Between Now and Goodbye (22 page)

'No, it's fine, I'll just... you know what you've got a lot to handle here, so I'll just go and find Carly. She said she'd be here tonight and you're busy.'

'Julie you don't have to go, I'm not too busy to hang out with you.'

'I'll see you later.' She turns quickly and walks off into the crowd.

'You must be doing something seriously wrong.' A familiar voice says from behind me, as someone claps a hand on my shoulder. I turn my head and see Colin Birch. He's in a lot of my classes at school, and though he's not one of my best friends, we do hang out a lot. We used to meet up with a bunch of other guys

to play basketball on the weekends, before my mom got sick and I had to stay at home more often.

'What do you mean?' I ask turning around to face him.

'I've been watching you since you arrived, and you've already had three girls walk away from you. Now one of them, I get, because your sister is always keeping her distance from anyone in an authority position, which I take it you are. The other two, though? Man, I thought they were your friends, but Libby walked off pretty quickly, and then Julie hurried off not long after. What's up with you man? You used to be so charming.'

'I guess I lost my charm.' I shrug.

'And I'm losing patience.' Lewis says loudly, 'I want to ride on the roller coaster.'

'And you will, just as soon as Libby joins us again.' I reply and then it hits me. Maybe Libby won't want to spend her evening helping me watch the kids. She offered to pay for them all to come in, but that doesn't mean that she's willing to babysit. She's with Georgia now, but maybe she wants to go off and find other people to hang out with. Maybe she wants to go find Julie and spend time with her. Julie didn't want to hang around my siblings all evening, so why would I assume that Libby would want to?'

'So, is it true that Julie burnt down her dad's office?' Colin asks.

'Yeah,' I nod, 'it's true.'

'Wow, who knew you were drawn to such trouble makers.' Colin grins, 'I always pegged you as a much more sensible person.'

'She's not a trouble maker. She just made a bad call.' I'm underplaying it and I'm not really sure why. I don't think what she did was just a simple bad call. I think she well and truly messed up, in a big way. So why am I playing it off like it's nothing? The way Julie plays it off.

'Right,' he laughs and then his eyes drift to something behind me, and a smile appears on his face. Softer and without the teasing that had been there just seconds before. 'Evening Libby.'

My head snaps around and I see Libby walking over. Georgia's hand in hers, and no traces of the scared, upset look which had been there when she ran off earlier.

'Hey Colin,' Libby smiles back at him, 'Having fun?'

'I am now.' He grins. 'How about you?'

'It's impossible not to have fun with this one.' Libby ruffles Georgia's hair, and Georgia giggles happily. Libby catches my eye and smiles a little. 'So yeah, I'm really good.' She's talking to Colin, but her eyes stay on me. I know she's telling me that whatever happened before, she's put behind her now.

'Ok, so who's up for a ride on the roller coaster?' Colin asks. 'I'm thinking,' he looks between us all, 'I'll ride with Lewis so we can talk basketball, because we all know he's going to be a famous player someday. Then Libby,' he smiles at her again, 'you can take Georgia, and Charles can take Sean.'

'You guys don't have to help me watch them.' I say quickly.

'Char, don't be silly, that's what friends are for. Besides,' Libby nudges me in the side, 'it's fun hanging out with all of you.'

'Truer words were never spoken.' Colin nods, 'Besides, neither Libby or I could ride with you.'

'Why?' I ask.

'Because,' he says, pausing for what I can only assume is supposed to be dramatic effect, 'you are dressed way too... class president tonight, and it'd ruin our reputations to be seen with you too often.'

'Very funny.' I groan. I already felt ridiculous enough in these clothes, and it's all been for nothing anyway, because Julie's already gone.

'It's kind of funny.' Libby says, stifling back a laugh, and because I'm so happy to see her looking like her normal self again, I laugh right along with them as we head to the roller coaster.

Twenty Seven – Julie

In the end, I didn't stick around at the fair as long as I normally do each year. I wasn't having fun the way I should have been, because to me it all seemed so juvenile. Besides, I have more important things I need to focus on. Which is exactly why I'm sitting in my bedroom, with Carly, working on what's proving to be quite a tough challenge.

'What exactly is it that we're doing?' Carly asks, staring at the blank page in the notebook I just handed her.

'I need you to write down every place that Libby said she lived, in order. I know you remember, because you remember everything, which is why you're so good on the school newspaper.'

'Why do you need to know?' She asks, but she's already starting to write it out.

'Because, if I can trace back through her previous addresses. I may be able to find someone who knew her father, and knows what happened to him and where he is now.'

'You're trying to track down her dad?' She pauses with the pen hovering above the page, 'why?'

'Because I'm never going to get any answers out of her, and she's one of my best friends. I feel like I have a right to know why she never talks about her dad. I want to find out who he is. I mean, what if he's looking for her all this time, but her mom keeps moving them around, so he can't find her.'

'You think?'

'Well, it's a possibility. Maybe her mom didn't want him around, so she took off with his kids and he's been trying to find them. Maybe Libby's mom wasn't even supposed to get full custody, but she ran off with the girls. I mean, it could be that he wants to see her.'

'Yeah, but... if she wanted to see him, then surely she wouldn't keep so quiet about him all the time.'

'Oh my goodness.' My heart suddenly speeds up a little, 'What if she's not allowed to talk about him, because he's like...famous.'

'Oh my goodness, you're totally right. It adds up. Her mom got married to someone famous, and they had kids. He probably didn't have much to do with them, because he would have been so busy...'

