The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky

Bethany.
    Fingerprints…
    ‘She probably just dropped it on the ground and forgot about it,’ said Georgina. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
    Icara had been sitting by herself at the back of the classroom. Icara, remote, isolated, distant, far-flung. But now she got up and, with her hands in her blazer pockets, she sauntered down the aisle to where Bethany was slumped forward on her desk, surrounded by the other girls. Bethany looked up apprehensively.
    ‘You’ve got to face facts,’ said Icara.
    Icara is a realist, but the world needs dreamers.
    ‘What do you mean?’ said Bethany.
    ‘The truth is,’ said Icara, ‘the police think Miss Renshaw is dead.’
    The room held its breath, scandalised. Then out tumbled a medley of outrage.
    Don’t be mean! That’s horrible. Miss Renshaw is not dead! Don’t say that! How can you say that? You don’t know! Don’t listen to her. It’s not true!
    The voices came from everywhere. Icara stood with her feet apart, steady on the ground.
    ‘It’s been too long,’ she said. ‘If she was alive, we’d know by now.’
    ‘Not if she was hiding on purpose,’ said Martine.
    Icara looked at her scornfully. ‘Why would she do that?’
    ‘People do hide in caves,’ retorted Martine, ‘for your information,’ as though this sort of thing happened all the time on the Isle of Pines.
    ‘Why didn’t they find her, then?’ said Icara. ‘Why did they only find the necklace?’
    For a moment they all saw it, the delicate, nearly invisible remains of the winged insect trapped in amber, millions of years ago.
    ‘What do you think happened, then?’ asked Cubby.
    Icara turned and looked straight at her.
    ‘I think Morgan murdered her,’ she said. ‘Down in that cave. That’s why they want the fingerprints.’
    Sickness spread from one child to another.
    ‘But he loved her,’ said Georgina. ‘I saw them kissing.’
    The kiss. A kiss means love. Morgan loved Miss Renshaw. Down in the cave with the Aboriginal paintings, under the grand Moreton Bay fig, at the water’s edge, in front of the wild Pacific Ocean, he kissed Miss Renshaw and he loved her.
    ‘But he was a poet,’ said the tall Elizabeth. ‘He wrote poems.’
    ‘And he was a gardener,’ put in another Elizabeth. ‘He loved living things…’ She trailed off.
    ‘He probably learned all that in prison,’ replied Icara, shrugging. ‘That’s what you do in prison. You learn things so that you can get a job when they let you out.’
    ‘But he was against killing,’ said Cynthia. ‘That’s why he wouldn’t go to the war, remember?’
    She stopped, troubled. From what they had read in the newspapers, it seemed unlikely that Morgan would have been made to go in the army at all. He’d been in prison, until just a little while ago. They wouldn’t put someone like that in the army, would they?
    Cubby tried to remember Morgan’s face, but all she could bring to mind were his gentle fingers covered with earth, and the sound of his voice, singing like rocking waves.
    ‘But why?’ she said. ‘Why would he do that?’
    ‘People just do,’ said Icara. ‘Some people just murder people,’ said Icara, the realist. ‘They don’t need a reason, they just do it.’
    Dead, dead. Could Miss Renshaw be dead? Swallowed up, disappeared, dead?
    ‘You’re wrong, you’re so wrong,’ said Bethany, clenching her little white hands into fists. ‘Miss Renshaw is not dead. She’s coming back. I know she is.’
    Cubby stared up at the blackboard. Words are never really wiped away, she realised. They’re always there, under all the layers of chalk dust. Thousands and thousands of words had been written on this board, hundreds of thousands.
    Not now. Not ever.
    ‘I know she’s coming back,’ said Bethany.
    All the words Miss Renshaw had ever written might have been wiped meticulously away by Miss Summers, but they were still there, Cubby knew it, in chalky, invisible layer upon layer underneath. Every word.
    They