As She Left It, by Catriona McPherson

Opal Jones finds out that you can go home again. But maybe you shouldn’t.

When she was 12 years old, Opal left the home of her hopeless alcoholic mother to live with her father and her wicked stepmother. Years later, Opal returns to her childhood home in Leeds after her mother died of alcoholism. She moves into her late mother’s cottage, clears out the filth and trash, and reacquaints herself with the neighbors, who are the same ones she had as a child.

"How could it be that they were all still here? Thirteen years, half her lifetime. She’d been to hell and back and yet here they all were as if it was yesterday. Just as she left them.  People who knew her. Knew her mother was a drunk and her dad had walked out and she’d not been home since she was twelve. So much for being alone in a crowd in the big bad city."

She might have the same old neighbors, but they are party to new mysteries. In fairly rapid succession, Opal discovers one puzzling thing after another involving the residents of Mote Street. Which one had paid her mother’s bills for many years, and why? Who wrote the odd messages she finds hidden inside her second-hand furniture?  And what became of a young boy who went missing - perhaps stolen away by the Mote Street Snatcher - about the time she left town?

Craig, the child who disappeared, was the grandson of Opal’s favorite neighbor. Opal soon becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the red-haired little boy, but as she digs deeper in the mystery, she discovers that almost everyone she encounters in her search has things to hide. And then she starts feeling that she too is hiding something dark and disturbing deep in her subconscious.

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