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  Since then, she’d periodically checked in as the other woman, letting loose pent-up frustrations.

  Kendra had 543 friends on Facebook, over a thousand followers on Twitter, and used as her profile a photo of Laney so old and blurry she could easily have passed for a teenager.

  A quick Google search and Laney changed it to a picture of a random pouty teen with blonde hair and long eyelashes. Back on Facebook, she scrolled through the comments under the missing-child post and sent friend requests to the six commenters who, based on their profiles, appeared to be Alfie’s schoolmates: JP Spankthemonkey, Bondage Balls, Allison Marie, Madison Addison, Tom Riddle2002, and Frankie Furter.

  She knew with near certainty that her son was not on any social media. Laney had given Alfie a phone for his thirteenth birthday, not because he asked but because it seemed odd for him not to have one, not when six-year-olds texted at the school bus stop next to their simultaneously texting mothers. Despite this, she had no evidence he ever used his phone or laptop for anything other than taking pictures of furtive wildlife, watching videos of musicians he admired, or researching fire breathing. She forbade him to practice anything fire related, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop his Googling, or whatever it was he did when he spent hours watching men and women play with fire.

  Because of her upbringing, she’d always been respectful of her son’s privacy. Even the occasional peeks at his phone were done in his presence and with his (indifferent) permission, the exception being that horrendous argument last month when she tore his room apart. A rancid heat surged up her throat as she realized she had probably been on the right track back then. But yet somehow not. He had been so forceful in his denials, so hurt at her refusal to believe him.

  Her own parents had been both strict and intrusive, instituting surprise searches of her and her brother’s rooms, forbidding locks on their bedroom doors, interrogating their friends on the few occasions the friends stopped by. Her father, a thirty-year NYPD veteran, had risen to captain before retiring, and Laney held the job responsible for his distrust of everyone, his own children included. The job affected everyone differently. Some, like her father, became cynical, seeing criminal tendencies everywhere. Others, like her old partner, Harry Burroughs, fell in love with the authority that came with the badge, relished both helping people and bringing them to justice. For Laney it was about setting the world to order. The bad guys arrested, the good guys safeguarded, the missing found, the victims avenged.

  But world saving comes at a price. Harry used to call it shit-colored glasses: spend six months looking at people being their absolute worst to each other, and pretty soon even your nearest and dearest will acquire a craptastic gloss.

  Laney closed the laptop again. She’d check the page later, see if the Facebook users she suspected were students had accepted her friend requests. Maybe it was time for her to don her shit-colored glasses and go through Alfie’s room again. That search a month ago produced nothing, but she’d been wild with suspicion, angry, unable to think clearly.

  Although she always thought of Alfie as being almost pathologically honest, she was no longer sure of anything. What does a person really know of another? How honest had Alfie really been with her?

  CHAPTER

  7

  ALFIE LOVED ORDER in his room as much as Laney craved order in the universe. Even as a little boy he’d never gone to sleep without putting away his Legos, stacking the stuffed animals around his bed (where they either guarded or spied on him—Laney had never been quite sure which; he seemed wary of them if he woke in the night).

  His bookshelves were neat, his bed made, his dirty clothes inside the hamper, his mechanical pencils poised at attention in a clay cup he’d made at camp one summer. Laney stood in the middle of the room and rotated, focusing on one quadrant at a time. She breathed in deeply, her son’s boyish smell all around, a mix of shampoo, fabric softener, Old Spice deodorant, sweat, and grape-flavored gum.

  She started with his books, taking down every chapter book and graphic novel from the lower shelves, moving to histories and biographies he favored lately, interspersed with the occasional dystopian YA. She shook each one, slid her palm across the exposed smooth wood of the shelves, checked for anything that might clue her to Alfie’s whereabouts (papers, glassine envelopes, pipes, pills, weapons, letters, postcards, cash, credit cards, bank cards).

  His shelves were innocent.

  His closet volunteered even less evidence. She checked every pocket, felt along every seam and cuff.

  When she sat at his desk, the sense of his unexplained absence overwhelmed her and she had to grip the edge for a few seconds, her eyes shut, her breathing raw. But she couldn’t afford self-indulgence.

  She had to stop thinking like a mom and think like a detective. Nobody can live without leaving crumbs of their existence littering their environment. The universe did not open its maw and swallow her son into nothingness. He was somewhere, and got to that somewhere somehow—and quite possibly of his own volition.

  She opened his top desk drawer and started removing his papers. Geometry homework, Global History, a paper on Romeo and Juliet.

  When she pulled out the chart, she thought it was some kind of science project, boxes filled with numbers and seemingly random letters. She had already opened another drawer and taken out his calculator and index cards when her hand froze, fingers bent midair, and her eyes turned back to the chart and the letters in the third box from the top. JP, underlined three times.

  She grabbed the paper. JP? A name? She scanned along the row belonging to JP, but the letters in the corresponding boxes didn’t make sense to her. It was some kind of code that only Alfie understood.

  Over and over she looked at the chart. There were seven boxes that belonged to JP, and in order, their contents were: Wd, DS, Ho, ND, YM, YS, Ma.

