IT was nearly ten when I turned down the driveway. What struck me first was how dark the house looked.
The front porch light, the one at the side of the house, and the one on the barn door are all on timers, so they were on. But there was no light emanating from behind the windows. The living room was in darkness. Same for the second floor. Not even a bluish computer haze from Thomas’s room. It seemed unlikely, but maybe he’d gone to bed early.
The front door was locked. I let myself in, turned on some lights, then stopped and listened. No sounds. Not that Thomas was ordinarily noisy. Whirl360 had no audio.
“Thomas?” I called out softly, thinking he might be asleep. I didn’t want to wake him. I had expected him to be waiting up for me, eager to know what I’d learned. Not much, as it turned out, but he didn’t know that yet.
I could see through to the kitchen. “Shit,” I said under my breath.
Dirty dishes littered the table. Not just from breakfast, but lunch, too. Dinner I wasn’t too sure about. I put my hand on the half-full container of milk left sitting out. Room temperature. I gave it a sniff.
“Jeesh,” I said, and upended it in the sink. Then I noticed the peanut-butter-smeared knife stuck to the counter next to the open jar.
I mounted the stairs to the second floor and knocked on Thomas’s door ever so quietly. When there was no response, I eased it open.
I didn’t need to turn on a light to see whether he was in his bed. Moonlight streaming through the window illuminated the covers. The bed was empty. At that point, I flicked on the light.
The computer tower was still humming but the screen had gone to black from disuse. It was Thomas’s routine to shut everything down when he was done for the day.
I stepped out into the hall, traveled a few steps down to the bathroom. The door was open. I hit the light.
No sign of him there.
“Thomas!” I called out, no longer worried about making too much noise. “Thomas! I’m home!”
Unease washed over me. I never should have gone into Manhattan and left him for an entire day. He’d gotten into some kind of trouble, but what, exactly? I hoped to God the FBI hadn’t returned and taken him away.
I returned to the first floor, made my way to the door to the basement that was off the kitchen. “Thomas?”
No reply, but I descended the steps, anyway. Using light from the kitchen to reach the bottom, I then pulled the chain to turn on a bare bulb fixture. This room was used mostly for storage, and there were innumerable boxes of things my parents had stored over the years. An awful lot of stuff to have to go through. I walked around the room, peeked behind the furnace. Thomas was not down here.
I went out the kitchen door and took a few steps into the yard. The air was cool, the landscape lit softly by the moon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and if I’d ever studied astronomy I might have been able to pick out some constellations other than the Big Dipper.
“Thomas!” I shouted, then, under my breath, said, “Goddamn.”
I wondered whether I should call the police. I decided to do more searching first. Starting with the barn. I sprinted across the yard and slid open the broad, towering door. Once inside, I found the large electrical box screwed into a vertical beam and turned on the lights.
There wasn’t much in here, aside from the lawn tractor that had killed our father.
“Thomas! Damn it, if you’re hiding from me—”
I cut myself off, knowing how unlike Thomas it would be to play hide-and-seek. Displays of playfulness were rare from him. Once I’d stopped shouting, I listened. There was the nightly chorus of crickets, the kind of noise that’s always there, but that you really don’t notice. Not far from me, there was rustling in the bits of leftover straw that had been there for several decades, back to the time when this building was actually owned by a farmer.
A mouse scurried along, looking for safety.
I took a few steps into the structure, running my hand along the cracked hood of the tractor as I passed it. I wished, at this moment, that Thomas owned a cell phone. I would have tried calling him.
Struggling to think where he might be, I wondered whether he’d gone down to the creek, to where he’d found Dad. I killed the barn lights and ran to the crest of the hill behind the house. “You down there, Thomas?”
Nothing.
Who was there to call, other than the police? Thomas had no friends. It wasn’t like he’d gone to a sleepover.
This wasn’t like him.
I went back inside, decided I couldn’t wait any longer, and called the Promise Falls police. I told them my brother was missing.
“Sir, we’ll have an officer out to your place as soon as possible,” said the female dispatcher, “but in the meantime, I need you to provide a description of your brother. First of all, how old is he?”
I had to stop and think. “Thirty-five? He’s a couple of years younger than me.”
“And when did he go missing?”