‘Yin Mitchell,’ I say to myself. A cold feeling races through me.

The photo on the screen is at least a few years old—Yin has stubby ribboned pigtails, round cheeks. She wears her hair longer these days, with a feathery fringe she pushes to the side.

I stab the volume button on the remote and my sketch- book slides to the door. The newsreader’s voice is at, but laced with an appropriate amount of sorrow.

‘The armed assailant broke into the Sandpiper Drive house in the early hours of this morning via a ground floor window. The victim’s mother, Chunjuan Mitchell, intercepted the intruder, but was forced into a downstairs bathroom and tied up. The alarm was raised around dawn when Stephen Mitchell, who had been sleeping in a separate part of the house, heard his wife’s cries and discovered that their sixteen-year-old daughter was missing.’

Yin. Yin. Hangs out with Claire and Milla. Was in my English class in first term, but switched out later, I’m not sure why. Wears liquid eyeliner to school on the sly. Quiet, smart, deep into the orchestra scene.

It can’t be true. Not again.

‘Turn it down, Chlo. We’ll get another note under our door.’

Mum points to the thin wall we share with our elderly neighbours, leans against the doorframe to put her earrings in, her hair hanging like a silk sheet. Everything about her is tiny and neat and pretty; she always looks immaculate in her work uniform.

‘Someone else has been abducted from Balmoral.’

‘Oh my god.’ Mum comes closer and we watch grainy footage of a suburban street, cordoned off with striped plastic tape and swarming with shadowy figures searching for clues. Rosy-dawn-tinged, police-light blue. In the background a curious neighbour lingers in a pink dressing gown, hand clamped over her pixel mouth.

‘Is she in your year level?’ Mum sits next to me and grabs my hand.

My brother Sam slinks into the room and crouches in the shadows next to the couch. Our Jack Russell, Arnold, lifts his head from the rug to look disapprovingly at him.

‘Yeah. Not in my class though.’

The scene doesn’t look real.

It looks like a Bill Henson photograph, one of the barely lit landscapes I saw at the National Gallery on first term’s Art excursion. I’d never seen photos that looked so painterly.

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