Chapter One

The Sunday Morning Beat

It had been five years since our sister went missing, yet my brother and I spent another Sunday morning on the streets, stapling posters to power poles, taping them to shop windows or slipping them inside mail boxes.

I stapled a poster over one of a missing cockatiel. My sister’s lime-green eyes seemed to follow me as I moved around the telephone pole to staple another.

Her long dark hair was tucked behind her ears to show off the earrings I’d given her for her seventeenth birthday, just before she disappeared. The earrings had her initial, L, for Lylah, dangling from a silver hoop. She put them on straight away and smiled as Mum raised the camera. I’d spent all my birthday and pocket money on those tacky earrings, and she’d reacted like I’d given her a diamond necklace.

My twin brother Brody back-handed me hard on the shoulder.

"Come on."  He wasn’t my identical twin, but we looked enough alike that people still mixed us up. I was born three minutes and twenty seconds after him, so I was often referred to as my parents’ second son.

He walked ahead of me and called over his shoulder. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get home and watch the cricket.”

It wasn’t that Brody and I didn’t feel her loss; it was quite the opposite. Each time we put up another poster, it dragged back all those memories of her. I pictured her when I was four, pressing her nose against mine and calling me her little bee bee, my initials, Blake Billson.

“You can stop daydreaming now,” Brody said. “Dad’s coming.”

He walked towards us from the other end of the street. The empty poster bag swinging at his side. His long legs quickly covered the distance.

“That’s it for the morning,” he said. “We’ll do the next suburb over next week.”

Brody and I looked at each other. “Dad,” I said, “do you really think this is doing any good? It’s been five years, and we haven’t even had a prank call in, what, about a year?”

“Blake's right, Dad." Brody added. "She’d look different now than in her photo too."

Dad shook his head of greying hair. “You too, hey? I’d expect your brother here to give up, but not you too, Brody.”

I sighed, but as usual, I quickly shook off the comment. “We don’t even know if she’s still around here. She could be interstate or even overseas.”

Dad shifted his large feet into a wider stance and looked me straight in the eyes. “You think I don’t know that? That very thought goes through my mind every night before I sleep, if I sleep, and it’s the first thing I think of when I wake. But at least I’m doing something by being out here, and that’s more than I can say for the cops. Now, let’s get back to the car.”

Neither my brother nor I ever mentioned the glaring probability that she could be dead. A mate of mine mentioned her in connection with the ‘d’ word in our kitchen last year, not realising Dad could hear from the next room. Without saying a word, Dad grabbed a handful of his jumper, dragged him to the front door and threw him out onto the lawn.

All the while Mum screamed at Dad to let him go.

If we didn’t speak of Lylah in terms of her “eventual return," or possible “new life elsewhere,” her name caused tension.

Ever since she’d disappeared, our family’s peace had lived on a knife’s edge. Our six-year-old sister, Bethany, was the only one who ever escaped Dad’s wrath. She could do no wrong, but it never bothered me, because she was as sweet as I was reckless, and that recklessness was about to land me in a new world of trouble.

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