Hold Your Breath Read Online Free PDF

those concerned eyes and be annoying about whether she was ‘settling in’.
    Ask Karis for Melodie’s address?
    Nope. Bad idea.
    Find the boy she was cheating on?
    Tara’s pencil hovered over this and she started to doodle around the words. Maybe he really had done something to Melodie. Her heart lurched. You heard about stuff like that all the time
in the news. Should she tell someone? But there wasn’t anything to tell. And as far as the whole world was concerned, Melodie Stone was perfectly okay. It was just Tara who had the burning,
horrible certainty that she had never been less okay. She was going to have to research this herself. And then maybe she would be free of it.
    She concentrated hard on remembering what the boy looked like. She had a good memory. Sometimes too good. It made some things hard to forget.
    Anyway, she could see him in her mind’s eye: the dark eyes, the muscled arms and arrogant swagger. The T-shirt that clung in all the right places. Then she opened her eyes. The T-shirt had
something written on the back.
    Lifeguard.
    It wasn’t much to go on. But it was a start.

C HAPTER 4
L IFEGUARD
    I t was a half day for most of the school because of a careers event in the Sixth Form, so Tara had a free afternoon.
    She stuffed a towel and the bikini she’d eventually found at the back of her knicker drawer into her school sports bag. They were only props. She had no intention of actually getting into
the water.
    When she’d got to the big leisure centre in town she was relieved to see a spectators’ gallery above the Olympic-sized pool. Rows of plastic seats reached almost to the high ceiling,
giving her a good vantage point to watch the pool.
    It was loud and hot, the air heavy with chlorinated moisture. Tara spent twenty minutes watching young children splashing about and adults joylessly totting up lengths. But there was no sign of
the boy. Then she realised none of the lifeguards even wore a T-shirt like his. Instead, theirs were yellow with the leisure centre logo on them. Annoyed at herself for not realising this straight
away, she got up to leave.
    She bought a drink from the vending machine and sipped it, feeling flat about her wasted afternoon. It was all pointless anyway. Melodie bloody Stone. Instead of being here Tara could be . .
.
    . . . where, exactly?
    She searched her mind for what she might be doing and, finding nothing, felt a sharp kick of loneliness.
    Tara decided she might as well be thorough now she’d got this far. She wandered over to the information desk. A girl not much older than herself with blond hair extensions in a long, tight
ponytail was texting, head down. Her long nails were painted silver with tiny black cats on them.
    ‘Um, excuse me?’ said Tara.
    The girl’s head shot up, her high ponytail bouncing. ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Is this the only pool around here?’
    The girl nodded.
    Tara sighed. ‘Okay, thanks then.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Jasmine. Have you forgotten about the lido?’ An older woman bustled out from a door at the back with a stack of leaflets in her arms.
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ said the girl, Jasmine, making a disapproving face.
    ‘Lido?’ said Tara. ‘What’s that . . . like an outdoor one?’
    ‘Yes,’ the woman said with a smile. ‘Lovely old place really. I learnt to swim there. Bit too cold for wimps these days though,’ she said and batted the girl’s arm
with the leaflets.
    ‘Urgh,’ said Jasmine with feeling. ‘Nasty old dump. Wouldn’t catch me there.’
    Tara thanked them and, armed with a map the older woman had given her, set off to walk across town to the lido.
    Thick white cloud blanketed the sky, oppressive and low. She slipped in her earbuds and turned on her iPod, hoping to drown the sensible voice in her head. It kept saying things like,
‘You’re not going to find him,’ and ‘What would you even say, if you did? “Hello, have you kidnapped Melodie Stone?”’
    She marched on through the centre of town and