—
On the walk back to the parking lot, I turn on my phone, but there’s still no reply.
“Joe,” I say, “I have to call Nolan.” Something about what Elliot mentioned, about Hunter and a shelter…I wonder if maybe Hunter can act not as a witness for Elliot, but against Mike.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Joe says, nudging my shoulder. I look up, and Nolan’s car is parked beside ours. He sits on the trunk, his feet resting on the faded bumper, and waves when he sees me looking.
I start walking faster, and when I’m close enough to see him clearly, he grins. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, and I smile.
He looks over my shoulder at Joe, strolling across the lot. “Should we introduce your uncle to the world’s best pizza?”
Agent Lowell sits across from me and my parents, on that same couch where Abby and her parents once sat, setting everything in motion again. He’s told us there have been new developments. Some questions, some answers, he said.
“Did he talk?” my dad asks.
It was Elliot who provided the missing link. Who let us know that Hunter Long had been in that shelter at the same time as Liam. That he might’ve known something about what happened two years ago.
Agent Lowell spreads his hands apart. “His mother brought him back in yesterday, and we were able to fill in a few more holes.”
Kennedy told me the police found Hunter, managed to convince him to talk after promising not to bring any charges, but he was still afraid.
“The timing adds up,” Agent Lowell says. “His mother says Hunter first ran off right after she remarried. He’d gotten into a fight with his new stepfather and disappeared for months. Hunter told us that soon after he arrived at the shelter, he noticed that one of the volunteers was taking money from the younger people who were living there. Money they should not have had. He realized they were working for him, most likely distributing drugs.”
“Liam found out?” I ask. Mike had told me, leaning over me in the middle of the clearing above the quarry, that Liam didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.
Agent Lowell sighs. “Hunter says he confided in another volunteer—one who looked about his age. When he didn’t see that volunteer again, he took off, afraid.”
Liam. It had to be Liam. Liam must’ve asked Mike about it, maybe not realizing it was him. Or maybe he did realize, but he wanted to believe the best of Mike, that there was some mistake. Liam must’ve debated going to the police, turning Mike in. His hand shaking that morning, the razor falling, the drop of blood. When he saw Mike at the picnic, Liam must’ve agreed to hear him out. If you take not only a person but also a dog, it seems like a runaway. Mike knew this. He knew this, and he used it.
“Is it enough?” It’s the first time I’ve heard my mother ask Agent Lowell a question.
“It will be,” he says. “We know what questions to ask now about Mike’s work at the shelter. We’ve heard that he worked closely with the teen runaways. And now we think he must’ve operated by threatening to turn them in to authorities, or turn them in back home, unless they did what he asked—distributing for him, collecting the money. Problem was, there was so much turnover there anyway. Sometimes they came back to the shelter, sometimes they didn’t. I guess, if things didn’t go Mike’s way, he thought no one would look too closely when they didn’t turn up again.”
Until Liam.
There are witnesses this time. Me, and Kennedy, and now Hunter Long. Hopefully, with the support of the police, we will have more.
We don’t have proof, but we have enough.
Agent Lowell looks up at the ceiling, at the scratching I also hear, coming from my brother’s room. It’s becoming a habit. “Is that who I think it is?” he asks.
“We keep finding him in there,” my mom says, almost smiling.
* * *
—
Turned out, all the press was good for something. The phone call we received after the service—the woman on the other end who’d been trying to reach us for days. “I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said.
Then she described Colby—the brown-and-white coat, the tail that was a solid brown. “One day, two years back,” she explained, “I saw this scrawny thing digging in my garden. He looked too skinny, and he seemed frightened.”
My back straightened; even my parents noticed.
“Well, he had no collar, you see. I thought he was a stray. I put up signs, just in case. But, you know, it’s not really near you. And I think…”
“Nolan?” my dad said, stepping closer to the table. “What is it?”
I shook my head, dropping the phone to my side, barely able to believe it. “Colby,” I said. “Someone found Colby.”
And now he’s back, half ours, half belonging to someone else. And he keeps gravitating to that empty room. He spent the first day pawing at the door until I let him in, and then he sat in the middle of the room, staring at something no one else could see.
He’s in there again now.
Sometimes I think he can sense something we don’t.
And sometimes I think how things can still come back, even after we stop looking for them.
In the hallway of the shadow house, everything is too new. The paint, the lightbulb, the handrail. A terrible history we’ve been trying to ignore. So that when I look at it, I can only imagine the horrors and the dark.
The first picture that goes up is the hardest, my hands trembling as I hold the nail. But the second goes up quicker, and then the next, and the next. Until the stairway is lined with them—images of my mother, and me, and Elliot, smiling back. All the photos the Realtor took down and left in storage.
I think there’s something to it, in Nolan’s house—the faces of the missing lining the walls. A reminder, or a hope, that keeps you going.
There’s a knock at the front door, but I didn’t hear a car pull in. It’s officially summer break for me, but Joe still has to be on campus, and Nolan was meeting with the detectives on his brother’s case, going through the latest developments.
I peer through the living room window first, but I can only see a sliver of a body, fidgeting back and forth on the front porch. When I open the door, Marco seems surprised to see me standing there. He’s half turned away already, though he was the one who just knocked on the door, so.
“Hey,” he says, “I saw your bike.” He points to the side of the house.
I open the door wider, and though he hesitates, he eventually steps across the threshold, looking around.
“The For Sale sign is gone,” he says. “Does that mean you’re coming back?”
“We’re not sure yet,” I say. But it’s possible. We’re all in one big holding pattern, waiting to see what happens with Elliot; waiting to decide where we’ll all be comfortable living, if he comes home soon, like the lawyer believes will happen.
But if he comes back, and he steps inside this house, I want him to see beyond the shadow house, to what else might be possible.
Marco looks around once more, running his hand through his hair, in the way I once used to love. “Lydia told me what you guys are doing tomorrow.”
I nod, putting my hand on my hip, not sure whether I should be on the defensive.
I don’t know what he’s doing here, only that he’s here.
“Will you be there, too?” I ask.
He looks at me then before putting a hand on the doorframe. “Probably. I mean, I’m usually there anyway.”
I smile then, and he grins back, and he’s both the Marco I met last summer and the Marco who’s been changed by all that came after, just like the rest of us.
“Guess I’ll be seeing you, then,” I say.
Sometimes, when I first wake up in the morning, I close my eyes and try to go back. To find the crack in the universe, where time is malleable and I can change things.
I wish he had talked to me.
I would beg him: Tell me. I’m right here.
My parents say I have to accept that we may never know for sure. To be okay with the things we know but cannot prove.
Which is ironic, since no one seems interested in the things I know but cannot prove. No, it’s all too much for them. Something they try to explain away as a series of coincidences orchestrated by two kids looking for something, and falling for each other.
Never mind that we both found it.
They’d rather brush it all aside, the things we’ve told them. There are too many leaps for our families to accept.
We cannot explain why I received Kennedy’s words that night, in the form of my brother speaking the same words. Help us. Please. Her message, coming through.
Well, I can. It’s just not something my parents, or the police, are interested in hearing.