Stargirl of the Edge

Ch 32 - The Power of the Mind

Olivia has just had an unfortunate encounter with Ben, the boy who likes her, at a cafe in Alderley Edge village. He told her that people were gossiping about her, saying she had gone onto Alderley Edge at night to meet someone. She finds this accusation disgusting and and loses her temper with Ben, spilling a vase of water over him. She then walks out of the cafe and back up to the car park at the top of the village where her mother is going to pick her up.

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She went for a walk in the park nearby and by the time Liz came to pick her up she felt calmer and decided not to mention anything about the argument with Ben to her mother. She just wanted to forget about him.
Tuesday the first of May was sunny. Alan returned for another lesson. Now it was all pre-exam revision. The lesson went quickly.  This time he seemed in a better mood. Whatever the problem had been before, it seemed to have eased. Olivia didn’t want to pry into his personal life.
Olivia now knew the truth about the pendant. It didn’t have any powers of its own. The powers had come from within her. But it was a family heirloom and she felt a deep sense of loss. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the sense of frustration was getting worse and worse.
That night she went up to her room but instead of reading a book or perhaps browsing the internet, she just stared the ceiling with the light on.  What had happened on that day? The theft had taken place eight weeks before, and the events were hazy. But if only she could remember, if only she could recover that information that was buried somewhere deep in her memory. She began to piece together the events of Thursday the 8th of March.
She had been sitting in Lab number one, at the back workbench on the left hand side. And then she had moved to the front workbench to look for a partner and had left her pencil case with some papers and the pendant was underneath.
Who had been sitting next to her? It was Rosie. But she too had moved to a different part of the lab to work with a partner.  In fact the workbench had been empty and she had spent the rest of the lesson at another place in the room.
But on second thoughts, had she actually left the pendant on the workbench? Maybe she had had it with her? But no, that couldn’t be, there was no doubt that it was inside the pencil case. She became confused and went right back to the beginning again.
On the wall of her bedroom, the minute hand of the clock moved quickly around, and the small hand followed. She thought as hard as she could about the events of that Thursday over and over again. In her imagination she could see the pendant there right in front of her, hovering above her between her face and the ceiling. She so much wanted to reach out and take it back.
She was extremely tired, and yet she wasn’t sleepy. She wanted only to recall what had happened and solve the mystery. Now it was the early hours of the morning. The curtains were open, and a new moon shone its dim light through the window and onto the floor. She had been over everything she could remember, but she knew that she could only retrieve a fraction of the information that was contained in her memory.
So at around 3.30am, just as the birds were starting their morning chorus, she went right back to the beginning once again, but this time, she gathered the strength to focus her mind with much greater intensity and precision than before, applying every scrap of mental energy she could find.
What were the facts? She had been sitting at the back workbench on the left hand side. Rosie was to her left, two other classmates one to the front and one to her right. The pendant had been in her pencil case and she reached into it to get a pencil but then she taken out an eraser as she needed to rub out an incorrect number. In fact she now knew that she had written the temperature down as 37 Celsius when it should have been 47. She hadn’t recalled that before.
And then she remembered another thing. It was trivial, unimportant, but still significant. She had heard a lorry pulling up outside the building, with its engine running. And then the truck had reversed out and she could still hear the ‘beep beep beep’ and a distorted warning message. She could even remember what she was thinking about at the time. It was that she was hoping that her mum would be preparing those delicious mushroom dumplings for dinner that evening.
It was as if she had found a set of lost tapes from her past, and was replaying them in her mind. Using Play, Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward buttons, she could travel backwards and forwards and experience once again what had happened.
The teacher had told them to change seats and go and work with a partner. That’s when she had moved. She had written down another set of figures on the chart with the pencil, and she could remember all but one of the numbers she had written down. Then she had moved again and worked with Rosie. By that stage she could see the hands of the clock pointing to 10.49. The lesson was about to finish.
The teacher had told them to get ready to leave. She had a presentation in the next lesson and was already thinking about that. She zipped the pencil case closed, and put it in her bag.
And when the teacher had given permission to leave, she had stood up and walked to the door with the other students.
But now she remembered something new, something important that she had previously forgotten: Just as she was about to exit the door, she looked round. The reason she had looked round was because one of the girls had made some remark about another girl’s shoes. She was amazed that this trivial fact was still there in her memory.
And then as she was glancing down, she remembered very quickly, just in the blink of an eye, looking towards the end of the lab. There she saw a figure walking towards the rear door, which led to the little storage room.  If only she could have zoomed into to the image in her mind, she might have been able to see if the pendant was still on the workbench, but she knew that it wasn’t, that someone had picked it up.
Only one person could have taken it, and that was Miss Crabtree, the lab assistant. Miss Crabtree had only started a month or so before. She was unfriendly, and looked as if she had no commitment, no interest in what she was doing.
And then there was something else that she remembered that was relevant. In certain lessons she noticed that Miss Crabtree was using a small digital camera. This was all a part of the lesson to record experiments but what if…?
Olivia’s mind began to race. And she immediately ‘rewound’ the mental tape back to the beginning and played the whole lesson through again and again, pausing as she exited the door, zooming in to the fuzzy figure at the back of the lab heading towards the store room, holding the sheets of paper.
The more she replayed the sequence of events, the more she became convinced that she had found the thief.
And she had arrived at this conclusion not as the police might have done, by gathering evidence, looking for fingerprints, or as a teacher would have done, by telling everybody to stand up and turn out the contents of their pockets.
No, she had found the truth by retrieving the evidence from the depths of her memory and by drawing the logical conclusions. Of course, the evidence would need to be checked, the suspect would need to be questioned, but the key to solving the mystery lay buried deep within her mind.  The power of the mind, what an amazing thing!
It was now about 5.46am, the birds were twittering and the daylight was growing stronger. As she jumped up out of bed, she glanced out the window and saw that the Edge was beautifully shrouded in an early morning mist. She bounded across the hall and straight into the main bedroom where Liz was fast asleep in a tangled ball of sheets and covers, with Dennis next to her, fast asleep and snoring.
“Mum! Mum!” shouted Olivia pushing her on the shoulder. “Mum, I think I know who took the pendant!”
Liz was smiling in her sleep, as if there was a psychic connection between them and she was dreaming what Olivia was thinking. She opened her eyes, smiling.
“I think I know who took the pendant. I think it was Miss Crabtree, the lab assistant. I can’t be sure but… I think it was.”
Her eyes happy and sparkling, Liz gave Olivia a hug.
“Okay, well we’ll go and see Mrs Portree at nine o’clock.”
Olivia walked quickly back out into the hall. Jessie had heard her from upstairs and was waiting for her. She ran down the spiral staircase threw her arms around her beloved dog and stroked her soft, golden fur.
“I think we’ve found who stole the pendant, Jessie!”
The dog rested her chin on her arm, rolled her eyeballs and gazed up at her.

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Chapter 32 of my ☆女 story draws on something that happened to me on a holiday in Japan with my wife and daughter. One morning as we were about to go sightseeing, I discovered that I had lost my camera memory card somewhere in the hotel room. It had all our photos from the previous day on it. That night I stayed awake thinking about what I had done the previous evening, and I eventually worked out what had happened. The memory card had bounced off the mattress and was stuck low down in the bedframe. The next morning we looked and there it was! I managed to find it through the power of the mind, by delving into my own memory. The power of the mind is truly an amazing thing, and that is one of the main themes of Stargirl of the Edge!