Silence - By Kailin Gow Page 0,56

how things are in our house.

Except today, something is different. I know that from the moment I set foot through the door.

I can’t put my finger on it for a second or two, but then I realize what it is. The house is quiet.

“Mom? Dad? Hel o?” I cal it out, moving through into the living room, then the kitchen. There’s no sign of either of them. They aren’t there when I check the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, either, which is weird. By 6 pm, at least one of them is always there.

Stil , maybe it’s nothing. Maybe the sinking feeling I have in the pit of my stomach is just an overactive imagination playing tricks on me. For al that I stil can’t help feeling that there’s something wrong, it’s not like the place has been trashed, or anything. It’s not like anything has obviously been stolen, or is out of place. The opposite, if anything. The whole ground floor is neat, tidy.

Maybe Mom and Dad have just gone next door for a moment. I latch onto that thought, heading upstairs. Bailey wil know. He might not pay much attention to things that don’t involve computers, but Mom and Dad wil at least have told him where they were going.

“Bailey?” I knock on the door to his room, but there’s no answer. Tel ing myself that he probably has headphones on while he’s playing one of those online games of his, I invoke big sister’s prerogative and open the door anyway.

Bailey isn’t there either. And his room’s neat.

Too neat. Bailey is, like little brothers everywhere, I guess, a one boy disaster zone. This looks like one of those occasions when Mom has final y gotten tired of tel ing him to clean his room and done it for him, which means that Bailey can’t have been back since.

In fact, the whole house has that feel. Like someone has scrubbed it from top to bottom, and no one has been in it to mess it up yet. That probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me, it’s enough.

Enough to send me hurrying around the house, looking for clues as to what might be happening. Because there’s something happening. I’m certain of it.

I go to search every room again, even

though it doesn’t make sense. After al , Mom and Dad and Bailey aren’t about to leap out from behind the sofa, are they? Thereify"s stil no sign of them. More than that, beyond the car in the drive, there’s stil no sign that any of them has even been home.

I check my messages. Maybe there’s an

explanation there. There’s nothing. There’s nothing when I check my emails, either. Not even the usual stuff I’d get most days, which only makes me bite my lip harder with the worry of it. I don’t like this. I really don’t like this.

Should I cal the cops? That thought

springs into my head from nowhere. What would I tel them, though? That something doesn’t feel right in my house, and that it looks like a team of cleaners has been through the place? They’d laugh at me, or worse, accuse me of wasting their time.

I haven’t cal ed my parents yet, so I try that next. I get out my cel phone and cal the number for my father. It doesn’t even ring. Instead, I just get this message, saying “Error, number not recognized.”

The same thing happens when I cal my

mother, and when I try to connect to the number for the cel phone Bailey has ‘for emergencies’. I’ve sometimes wondered what kind of emergencies a ten year old can have. I guess now I know. I’m breathing faster now, and I know I’m starting to panic. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in D.C. Not that I know what “This kind of thing” is yet.

I punch in another obvious number. That of my Aunt Chrissie. She’s my mother’s sister, and my parents always say that if anything serious happens, and they aren’t around, I should ring her. I’m not sure what good it’s meant to do, ringing a woman we hardly ever see to come and ride in to save the day, but right now, I’m wil ing to try anything.

“Error. Number not-”

“Stupid thing!” I throw my phone and it bounces off the sofa, coming to rest on the carpet. I stand there seething with anger at it for a minute, my head spinning as I try to make