“Nothing. We rode, that’s all. I thought we could make it to Talking Lake, but we didn’t get that far before we got hungry. There’s a campground about a mile north of here, so we stopped to have lunch. Mom made sandwiches for our backpacks. Jer wolfed his down, and then he started bugging me.”
“How so?”
“Oh, he was batting a shuttlecock around with his badminton racket. He’d whack it and chase it, and he nearly hit me with it a couple of times. It pissed me off. He was collecting rocks, too, and he had to show me every one he found. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“So how did the two of you get separated?”
“Jer wanted to go back, but I wasn’t ready to leave. I mean, he made such a stink about coming with me, and then he wanted to head out before we did anything. I said fine, go, I don’t care. And he got on his bike and went back the way we came.”
“You let him go,” Ellen murmured to her son.
Her tone was gentle, but the lack of anger in his mother’s voice actually made the accusation cut deeper. I could see the kid folding up like a flower.
“You let your brother go. Alone. Out here.”
Adrian bit his lower lip and looked miserable. “All I did was give him a head start, Mom. I was going to catch up to him.”
“Are you sure he headed south?” my father asked, before Adrian disintegrated completely. “Is it possible he went the other way toward the lake?”
“No, I saw him go. He was heading toward the ranger station.”
“Was there anyone else in the campground while you were there?”
The boy squatted to pry a few prickly burs from the cuff of his jeans and flick them into the brush. “No.”
“What did you do next?”
“I hung out for a while.”
“Doing what?”
“Shooting at the crows. Just to scare them. I didn’t hit them or anything.”
“You carry a gun?”
“Sometimes.” Adrian flipped back his windbreaker to reveal the butt of a revolver jutting out of the pocket of his jeans.
“Boys need to know about guns, Tom,” Dennis interrupted, as if my father had been casting aspersions on his parenting. “The safest thing is to teach them when they’re young. You know that.”
“I do know that, Dennis. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Did you ever let Jeremiah handle your gun, Adrian?”
“A couple of times, but only if Dad was around.”
My father was silent for a while. That was one of the things he’d taught me about police work. Silence is your friend. People can’t stand silence, and they feel like they have to fill it up with something. Usually, they end up telling you things they never meant to say.
But Adrian kept his mouth shut.
“Okay, Jeremiah took his bike and left,” my father went on eventually. “You were alone in the campground. Did you see or hear any cars on the road?”
“No.”
“What about voices?”
“No. I said I was alone.”
“How long did you stay there after Jeremiah left?”
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Five minutes? Fifteen? An hour?”
“I told you, I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at what time it was.”
“But eventually, you got on your bike and headed back the same way?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, tell me the rest.”
The teenager heaved a sigh. “I found Jer’s bike. He was gone. I don’t know anything else.”
“Did you move the bike at all? Is this exactly where you found it?”
My head snapped up, as if someone had jabbed me with a live wire. I’d been on edge for months, watching for little things like that. I wondered if anyone else had noticed that Dad was repeating himself.
Adrian did. He looked puzzled and annoyed. “You already asked me about that.”
Dad’s composure broke for a moment, but he recovered with an easy smile. “Just making sure.”
“Well, I didn’t move it,” Adrian said again.
“What did you do next?”
“I looked for Jer, what else? I looked everywhere. I shouted and shouted. I rode back to the campground to see if I’d missed him somehow. Then I started back toward the ranger station. I figured maybe he was walking, like the bike crapped out or something, and I’d pass him on the way. But I didn’t. I rode all the way back and told my dad.”
“You have a phone, right? Why not call?”
“Signal sucks out here. Anyway, I was too freaked. I just wanted to get back and tell my dad.”
“Did Jeremiah have a phone with him?”
“Yeah, but it was dead.”
“He’s always forgetting to charge it,” Dennis interjected. “I called it over and over. It keeps going to voicemail.”
“Well, we’ll check with the phone company and see if they can tell us anything,” Dad said. “Adrian, what was Jeremiah wearing?”
“His Sunday suit.”
My father’s brow furrowed in surprise. “Really? Why?”
Ellen was crouched by her son’s bicycle on the shoulder of the road. Her fingers reached out and touched the front tire and spun it slowly. She spoke without looking up. “We lost my father a couple of weeks ago. Jeremiah was very close to his grandfather, and he took it hard. He wore the suit to the service at the cemetery, and he’s been putting it on ever since. I tried to make him stop, but after a while, I just let him do it.”
“He wore Nikes, too,” Adrian added. “Purple ones.”
“Okay. Adrian, is there anything else you can tell us?”
“No, nothing. Really. I don’t know what happened to him.” He shot a pained look at his mother. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
Ellen didn’t look back at her older son. She stood up again, brushed the dust from her clothes, and fixed her stare on my father. Her voice was barely a whisper, but she hammered out every word. “Someone abducted my boy, Tom. You need to do something right now. I want roadblocks. Helicopters. Alerts in every police department throughout the state. I want my son’s picture on TV. I want him on highway signs. I want the whole world looking for Jeremiah.”
She was barely holding back the hysteria that I knew was inside her. It was like lake water thumping against the surface ice, trying to get out.
“Ellen, none of us will sleep until we find your boy,” Dad assured her. He drew himself up to his full height, and when he was like that, you just had to believe everything he said. “I know you’re scared, but there hasn’t been a stranger abduction in this county ever. Ever. It’s easy to think the worst, but let’s focus on the likelier explanations first. We need to search the woods around here. If Jeremiah left the road for any reason, he can’t have gone far. We’ll put out the word and have fifty townspeople here in a few minutes and we’ll blanket the whole area. We’ve got hours of daylight left to find him. It’s also possible — likely even — that Jeremiah simply hitched a ride back to town with somebody he knew. He could be at a friend’s house right now. Kids don’t think about the panic they cause when they forget to tell their parents where they’ve gone. Shelby and Adam will check the whole town while we’re out here searching the woods. Okay? Trust me. We’ll find him.”
I knew my father believed that.
If I’d been in his shoes at that moment, I probably would have said the same thing. You try not to make promises you can’t keep, but Dad still believed that most stories had happy endings. Someone in town would find Jeremiah. Some hero would take him home, and Ellen would cry, and Dennis would hug his boy, and the rest of us would exhale with quiet relief.
That was how we all thought it would go. The boy would be back in his mother’s arms by nightfall.
But we were all wrong.