Excerpt: 52

One:

"My name is Holiday."
This was something she'd had to say a lot, recently.
"And how old are you, Holiday?" The policeman's eyes met hers only when he was asking questions, she'd noticed. Between questions they would dart down to the notepad resting on his knee, hiding from her face as he jotted down her answers. Many of the policemen that had come to the house were this same way. Their voices would drop when she was near, and they would smile at her if they found that they had to walk by her. The smiles that were apologetic and pained under the veneer of reassurance, smiles that adults use to hide bad news. She couldn't imagine the charade was for her benefit, she knew very well that her father was missing and that everything had somehow gone wrong. He was her father, after all. It was for their own ease, she had decided, that they tried to pretend at her. If they could believe they were protecting her from the harsh truth then they would sleep easier when they went home to their own families at the end of the day.
"I'm eleven. And a half, almost."
The policeman smiled one of his pretend policeman smiles.
"Eleven! You're practically all grown up. My daughter is about the same age."
Holiday decided that this was unlikely, she thought it sounded like his smile looked.
"Oh." she said instead, and pulled a throw pillow closer to her. She wished she could kick her feet up onto the coffee table and slouch down into the cushions of the couch and close her eyes until the policeman went away. But the policeman was sitting on the coffee table, right in front of her, and the only way to make him go away was to answer all the questions. She pulled the pillow into her lap and wrapped her arms around it instead.
"Holiday, do you remember hearing your dad say anything unusual in the last couple of weeks? Maybe about a trip he was taking, or a new friend who might have come by to visit?"
Holiday's mother was standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen, leaning against the frame and watching them. The policeman couldn't see her, but Holiday could, and in her peripheral vision she saw her mother's head turn one way, then the other. No.