“He’s the boy I raised, all right. The very one.”
“Well, then. Let’s bring him home. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know to call me? Yes? Good.” He walked to the door and stood there with a hand on the knob. “I wonder—”
I stood, felt for my cell phone through my pocket. “What?”
“I just wonder—what’s Joshua running from? In particular, I mean. Maybe you have some ideas. But could he have been running toward something? They’re asking you these things, I hope.”
“They’ve already asked. About—Chicago.” He’d loved it there.
“And before that?”
I looked away. “They’ve been nothing if not thorough.”
“Of course, of course.”
“Just say whatever it is, Kent.”
He came away from the door. “The police are being thorough, Anna, but they are just strangers following a checklist. You know him.” He looked around the room. I saw him noticing the bare walls, the single framed photo of Joshua in the corner. “If he doesn’t come back—” His eyes dug into mine to make sure I understood the possibility. “If he doesn’t come back and you’ve done nothing but wait for someone else to rescue him?”
I took a shaking breath. I couldn’t even be insulted that Kent still knew I needed his help. “What do I do?”
Kent smiled gently. How lucky his boys must be, his wife. “I would say do what you’ve always done,” he said. “Whatever you have to.”
KENT HAD ALREADY left when I realized I could have shown him the evidence forms from the sheriff. They were confounding me for some reason. I’d never figure it out now.
I was supposed to rest, but couldn’t. I was supposed to stay near home, but no one came through the door. I was supposed to keep my cell phone close, but it didn’t ring. My assignment was to do nothing. The world seemed quite content to go on without me, without Joshua.
My skin was itchy, jumpy. Something had to happen today. Joshua had to come home today. He had to.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, put it back. These motions didn’t give me even a second of satisfaction. I pulled out the phone again to dial Russ, but put it back down. I wouldn’t do it.
Whatever you have to.
Down the hall, Joshua’s room radiated emptiness. I walked to it, opened the door. I looked again in the boxes he’d never unpacked, opened the closet door again. Got on my hands and knees and bowed to the dust bunnies under the bed. The police had been over the room; I’d been over the room—who had not been over the room?
I fell back on his beanbag chair and looked around. His desk was dusty. His game system was gone, though I didn’t understand why.
From the closet, the spines of his textbooks mocked me. Huckleberry Finn—oh, God, he was a runaway, wasn’t he?—math, Our World and Its People.
I reached for the social studies book and flipped through the pages, stopping once to stare longingly at a note Joshua had made in the margins.
The text was all agriculture and war, famine and migration patterns. I shook the book upside down. Nothing fell out. I ran the book’s pages like a flip book forward and backward, checked the blank pages inside the back cover.
What had Joe said? History was a freshman class.
I flicked through the pages one at a time, willing the book to tell me what I could almost understand. And then I did.
Chapter Twenty-five
The school secretary didn’t want to tell me where the library was. “You understand, of course,” the woman said. She was younger than I was, pudgy cheeked, her hair cut short and matronly. “We can’t have just anyone running around the school.”
“I’m not just anyone. I’m a parent.”
“You wouldn’t want people running loose in the school, with your child—” The woman had the decency to stop talking. She blushed.
“So you know that my child is not in the building, and at the moment I couldn’t care a lick who’s running loose. I need to talk to your librarian. Urgently. I urgently need to talk—”
“It’s not a good time right now.” The woman pushed her chair back a few inches, as though readying for me to launch myself at her. “It’s lunchtime, and Mrs. Chandler is busy.”
“I don’t want to talk to the principal. I want to talk to—is Joe Jeffries here?”
The woman picked up her phone. At last. I stepped back from the desk. Now that I was getting my way, I could give a few inches.
While the secretary spoke quietly into the phone—I could tell it wasn’t Joe she’d reached and wondered whether there was such a thing as small-town school security—I glanced around. In the back was the principal’s office, the door closed. Around the corner was probably the nurse’s office and sickroom, the vice principal’s office. I might be able to find Joe’s office on my own. There was a student sitting with his back to me, waiting for one of the doors to open and a figure of authority to wave him in. Health trouble or trouble trouble? And then realized the boy was Steve Ransey.
I walked over and stood in front of him. “Steve,” I said.
He was hunched over, his elbows on his knees. He didn’t look up, so I knew he’d recognized me before I had him. “They already talked to me,” he said.
“I’m not the police. I have different questions.”
He kicked at the carpet. He wore work boots, as though seventh grade was a break from his job on a road crew. Or a chain gang. He was bigger than Joshua, heavier and thicker.
“What?” he asked, voice cracking.
Still thirteen years old, though, no matter how tough the uniform.
“You don’t know where he might have gone?”
“That’s the same question.”
“OK,” I said, sitting in the chair next to him. “When did he start spray painting on barn walls?”
Steve’s eyes shifted all around without alighting.
The secretary walked up to us. “I don’t think we can allow this.”
“Allow what?” I said. “This is my son’s friend. We’re just consoling each other, isn’t that right, Steve?”
Steve nodded at his boots.
The secretary made a small sound and hurried off.
“She’s going to go get the principal or the vice,” Steve said.
“Let her. I’m not doing anything. And neither are you at the moment. Why are you sitting here?”
“Waiting on the nurse,” he mumbled.
“Are you OK?”
He managed to look at me for a beat, then away. “Yeah.”
I’d used the mom tone on him, I realized too late. “Did the police ask you about the spray paint? And the barn?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess I can’t ask you about that. Did they ask you about . . . social studies?”
His face shifted subtly, curious. “No?”
“Are you in social studies with Joshua?”
“Different periods.”
“But the same teacher?”
“Mrs. Grivner. She’s kind of a bitch.”
“I like her already. Did she ever assign you a project where you had to map out your family? Make a family tree?”