Free The Start of Everything by Emily Winslow

winking mannequin in Wisbech, peeking out the sex shop window.
    “At least this will be straightforward,” I say.
    In the back of my mind, the memory of that mannequin face hovers: wink .

CHAPTER 9
    MATHILDE OLIVER
    I pressed the red STOP button. It had been fastened onto the post wrong, reading sideways. I pushed it down hard, covering the error with the pad of my thumb. A distant bell pinged to alert the driver. “I have to leave now,” I said. The girl next to me had an iPod, but the man behind me might have wondered. A mother with a pushchair tilted it to make a token space for me to fit through. The baby’s hand flailed, cracker crumbs flying from his dirty fist.
    I leaned on the button again, then pulled my hand back to my chest. The driver has a mirror. He’d know it was me. We’re not supposed to hit it twice. That’s why the red letters at the front of the bus light up: S-T-O-P-P-I-N-G. They light up so we know the button’s been pressed already.
    I breathed in through my nose. My heartbeat slowed with the bus. We’d already passed Corpus, now Pembroke College, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Something reflective in their new sculpture garden flashed light in my face. I covered my eyes.
    I’d had to come by bus, because the box was too heavy to carry any great distance.
    I jolted forward when the driver braked. I stood up. A government poster in front of my face advised “Slow down—don’t drown on Fenland roads.” The picture was of a flooded road, but all I could think of was the sketch of the dead girl from the newspaper.
    “Are you all right?” the driver asked, because my box was so heavy it hunched me over. My legs waddled so my knees could hold up the corners. I moved gingerly, one foot down onto one step, then the next.
    The box slipped out of my arms onto the pavement, umph ing heavily onto its flat bottom. The bus pulled away. I’d taped the top together, so nothing could fly out. But damp could climb up from the ground. I tilted it up with my foot and got my fingers underneath. I heaved it up again, leaning back for balance.
    That’s when I noticed the police car.
    It was one with a flashing light. It was parked on the quiet residential street on the other side of the brook, running parallel to the traffic of Trumpington Road. The houses there were all tall and terraced, rubbing up against one another to the point of shared walls. I felt squeezed just looking at them. George’s was one of those.
    A little farther down, people in white coverall suits prodded the shallow waterway. They looked puffed and padded and bald. Their hands were purple rubber, and their heads were white hoods pulled tight with elastic. Their mouths were wide paper ovals, big with surprise or horror.
    I turned around. I counted. I counted cars, which doesn’t work, because they move. So I reduced it to red cars only, which I can keep track of, even when the light turns green. I counted people inside red cars. I counted people with beards in red cars. There was exactly one.
    I turned. The white suits were still there. They bent. They had poles and a bucket up on the bank. A uniformed officer watched from the footbridge.
    I looked past them. George’s was one of those terraced houses behind the brook. I plopped the box back down onto the pavement. I pushed it up against a brick wall. I got a pen out of my bag and wrote “George Hart-Fraser” on it, and the number of his house.
    I ran up Trumpington Street, then flattened my back against thecollege wall. Down the road, the white-suited police were searching the water.
    Up the road, another crowd clustered around the grasshopper clock.

    I don’t like answering telephones. I’d been letting the one at home take messages and keep them. The recording is of my father’s voice. He says who we are and that we aren’t home. It was strange to be sitting right there and hear him say I’m not home.
    I still had the number Enid had written on a slip of paper for me. I