Tuesday, July 27. 11:37 a.m. Seatoun, Wellington, New Zealand.

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Seatoun, the suburb where Theo’s school was located and the same suburb her dad lived in, had been badly damaged by the quake and following tsunami. The cleanup had already started with crews of volunteers working to remove rubble and trash and broken tree branches from the streets, but evidence of the tsunami—the stench of the mud and probably sewage drying in the winter sunshine—was almost enough to make her gag.

Walking along a street on the hill above Theo’s school en route to her dad’s place, Ana spotted a cluster of people beside a church hall which had been commandeered as a civil defense shelter. They continued toward it and Ana spotted a boy with carroty-red hair tossing a cricket ball back and forth with another kid.

“That’s one of Theo’s friends.” She lightly touched Daniel’s arm to stop him. “I’ll have a quick word with him.”

Ana waved out and the boy jogged over to them on the sidewalk. “Hi, Ms. Grace.”

“Malcolm, what happened on Friday? You and Theo were in PE, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. Theo told us to run up the hill after the quake hit. Lucky we did. Man, that tsunami totalled everything.”

It was that close? She swallowed, heart in her throat, and took a deep breath. “He’s okay, then? You’re okay?”

“Yeah, sure. We’re all okay.” His forehead crumpled and he picked a scab that had formed over a graze on his chin. “The teachers brought us all here afterward to wait for our parents. Mine are away in Aussie with my grandma and can’t get a flight into Wellington. I was staying with my auntie, but”—his gawky adolescent Adam’s apple bobbed rapidly—“one of the teachers tracked her down in the weekend. She’s in hospital, and they told me I should stay here for now until her house can be checked out.”

Ana drew the boy in for a hug, and the stiffness in his shoulders quickly melted away. “I’ll stop on the way back from getting Theo and his granddad and see if you can come home with us, okay?”

Malcolm nodded and surreptitiously swiped a grubby fist across his eyes. “Thanks, Ms. Grace.”

“When did Theo leave the shelter?” Daniel asked.

“Saturday. I saw him talking to Mr. Burbank. Guess he must’ve been asking if he could be dismissed to go to his granddad’s. He took off a few minutes later with him.”

Tiny spiders of unease skittered down her spine.

“With who? Mr. Burbank?” she said.

“Yeah.” Malcom gave her an adults worry about everything eye roll. “It’s okay, Ms. Grace. He’s the school’s drama teacher.”

The boy who’d been tossing a cricket ball to Malcolm sidled up. “Harrison Burbank’s freaking weird, if you ask me.”

“Harrison Burbank?” she parroted and the chilled spidery sensation escalated.

Something about the teacher’s full name.

Where had she heard it before? Why did it feel like her skin was about to break out in a nasty rash?

“What’s weird about him?” asked Daniel.

Ana looked up. Daniel was frowning.

The boy shrugged to indicate it was no big deal. “He’s just, ya know, a creepster. He smiles at you all the time, but we all know underneath that smile he doesn’t like kids. It’s like he’s always acting.”

“He is a drama teacher, doofus,” Malcolm said.

“He’s still creepy, dipshit.” The other boy shoulder-checked him and they began to tussle, shoving each other until Malcolm laughed and took off, sprinting back toward the shelter.

“What do you think?” Daniel said, leading her to sit on the low concrete wall that encircled the parking lot in front of the church.

“There’s something about that teacher’s name. It’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite—argh.” She rubbed her forehead, trying to massage the answer to the forefront of her brain.

“Relax. Sit in the sun for a moment. It’ll come.”

They sat with seagulls swooping overhead and the growl of a dump truck changing gears as it ground up the hill away from them. She let her mind drift.

Harrison. Harrison Burbank. She didn’t know any Harrisons, apart from the actor Harrison Ford. It hit her then—

“No. It can’t be. No.” She grabbed Daniel’s forearm, her nails digging into his flesh.

