Lyndall Henning
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Her voice made the beggars look up, and seeing my head above the bars seemed to make them angry. One of them, with his leg in a filthy cast, waved his wooden crutch at me, black eyes wide as he moved closer. The others began to approach the wall as well, gabbling in their thick accents and staring up at me with creased-up adult expressions that I couldn’t understand.
Terrified, I scrambled quickly down the wall, skinning my hands and elbows and landing in a heap on the ground. I pulled myself to my feet, and ran as fast as I could towards the house, followed by my sisters. It seemed like hours before we reached the laundry where Beauty, our maid, was doing the ironing.
“Eh, Lyndie,” she said in surprise as I whipped my sun-hat off my head and stuffed it in the copper bowl on the windowsill by the door. “What is the matter?”
I ignored her and dived into the playroom, followed by the sisters. We stood in a circle staring at one another, gasping for breath.
“What happened?” Derryn wanted to know, clutching the veil of her wedding dress, which must have fallen off while she was running.
I shook my head and pressed my lips together. I could feel funny tremors running through my body.
“Lynd?” Gwynnifer touched my arm.
“A body. In the street,” I said eventually.
“A dead body?”
I shrugged and looked away. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe dead.”
Later that evening, while the sisters and I sat round the huge dining room table, Mom looked up and said, “Mrs. De Silva from down the road was highjacked and killed in her car today, girls. I think we should go to Church tomorrow after school and pray for her.”
My stomach scrunched up when she said the name. I knew Mrs. Da Silva. She would be the second person murdered in our street in the last six months. It was Crissie Dooren last time - killed slowly while her mother was tied up with washing-line cord and made to watch. We hadn’t known them very well, but we did know the Da Silvas.
There was something odd and strained in Mom’s voice, and I wondered if she, like me, was unable to stop thinking about the crumpled, caved-in shape of Mrs. Da Silva’s body in the road.
I didn’t say any of this out loud, and nor did the sisters. It was too nightmarish to talk about – as though if we brought it up and discussed it with the grown-ups it would make it all more real.
I wondered what Mom would say if she heard we hadn’t run when we heard the gunshot. She had made us promise to a hundred times.
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