The search teams and the cops on the four-wheelers and the fire department found nothing. They needed a dredger for the canal, but that would have to wait until morning. The parents had collected their children and gone home, using the flashlights they’d trained on the woods before to pick their way back across the dark streets, holding each other closer now, even just going through somebody’s yard.
Pitre stayed. He kept thinking about the little boy. He had the child’s school photograph attached to his clipboard—blond hair, blue eyes, a gap-toothed grin. The uncle, a man named Richard, had given it to him. He sat behind the wheel of his car and flashed the high beams into the woods. Once, twice, three times. Then he stopped and waited. Once, twice, three times again. Wait. The woods were dark, the only movement the ripple of black leaves in the wind. He flashed the beams again. Again. Whenever he thought it was time to go home and get some sleep, he’d imagine the boy’s blond head from the photograph against the leaves, the child just starting to awaken from sleep, opening his eyes slowly the way Pitre’s son did. That’s when the boy would see the flashing lights. That’s how he’d know to go toward them. What if Pitre stopped before the boy finally woke up?
But eventually he started nodding off himself. The next day would be a long one. Pitre drove home, kissed his sleeping son, kissed his sleeping wife. Slept.
Now he’s back at first light. He sits behind the wheel of the cruiser and sips from his coffee, watching the neighborhood mothers return to help with the search.
The mothers look exhausted, some of them still with their bathrobes on. One woman wears a winter coat buttoned fully over pajama pants and slippers. Word spreads quickly: No news, the Guillory boy is still missing. Fast as an echo comes the answer: He’s only lost; he must only be lost. They’ll find him. A woman stands where the road meets the grass—where in another part of town, the part with street names, there would be a curb—and shouts to organize the mothers into search teams. Someone else thinks to knock on the door of the white house to find out if there’s any coffee left from what the Fuel Stop out on the highway sent over the night before.
*
No one answers the door at the white house. Ricky and Pearl Lawson, his landlady, have already gotten into Pearl’s car. He’s due for his shift out at the Fuel Stop, and on the mornings she’s scheduled there, too, she drives him. Pearl is a supervisor, sometimes works cashier for the trucks. She’s trusted to handle the cash. Ricky does maintenance. Usually there’s easy chatter between them, but they’re quiet this morning. The morning air is chilly, shrouded in a faint gray mist, and Ricky rubbed his hands as he waited for her to unlock the car. He slid in. He tossed the bag of laundry he has with him into the backseat, and now he stares down at his lap. Pearl won’t look at him, either, the two of them like a warring couple this morning.
Last night, as word spread through the neighborhood that a child was missing, and the mothers arrived for the first time, they stood in the street in front of the Lawson house and decided that while they searched, the Lawsons’ lodger Ricky would look after their children, like he often looked after Pearl and her husband Terry’s two. The children had watched television with Ricky in the living room, and then later gone up to his bedroom to play.
But late last night, after the last child had been collected by her mother and even the police had gone home, only one patrol car still parked in front of the house, periodically lighting up the sky through the windows with its beams, Ricky came downstairs and found Pearl sitting at the kitchen table. He was carrying a plastic basket of laundry. The washer was out in the yard, hooked to the side of the house by a hose. But she looked at him so gravely he stopped and put the basket down. She was in her nightdress already, a cup of tea in front of her. She and Terry slept on a mattress in the living room since Ricky had come to stay. They’d rented him the bedroom.
“You know, Ricky,” she said, her voice even and her eyes down, studying her tea, as though she was trying to make her words sound casual, “maybe you’d better leave town for a few days. Just until this blows over.”
Pearl knew, Ricky would later swear, that he’d served time for child molestation. She took him in when he was on parole from his sentence in Georgia. They’d met when they were both living in a run-down motel out by the Fuel Stop, paying by the week. Pearl, Terry, and their two kids were all in one room. Ricky didn’t know anybody, so he was trying to pay for another all on his own. Pearl and Ricky saw each other on breaks at the Fuel Stop, at the laundry and the ice machines at the motel, and when paying the man at the front desk. One night, as Pearl and Ricky stood in the parking lot just outside the motel doors, she had an idea. She and her husband wanted to rent a house in Iowa. But affording it meant working more, with no one to look after June and Joey. Maybe they could team up.
That was two months ago. And Ricky’s never molested the Lawson children. That’s a promise he made to himself. A promise he’s kept.
Now she’s asked him to leave.
So Ricky has a duffel of clean clothes with him this morning, and the laundry sack, too, with the clothes he was wearing the day before, which he’d meant to wash during the night. They pull into the street, and Pearl rolls down her window to nod at Pitre before they drive past the police barricade.
Pitre nods back. He recognizes Pearl. Last night, she’d shown him the phone and coordinated the coffee the Fuel Stop had donated. He recognizes Ricky as the young man who drew the map now pinned to Pitre’s clipboard. The sun’s still climbing in the sky, tired parents still trickling in, but when enough parents arrive today, Pitre will use the young man’s map to organize them into teams. He’ll check off sections of the woods as they search. They’ll find the child. He’s sure of it.
*
Later, in the evening, when Ricky’s finished with his shift at the Fuel Stop, for the first night since he moved in with the Lawsons he doesn’t go back to the white house he’s so proud to be living in. The first room he feels he can really call his own. The room where now, in the closet, Jeremy Guillory’s body stands rigid, wedged in, wrapped in the blue blanket from Ricky’s bed, a white trash bag covering his head and shoulders. The hiking boots that fell off while Ricky was strangling him tucked neatly at his feet. The BB gun placed beside him. Ricky had him in there and shut the closet door before the children came into the room. The boy has a sock in his mouth now, a piece of trout line around his neck that Ricky pulled tight. He’d kept making gurgling sounds.