Lullaby (Watersong Series #2)

FIVE - Searching

Both Harper and Brian had really let the housework slide since Gemma had left. Their minds had been on other things, so the house was in disarray. Newspapers were strewn about the living room, and empty beer bottles covered the table next to Brian’s chair. In the small laundry room off the kitchen, a pile of dirty clothes was spilling out the door, but that had been building up since before Gemma left.

Eyeing their mess of a house, Harper chewed her lip. She didn’t want to clean, and it wasn’t out of laziness. It just felt sacrilegious somehow. Her sister was missing, and she had no right to resume her normal life as if something weren’t horribly wrong.

The problem was that Harper didn’t know where else to look, and real life didn’t stop just because Gemma was gone. The garbage still needed to be taken out. The lawn still needed to be mowed. And her father still needed to go to work.

Harper was supposed to be working today herself, but she’d only been able to convince Brian to leave by agreeing to stay home. In case Gemma came back or called, he insisted that somebody be at the house at all times.

After Brian had finally left for work that morning, Harper had waited nervously near the front door. He’d already missed two days this week and then showed up late today. She was afraid he might not have a job waiting for him. When he didn’t come back after an hour, she let out a sigh of relief and moved on.

The first half of the day she spent calling every missing children’s organization she could find. None of them put Gemma high on their list, because of her age and because she’d left willingly.

Once Harper had exhausted all the organizations, she sat by the phone at the kitchen table trying to think of other people to call or anywhere else to look. But she was coming up empty.

Harper and Gemma had lived their whole lives in Capri, and they didn’t have close ties with anybody outside it. Their grandparents were dead, and they had an aunt and a couple cousins who lived in Canada, but they didn’t really know them.

That was when Harper noticed the state of the house and decided to do something about it. There was really nothing else for her to do, at least not anything that could help her with Gemma or the sirens, and she had to put her nervous energy to work. She couldn’t just sit there staring at the phone all day, willing it to ring.

So she cleaned.

Harper started with the laundry, since it was overflowing, and then moved on to the living room. She threw away garbage, vacuumed, and dusted. In the kitchen she scrubbed the floors, cleaned out the fridge, and rearranged the pots and the pans in the cupboards.

Alex came over shortly after Harper decided to tackle the basement. Every Christmas, when they brought up the tree and the ornaments, Harper vowed to go through the old boxes and get rid of junk and organize the keepsakes. She finally decided that today would be the day.

“Harper?” Alex was upstairs calling her name, and, based on the creaking of his footsteps above her head, she guessed he was in the living room.

“I’m down here!” Harper shouted toward the basement steps, hoping he’d hear her.

She was sitting in an old lawn chair, which she’d had to steal from a very large daddy longlegs spider. Once the chair was clean of cobwebs, she’d sat down with an oldbox on her lap and started rummaging through it.

So far, the box’s contents appeared to be papers and projects from when Harper and Gemma were little. All of the papers had their mother’s writing on them, like Harper—First Grade, Age 7 or Gemma—Mother’s Day Card, Age 3 scrawled across the back.