North of Nowhere by Liz Kessler

across his eyes.
Was he laughing at us?
    “It’s not a joke,” I said quickly. “It’s really serious. He’s gone, and we need to find him.”
    The man put the poster down on his desk. The smile still seemed to be there, glinting deep inside his strange green eyes. Then he shook his head. “I’m not laughing,” he said carefully. Then he turned his back on us.
    Sal and I exchanged a glance. “So you’ll put our poster up?” Sal asked.
    The man waved a hand at us without turning back around. “Aye, I’ll put your poster up.”
    And with that, he shuffled off into the back room he’d come from.
    Was that it?
    “Do you think he’s coming back?” Sal whispered.
    “I don’t know. Should we just hang on a minute and see?” I whispered back.
    We waited for a minute. Then another. Finally, I turned to Sal. “I think we should go,” I said. “He said he’ll put it up.”
    “We could pop back later, just to see if it’s in the window,” she suggested.
    “Good idea. Come on, let’s go.”
    We turned and made our way back through the shop. Sal opened the front door and we were about to leave when the man called from the back of the shop.
    “So, which one of you is Mia?” he asked.
    We stopped in our tracks so quickly that if we’d been playing freeze dance, we’d have tied for first place.
    I was the first to recover. I turned toward the man. “
I’m
Mia,” I said shakily.
    The man nodded. “Thought so. Just checking,” he said. Then he held out a plastic bag and added, “This is for you.”
    I stared at him from across the shop. Then, feeling like a doll made of wood, I somehow walked back to the counter and stood in front of him. Sal followed me.
    The man put the bag down on the counter. As I glanced at it, my stomach seemed to coil up inside me as tightly as the fishing ropes at my feet.
    The bag had my name on it.
    The man shoved it across to me. “For Mia” was scribbled on the side in a faded marker pen. As I stood staring down at it, he reached under the counter for a pouch of tobacco and some cigarette papers. “Are you going to take it then?” he asked, pulling off a paper and spreading tobacco across it.
    “Is it really for me?” I asked. “I mean, how do you know I’m the right Mia? How did you even know I was Mia at all? Who left it for me?”
    The man rolled his cigarette and lit it. Then he exhaled a line of smoke and coughed a long, rasping cough. When he’d finished, he wiped his hand across his head again and said, “Which of those questions would you like me to answer first, my dear?”
    “How did you know I was Mia?” I asked.
    “Gave me a description,” the man said.
    “Who did?” Sal asked.
    “Boy who left the bag.” The man shrugged. “Said his name was Peter.”
    “Peter?” Sal gasped.
“Peter?”
    My stomach twisted into another knot. Peter had been here! He’d left something for me! What was it? And when had he left it? Since I last saw him?
Since he’d disappeared?
    And why had he come in here, anyway?
    The old man pointed at the poster. “Plus, he looked like that. Same scruffy hairdo, anyway.”
    “When did he come in?” Sal asked, her voice coming out in a kind of tight squeak.
    “Oh, a little while ago. He said I might be waiting some time for you.” The man took another long suck on his cigarette. “He was right about that,” he added, and suddenly burst out laughing.
    His laughter soon turned into a wheezing, rasping cough. As he was laughing and coughing, a phone on his desk started ringing. The man picked it up, turning his back on us as if we weren’t there.
    “Eric Travers,” he said curtly into the phone.
    I walked around to the other side of the counter and stared at him until he looked at me.
    “When did he leave it?” I whispered.
    He waved a hand at me as if to shoo me away.
    “It’s important,” I said.
    He frowned at me. “Just hold on a second, will you?” he said into the phone. Then he cupped a hand over the