There’s No Place Like Here

Cecelia Ahern

There’s No Place Like Here

Copyright © 2007 by Cecelia Ahern

For you, Dad-with all my love.

Per ardua surgo.

“A missing person is anyone whose whereabouts are unknown

whatever the circumstances of disappearance.

The person will be considered missing until located and his/her

well-being, or otherwise, established.”

An Gardaí Síochana

1

Je

The Gardaí launched an investigation, which led to a lengthy public search for her. For months every night the story was on the news, every day it was on the front pages of the papers, everywhere it was discussed in every conversation. The entire country pitched in to help; it was the biggest search for a missing person I, at ten years of age, had ever seen, and it seemed to affect everyone.

Je

She too was ten years old and in my class at school. I used to stare at the pretty photograph of her on the news every day and listen to them speak about her as though she were an angel. From the way they described her, you never would have known that she threw stones at Fiona Brady during recess when the teacher wasn’t looking, or that she called me a frizzy-haired cow in front of Stephen Spencer just so he would fancy her instead of me. No, for those few months she had become the perfect being and I didn’t think it fair to ruin that. After a while even I forgot about all the bad things she’d done because she wasn’t just Je

She was never found, not her body, not a trace; it was as though she had disappeared into thin air. No suspicious characters had been seen lurking around, no CCTV was available to show her last movements. There were no witnesses, no suspects; the Gardaí questioned everyone possible. The street became suspicious, its inhabitants calling friendly hellos to one another on the way to their cars in the early morning but all the time wondering, second-guessing, and visualizing dark, distorted scenarios implicating their neighbors. Washing cars, painting picket fences, weeding the flowerbeds, and mowing lawns on Saturday mornings while surreptitiously looking around the neighborhood conjured up shameful thoughts. People were shocked at themselves, angry that this incident had perverted their minds.

Pointed fingers behind closed doors couldn’t give the Gardaí any leads; they had absolutely nothing to go on but a pretty picture.

I always wondered where Je

At night I would look out my bedroom window and stare at her house. The porch light was always on, acting as a beacon to guide Je

Like Mrs. Butler, I wasn’t happy with not having any answers. I liked Je

It disturbed me that frequently my missing possessions were nowhere to be found and on the odd occasion that I did find them, it disturbed me that, as in the case of the socks, I could only ever find one. Then I’d picture Je

I never wanted anything new; from the age of ten, I was convinced that you couldn’t replace what was lost. I insisted on things having to be found.

I think I wondered about all those odd pairs of socks as much as Mrs. Butler worried about her daughter. I too stayed awake at night ru

Perhaps this is why it happened to me. Perhaps because I had spent so many years turning my own life upside down and looking for everything, I had forgotten to look for myself. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten to figure out who and where I was.

Twenty-four years after Je

This is my story.

2

My life has been made up of a great many ironies; my going missing only added to an already very long list.

First, I’m six foot one. Ever since I was a child I’ve been towering over just about everyone. I could never get lost in a shopping center like other kids, I could never hide properly when playing games, I was never asked to dance at discos, I was the only teenager that wasn’t aching to buy her first pair of high heels. Je

The second irony is that my job was to search for missing persons. For years I worked as a garda. With a desire to work solely on missing persons but without working in an actual division assigned to these, I had to rely solely upon the “luck” of being assigned these cases. You see, the Je

In the Gardaí sometimes we found missing people in conditions I won’t ever forget, not for the rest of this life and far into the next, and then there were people who just didn’t want to be found. Often we uncovered only a trace, too often not even that. Those were the moments that drove me to keep looking far beyond my call of duty. I would investigate cases long after they were closed, stay in touch with families long after I should have. I realized I couldn’t go on to the next case without solving the previous, with the result that there was too much paperwork and too little action. And so knowing that my heart lay only in finding the missing, I left the Gardaí and I searched in my own time.