Missing Page 11

  It was as if he had forgotten that Maxine and Cam were still there. There was only himself ... and whatever belonged to the weird, disembodied voice in the gloomy cemetery.

  He took one step back and then another.

  ‘Watch every dark corner, Ssssweeney ... I’ll be there ... waiting ...’

  And breathlessly, Sweeney ran, tripping and jumping at every movement, at every sound. Clawing in terror at the overhanging branches brushing against his face. He ran in fear, until he was swallowed up in the darkness of the cemetery.

  Maxine held her breath until he was gone. Gone completely. She looked at Cam. He was bruised and his trousers were torn, his tie twisted round his neck. He was looking at her too. Then both of them turned their eyes to the trees.

  At first Maxine could see nothing. Except the branches dancing and shifting. And then she caught her breath. A movement. A shadowy figure, a face. The face she’d seen in the trees that day so long ago.

  The face of her brother.

  This time he stepped out of the shadows. He was thin and pale. He didn’t look real. He said nothing at first. He didn’t even smile. He stood beside the gravestone.

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  DEREK MOODY

  BELOVED SON

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  And then, in a soft trembling voice, he whispered, ‘It’s me, Maxie. It’s Derek. I want to come home.’

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Derek became something of a media star, interviewed on radio and television. There were even columns written about him in national papers. His whole story was told. Of why he ran away, of how he survived on the streets and in squats, and how just seeing his death announced in one of the papers had been the spur that had made him come back. He’d wanted to see his family so much. To let them know he was still alive. He’d followed them, Maxine especially, always in the shadows, waiting for his opportunity to talk to her. But he would never have come back while Sweeney was around. He would never go back to that. ‘It would all start all over again,’ he had told Maxine. Now she knew what he had meant.

  Derek had lived in the old mausoleums in the cemetery during those weeks, moving from one to another. He knew them all well and had never once been frightened there. There were too many real things to be afraid of, he had told reporters. He was even invited on to one of those morning chat shows to talk about bullying and tell of how many of the young people he had met when he was on the run had left home, just like him, because of the nightmares they were living at school.

  Sweeney never quite got over the shock of that day. He had been terrified, right there in front of little Maxine and the Chinese boy he hated, terrified and humiliated. At last something was done about Sweeney. He was expelled, and Cam’s father made sure he was charged with the assault on his son. Sweeney was out of the school, and the school breathed a sigh of relief.

  Maxine didn’t care. She hated him. She could never hate anyone as much as she hated Sweeney ... and yet. Try as she might, the thought kept coming to her. Why had Sweeney been so bad, so evil? She had been bad for a long time, because she was hurting so much. And Derek too had changed from the perfect son to a boy no one had particularly liked because he had tried to make Sweeney like him. Did Sweeney have a problem too? She wanted to hate him. She did hate him. And yet (why did these thoughts keep invading her mind?) Sweeney had a family who thought being cruel and vicious made you a man. She had something Sweeney would never have, a family who cared about her, who wanted her to be the best she could be. Not the worst.

  Derek became something of a heart-throb. There was a mystery now to Derek, the boy who had come back from the dead. Maxine had even seen his photo pinned up in the prefects’ common room. Yuck!

  All this attention, in Maxine’s opinion, had only turned his head. He’d be selling his autograph soon, she was sure of it.

  She watched him one night a few weeks later, lying along the sofa and popping popcorn into his big mouth. ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she answered, flicking through a magazine. ‘You just look so much like a creature I saw on The X Files the other night.’

  ‘You can’t sit here with us,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s us?’ she asked, although she had a feeling she already knew.

  ‘Cam’s coming over. We’re going to watch a video.’

  ‘He doesn’t even like you. He told me. And you don’t like him. You never did.’ She couldn’t understand how suddenly they had become such close friends.

  Derek studied his popcorn. ‘It’s amazing how much more likeable he’s become since I came back.’

  Cam never came to see her now. He and Derek were inseparable. Now she had two of them to contend with. ‘Anyway, it’s my house too. I can watch the video with you.’

  The doorbell rang just then. ‘That’ll be Cam. And there is no way you are watching a video with us.’

  Maxine stood up. ‘I’ll ask Mum. She’ll let me.’

