Wildflower

Chapter 9

It had been nearly 10 months since Belles disappearance. The media storm it had kicked up had slowly died down. The press had instead moved on to a case surrounding a high profile southern socialites murder. So the little town quickly returned back to normal except now Violet would receive a pitiful look or occasionally hear a snippet of "That's the poor little girl-" as she passed town gossips.

During the day she spent every moment with Poppy Monroe, a girl who had recently moved to town. Every day they would go cycling to the cinema and try to sneak in to 15+ movies or steal peaches from Ms. Marshals garden but Violet always secretly left a dollar or two under a rock by the door out of guilt.

On this particular day they had decided that they wanted to try and climb to the top of the biggest tree in town. This of course had ended in distaster with a broken arm for Poppy and a fractured ankle for Violet when they had attempted to jump to each other's branches.

As she sat there in A&E Violet didn't really understand what the big fuss was. In fact all of the pain that she had felt in her ankle was gone.

A figure burst through the doors and Violet looked up to see a frazzled Flo searching madly for her. Ever since Belle had disappeared Flo hadn't been the same. Her cool happy go lucky adoptive aunt had become cold and hard. Her nights were spent attempting to track Belles whereabouts or researching things that Violet wasn't allowed to know nothing about.

Flo ran over to Violet and grabbed her little shoulders with her hands. For such a small and unassuming woman she was inhumanly strong.

"Dear god Violet what were you doing? You could have been killed." Her eyes are flittering and darting, analysing her injuries.

"I was testing if Gravity was really all its cracked up to be." Violet answered without missing a beat.

Flo glowered at her.

"The doctor said my ankle was fractured but it doesn't even hurt anymore. Look it's not even bruised!" Violet said sticking out her foot and rolling it in the air.

The colour drained from Flos face and she had the same look of utter shock that she wore for days after Belles disappearance.

"Oh no please not him, anyone but him, oh Belle." She frantically whispered to herself on repeat.

A loud noise behind her made Flo jump and scoop Violet into her arms. It was just a nurse dropping an empty bed pan. But Flo didn't stick around to find that out.

Brooklyn was rather pretty with its brick houses and artisanal restaurants. There was also a lot more foliage than I had anticipated. It's amazing that no matter how metropolitan a city gets we still instinctively want to see some part of nature. I was staring out of the window while lying on my back trying to count all of the people we passed.

"Are we nearly there yet Raph?"

"Close enough kid, and when may I ask did I say you could start calling me Raph?"

"The minute you kidnapped me." I muttered just loud enough for him to hear. My life was in utter bloody shambles with him the reason. I think I was allowed to call him whatever I bloody liked.

We drove in silence for a while before I realised that the almost never ending stream of buildings was slowly coming to an end, replaced with old warehouses spaced far from one another.

I shot up and looked out the window. We were coming on to a dock land area that seemed pretty deserted.

"What are we doing here?" I didn't like the look of the place. It was sketchy and although I knew I could handle myself at this point I didn't like the idea of why we were coming to such a run down area.