Free Disappeared: MANTEQUERO BOOK 2 by Jenny Twist Page A

eyes as soon as her head hit the pillow and slept like a baby till dawn.  She neither heard strange noises, nor did she have disturbing dreams, and when she woke up she felt marvellous. The more her mind worried at the problem of Miss Blacker, the more the whole thing seemed surreal. She half expected that they would return to England to find Miss Blacker had returned of her own accord, or at least been in touch explaining why she hadn’t returned on time.
    She crossed the landing to Heather’s room to give her a shout before going down to make the coffee.
     
    “Now the elastic’s gone in my pyjama trousers.” Heather tugged at her pyjama bottoms whilst at the same time trying to tighten the belt of her dressing gown. “Why is it that everything goes at once?”
    Alison laughed. “Give me your trousers and your pyjama bottoms after you’ve got dressed and I’ll sort them out for you. I’m sure we can get elastic at the village shop but I might get away with just shortening it a bit.”
    “Alison, you’re a star!” Heather grabbed her mug and took a large gulp of coffee. “Did you sleep all right last night?”
    “Fine. No funny noises, or if there were I didn’t hear them. And no nightmares. How about you?”
“Blissful. Had the dream again. Oh, if only such men existed in real life.”
    Heather stared ahead with a soppy smile on her face.
    “Steady or you’ll want to spend all your time asleep and give up real life altogether.”
    “That’ll be the day.” Heather gave a theatrical sigh. “If only. But it’s back to work in just over a week.”
“Oh, shut up! I’m trying not to think about it,” said Alison, and got up to put the toast on.
     
    ****
     
    “That’s much better.” Heather’s trousers sat snugly at her waist, showing no inclination to slide down. Alison eyed her critically. “You don’t think it could be that you’re actually losing weight, do you?”
“I wish,” Heather said. “I gave up dieting years ago.”
    Nevertheless, Alison thought she looked slimmer. She didn’t remember that Heather had a waist when she first met her.

V
     
    The next few days seemed to pass very slowly. Alison felt fidgety. She had become determined to find out what had happened to Miss Blacker. Somebody must know and she was prepared to shake it out of them if necessary. But all she had was this preposterous story about a fat-eating vampire. She seemed to have come to a dead end and she couldn’t think what to do next.
    Heather was no help at all. She had been very quiet the last couple of days. Doing a lot of staring into space, sleeping in in the mornings and over-sleeping the siesta, reluctant to do anything more energetic.
Alison had taken to going for long walks in the afternoons just to burn off all that pent-up energy, leaving Heather to sleep as long as she liked. In the evenings they went to the bar and Heather showed a brief reanimation whilst playing dominoes, but it was short-lived and she went straight up to bed when they got back.
    Alison still found the walk back in the dark unnerving. An evening with the old boys was guaranteed to make the strongest sceptic look over their shoulder at every passing shadow. And she maintained her practice of locking all the doors and windows every night before she went to bed.
    A couple of times she had walked back up the street where Miss Blacker had stayed and looked at the house from a discreet distance, trying to decide whether it looked inhabited. But there were no clues – no open windows, no smoke rising from the chimney – just the flowers round the door stirring in the breeze and that strange, disturbing cross standing guard.
    She had tried to get the woman in the village shop to talk to her, trying the `do you get many tourists?’ approach, but her replies were monosyllabic and unfriendly and Alison was glad to escape. The old boys at the bar were more forthcoming.
     
    Then one evening, when she had walked rather further than