'Right,' I nod, 'so Libby's mad at him for being absent, and her mom finally had enough, and divorced him.'

'And then she took the kids and left, and he wanted them back...'

'But Libby's mom didn't want them to be abandoned by him again, so she kept moving them from place to place, until he couldn't track them any more.' I pull my laptop towards me, 'He probably just wants a chance to make it up to them all.'

'Then we should definitely help.'

'Think how happy Libby will be if we can reunite her with her dad.' I smile widely, but then it drops, 'problem is, we don't even know what his name is. All we have to go on at the moment is the list of places she lived, and we don't even know how old she was when she last saw her dad, or where they were living at the time.'

'Let's look at it logically. She gave us a list of places she's lived, and in what order.'

'Not towns, though.' I point out. 'We know the cities, states. Nothing concrete.'

'You don't need a lot of information to start with, all you need are a few details and the knowledge of how to use the tools we have to get more.'

'Ok,' I nod, 'so let's think about what tools we have. We have the internet.'

'We have money.'

'We know people with connections that might get us information from sources we wouldn't be able to get into ourselves.' I add. 'If we can work out the last place she lived with her father, then we can try and work out where she went to school.'

'If we do that we might be able to get access to the school records, find out her father's name.' Carly nods.

'Then we have everything we need to find him. So we'll trace backwards from here and see where he pops up.'

'Let's get started.'

We work until our eyes get bleary with tiredness and we're forced to stop and get some sleep. I hadn't wanted to give up, because when I'm determined about something, I don't like letting go. My parents have always called it driven. A lot of other people call it stubborn. I'm pretty sure the two terms are interchangeable, one just had a much more negative connotation.

We did make progress last night, though, which is what I'm going over right now on my computer. We decided that we'd keep all of the information in a file on my computer, so I'm trawling through the evidence.

We didn't make all that much progress, definitely not as much as I'd hoped we would make. Still, it's progress and that's something.

Between the two of us, we managed to figure out two of the towns that Libby lived in previously, and it wasn't even all that hard. We started off by searching her name, typing it in with the state or city where she'd told us she'd lived. Mostly it didn't turn up anything, she must have been good at keeping a low profile. There was no record of her on any school website, she never joined any clubs, so she didn't have her photograph included in any club pages. We couldn't find any trace of her on social media and a simple google search pulled up more results that we could trawl through.

The first town we found was because of Pippa. After hours of digging through website after website, and making call after call. I stumbled upon a picture on a website of a small town newspaper. I got giddy with excitement when I saw a picture of Pippa staring back at me. She was younger of course, going by the date of the article she would have been thirteen at the time, but it was definitely her.

The article was about how a young local girl had saved a boy from drowning.

From that one picture we were able to find out a lot. The first thing the article told us was that this must have been the town they lived in before they came here, because in the article, they mentioned Pippa's sister, mother and soon to be stepfather. I already knew that they moved here directly after her mom married Matt.

We had something solid on our time line of where she's been, so we added that into the file on my computer and from there, we could keep working backwards.

We traced backwards through the places she'd mentioned she'd lived in. It wasn't until this morning that I realized we probably should have started in the first place she mentioned, but it's too late for that now, we have a system.

Texas, we found no trace of them. Colorado was the same thing, not a hint. Pennsylvania again we turned up nothing. Not one little thing popped up and we were starting to lose hope.

Then just before we were planning on sleeping, Carly found something. She'd started working on finding their connection to Michigan, which was the place that Libby had said she'd been living in before Pennsylvania.

She found something by searching under Libby's mom's name, and trawling through hundreds of search results. Then she finally found something. An employee of the month post on a business website. Accompanied by a picture of Libby's mom and a first name.

It was the date that got me though. The picture and small congratulations post was dated just four years ago, when Libby would have been thirteen. So between ages thirteen and seventeen, she's lived in five different states, and multiple places within those states.

After finding that out I wanted to keep finding more information, but both of us were struggling to keep our eyes open, so we were forced to call it a night.

This morning, I'm actually up before noon, despite the late night. Carly is still spread out on my bed, snoring lightly, but I've been up since ten, which is a little over an hour ago. I've had my shower, put on some clothes, and now I'm reviewing the file of what we know for certain.

I'm about to start looking into New York, to see if I can find any trace of them there, when my phone starts ringing. I grab it and answer quickly, because I don't want to wake Carly. It would be useful to have her help, because she's a genius when it comes to unearthing information. However, waking her up is definitely not something I want to be doing. She tends to get extremely agitated when someone interrupts her rest.

I slip out of the room onto my balcony and hold the phone up to my ear.

'Hello?'

'Hey Julie, it's Libby.' Her voice comes through clear and bright, and I get a small pang in my chest about how I spend my night, and when I have open on my computer right now. I shouldn't feel bad though. I shouldn't be feeling guilty for looking into her past, because she won't tell me the truth, and I'm doing it for her.

You see it on talk shows all the time. The hosts reunite people with their estranged parents, and they're all really happy about it. So I brush aside any feelings of discomfort.

'Good morning.' I say breezily.

'I didn't wake you up did I?'

'Surprisingly, no,' I laugh, 'what's up?'

'Well, I have to go to the mall today to return some stuff my mom bought and doesn't want, and I thought to myself, I know someone who loves the mall. So I wondered if you were free, and if you were, do you want to come with me to the mall?'