  Some of those acronyms had been entered in the others’ boxes as well, but made just as little sense there.

  Laney jumped when her phone rang, and she grabbed it, answering on the second ring.

  It was Detective Boswell, Ed, calling to ask if Alfie had come home.

  “No,” Laney said. “I’d let you know if he did.”

  “Oh, I’m sure, Laney. I was just checking. Sometimes the parents forget.”

  She cleared her throat to keep from saying something sharp. He was right, of course. Parents often did forget to let the cops know their kid had come home. Sometimes they were too busy being relieved, sometimes too busy beating their child for causing trouble.

  “Listen,” she said, “have you spoken to any of his classmates? To his band teacher? He was coming home from band when—”

  “Laney, he never went to rehearsal yesterday.”

  Blood rushed to her head. He said something else, but she didn’t hear.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “Can you repeat that?”

  “I said that you were the last person to see him, as far as we can tell. Laney, he didn’t go to rehearsal. He left school; we have corroboration on that. But he never returned for band practice. His music teacher never marked him as absent, so we thought he’d been at school until late, but no. There’s a two-hour window between him leaving his last class and when he should have come back. This means the last person he was with was you.”

  “But …” She looked around her son’s room, frantic. Wasn’t there anything to give her an idea of what happened? “But he took his saxophone with him. And he didn’t … Look, all his clothes are here. His backpack is here.”

  “I’m not far from your house right now. Are you home?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  She ended the call and sat back, a cold shock rolling over her. The image of him walking away, holding his saxophone, played over and over in her mind. Alfie was terrible at deception, and if he’d intended to run, she’d have known it. No, he’d meant to go to practice. So what happened?

  A we
ird little whine escaped her throat, and she swallowed it down. Once again she reminded herself she couldn’t afford to think like a mother. She was a detective. Probably better trained than anybody in this town, if only due to the sheer number of crimes she’d worked in the city.

  Her eyes settled on that chart. The JP snagged her attention once more.

  She grabbed the paper and went to get her laptop. It could be a coincidence. It could stand for June Prom (as if). She opened her alter ego’s Facebook page, and there under notifications she saw she was now friends with JP Spankthemonkey.

  JP Spankthemonkey used a crying-clown oil painting as his profile picture. He had shared the Alfie missing-person page with an accompanying comment—this is serios shit hes weird but still a reelygud guy hes my friend if you see him call the police.

  Laney frowned. JP was Alfie’s friend? She clicked on JP’s photo album, but most of the pictures were of body parts: expressive fingers, studded tongues, pierced nipples, a tattoo of a pug with a halo on a forearm. She clicked on his friends and checked whatever photos they had made public (apparently most of them, including videos of themselves smoking joints, vaping, and flashing even more body parts). She then searched for anything tagged with JP Spankthemonkey. This produced a number of photographs. She bent so close to the laptop that she was almost pressing her nose to the screen. Who was this boy? He looked to be the same age as Alfie, barely into his teens, no longer childish, not yet manly. He had angular, pockmarked cheeks, clear, light-blue eyes, and shaggy, copper-red hair down to his shoulders. In one picture she saw he wore braces. And in another, she saw Alfie.

  JP was in the foreground, grinning at the camera, a can of Red Bull in his hand, and next to him, in the process of turning away from the lens, was her son. They sat on the bleachers by the football field, Alfie in his marching band uniform, his sax across his lap. She squinted at the date—October of last year. Had Alfie been friends with this boy since the fall and she not known it?

  Something else snagged her attention. She peered at the picture, trying to figure out what was bothering her, then sat back with a gasp. It was JP she’d seen this morning doing what she was convinced was a hand-to-hand. She was sure of it, the image of the boy’s hand sliding over the jock’s fingers, a baggie slipping in one direction and a rolled-up bill in another. She’d seen this done hundreds, thousands of times on the job. She had no doubt she’d seen it this morning. Well. Almost no doubt.

  The doorbell ringing sent her scrambling to close the laptop and tuck the chart into her pocket. It was only after she opened the door and let Ed in that she realized she meant to keep this new information to herself. She wasn’t sure why. But she’d share it as soon as she understood it. Of course she would. Why wouldn’t she?

  The detective accepted the cup of coffee she offered (two sugars, black), and opened his notepad.

  “Laney, what was your son’s behavior like when he left yesterday?”

  Her face burned as she thought of that moment again. She’d been so comfortable in the armchair, so safe in her assumptions about her world, too lazy to stand and hug him good-bye, to ask him if he was all right.

  She shrugged. “He was okay. Same as always.”

  “Uh-huh.” He wrote in his book. “So, you wouldn’t say he was planning to go away?”

  “All his clothes are home.”

  “Uh-huh.” More scribbling. “And do you think he might have stashed some other clothes at school?”

  Could he have? No. None of this made sense. Alfie was a homebody if anybody was.