“What?”

“I should have thought of it the moment that kid said his name. The woman I was telling you about yesterday—the one who accused Dad of rape? Her name was Patricia Burbank.”

“It’s not an uncommon surname.” Daniel’s voice remained steady, even though her nails must have been imprinting shallow crescents in his skin.

“No, it’s not uncommon, but I remember.” Her breath quavered out. “I remember meeting her now.” She shot him a quick glance. “Guess I’d kind of blocked it out. It isn’t a pleasant memory.”

He plucked her clenched hand off his arm and laced their fingers together.

She laughed, but the sound came out of her throat like a turkey being slowly strangled. “This has become a habit I need to kick—me dumping all the horrors of my past on you.”

Turning toward her, he cupped her chin in his free hand, forcing her gaze to meet his. “There’s not a part of your life I’m not interested in, and you sharing it with me is not dumping. So tell me, for now, the edited version.”

The spiders were back, with an army of their friends, but she gulped past the nugget of dread in her throat. “When I was fifteen, Mum and I visited some relatives in Auckland. We’d gone mall shopping when this woman accosted us. She reeked of alcohol and started swearing at us, calling Mum the wife of a—well, I figured out pretty fast who she was.”

In her mind’s eye she saw herself as she’d been that day. Wearing the new top she’d conned her mum into buying earlier, and Lily Grace angling her body to protect her in case the abuse should turn physical. Hot shame-filled tears had dripped off Ana’s face at the woman’s taunts.

“When I dragged Mum back from the woman I saw a little boy—he must’ve only been about three or four—standing behind her. The poor kid was sucking his thumb, a blank look on his face. He seemed so resigned to his mother’s viciousness, like it was nothing out of the ordinary. She yelled his name to get his attention and I remember thinking that the kid better turn out as brave as Indiana Jones, the character Harrison Ford played, because he’d need to be with a mother like that.”

She paused, pushing back the hurt and despair the memories dredged up from that day long ago. “We never saw or heard from Patricia Burbank again.” She stood up, brushing her palms down her legs. “I know it sounds far-fetched but do you think it might’ve been him watching my dad?”

Daniel frowned. “It’s possible. We’ll ask around and see if any of the teaching staff is still here,” he said, rising to his feet.

Her heart swelled. Whether he thought her theory crazy or not, Daniel believed her.

They got lucky. Two teachers from Theo’s school remained at the church, waiting with the group of five students whose parents still hadn’t arrived. Both were unimpressed when Ana asked them about Harrison Burbank. A teacher who skipped out on his colleagues almost immediately after a major disaster didn’t warrant the usual code of loyal silence between coworkers.

They discovered Harrison was in his mid-twenties, had joined the staff at the beginning of the school year, and didn’t socialize with them outside school hours and the formal school functions he was expected to attend. The most useful information was his home address, pried without too much arm-twisting out of the elderly science teacher. He’d dropped Harrison at home once after a staff meeting and sniffed as he recalled the young man hadn’t even bothered with the common courtesy of a thank you.

“Most rude,” he declared. “And I doubt he’ll have a job here after his behavior, though he may have been helping Theo reach his granddad’s, as you say.”

Theo’s granddad. She swore, smacking herself on the forehead. “I’m so stupid.”

“What?” Daniel said.

“Theo’s last text to me said, ‘Going to Granddad’s house to check on him. Meet me there.’ Or something like that—but he definitely said granddad.” She could picture the text in her mind’s eye.

“And?”

She tried to just breathe, but her chest rattled with a shaky inhale. “Theo’s never called my dad Granddad. It’s been Pop ever since he was a baby.”

They stood looking at each other, people brushing past them, children laughing, and the rhythmic squeak of a wheelbarrow trundling along the footpath.

“Either Theo sent that text trying to tell me something or someone else sent it for him.” Her chest tightened under bands of constrictive fear. “Something’s not right. I need to go to the police.”