Read an extract from Leave the Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz
Read an extract from Leave the Girls Behind, the new thriller from the acclaimed author of Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz.
Prologue
In her own bedroom, she has a night light shaped like a star.
It turns off when she is sleeping, because she doesn’t need it to stay on all night.
Only when her eyes are still open. It’s not really the dark that she’s afraid of, anyway.
It’s not being able to see where all that darkness ends.
Her teacher said the stars don’t actually go away; it’s just that sometimes the sun makes it too bright to see them. And when you can’t see the sun anymore, that’s not because it’s gone, either. You’ve just been spun away from the light.
There are no suns in this room. Unless you count the three blue ones scribbled on the wall. She saw them when he first brought her here. Back when there was still a little light. Now there’s not even a crack under the door.
Who drew those suns? Was it the girl she can hear through the wall?
The one who’s been singing the same song over and over?
That girl sounds too grown up to draw blue crayon suns on somebody’s wallpaper, but maybe those scribbles have been here for a long time already.
Like she has.
She likes being sung to when she can’t sleep. But not by the girl on the other side of the wall. Because that’s not the right song. This is not the right room, or the right bed.
She is not supposed to be here. She’s been spun around and around.
And now she can’t see anything at all.
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AMITY
CHAPTER ONE
NEW YORK, MAY 2015
RUTH-ANN BAKER IS HAVING AN UNREMARKABLE DAY.
For the twenty-six-year-old New Yorker, unremarkable looks something like this . . .
She gets out of bed before 10 am. She does not worry excessively about her dog, Ressler, dying (she just worries a small, helpful amount). She does a quick tidy-up of her apartment and eats the right food at the right times. A bagel for breakfast, a salad sandwich for
lunch. She drinks three coffees, none of which make her overly jittery,
and she does not grab at her stomach when looking in the mirror, nor hate any part of her body excessively.
She completes the requisite amount of steps for herself and for Ressler, and she does her
breathing exercises. Talks briefly to her Uncle Joe on the phone.
Ignores a call from her mother, and communicates with her father exclusively through emojis. She watches a half-hour documentary on climate change at 5 pm, and times her wallowing after. Ten minutes to worry about the state of the world, and then she puts
her hair up in a messy bun and gets ready for work.
The walk to Sweeney’s Bar will take her ten minutes, the way it always does.
Meaning she’ll be right on time for her shift, the way she always is.
There is nothing remarkable about her day at all, no cause for
concern.
Until.
Her cell phone begins to beep loudly, just as she drops it into her bag. Living in Manhattan, Ruth is used to wailing sirens, to honking horns and sudden booms that make you jump, but the noise emanating from the bottom of her satchel has a different tone; there’s an insistent, high-pitched urgency to it. She scrambles to retrieve the phone, her fingers brushing over the tiny stun gun disguised as lipstick and the can of deodorant that’s really mace, until she finds it, just as the beeping stops.
And now she understands why that sound seemed to reverberate all around her.
She has been sent an automated emergency alert, one that would have echoed
throughout the city and beyond.
Ruth feels her stomach drop. It’s a notification about a child abduction. She knows that AMBER Alerts can be sent directly to cell phones these days, but it’s still a shock to receive one right here in her apartment.
Taking a deep breath, she reads over the truncated details, each line causing a little earthquake that makes her hand— and the phone— shake
AMBER ALERT Hoben, CT
VEH DrkBlu Van
CHILD 7F 4ft 45lb
SUSPECT White M 30–40 yrs
CHECK MEDIA
Less than ninety characters of information, but Ruth can see through the gaps. A little girl has been taken from the town of Hoben, Connecticut, by a man with few identifiers, outside of the blue van he was driving— possibly across state lines, given the alert has been sent as far as New York City. A child has gone missing. An adult male has driven her away.
Ruth tries not to think about what that man did next.
Or the town he took the little girl from.
Where so much has already been lost ...
Extracted from Leave the Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz.
Available now in all good bookstores.
Jacqueline Bublitz will be on tour in NSW, VIC and QLD this November.
Find out where you can meet her and get your books signed at the link below.
Leave the Girls Behind
by Jacqueline Bublitz
The acclaimed author of Before You Knew My Name returns with another taut suspense thriller where nothing is as it seems.
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