Free Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) by Eli Yance

indifferently.
     
    “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
     
    She didn’t answer.
     
    “Are you out by yourself?” Pandora wondered. “Where are your friends?”
     
    “I don’t have any.”
     
    “Oh.” Pandora could empathise, as a little girl she spent most of her playtime by herself. She would play with her dolls, ride her bikes, watch her television and play her computer games without the company of kids her own age. She was shy, a cautious only child who suffered under her parents’ distant and protective hands and didn’t know how to function around the children who were allowed to stay out late and owned the latest toys and games. “That’s a shame,” she said softly. “What about your parents, your mum and dad?”
     
    “What about them?” the girl asked simply.
     
    “Are they around?”
     
    “My mum is at home. I don’t have a dad.”
     
    “Oh, I’m sorry.”
     
    “Why?”
     
    Pandora frowned, gave a gentle shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s just that, well, it must be hard not having a dad.”
     
    The little girl didn’t answer. She looked Pandora up and down, concentrating on her beautiful eyes , studying her features in detail. She felt like she was under the studious and knowing gaze of a doctor or a psychiatrist. She became uneasy on her feet, in her own skin.
     
    “ It is ,” the little girl said eventually. She lifted her feet, gave Pandora one last bland stare and then pedalled away, her legs working methodically as the pushbike crept out of sight along the empty street.
     
    ***
     
    The shopkeeper eyed Dexter as soon as he entered. He was a hunched, haggard old man with tired eyes and failing skin that drooped off his neck like a punctured football. He looked ready for death, not just because of his dwindling years -- the reaper was certainly around the corner -- but because of an attitude that suggested he was ready, that he had given up on the few things life had left for him and was ready to bid it farewell with one last cynical sneer.
     
    Dexter didn’t even try to acknowledge him with a friendly greeting. It always paid to be friendly, especially when you needed the world on your side, but with some people it wasn’t worth the effort.
     
    The shop looked like a newsagents but there were no newspapers or magazines, a relief for Dexter who didn’t have to wonder if the grumpy old git behind the counter was waiting to supply the town with pictures of him and Pandora at their worst.
     
    A scattering of items littered the shelves. Dorothy said this was where the locals did their shopping, this little hovel that was barely big enough to hold its sour-faced owner and his antique till, was where they all came to acquire life’s essentials. They stocked stacks of toilet paper in the corner, like bales of hay in a farmer's field. Crates of pop, juice, water and milk sat in the other corner -- Dexter had to be careful to avoid standing on them when he scoured the shelf, reaching up to pluck some chocolate bars and a couple of packets of crisps.
     
    He didn’t crack a smile when he laid the items down on the counter, wasn’t expecting the old man to talk to him.
     
    “Pretty woman you have there,” he said in a voice that crackled like an out of tune radio. He nodded his head towards the window, through which Dexter could see Pandora’s shadow as she stood in the sunlight.
     
    He let a curious expression cross his face but didn’t reply to the old man. There was something sinister behind his grey eyes.
     
    “You want to keep an eye on her,” he pushed, not making a move to tally the items on the counter.
     
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
     
    The grey eyes bore through him. A soft cackle spilled out of his thin blue lips; a smile curled half of his face like a cruel stroke.

 
    Dexter held his stare, shook it off. He looked down at the items on the till, raised his eyebrows to indicate them.
     
    The old man put his hands -- skeletal specimens