Page 39 of The Christmas Competition

She looked up from her cross-​stitch. It was another good sign that she had started to undertake this hobby, because there was no way she would have been cognitively able when she’d first arrived. When she’d started asking where her cross-​stitch set was a few days ago, I bought her one and brought it in so that she could exercise her faculties and also have some comfort and familiarity.

“Oh, hello, Bonnie love. Lovely to see you.”

She was still convinced that I was this Bonnie character, whom I had confirmed, by asking her a few questions, had been her home care nurse in the past. Bonnie had tended to Anna after her discharge from hospital post-​stroke. But Anna hadn’t been able to recall Bonnie’s surname when I’d found a way to ask about it, so it didn’t really help me in discovering whereabouts Anna lived. In any case, it could be that this Bonnie had since moved or retired.

“Cross-​stitch going well?” I asked, looking at her work. She was following a simple pattern with the alphabet on it and doing a pretty good job.

“Yes, thank you. I thought that I might get it framed and then I can hang it on James’s wall. To help him with his alphabet.”

Now this was new. My ears pricked up, my mind whirring. “That’s a wonderful idea,” I said, quickly thinking of a follow-up question to find out more. “And remind me, how old is James now?”

“He’s five years old already!”

“Oh wow. Time flies, doesn’t it?”

She beamed, a proud look on her face that both warmed my heart and prickled it with sadness at the same time. “Absolutely.”

It was clear that Anna’s timelines were all muddled. Not only was she clearly too old to have a five-​year-​old son, but it was unlikely her son would have been that young at the time she was under Bonnie the district nurse’s care; I felt that Anna’s stroke was most likely to have occurred once she was a little older. Her CT head scan had shown signs of vascular dementia, a condition whereby repeated strokes (often including small strokes that went under the radar) damaged the brain and cognition. And those sorts of strokes usually occurred a little later in life.

However, I was pleased that she had remembered her son’s name. And I had an unquenchable desire to find out more about James. What if I could get enough information to find him? Perhaps we could reunite Anna with her son! He might be searching for her right now. I sat straighter as a pop of excitement shot through me. What if I could reunite them in time for Christmas?

“I’m sure the alphabet pattern will come in very handy for him,” I told her. “What sorts of things does James like?”

She paused to think, giving me hope that if she thought a little more about him and talked about him, she might come up with more recent memories. “He loves trains. When I walk him to nursery we always stop and look at the trains passing by.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s close to the railway tracks here, isn’t it?” It wasn’t—​there wasn’t a station in Inverglen. But clearly wherever Anna and her family had lived at the time had been near the railway lines.

“Yes. They do make a racket though, don’t they?”

“Absolutely, noisy devils. And remind me, Anna. What nursery school is James at?”

She paused, mouth open. Then she closed it again and frowned. “I can’t quite remember.”

I waved a hand. “Not to worry. I’m just being a nosy bugger, that’s all.”

Anna chuckled. “I’m nosy too. I like to have all the village gossip.”

We chatted a little more before I left her to her cross-​stitch. As I got on with my busy afternoon, I kept coming back to the idea of finding James. Could he still be somewhere in the area? Perhaps checking out which nearby villages and towns were on the railway line would help . . .

Once we were in Rona’s car heading home at the end of the day, I told Rona what I had discovered and my mission to find James.

She frowned as she drove. “I don’t know, Nisa. Sounds like a needle in a haystack kind of scenario.”

“Not impossible though. And how amazing would it be if I found him?” I clasped my hands in excitement. “They could be reunited in time for Christmas!”

She gave me some side-​eye. “That’s only a month away, Nisa.”

I waved a hand, watching the dark, mountainous scenery fly past as we drove along the fast A road connecting the community hospital with the residential part of Inverglen. “I like a challenge.”

Rona laughed. “I know you do.”

“What do you reckon, then? You’re a local geography buff. Which towns and villages are on the railway lines?”

She frowned as she thought about it. “Working from Inverglen outward . . . obviously our nearest neighboring village is on the lines, but we know Anna doesn’t live there because her allocated social worker already checked that out.”

Our nearest neighbor was a village named Auchness. The lines ran past the edge of that town on to the next slightly larger town, which housed the nearest train station. “The lines then run out of Auchness, past a couple of other small villages but not near enough to any housing, and then the next station is Inverness,” Rona finished.

“Hmm.” Did Anna live farther away, then? In which case, why had she been discovered wandering around Auchness? Unless Auchness was where she had lived when James was little and they had moved to another village where Anna lived now. And perhaps James too. But, frustratingly, there were no clues as to where that might be.