Darting inside, she stripped back the hood of the first sleeping bag and stared in dismay at the untidy sausage of towels and designer-label clothes which had been used to pad out the empty interior. A quick check of the second bag yielded the same result.
Her stomach clenched in apprehension. Of course, it was quite possible that Cheryl and Emma were off on some innocent teenage escapade, but she had the sinking feeling that their sophisticated tastes wouldn’t be satisfied by a common-or-garden midnight feast or giggling dorm raid.
A quick search of the rest of the empty rooms revealed no sign of the missing pair and, clinging to the slim hope that her instincts were wrong, Anya opened one final door and flicked on the overhead light.
‘Girls?’
Jessica jerked bolt upright in her sleeping bag, her spectacles still perched on her nose, while in the next bed a chubby redhead rolled over onto her back, blinking blearily into the glare as she struggled into wakefulness.
‘Cheryl and Emma seem to have disappeared,’ said Anya crisply. ‘Do either of you know where they’ve gone?’
She fixed her eyes on the redhead’s sleep-creased face.
‘Kristin? You’re friends with both of them—did they say anything to you about what they were planning to do?’
‘I was feeling so rotten earlier, Miss Adams, that I didn’t really pay attention to what anyone was saying,’ she replied plaintively.
Anya wasn’t fooled by the self-pitying evasion, nor was she in any mood for a drawn-out question and answer session.
‘What a pity,’ she sighed. ‘I was hoping to handle this on my own, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. You girls should get dressed—the police will probably want a word with you—’
‘The police?’ Jessica gasped.
‘B-but—shouldn’t you wait a bit longer before you do anything?’ gulped Kristin. ‘That’s what Miss Marshall would do if she was here. I mean—they’ll probably turn up soon, anyway…’
‘I can’t take the risk—not with a beach and river nearby,’ Anya said firmly. ‘If I was still on staff it would be different, but I’m just an unofficial helper on this trip. I can’t simply do nothing—that decision isn’t mine to take. Fortunately we have their parents’ phone numbers—’
It was the master stroke.
‘Their parents?’ Kristin’s flush of horror almost matched her vivid hair. ‘You can’t call Cheryl’s Dad—he’d go ballistic! They only went to a party!’
‘A party?’ Anya’s heart sank even further. ‘What party? Where?’
The facts that reluctantly emerged were hardly reassuring. A group of local boys who had been tossing a rugby ball around on the sand that afternoon while the girls were playing a game of beach-volleyball had extended the invitation to a party at one of their homes. Cheryl and Emma, the only ones daring enough to accept, had arranged to be picked up outside the gates of the regional park at ten o’clock by one of the boys in his car. They had been promised a ride back any time they wanted to leave the party.
Anya hid her horror. ‘You mean they agreed to go off in a car with total strangers?’ She racked her brains to remember exactly who she had seen on the beach. She had noticed several familiar faces from her new school, and had been able to reassure Cathy that the boys weren’t a roaming gang of thugs.
‘No, of course not!’ Even Kristin knew the difference between reckless defiance and outright stupidity. ‘It’s OK, Miss Adams—because Emma knew a couple of them from one of the bands who played at our school ball!’
Anya rolled her eyes. Oh, great…raging hormones and delusions of rock star grandeur!
The last straw was finding out that one of the big attractions of the party was the lack of any supervising adults.
‘Emma said that this really cute guy—the one whose party it is—told her that it would be a real rave because he had the house to himself for the whole weekend,’ added Jessica.
When pressed, Kristin was vague on the exact location of the party. ‘The boys said it would only take about ten minutes to drive there. Some big, two-storeyed place on the other side of Riverview…’
‘A white house on a hill, with a bridge at the gate and a stand of Norfolk pine trees,’ added Jessica, whose memory was as sharp as her intellect.
Anya’s mouth went suddenly dry and prickles of alarm feathered the back of her skull.
‘The Pines?’ she asked, her voice sounding shrill to her own ears. ‘Was the house called The Pines?’
Kristin had turned sulky again. ‘Yeah, that’s it…’
‘And you’re sure about there being no adults there?’
Kristin nodded and was even more disgruntled ten minutes later as she clambered into the back seat of Anya’s small car.