Yours with respect,

X.

This would have been a good point for Laura to have burst into tears. But she didn’t. She took the letter back upstairs, and pinned it on her noticeboard, where she could lie in bed and look at it. The numbers, after an hour or so of staring at them without comprehension, burned into her brain, committed indelibly to memory.

She slept, and digits danced around her as she stood, alone, in a candlelit church, the sound of Mrs. Eveleigh’s weeping rising and falling like the tide all around her.

13.

After the first clue, there was nothing. No more letters, no more codes. She waited, heart constantly in her throat, so that she felt as if she were always swallowing, always massaging her neck to get her heart back into the right place, sure that any day now there would be another letter, another request, another clue, another tit-for-tat. She waited, and disappointment became another rock to carry, a rock painted a different colour, but a rock the same size and weight as the rocks she already bore: those smeared with the colours of guilt, and grief, and shame.

She could not stand the thought that she had been fooled into sending underwear to a mysterious pervert taking advantage of Bobby’s disappearance. Laura held a thin belief that people were inherently good, not evil, although that belief was eroding quickly. So, she waited, but her patience was met with one thing: a resounding silence.

Still, she had the code, and that was better than nothing. She quickly figured out that the code was a geographical location, a latitude and longitude. According to an old map she found in her father’s study, it pointed to a spot in the middle of a road that ran through a part of the vast, sprawling Old Forest only twenty miles away. From that point on, she became convinced that this was where Bobby’s body was buried. It consumed her every waking thought, that one, single location. It dragged her out of her grief, and threw her into action.

She got a job delivering papers, worked hard every day, saved her money, bought a compass, bought a brand new ordnance survey map from the local tourist information office, took a bus, then walked to the exact spot in the Old Forest that the coordinates pinpointed.

And found herself standing by a quiet roadside next to a car park on a place called Stoney Plain. To either side of her, there was scrubland, ringed by the huge, far-reaching mass of woodland that stretched far into the horizon and beyond. Behind her, there was more road, leading back the way she’d walked. In front of her, a dual carriageway bisected the horizon, bracketed by cattle grids meant to stop livestock and ponies from wandering into traffic. Aside from a dog-walker mooching along in the distance, she was alone, and she cut a forlorn, thin figure as she dithered on the roadside.

It had taken all her energy to get to this point, and now she was here, she didn’t really know what to do. She scanned the ground to either side of the road, couldn’t see anything that looked obvious, like a grave or a trench, and then sat down wearily on the scrubby verge.