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CLARA
There were four boxes. Big ones. They must have lots of things in them because they were heavy, you could tell by the way the man walked when he carried them in, stooped over, knees bent. He brought them right into Mrs. Orchard's house, next door to Clara's, that first evening and put them on the floor in the living room and just left them there. That meant the boxes didn't have necessary things in them, things he needed straight away like pyjamas, or he'd have unpacked them.
The boxes were in the middle of the floor, which made Clara fidgety. Every time the man came into the living room he had to walk around them. If he'd put them against a wall he wouldn't have to do that and it would have looked much neater. And why would he bring them in from his car and then not unpack them? At first Clara had thought it meant that he was delivering them for Mrs. Orchard and she would unpack them herself when she got home. But she hadn't come home and the boxes were still there and so was the man, who didn't belong.
He'd driven up in a big blue car just as the light was starting to fade, exactly twelve days after Rose ran away. Twelve days was a week and five days. Clara had been standing in her usual place at the living-room window, trying not to listen to her mother, who was talking on the phone to Sergeant Barnes. The phone was in the hall, which meant you could hear people talking on it no matter what room you were in.
Clara's mother was shouting at the policeman. "Sixteen! Rose is sixteen years old, in case you've forgotten! She's a child!" Her voice was cracking. Clara put her hands over her ears and hummed loudly to herself, pressing her face against the window until her nose was squashed flat. Her humming kept breaking up into short bursts because she had trouble breathing when her mother was upset and she kept having to stop and gasp. But humming helped. When you hummed you could feel the sound inside you as well as hearing it. It felt like a bumblebee buzzing. If you concentrated on the feel and the sound you could manage not to think about anything else.
Then there was a scrunching noise, louder than the hum, the noise made by wheels on gravel, and the big blue car rolled into Mrs. Orchard's driveway. Clara had never seen the car before. It was fancy and had what looked like wings at the back and it was light blue. At another time, a safe time, Clara might have liked it, but this wasn't a safe time and she wanted everything to be exactly as it had always been. No unfamiliar cars in driveways.
The engine stopped and a strange man got out. He closed the car door and stood staring at Mrs. Orchard's house. It looked just like it always had; it was painted dark green with white window- and doorframes and there was a big wide porch with a grey-painted floor and white railings. Clara hadn't given much thought to how the house looked before, but now she realized that it matched Mrs. Orchard perfectly. Old but nice.
The man walked over to the porch, climbed the steps, crossed to the front door, took some keys out of his trouser pocket, unlocked the door and went inside.
Clara was shocked. Where had he got the keys? He shouldn't have them. Mrs. Orchard had told her there were three sets of two keys (one for the front door and one for the back) and Mrs. Orchard had one, Mrs. Joyce (who came in to clean once a week) had another and Clara had the third. Clara wanted to tell her mother, who was no longer on the phone, but her mother sometimes cried after speaking to the policeman and her face got all red and blotchy and it frightened Clara. And anyway, she couldn't leave her place at the window. If she failed to keep watch for her, Rose might not come home.
A light came on in Mrs. Orchard's hall—the glow of it spilled out onto the porch for a moment before the man closed the door. It was getting quite dark inside the house. The living room of Mrs. Orchard's house was right next to the living room of Clara's house and both had windows at the side, facing each other, as well as at the front, facing the road. Clara scooted across to the side window (so long as she was at one of the windows, Rose wouldn't mind which one), arriving just as Mrs. Orchard's living-room light came on and the man walked in. Clara could see everything that happened and the first thing was that Moses, who'd been hiding under the sofa (he always hid there if anyone but Mrs. Orchard or Clara came into the house), shot across the room and out of the open door at the other end so fast that he'd disappeared before the man was fully through the doorway, so the man couldn't have seen him. He would have gone into the mud room, Clara knew, and from there out into the garden. The mud room had three doors, one to the living room, one to the kitchen and one to the garden, and the garden door had a cat flap at the bottom. "He skedaddled," Mrs. Orchard would have said. She was the only person Clara had ever heard use the word "skedaddle."
Excerpted from A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. Copyright © 2021 by Mary Lawson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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