Free The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Coates Page B

frilled edges. The windowsill was painted white, matching the other accents in the room that set off the pastel-peach walls.
    A stack of boxes, all open, sat in the middle of the room. I caught glimpses of a diary, a photobook, and a collection of picture frames inside.
    “Wow…” I remembered that this was supposed to have been Jonathan Gillespie’s room, and I broke into laughter.
    It was such a relief, so much sweeter and less menacing than what I’d feared, that I let myself fall to the ground and racked in gasping breaths between bouts of chuckling. After a few minutes, I calmed down—and looked at the room with fresh eyes.
    I’d found out its terrible secret, which wasn’t that terrible to begin with, but that didn’t explain why it had been locked. I scooted over to the box holding picture frames and pulled out a few.
    They showed Mr and Mrs Gillespie, looking a little younger, posed with a girl with shoulder-length straw-coloured hair. She had a huge gap-toothed smile, and I guessed she wasn’t older than six or seven.
    I pulled out more photos, and they were all variations of the same. The Gillespies with their daughter at an amusement park. Mrs Gillespie pushing the toddler on a swing. A Christmas photo that was marked from five years previously.
    If this was the Gillespies’ daughter, where was she now?
    The Christmas photo looked like the most recent. The child was holding up a miniature toy horse, beaming at the camera while Mrs Gillespie sat on the ground just behind, wearing longer hair and holding a glass of wine. The date set it at five years before, but the girl couldn’t have been older than seven. That would make her a young teenager now.
    Where is she? Boarding school? Mr and Mrs Gillespie seemed the sort of people who might send their daughter to one. I knew I was pushing the limits of what was appropriate, but I was too curious to stop. The second box held stacks of newspaper clippings, and I pulled out a handful. The headline on the top sheet—from January five years ago, not long after the Christmas photo—made my heart drop: LOCAL GIRL MISSING.
    I skimmed it quickly. The Gillespies’s child, Hanna, had been reported missing on the morning of January the eighteenth. It was a suspected kidnapping, and the police were asking for information.
    More of the story unfolded through the clippings—there were at least thirty of them, stacked in chronological order. Police had searched the house and found no signs of a forced entry, and all the footprints in the damp ground had matched the Gillespie family’s shoes. However, a set of footprints belonging to Hanna had led towards the forest, though no one was sure how old they were.
    Nearly a hundred police officers and volunteers had spent three days scouring the woods. No signs of Hanna were found, and the search was eventually scaled back then called off completely. Mrs Gillespie believed her daughter had been kidnapped, rather than lost. She made repeated requests for information in the media. Two weeks after her daughter had disappeared, she offered five hundred thousand dollars to anyone with information that led to her daughter’s discovery. Despite hundreds of leads, Hanna wasn’t found.
    The last clipping was from four months before the Gillespies left me in charge of their home. It was the four-year anniversary of Hanna’s disappearance, but Mrs Gillespie still hadn’t given up. The reward was still on offer, she said. She implored the police to pull the file out of storage and reassess it, and she pleaded with the public to come forward with information. The article quoted her as saying she couldn’t rest until her child had been found. A photo was included, showing what Hanna might look like at age eleven.
    I carefully put the clippings back in the box in the same order I’d found them, then I looked around the room again. My stomach turned leaden as I realised what it was: a shrine to the Gillespies’ lost child. Of course the