I looked down at Spud. He didn’tseemokay. He seemed agitated. And not just Daddy-Luc-used-me-as-an-emotional-support-animal agitated.
And while I was puzzling over that, Oliver asked, “Lucien, what’s happened to the car?”
I looked at the car. Or rather, I looked at Spud, who was sitting where the car should have been, his tail hammering on the floor as if to say,Why are you humans so dense. And I was suddenly, horribly certain that I knew exactly what he’d been trying to tell us.
“Fuck the car,” I said. “Where’sJaz?”
Chapter 38
Perhaps it was just a defence mechanism, but Oliver slid right back into rational-and-calm-in-a-crisis mode. And that was a relief on so many levels, not just because it was always a relief when Oliver was rational and calm in a crisis but also because it was so typicallyhimthat it meant he was back to being Oliver.MyOliver, the Oliver I knew and loved, instead of the weird authoritarian stranger who’d been paying random unscheduled visits for the past six weeks.
“I’ll check her room,” he said calm-in-a-crisisly.
“Won’t that be a bit pointless?”
Oliver shrugged. “Yes and no. I agree she’s probably gone, but we’d look like fools if we ran into the night looking for our missing foster daughter and it turned out she was upstairs asleep and the car had been stolen quite independently.”
“That seems pretty unlikely.”
“I’m trying to avoid jumping to conclusions. Besides, even if she did abscond with our motor vehicle, we’ll learn something from what she left behind.”
If Jaz had left anything behind, it was probably a note saying “seeya suckers, p.s. Luc you were a shit dad,” but that aside, Oliver was right.
We trooped upstairs, and he rapped smartly on Jaz’s door.
“Jaz,” he called out. “We’re concerned that you might bemissing, so unless you tell us not to, we’re going to come into your room.”
Silence.
“Jaz,” he repeated. “I’m sorry if we’re waking you, but we’re coming in now.”
It had been nice and polite, and also completely unnecessary. The room was empty.
No. Not empty. Thebedwas empty and—I noticed—made, but everything else was still there. Her laptop, her clothes, the guitar my mum had stolen from Brian May.
“We can at least assume she intends to come back,” Oliver murmured. “That or she planned extremely badly.”
I still didn’t know Jaz anywhere near as well as I wanted to or thought I should, but she didn’t seem the sort to plan a runaway badly. I mean, hell, she’d made the bed before leaving. “That’s good?” I ventured.
“Relatively. Still, we’ll need to contact the police.”
And just like that we were back in the stop-being-your-dad space. “Fuck me, Oliver, she’s a kid. Do you really think getting her arrested for grand theft auto is the best thing for her?”
Oliver’s expression was that very specific hurt-but-acknowledge-I-deserve-it face that I was way more used to doing myself when he, say, suggested I could sometimes be unreliable, flaky, or lacking in motivation. “I didn’t mean about the car, although I understand why you wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. I meant about her.”
“About her?” I asked, feeling slower on the uptake than I would have liked.
“She’s a missing child. She almost certainly wasn’t abducted, but it’s the small hours of the morning, she’s in a car she might not know how to drive, and she’s fourteen. I don’t want to be alarmist, but literally anything could happen.”
I tried my best not to imagine quite how long a listanythingcovered. My best didn’t do great. “Isn’t there, like, a twenty-four-hour thing with reporting people missing?”
“That’s a myth,” Oliver told me, and it was weirdly comforting being back to a world where Oliver told me things were myths instead of one where we had gut-splaying arguments about our values, assumptions, and emotions. “For any missing person butespeciallya child, the first twenty-four hours are the most important. A rule that said you had to wait twenty-four hours would, a lot of the time, be equivalent to a rule saying you had to wait until the person was dead.”
Fuuuuuck. “Thanks for that.”
“Which is why we’re not going to wait twenty-four hours. Or any hours. I suggest you call Jaz. She’s more likely to pick up if it isn’t me. Then, if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to the authorities.”
“But what about”—I shuddered—“like the whole grand theft auto thing?”
