Vanished Read Online Free Page A

window, seeing that the rain had pretty much stopped, though there was water still pouring noisily overhead from the gutters.
    As she scrubbed and rinsed the soap from the mug, her annoyance at Hal slowly dribbled away. She wondered again why he seemed so familiar. It had something to do with his eyes and that expression of concentration on his face. Maybe it wasn’t him she had seen before, she decided. It was that look .
    A few minutes later, Neela was done with the mug and was about to leave when the teakettle caught her eye again. Hal had replaced it on the shelf while she drank her cocoa. What had he called it? A why ? A why-something. It was hard to tell, with his accent. She looked at it more carefully. The dragon was made out of cast iron, with outstretched wings and scaly legs. Its face was sharp and triangular, with eyes set back high in two slits. Without thinking, Neela reached out with one finger. The dragon felt cold and smooth, except for the mouth, which was very sharp, despite its miniature size.
    She slowly retraced her steps out of the kitchen to the vestibule. She wondered what she would tell her mother, who would be worried about her by now. At the coat closet, she opened the wooden folding door, still thinking of what to say at home, when she stopped. At first she thought she was mistaken. But the closet was so small, the truth was plain and simple. An awful feeling crept over her. She stared at the coat still hanging in the closet, a dark vinyl jacket that Hal had said was his, and the gaping space next to it where her veena should have been.
    She searched the vestibule and then went as far as the doors of the chapel. Inside, the chapel was dark and empty, the somber-colored sky barely shining through the multicolored stained glass behind the altar. She felt a tightness in her throat as she entered, looking around the nearest pews, afraid that someone would ask her what she was doing, but looking nevertheless, wishing desperately that the veena had been moved to the chapel or else stored somewhere close by. But no matter where she looked, she found nothing.
    At last she went back to the kitchen. Maybe Hal was still around; maybe he had put the veena away someplace else; maybe he had done something so explainable and obvious that the whole disaster she imagined unfolding before her would disappear instantly.
    She walked back through the vestibule, continuing down the hallway to the kitchen, and opened the door through which he had left, thinking it led to another part of the church. But when she opened the door, she was dismayed to see an alley instead. There was no one there, only a long walkway with puddles of water on the ground.
    â€œHal?” she called out. Her voice sounded feeble to her ears, like a small pebble thrown inside an empty cavern. Beyond the alley lay the great, yawning expanse of the parking lot, with no sign of Hal or her missing veena.

It had stopped raining when Neela trudged home. Just take very good care of it —her grandmother’s words came echoing back to her. And now, somewhere out there, her grandmother’s veena was traveling farther and farther away. Neela choked up, imagining it thrown carelessly into the back of a car, rolling around along the bumpy roads of Arlington. Her grandmother would never forgive her.
    Maybe Hal had planned the whole thing, from the time he opened the door and found her, a drowned rat in the pouring rain. And yet, something didn’t seem right. Sure, Hal could have tricked her, but how could he know it would rain, and how could he know she would stop at the church because of it?
    Unless he was following her already. She remembered the sound she heard walking home, like someone stepping on a twig behind her. Was that Hal? But why would he follow her? And if he did, it didn’t explain how he could be in the church before her and how he seemed to know his way around. It also didn’t explain why he wanted her veena.
    When