Moth Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

they decided what to do with them?
     
In the next few days there was speculation on the television news. There were press appeals. The police made several re-enactments of what they thought had happened. They had three twelve-year-old girls walk along Princess Street and then one of them walk off while the other two headed towards the house. It was dark though, and most people were at home and not in the street, so Mandy couldn’t see how anyone would remember anything. The police were adamant that it had ‘yielded fresh clues and new information’.
     
Now Mandy looked at the article again. She flicked through a couple of the others behind it. She began to feel a bit irked. It was on her mind too much. Why had Tommy downloaded all this stuff? How was it relevant to a talk at a memorial service? The facts were simple. Two girls had disappeared. There was no explanation. What else did Tommy need to know in order to give a talk to the sixth form? Then she remembered he was also writing something on it for the school website. She sighed.
     
When she left Tommy in the common room he was being monopolised by Toni and Leanne. She wondered if he had sat near them in sociology. She pictured them perching either side of him protectively. She wished, not for the first time, that she had chosen sociology as one of her subjects.
     
She turned crossly to the back pages. Tommy had included a longer, more serious piece, perhaps from a Sunday supplement. The date at the top was June 2011, eight months afterwards. Most of the newspapers had stopped reporting the story by then, though there was one that had lurid headlines every couple of weeks or so. She remembered some of the headlines: ‘Moth Girls Abducted from House’; ‘Girls Drawn to the House’; ‘Moth Girls Besotted by Gloomy House’; ‘Mystery House Holds Its Grisly Secrets’.
     
The Moth Girls.
     
She hadn’t thought of that phrase for years.
     
It gave her an unpleasant feeling. She hadn’t liked it at the time. She didn’t like moths. They made her shiver. They came into her room on a summer night and were sucked towards the light, sometimes throwing themselves against lampshades, making scuttling noises with their wings. They were dark and hairy-looking, and sat on walls in high-up places where they couldn’t be shooed away. They only seemed to come out when it was dark, stealthy and foreboding.
     
The press called Petra and Tina ‘Moth Girls’ because they had been attracted to the house. They were drawn to it. Though Mandy hated the phrase she couldn’t dispute the truth of it. Right from the moment that she’d started to hang out with the girls, Petra had talked and talked about going into the house in Princess Street. Tina never said much about it but she usually did whatever Petra wanted her to do.
     
Her eye skimmed over the Sunday supplement article but she didn’t take any of it in. She was upset. She was also a little bit angry. Why was she even reading this stuff? She packed it all away in her bag and got up and walked out of the library.
     
She headed for the lunch rooms and when she got there she looked around for Tommy. He was in the far corner at a table with Toni and Leanne. Zoe was there as well with some boys Mandy didn’t know. She saw, from across the room, that Tommy was sitting smack in the middle of the group and he was talking about something. The other students were staring at him, hanging on his every word. The sight of it gave her a twinge in her chest. Tommy was popular. He was easy to get on with. That’s why everyone else liked him. People like Tommy had to be shared around.
     
He noticed her standing there and got up and walked towards her. The others looked round. Their faces did not have the same welcoming look. Mandy stood where she was. She had no intention of encroaching on their gathering.
     
‘Hi,’ she said, pulling the papers out of her bag. ‘I’ve looked at these. They all seem pretty