Tilly and Jessa are crazy with excitement.

“Take care of my little girl,” Santangelo’s dad says to me and for a moment my blood runs cold.

“What? What did you say?”

He is confused. “Tilly. Take care of her.”

And then the moment is gone but the words still ring in my ears.

“I think he’s worried about the serial killer,” Jessa tells me.

“No mention of the serial killer,” Santangelo’s dad says warningly as he takes both girls inside to ring Santangelo’s mum.

The three of us sit on the footpath and I can tell they want to say something. Anything.

“At least it means that your father wasn’t weak and didn’t leave you,” Santangelo says.

I stare at him. “Dead or weak? Are they my options? I think I just might say yes to a weak father rather than a dead one, if you don’t mind.”

He tries to find something else to talk about and I want to make it easier for him because it’s not his fault, but all I can think of is Hannah’s story. My aunt’s story. How strange it is to use those words for the first time. I have an aunt and I don’t even know where she is. But I do know that I yearn for her in a way I never thought possible, and that she’s somehow written the story of my family’s life. And part of that story is sitting in the Brigadier’s tent. Halfway through Santangelo’s spiel about Club House stuff, Raffy looks at me and she knows exactly what I’m thinking.

“We’re going into Cadet territory,” she interrupts him. “Tonight. And you’re coming with us.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I need to get something out of the Brigadier’s tent,” I explain to him. “He’s not there and I’m breaking in.”

“Are you nuts?” he says, as though we couldn’t possibly be serious. “Both of you?”

“He has something of mine…well, kind of mine.”

“I’m not breaking into the Brigadier’s tent and neither are you!”

“Come on, Chaz,” Raffy says. “You and Joe Salvatore are experts on locks.” She looks at me. “Joe’s father’s a locksmith and Chaz worked there part-time for a while. He broke into the high school once for my mum when she left her teacher’s chronicle there.”

“Wow.”

“Breaking and entering is a crime,” he reminds us, not falling for the feigned enthusiasm. “Can we just get back to what I was saying? Stevie reckons he’s got hold of an espresso machine and—”

“You broke into your father’s police station,” I remind him. “That’s a crime.”

“To help you,” he says forcefully, giving up on telling us about the Club House.

“Santangelo, I promise you,” I say, “somewhere deep down I have a feeling that the thing in the Brigadier’s tent is going to help me. Please.”

“I’m going home,” Santangelo says. “You’re going back to your House and no one is invading Cadet territory.”

“What are you going to do? Arrest us?” Raffy asks.

Santangelo is irritated. “We’re not supposed to be collaborating. It’s supposed to be a war and you’re supposed to stick to the boundaries.”

“We’ve seen you in your jocks,” she reminds him. “Taylor and Griggs have pashed. You’ve broken into your father’s police station for us. Don’t you think the war has lost a bit of its tension?”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t seem to have lost the tension between them,” he says, presumably referring to Griggs and me.

“Why? What has he said to you?” I ask.

“I’m going home,” he says, ignoring my question. “Count me out.”

Raffy dismisses him with a shrug. “We’ll do it on our own, Taylor. Joe Salvatore said he was hopeless under pressure, anyway.”

It doesn’t take Santangelo long to get the lock open. I am very impressed by Raffy’s and Santangelo’s abilities to commit crimes with such finesse.

“You keep watch,” I whisper, looking at the rows of tents around us. Once or twice I see a flashlight on in one of them, but the chances of anyone going for a walk at this time of night should be low. I find myself wondering which one is Jonah Griggs’s tent. There’s a part of me that desperately wants to see him, to make him promise two trillion times over that he will never do anything to hurt himself. But I’m a coward and I know that he will never realise how much he means to me.

“Griggs will kill us,” Santangelo whispers back.

“You don’t owe Griggs anything,” I say as I open the flap. I walk into the tent, taking out the small flashlight and trying to be as discreet as possible. I’m surprised at how big the tent actually is—almost the size of an office, with a bed in one corner and a desk and cabinet in the other, as well as tea-and coffee making facilities alongside it. When I approach the desk, I look for locks, ready to call Santangelo in, but there doesn’t seem to be any and there’s no mystery about where anything is. In the largest drawer I find the manuscript and alongside it is something else that belongs to Hannah. It’s a stationery box that she has always kept in her bedroom in the Lachlan House cottage, and I realise that not only has the Brigadier been in the unfinished house by the river but on school territory as well. I’ve never been curious about the stationery box but I am now that the Brigadier thinks it’s important enough to steal.

I open it slowly and shine the torch on the contents: Hannah’s passport and birth certificate and those of Xavier Webster Schroeder, a tape cassette, a couple of newspaper clippings, and a few photos. My heart begins to beat hard as I touch the photographs. I am about to see my first images of the five. I wonder if they will live up to my expectations and answer my questions. But the first few photos are of a child, about three years old, with eyes that are big and wide and a mullet that the Townies would envy. Although I have never seen a photograph of myself as a child, I know it is me. Whoever I was back then, I looked happy and whoever I was looking at was the very person who made me happy. How can someone who made me look this happy no longer be in my life?

I turn my attention to the two newspaper articles. One is small and looks older than the other. It’s about the disappearance of Xavier Webster Schroeder. Just fifty words or so. Is that all he was worth? When I think of the screaming headlines of the teenagers who have gone missing over the years, I can’t help wondering how many words they would spend on me if I disappeared. It mentions the Jellicoe School and calls for any information to be forwarded to the police station and I’m not surprised to see the Santangelo name there, back when Chaz’s dad was a constable. I pick up the second article but can hardly read the print. It’s as if the words have faded with too much sun, but the photo and the headline are clear and they send a chill right through me. Because looking straight at me, thinner in the face, younger by almost ten years, is the Brigadier. But it’s not the photograph that shatters me the most. It’s the headline above it. KIDNAPPING CHARGES DROPPED. I feel woozy and nauseous and for the first time in four weeks I accept the fact that Chloe P. and Jessa might be right about the Brigadier and that I may never ever see Hannah again. I feel a sob rising in my throat, but suddenly a hand is placed over my mouth.

“Are you insane?” Griggs whispers in my ear. When he feels me relax, he lets go and I pull away. I put everything back in the box and pick it up, ignoring him.

“You can’t take that,” he whispers loudly, turning me to face him. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in clothes other than his fatigues. He’s wearing boxer shorts and a long-sleeved South Sydney football T-shirt. He looks exactly how I feel. Like shit.

“It’s mine,” I manage to say.

“Why would the Brigadier have what’s yours?”

“Because it’s Hannah’s.”

“Then it’s not yours.”

“Well, it’s not his,” I say as forcefully as I can but I feel sick at heart. I take a few deep breaths, still clutching the box and the manuscript. “I need to go,” I say, turning off the flashlight. He tries to take my hand.