Deceive Me (On Hold)

Chapter One

There are some things you just never want to open your front door to; murderers, preachers, door-to-door salesman. Today however, it was none of the above. Today it was, in Charity's opinion, something worse than all three combined. A man and a woman who looked to be in their late twenties, stood in the entrance to Charity's house, wearing Police Officer uniforms, with grim expression spread over both of their faces.

"Miss Charity Davenport?" the male policewomen asked. Charity responded with a silent nod of the head. "We have a serious situation to notify you about Miss Davenport."

"What's happened officer?" Charity stuttered over her words nervously.

"We need to ask you a few questions about Skylar Branning, if you could please accompany us to the station we can get this done quickly," the female police officer stated formally.

 A lump had now formed in Charity's throat, what had Skylar done now? Skylar had always been a reckless, liveing in the moment person but what could he have done to peek the police officers interest, and why did they look so sullen?

After twenty minutes the police officers, who Charity had learned were named Ellen Winter and Blake Walker, and herself were entering a stark white room. The only furnishings were a black table and a set of black chairs. Two of the chairs were already occupied by people Charity knew very well, Dakota Johnson and Tabitha Maxwell, two of her three best friends. Three other blank chairs sat vacant, which Charity assumed were for Ellen, Blake and herself.

"Officer can you please tell us what is going on here?" Dakota practically begged Ellen and Blake  for information as we sat down in the empty chairs.

"Miss Branning's parents reported her missing at a quater past ten this morning, she's been gone for the last fourty- eight hours, she also reported that you three were the last ones to see her. You were supposed to be having a sleepover on Friday night and Miss Branning never returned home after that night," Ellen explained to the group who were listening intently to the officer talk, Tabitha's mouth dropped open to form an 'o' shape as Ellen spoke.

 "Skylar never showed up, she called an hour after she was supposed to be at my house and said she had contracted the flu. She told us that she was curled up on her couch with a blanket, a box of tissues, a cup of hot chocolate and was about to turn on The Notebook. We haven't heard from her since then," Tabitha explained to Ellen who was chewing on her bottom lip as she considered Tabitha's words.

"And you didn't try to convince her to come over anyway?" Blake spoke up for the first time.

 "You don't try to convince Skylar of anything, once she made up her mind she stuck to her guns," Charity stated.

"I see, so do you have any idea where she would have gone. A favourite place of hers, maybe she went to see a boyfriend?" Ellen asked us.

"Skylar's favourite place was the mall and you don't stay there for two days in a row, not even Skylar was that crazy about shopping, and Skylar doesn't do boyfriends only a long list of flings," Tabitha told them.

The questioning went on for another hour and a half before the officers were happy enough with the girls' answers to let them go. Blake scribbled down notes as the girls rattled off answers to all of Ellen's questions, the three girls gave as much detail to the police about Skylar's life and that Friday night as they could but none of the information was any good to the officers. Ellen and Blake had only let the girls go because they were either telling the truth about not knowing the whereabouts of their friend or they were just extremely good liars, the officers still had no insite to where the issing girl could possible be.

Charity, Tabitha and Dakota didn't feel like going home after there long questioning session, so instead they walked to a nearby park, the only one in the small town of Burlingwood. Considering the town was only populated by about three thousand people they only needed one park to satisfy the needs of the towns citizens.