Finders Keepers by Belinda Bauer Read Free Book Online Page A

additional second she could thinking of her headline. It was vital to capture the imagination of first the news desk, then the nation. Nothing was set in stone, of course, but she’d been around long enough to know that no sub-editor could resist a good pun-based headline, even if it did come from a lowly stringer.
    She wasn’t thrilled with it, but she finally punched the Send button on ‘New Terror on Murder Moor’ and then – confirming her status as dinosaur – she reached for a cigarette.

8
     
    FOR SOME REASON , the paperboy had stopped bringing Jonas’s copy of the
Bugle
. Instead he delivered it to Mrs Paddon next door, who sometimes took several days to push it through Jonas’s letterbox.
    Not that he cared. He never read the
Bugle
any more, but cancelling it required thought processes and actions, so it was easier merely to pick it off the mat once a week and walk it through to the kitchen bin, along with all the junk mail.
    On this day he stopped between the hall and the kitchen to look at the school photo of Jessica Took on the front page. Straight straw-coloured hair, slightly buck teeth, her school tie tied fashionably and ridiculously short. She looked familiar; he probably knew her by sight – one of the hundreds of children who would pass him every day in that same school uniform as he walked or drove through the seven villages that made up his patch.
    What used to be his patch.
    MISSING . That was what it said. But the report seemed vague and full of holes, and Jonas’s imagination filled those holes with dark and fearful things.
    That night he found Lucy again. This time she had a child with her. Not Jess Took, but a child of her own. A child she’d always wanted and which Jonas had always denied her. When they finally embraced, the child was between them, awkward and annoying and demanding attention.
    When Jonas got up the next morning he took the
Bugle
from the kitchen bin and carried it to the outside bin. When he threw it away, he made sure that Jessica Took was face-down.
     
    *
     
    Steven didn’t take the
Bugle
to Jonas Holly’s house any more, but he still had to pass Rose Cottage to see if he could get an order from the new people further up the hill.
    He flipped his skateboard expertly up into his hand and tucked it under his arm. Skating past the house where Mrs Holly had died seemed like the wrong thing to do, and so Steven never did it. But there was another reason. The deck made a loud rumbling noise on the rough tarmac and he didn’t want anyone to know he was passing.
    He didn’t want
Mr Holly
to know he was passing.
    Because Mr Holly had murdered his wife. Steven was sure of it.
    Almost sure.
    He had no proof, of course, or he’d have told the police who were in the village two winters ago, hunting another killer altogether.
    And what could he have told them anyway?
    That he’d seen Mr Holly slap his wife’s face? That he’d looked into his eyes and seen nothing human there? That it had scared him so badly that his legs had turned to jelly under him and he’d almost lost control of his bladder? Even now he squirmed at the memory and pushed it away. Pushed it
all
away.
    He had no evidence. And anyway, who was
he
? Just a boy.
    And who was Mr Holly? A man – a
police
man. A policeman who had nearly died trying to save his wife from a brutal killer.
    Supposedly.
    Once, Steven had made the mistake of confiding in Lewis about his suspicions.
    ‘You’re mazed,’ Lewis had said, tapping his own temple. ‘You’re just paranoid ’cos of nearly being murdered and all that. You need to get over it, mate. Lalo’s aunt says Mr Holly’s got wicked scars. I wish I had wicked scars. Awesome.’
    Jonas Holly was a hero to everyone but Steven Lamb.
    He sighed. He
should
try to let it go. Or at least shut up about it. It was the past, and if Steven had cared to live in his past, he would never have been able to enjoy his future, so he’d become a master of moving on. He often