Chapter Three
Ten years old. That was Jeremiah’s age.
I still remember what it was like to be a kid in the summertime in Mittel County. When I was that age, I used to do exactly what Jeremiah did — take my bike down the dirt roads with my hair blowing in the wind, ride to one of the dozens of lakes around here, and swim in the cool water with fish brushing up against my bare legs. Those days felt like they lasted forever. The sun came up early and went down late. When I finally got back home, I’d be wet, dirty, tired, and ready to do it all over again.
Rose Carter was my best friend back then. Rose was the girl who got booted off the Everywhere Strikers when Violet went out for the high school volleyball team. It wasn’t my fault, but Rose and I were never as close after that. I think she held it against me that I stayed on the team.
But when we were ten? We did everything together.
I would make up puzzles and mysteries for us. She and I would hike into the woods to hunt for signs of the mythical Ursulina. We’d find what looked like footprints in the mud, and we’d measure them and take pictures and bring them all back to my father to show him what we’d found. He would swear that our evidence was very, very persuasive, and we believed him when he said he would consult with people in the government about what we’d discovered.
Rose and I explored the whole county in those days. We went everywhere, just the two of us, and the Ursulina was the only monster that ever crossed our minds. We didn’t worry about being alone miles from home.
We never imagined a bicycle lying on the side of the road.
Ten years old.
Dad used to keep a picture of me on the mantle from when I was that age. Hands on my hips, hair in my face, annoyed and impatient that I had to take a break for even a moment from the whirlwind of being a child. I suppose every parent has a picture like that.
If I look in a mirror even now, I can still see hints of the girl in that old photograph. I haven’t lost that faraway look in my brown eyes or the stubborn crinkle in my forehead. I was a medium girl then, and I still am, not short, not tall, not heavy, not thin. My hair looks dark enough to be black, but you’d have to see me in the sunlight to know it’s more like chocolate. It’s straight as an arrow even on the most humid July day. I keep it parted in the middle and just long enough to frame my face. I have a few freckles, too, sprinkled like pepper across the bridge of my nose.
When I look at that picture now, I think: that girl wasn’t afraid of anything. It’s hard to find things you like about yourself, but I’ll go with that one. I don’t scare easily.
Ten years old.
It can be a dangerous age, too. You’re not just a little kid anymore. You’re starting to become a person, but you haven’t lost the wonder of being a child. You have no sense of your own limitations. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.
I thought about Jeremiah at that age, trying to figure out the world.
I knew him better than most kids in the area, because his best friend and next-door neighbor was Anna Helvik. Anna was the daughter of my friend and former volleyball coach, Trina, and I was over at Trina’s house all the time. Anna and Jeremiah were often with us. He was a shy kid, not saying much when you talked to him. Anna was the brave one, like me, the girl who would go anywhere and do everything. Jeremiah looked happy to trail behind her and play Spock to her Kirk. He was sweet, always with a big smile, the polite kid who called me “Miss Lake.” I liked him.
Where was he?
I kept going over Adrian’s story in my head. I thought about Jeremiah heading out of the campground on his bike. I tried to picture this short, skinny boy flying down the road through the national forest. His little legs pumped up and down on the pedals, and his backside probably lifted off the bicycle seat. His badminton racket jutted out of his backpack. His hair whipped like strands of fine straw, long enough to fall over his eyes, with a cowlick sprouting from the back.
But you know what really struck me?
That Sunday suit he was wearing.
They’d put Jeremiah’s grandfather in the ground two weeks earlier, and this little boy still couldn’t take off his Sunday clothes.
I didn’t know if it would help us find him, but it told me one thing. Jeremiah was lonely. That’s what worried me, because if I could see it, then so could others.
The ones who saw a boy like that as prey.
Chapter Four
“So what do you think?” Adam asked me as we drove back toward Everywhere. “Where’s the kid?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I was watching a caravan of cars pass us in the opposite direction, filled with searchers ready to fan out shoulder to shoulder to hunt for Jeremiah in the woods. They were our friends and neighbors. Around here, when someone’s in trouble, the word goes out, and people drop everything to help.
“I hope he’s in town with a friend,” I said finally, “and we just haven’t found him yet.”
Adam took off his sunglasses and waited until I turned my head and stared back at him. “Shelby, you know he’s not in town.”
“He might be.”
“Without his bike? How did he get there? Somebody had to drive him, and by now, the whole town knows he’s missing. If anybody knew where he was, they’d have called. The fact is, he’s either still in the forest, or else—”
I waited. “Or else?”
Adam shrugged and replaced his shades on his face. “Hey, you’re thinking what I’m thinking. You just don’t want to say it.”
He was right. I didn’t want to say it, so I said nothing.
We drove on in silence. It was ten more miles before we reached the southern border of the national forest. Dennis Sloan worked at the ranger station and welcome center at the park entrance. There was a stop sign ahead of us marking the main highway cutting through Mittel County. Going left would take us east toward Stanton an hour away. Going right led toward block-long towns like Witch Tree and Sugarfall that were situated deep in the kind of woods where Goldilocks got lost.
The checkerboard streets of Everywhere were directly ahead of us. Century-old brick buildings lined the main street, which was dominated by the county courthouse and its acre of green lawn and historical statues. Next to the courthouse was the boxy library that housed the sheriff’s office downstairs. The rest of the street was made up of shops that had been around for years. The small market owned by Ellen Sloan. The bakery with green-frosted sugar cookies that have always been a weakness of mine. The hardware store. The Post Office. The Nowhere Café, where Dad and I ate nearly every day of our lives.
You can imagine the jokes. Where do you eat in Everywhere? Nowhere.
Some of the shops had closed over time, leaving empty buildings with rusted signs and broken windows covered over with plywood. It’s like a funeral for a friend when a main-street shop closes, because you know it’s never coming back. This isn’t a place where new customers come to live and shop. Every census report whittles down Mittel County by another few hundred people. Either they die or they leave for better jobs and bigger towns. People aren’t having enough babies to compensate.
Adam and I parked outside the Nowhere and then went door to door at all of the shops in less than an hour. No one had seen Jeremiah that day. Searching the outskirts of town was going to take longer, because most neighbors lived half a mile or more from each other, in houses carved out of a few acres of forest, with long dirt driveways winding through the trees. I drove toward Jeremiah’s house, but Adam stopped me when we were barely out of the town center. He grabbed my arm and pointed at the parking lot for our one-story K–12 school, home to the Everywhere Strikers. I’d gone there. Adam had gone there. We’d all gone there. It was summer, when kids wanted to forget about school, but there was a beat-up red SUV parked in the far corner of the lot.