  Mum came into the hallway just as Derek opened the door to Cam. She was trying to fix on one of her earrings. She looked so different now. The glow had come back into her cheeks, the brightness to her eyes.

  Maxine would always remember that moment when she and Cam had brought Derek back to her. She had been sitting by the fire, and she had turned as Maxine entered, and smiled her pale smile. And then Maxine had stood aside without a word. What words were there to say? How could she tell her? She had simply stepped aside, and Derek was there. And the strange thing was, her mother hadn’t screamed with disbelief. She hadn’t fainted. Tears had begun to spill down her cheeks and she had opened her arms to him, and Derek had run to her. Her beloved son had come back. She had never given up hope. She had always believed that he would. Maybe her mother was as psychic as Luella Oribine.

  ‘Derek,’ she was saying now. ‘I don’t see why Maxine can’t watch the video with you.’ Then she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Derek looked at Cam. ‘We’re not letting her. Are we, Cam?’

  ‘For all you know, Derek Moody, Cam might be here to see me.’

  That struck both of them as funny.

  ‘Well, maybe if I’d had my brain removed,’ Cam said.

  ‘And your eyes.’ This was Derek. ‘Go on, Cam. Give her a kiss. Who knows, she might turn into a beautiful princess.’ By this time they were almost doubled up with their own wit. ‘I mean, that’s what usually happens when you kiss a frog.’

  Maxine let out a yell and ran at them both. Derek held her at arm’s length while she punched thin air.

  Mum suddenly zoomed from the kitchen. ‘Will you two behave!’

  They both stopped guiltily. They had tried, when Derek had first returned, to be friends. It was easy then. She was so happy to have him back. So happy just to see the glow of joy on her mother’s face, to see the smile back on her father’s. It didn’t last, though. They were brother and sister, and there was no point in going against nature. They weren’t meant to get on.

  The bitterness had gone, though. And that would never come back.

  Mum was pulling on her coat. ‘You can all come with me, then.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To church. I’m going to Saturday evening mass.’

  And there, Maxine knew, she would put up a special candle as she always did now, for the boy who had been buried in Derek’s grave.

  ‘Some mother, somewhere,’ she had said, ‘is going through what I went through. She may never know what became of her son. It’s up to us not to forget him, for her sake.’

  She looked around them all now. ‘Well, what’s it to be? Does Maxine watch the video with you? Or do you all come to church with Dad and me?’

  Dad lifted the car keys from the hall table and threw them in the air, laughing. ‘Well, Gill, th
at soon shut them up.’

  Her dad was so different now too. For a while Maxine had wondered how he could possibly have identified another boy as his own son. His explanation made her realise that he had felt exactly the same as she did. ‘I suppose in a way, I wanted it to be Derek,’ he had told her. ‘If Derek was dead, maybe your mother would accept that. There would be a funeral. It would be finished. Maybe everything would get back to normal. And I was so sure it was Derek. The same size, the same build, and other people in the squat had seen him in those clothes. Of course, I know now the boy they saw wasn’t Derek at all. It was the other boy, but at the time I felt it just had to be Derek.’

  ‘Looks as if we’re stuck with her, Cam.’ Derek gave in with a grin.

  ‘Yippee!’ Maxine yelled, jumping in the air.

  ‘Your sister’s not right in the head. You know that, don’t you, Derek?’ Cam said.

  ‘It runs in the family,’ Maxine told him, determined to get the last word.

  The family, she thought. What a lovely word! Maxine’s favourite.

  Family.

  Derek, her brother, the prodigal son, back in the fold.

  The family, together again.

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  National Missing Persons Helpline is a charity (Reg No 1020419) that tries to contact missing people and offers advice and support for their families as they wait for news. They run a Helpline especially for young people who have run away, enabling them to send a message to their family or carer and to receive advice and help:

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  message home helpline 0800 700 740

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  Also by Cathy MacPhail

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  Run, Zan, Run

  Bad Company

  Dark Waters

  Fighting Back

  Another Me

  Underworld

  Roxy’s Baby

  Worse Than Boys

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  Also:

  Nemesis 1: Into the Shadows

  Nemesis 2: The Beast Within

  Nemesis 3: Sinister Intent

  Nemesis 4: Ride of Death

  .

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

  Copyright © Catherine MacPhail 2000

  This electronic edition published in October 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 1656 1

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