The Apple Tart of Hope Read Free

a terrible pity but, oh well, that’s that.”
    In actual fact, the disappearance of someone is exactlyeveryone’s cue to get out and search, and keep searching and not stop until there’s dirt under their fingernails and wretchedness in their souls from the number of rocks they have pushed aside to see whether I’m under one of them. If you want to know my opinion, coming to terms with someone’s disappearance is a bit of an offense. It’s an insult to someone’s memory.
    I learned a lot, though. As the days passed, I learned that staying lost made its own sort of sense. I learned that there’s not that much difference between pretending to be dead and really being dead. As far as I can see, both seem to amount to the same thing.
    I learned that if someone you know disappears you shouldn’t automatically jump to conclusions. You should ask questions, and look, and search until you know for sure. Don’t write them off until you’ve exhausted every avenue. Keep hope in your heart.

the third slice

    According to the reports, Oscar had taken his old mountain bike from his garage and he’d gone rattling off along the road over Hallow Bridge, whose lights always look as though they’re winking at you. People were saying he must have freewheeled from the top and launched himself into the sea.
    â€œIs there any proof that he did that? Where’s the evidence?” Stevie and I had asked each other when we’d met, as planned, the midnight after Oscar’s mass.
    â€œThere was the bike,” said Stevie. “They did find his bike. One of the divers fished it out, twisted and dripping. Someone propped it up against the last stone bollard over there and it stayed like that for a few days.”
    Stevie trundled over to the bollard and circled it slowly.
    â€œNobody wanted to touch it or move it. It was like a curse everyone was a bit afraid of. People wouldn’t even
look
at it. You could see them carefully making sure they kept their eyes away from it.”
    Stevie said he’d looked at it, though—he didn’t have a problem with it. You have to examine all the clues very carefully if you’re going to get to the bottom of something. He said he’d kept comingback to look at it a load of times, until his dad had organized for someone to take the bike away. He said there had been something a bit human about the way it leaned over, as if it was looking for comfort from the cold bollard.
    Loads of other people had visited the pier in the days after Oscar had gone—to leave flowers and to shake their heads at one another, but mainly, Stevie said, to be snoopy and nosy.
    Mrs. Gilhooly from up the road—always a major drama queen, even at the best of times—had been an expert, my dad had said, in stirring up commotion. She’d sighed as she’d busied herself around the pier, talking to the scuba divers and filling people in on the latest developments.
    â€œHow cruel! The way that bollard stands hard and solid and insensitive, just as it must have done when that poor boy flung himself in.”
    Stevie said he’d got really angry with Mrs. Gilhooly, and he’d started telling her she shouldn’t make comments about things she knew nothing about.
    â€œHow do you know he flung himself in? Why are you jumping to that conclusion? If my brother is supposed to be so dead, then where,” he’d demanded, “where is his body? Tell me that if you’re so sure!”
    And nosy Mrs. Gilhooly had asked Stevie where his father was because it didn’t do for grieving little boys in wheelchairs to be hanging around on their own at the site of their brother’s tragic demise, in what seemed to her like a vulnerable and out-of-control condition.
    Stevie had told her that for her information, he wasn’t grieving. He was looking and searching and thinking very hard—and other important stuff that nobody else