  “He was happy at home,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. But”—he shrugged—“teenagers.” Smiled. “I have two myself. As you know. They drive me nuts.” The fact that his well-adjusted, popular, industrious children most likely did not give him the kind of grief Alfie gave her was not lost on either of them, and they dropped their eyes to the floor, Laney’s old analog clock ticking, ticking in the silence.

  He closed his notepad, tucked his pen inside, sipped the coffee. “I’m sorry, I need to ask—have you been in touch with Mr. Bird?”

  Laney tried to keep her feelings out of her voice. “No.”

  “No?” He waited, but when she said nothing, asked, “Okay. Well, I would like to reach out to him. Do you have a contact number?”

  This time her denial came quick.

  Ed lowered his cup, raised an eyebrow.

  “Alfie’s father and I are divorced. Almost three years.”

  Ed nodded. This was not news to him. In tiny Sylvan everyone knew at least that about her. He said, “My sister has been divorced for ten years, and she still has her ex over for barbecues every summer. But you’re saying you don’t know where he lives?”

  “I know the general vicinity. Somewhere in New Mexico. Near Santa Fe, I believe.” She didn’t want to think what this made Alfie’s life sound like. That his own father (damn his eyes) would keep himself apart like that. She brought her coffee cup to her lips but didn’t drink. She didn’t think she could swallow right now.

  “I see.” The detective sat back, held her gaze just long enough to make her even more uncomfortable. “Is it possible your ex-husband had something to do with Alfie’s disappearance?”

  Laney placed her cup on the table. “Like what? Like his father kidnapped him?” It happened. She’d worked at least two cases where the fathers had maintained secret communications with their children and used friends or relatives to pass along cash, arrange for flights. In one of those cases the kidnapped daughter had refused to come home to her mother, said her father lived in a bigger house and bought her better things.

  But Theo? I-don’t-want-to-do-this-anymore Theo?

  “I need to ask these things,” Ed said, and she recognized his guardedness. He was observing her, her reactions, cataloging her answers. She thought of another case, one of her first as a detective, where the mother had poisoned her adolescent daughter because she believed the daughter was having sex with the mother’s boyfriend. The mother had dumped the body in an elevator shaft and then reported her child missing, going on to suggest her ex responsible for the disappearance.

  Laney nodded. “I know. But Alfie’s father, Theo, abandoned us. He”—even all these years later she couldn’t give voice to how that abandonment made her feel (enraged, betrayed, bereaved)—“he thought he needed to pursue his art career, and he couldn’t do it while taking care of a child.” At the detective’s inquisitive stare, she clarified, “I had the full-time job.”

  “So you don’t think it’s possible there was communication between them?”

  Well, anything was possible. Her son had a friend he’d never talked about. A friend who appeared to be the school drug dealer.

  “I guess I don’t know,” she said, the truth of this a needle in her heart.

  Keeping his face and voice neutral, his body so stiff he seemed mechanized, he said, “It must be hard to do all this on your own.”

  She knew from conducting these kinds of interviews herself that this was not sympathy talk. He was giving her an opening, an invitation to admit something he could use. And he was right, it was his job to ask, and even though she approved of his thoroughness, she also resented it, if only because she already felt responsible for every bad thing that happened to her son.

  “I love Alfie,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It being hard is simply part of the package.” She rose to her feet, hoping to end the interview.

  He stood up. “Do you think it would be all right if I took a look at Alfie’s room?”

  Laney thought of all the books now on the floor, the clothes in a heap, the desk turned inside out. The only place she hadn’t searched yet was the bed and the spaces around it.

  “Okay.” She pointed up the stairs. “It’s the room on the left that looks like a twister went through it.” She shrugged, hoping her laugh was not as hideously nervous as it felt. “I’ve been searching through his things.”

  Ed paused. “For something in
particular?”

  “No. I don’t know. I guess I figured I’d know if I saw it.” The chart folded in her pocket.

  He studied her for a few seconds, then disappeared down the hall.

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE SILENCE IN the house after Ed left ate at her. It was only one PM but already gloomy, the sky hanging low and metallic above the pines. She grabbed the remote and turned on the television for background noise, then flipped to the news. Nothing held her attention.

  After a moment’s indecision, Laney punched in the number for Ann MacDonnell, the school counselor-in-training she’d argued with that morning, and left a message asking her to call back.

  A half hour later Ann did, and Laney asked, “Does the name JP mean anything to you?”

  The surprised silence on the other end elated Laney. Please, please, please, let that name mean something.

  “Mrs. Bird, I can’t betray another student’s confidence,” Ann said, her voice cool.

  God, this woman was inexperienced. All students were assigned a counselor automatically. Many (most) of the kids never visited them to discuss personal problems. Ann could simply have said that yes, JP was one of the students on her list, but she hadn’t. What she said was about as good as saying JP had also sought out or been assigned therapy with her. This in turn was an insight into the other boy’s life and possibly into Alfie’s.

  “I understand,” Laney said. “You said you’d ask the boy who had group therapy with Alfie if he’d speak with me. Have you had a chance to do that?”

  Another pause. Not a good one. “I did, as a matter of fact. I’m afraid the boy doesn’t want to.”