Then She Was Gone

Then She Was Gone

Adult mystery
"She'd made her beans on toast, sat and watched her eat it.
Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The
one she wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a
terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it.
It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast."
Ellie (15) was her mother, Laurel's favorite child, her golden
girl. It would seem that she had an, if not idyllic, at least
enviable life. She excelled at school. She was being courted by the
boy of her dreams.
But one day she never returned from a trip to the library.
Intensive searches had yielded no clues to Ellie's disappearance
until a tenth anniversary reconstruction had uncovered the backpack
Ellie had taken to the library and some mangled human bones.
Those ten ten years have been hard ones for Laurel, protagonist
of Lisa Jewell's Then She Was Gone. Her marriage has ended in
divorce. Her remaining children have grown and flown. But even
before their physical departure they had checked out emotionally. Her
days have settled into a monotonous routine.
"...She worked in the marketing department of the shopping
center in High Barnet. Once a week she went to see her mother in an
old people's home in Enfield. Once a week she cleaned Hanna's flat.
The rest of the time she did things she pretended were important to
her, like buying plants to decorate her balcony with, like visiting
friends she no longer cared about to drink coffee she did not enjoy
and talk about things she had no interest in..."
Laurel's life seems to change for the better when, eating lunch
in a cafe, she catches the eye of handsome Floyd. A restaurant date
quickly morphs into a romance. Before you know it they're sleeping
together and meeting each other's families.
But Floyd may not be quite the person he's presenting himself
as. And he may even hold the key to Ellie's disappearance. His
younger daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Laurel's missing child.
On a purrrsonal note, I am super discouraged. I opened my one and
only laptop. It didn't turn on. I charged it until the charger light
went green. I tried the on button. Nothing worked. I called IT at
the University. They were clueless. They gave me the Apple number.
The woman there said I'll have to get it repaired or replaced. As if
I can afford that. But school is on zoom. And the laptop is the only
device I have zoom on. My faith in computers' reliabilty is back down
to zero.
Jules Hathaway




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