My stomach growled. As we drove slowly past the streaked windows beneath a flat green awning, a sheet of paper taped to a stop sign caught my eye. I hung further out the car, noticing the face on the poster as it drew closer. “Stop!” I yelled.
The wheels screeched against concrete. I popped the lock and slammed the door behind me. The flyer fluttered against the metal pole. I tore it down and held it in trembling hands. A black-and-white picture of a dark-haired boy with deep-set eyes and a straight nose stared out at me with the word Missing branded over his head and the words John Wheeler printed underneath it. Unlike when I’d first seen the picture of Trent Jackson Westover, I knew immediately that this boy was Adam.
Only less dead.
I scoured the surrounding area. Not ten feet away, there was another, identical flyer pinned to the display window of a jewelry store. I marched over to it and stripped the paper from the window.
John Wheeler. That name was a punch to the face, waking me up to what was real. And that was a boy named John.
I saw another one a short distance farther. A corner tore off when I ripped it down, crumpling the page in my fist. Owen’s horn blared behind me.
I worried that I was being watched, that someone would see me. I crushed John Wheeler’s photograph over and over as I followed the trail of flyers. An engine revved beside me and a door slammed. Lock beeped twice. Footsteps ran toward me as I reached up for another flyer. I was two blocks away from where I’d begun.
“What are you doing?” Owen said, spinning me. “I’m double-parked.”
I crammed the freshly picked flyer into his chest, and he shuffled back. Peeling the paper away from his body, he stared down at the picture. There weren’t very many words on the page, but Owen looked for a long time. His lips pressed into a white slash. “It’s him,” he said at last.
I took a deep breath. “It’s him.”
Owen and I collected flyers like bread crumbs, destroying the evidence and the search for John Wheeler. The fact that anybody might have seen these was enough to make me break out in hives. I handed my collection to Owen, and he stuffed it in a garbage bin.
He straightened and froze. “Look.” He nodded up the road where a stoplight blinked from yellow to red. Near a sign that marked the way toward State Highway 24 was a girl taping a poster to a storefront with boarded-up windows. She stood on her tippy-toes and fastened the paper to the wood.
I took off toward her.
“Tor,” Owen hissed. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t pay attention to him, and he didn’t follow. When she heard me approach, the girl snapped her chin up to meet me. At first, I thought that I’d misjudged and maybe she was just a kid, but when I got closer, I saw that she was only small. She clutched a stack of papers in her hand and a roll of duct tape.
“Just posting, if that’s all right with you,” she said in a thick country accent. This girl was all pointy elbows and sharp eyes. She wasn’t unpretty exactly. I could appreciate her in the same way I might the appearance of a starving raccoon. Cute, but scrappy. Tattered jean shorts hung off her hips, exposing a heart-shaped freckle on the bony ridge of her pelvis. “Been putting these all over town,” she said, tearing off a strip of tape with her teeth.
I hadn’t prepared anything to say. She stared at me expectantly, like she wasn’t sure whether to call a doctor or the police. At this point, both were probably worthy choices. “Who—uh—” I pointed. “Who is that? Do you know him?” In my mind I repeated the words she had said: all over town. My palms began to sweat.
She looked at me sideways. “Why? You seen him?”
I folded my arms, squirmed, and then scratched my temple. “Me? No. I—there’s just been a lot of boys going missing around here, you know?” I rubbed my arms to fight off imaginary goose bumps. On a hazy day like today, it was always tough to tell when the sun was beginning to set, but I noticed her shadow stretching along the length of sidewalk and knew that the day’s light was fading. “Hard to feel safe anywhere.”
She nodded. “I heard about that. The Hunter of Hollow Pines. Gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?” She made a little visible shiver. “If it eases your mind, though, I don’t think he’s one of them.”
“Oh.” I forced a smile. “That’s good to hear.”
I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the poster. Heat crawled up my neck. I tugged at the fabric around my collar. I wanted to snatch the poster away and add it to my trash collection.
“How do you know that he—” I kicked the ground, hiding my face in case I was a worse liar than I thought. “Isn’t, you know, one of the other boys that went missing?”
She started to open her mouth when another round of honking came from the road. I looked over to find Owen had pulled even, and he was waving me in, mouthing, Are you crazy?