were only two stops from my house. I could have got out and tried to catch up with her but I just couldn’t quite summon up the energy to do it. I watched as she disappeared into the distance. It was Friday, and I was over everything.

  The kids did have the hose out. Grace was trying to get it hooked up to the sprinkler. Josey had a plastic tub half-filled with water that he was climbing in and out of, a tiny wading pool barely big enough for him to squat in. Every time he climbed in, grass and dirt from his feet would muddy the water. He had a small plastic bucket and he was using it to scoop up water and drink it. Nobody cared.

  I grabbed the hose from Grace and adjusted the nozzle till cold water shot out. I tipped my head forward, my hair hanging in front of my face, and held the hose above me like a showerhead until my hair was a limp, dripping mess. It ran down under my shirt, icy cold, sending shivers along my spine.

  I went inside, walking slowly enough past the kitchen that Mum saw me on the way to my room. A year or two ago Mum and Dad went through and put ceiling fans in all the bedrooms. We’d been begging for reverse cycle aircon like everyone else had, but nope—we got ceiling fans. The one in our room wibbles and wobbles and clicks and clacks. I flopped down on the carpeted floor and stared up at it, wondering not for the first time about the likelihood that the whole thing would spin right off its fitting and slice me up on the way down. Usually all it did was turn an oven into an oven with moving air, but right then the breeze was nice. Cool on my wet hair. I lay there, staring upwards and thinking.

  Vogue was staying somewhere nearby. She had to be. That was twice I’d seen her in the same area, looking like she wasn’t going anywhere in particular. She didn’t have a bag with her but she’d been in a different outfit. That meant she had somewhere she was keeping her stuff. A friend’s place? Overnight, maybe. But any longer than that, their parents would have noticed and reported her. Everyone knew she was missing. So…not a friend’s place. If she was staying with someone, it had to be someone who didn’t care that the whole world was looking for her. Or else she was somewhere all by herself. Somehow.

  I tried to picture the streets where I’d seen her. A suburb. Our suburb—an uninterrupted expanse of houses and nature strips. No hotels or motels or anything like that. So where could an eleven-year-old stay by herself in a place like this? My mind’s eye roved, and stopped when it reached a For Sale sign.

  Bingo. An empty house.

  I sat up. ‘Damn, I’m good,’ I muttered, because I had to say it out loud even though there was nobody to hear it.

  Okay. I could have been completely wrong, but it felt like a stroke of genius. I couldn’t help getting excited. I headed downstairs two at a time to the study, pulled up the real estate website and punched in our postcode. Thirty-five results. I tapped my fingernails on the keyboard. My hair, still wet and straggly, fell over my face and I pushed it back. It fell straight back down again. I brought up the map showing where all the houses for sale were: looked like at least one on every street. Not helpful. And besides, I re
asoned with myself, just because it was for sale didn’t mean people weren’t still living in it.

  I gave up and headed back upstairs, shutting myself in the bathroom. I towelled my hair dry properly, shoved it back into a ponytail and faced myself in the mirror.

  ‘Vogue Fontainbleau is none of your business,’ I told my reflection. ‘You really need to get a life.’

  The thing is, I don’t have a life. I tolerate Mum being so tense about knowing where I am all the time because I never go anywhere anyway. My only hobby, if you could even call it that, is that I collect pictures. Luxury resorts on tropical islands, pure white snow on mountaintops, grassy green hills, ancient castles.

  These are the worlds that might, for me, exist only in books, given the fact that I’ve never been on a real holiday. Never even been out of the state. We were supposed to go to Queensland for our eighth birthday, but obviously that never happened. Then the younger siblings started coming, keeping Mum so busy she didn’t have time to think anymore, which was kind of the point.

  The pictures are some sort of pathetic consolation prize I’ve awarded myself. I don’t ever expect to go to any of those places. Though sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I ever do, that’s where Frankie will be.

  I keep the pictures in a box. Also in the box are an old atlas that I bought for fifty cents at a primary school fete, and an even older street directory Mum was going to throw out. Everyone else uses Google Maps. I use a 2006 UBD.

  I got out a Sharpie and flipped the directory open to the page with our suburb. Made a mark at the bus stop where I’d first seen Vogue. A second in the street where I’d passed her earlier. They were about a kilometre apart, but I figured it made sense to start searching near the second, given that was where I’d seen her most recently.

  I don’t know why I felt so sure I could find her when nobody else had managed. I just felt like I could. It was one thing I was good at, finding missing things.

  I made a mental note of my route and put the street directory away before anyone came in and asked about it. There was an hour left until dinner. I pulled off my uniform—still wet—and tossed it in the laundry hamper. Pulled on my knee-length cut-off jeans and a hoodie. Everyone else seems to be wearing tiny shorts that barely cover their backsides, with their pockets hanging out below, and I know I’d feel naked if I walked around like that. I don’t care if it’s forty degrees, I’m still going to wear a hoodie. I need clothes I can hide in.