Every Missing Piece

by Melanie Conklin

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Melanie Conklin

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Pascal Campion. Cover design by Phil Buchanan.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at LBYR.com

  Originally published in hardcover by Disney Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Publishing Group, in May 2020

  First Edition: May 2020

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945906

  ISBNs: 978-1-368-04895-8 (hardcover), 978-1-368-06393-7 (ebook)

  E3-20200409-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Was

  1: Everything Goes Somewhere

  2: Ghosts

  3: The Girl Who Cried Wolf

  4: Stan Saturday

  5: Safety Checks

  6: Kiss My Grits

  7: Welcome Wagon

  8: Unknown Quantities

  9: Bait & Trap

  10: The Living Museum

  11: Patterns

  12: That Again

  13: The Birds and the Bees

  14: Also Known as Bob

  15: April Fools

  16: Fluffernutter

  17: Blackmail

  18: Time Travelers

  19: The List

  20: Sister Stuff

  21: Seeing Red

  22: A Trojan Horse

  What Is

  23: Now

  24: Easter

  25: Bag in the Hole

  26: Right and Wrong

  27: Big Bads

  28: Strangers

  29: Talking in Code

  30: Miracle Mud

  31: The Plan

  32: A Different World

  33: The Facts

  34: Code Yellow

  35: Playing Pretend

  36: Running the Gauntlet

  37: Great Minds

  38: A Person-Shaped Lump

  39: The Syrup to My Waffle

  40: Elsewhere

  41: The Last Day

  42: Good-Bye

  43: Lost

  44: June 2

  45: Man Down

  46: A New Puzzle

  47: Next

  Acknowledgments

  For my father, one of the good guys

  WHAT WAS

  1

  EVERYTHING GOES SOMEWHERE

  The day Billy Holcomb went missing, tornadoes made me miss the bus. Technically, they were just potential tornadoes and I was hiding in the culvert when the bus blew past me, but life can go from good to bad in a heartbeat, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

  “How did he miss you?” Mom asked.

  “Maybe he was in a hurry,” I said.

  Which was sort of true.

  The middle-school bus driver has a reputation. He’ll skip your stop if you aren’t waiting exactly where you’re supposed to be. We were three weeks into the school year, so I already knew that, but the sky had looked way too angry that morning to risk standing out in the open. Tornadoes can come from anywhere at any time. It doesn’t even have to be raining out. North Carolina may not be a tornado magnet, but there are more of them here than you might think.

  “I should say something to the principal,” Mom said.

  Stan looked up from the little red notebook he keeps in his pocket, where he was busy writing about who-knows-what. Stan basically ceases to exist when his notebook is out. It’s like his whole brain disappears inside the pages.

  “Where were you standing, exactly?” he asked.

  “By the bus stop.”

  This wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I was standing, but sort of crouched over, and not right next to the bus stop, but in the culvert next to it. The culvert is a ditch made of thick concrete, so it isn’t going anywhere, even if a tornado does drop out of the sky and try to suck me up. If Mom knew the truth, she wouldn’t have been mad, but she would have been concerned.

  Those days, everyone was concerned about me. Like they all expected me to freak out because Mom and Stan got married, when really I just wished everyone would leave me alone about it.

  Stan tipped his head, thinking. I swear you could see gears turning behind his eyes. If I didn’t get moving, he would put the pieces together and blow my cover.

  “Can you give me a ride?” I asked Mom, who sighed. She works nights as a labor-and-delivery nurse, and she really should’ve been asleep by then.

  “I can,” Stan offered. “I need to get to the office early, anyway.”

  Mom smiled. “That would be great, honey. Thank you.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “Maddy. I’m sure you appreciate Stan’s offer.” Her eyes said I did, with daggers.

  Mom is always trying to get me to be cool with Stan. I don’t have to pretend he’s my real dad or anything, but it’s still annoying how she says stuff in this pointed way, like we don’t all know what’s going on here. But I also know that “getting along” really matters to Mom, and that more than anything, she wants me and Stan to be friends.

  “Thanks, Stan,” I said.

  He beamed like he’d won stepfather of the year.

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate Stan, but he drives slower than church ladies on Sundays. Sure, there aren’t any posted speed minimums, but there are limits to what is reasonable. Stan is from New York City, where people don’t even have cars. He doesn’t know how to mow the lawn or rake leaves, either. He just got his driver’s license over the summer, and that was only because Mom made it a requirement for getting married, which they did in August, right before I started sixth grade. Now Mom is Sarah Wachowski instead of Sarah Gaines, but I’m still Madison—Maddy—Gaines. It’s not like Stan adopted me or anything. I don’t expect him to, either. When a person is right, there’s a click. You fit together, like two halves of a plastic Easter egg. Stan is a good guy, but I’m pretty sure we’ll never click like that.

  Mom opened her arms and gave me a squeeze. “I’ll miss you today.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed in her warm vanilla smell. Mom is taller than me, but not by much. Her side is soft and steady, and when she presses her cheek against the top of my head, I can feel her smile. She was smiling all the time those days, which I knew had a lot to do with Stan being around. Stan is tall and skinny, and he looks even taller next to Mom. She says I look like Dad, with my stick-straight hair and pointy chin, and that I’ll probably grow up to be bigger than her because Dad was a tall guy, too.

  Stan gathered his work computer and I followed him out to the garage, where my dog, Frankie, was asleep on her bed. She shot up the second she saw me, but I told
her to sit and she plopped down, her black tail wagging. The people who say Labs are the best dogs are right.

  In the car, Stan checked his mirrors and tested his brakes. He set the radio to the local station and beeped before he backed out. At the end of our court, he rolled his window down and signaled with his arm as well as his turn signal, like the dork that he is.

  As we drove to school, I rested my forehead against the window and watched the familiar pattern of houses and fields roll by. Summerfield is just a stretch of highway to people passing through, but it’s a nice place to live, even if we have more cows than human beings. The grocery store is a social visit and pig pickin’s are regular occasions. If you need a hospital or a dry cleaner, you make the twenty-minute trip to Greensboro. The local churches hold Sunday suppers, and everyone’s welcome even if you don’t belong to a church, like us. The downside is that everyone knows everybody else’s business, and rumors spread like wildfire.

  Halfway to school, a new voice came on the radio. “—the boy was last seen crossing the street opposite his Fayetteville middle school at approximately seven forty-five yesterday morning. Foul play has not been ruled out at this time.”

  Goose bumps prickled along my arms.

  Stan moved to switch the radio off, then hesitated.

  “Authorities have issued an Amber Alert for the boy, Billy Holcomb, age eleven. He’s described as a white male, approximately four and half feet tall and eighty-five pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a round birthmark on his upper chest. He was last seen wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Anyone with information pertaining to his whereabouts should contact their local authorities. Police say the boy may have been abducted.”

  This time Stan did switch off the radio, plunging us into awkward silence. For some reason, the missing boy made me think of Dad. Only my father didn’t disappear.

  He died.

  A heavy feeling clouded my chest.

  This happens sometimes when I think about Dad. It’s like my body doesn’t know how to live with the idea of him not being here anymore, even though he’s been gone a long time. Dad died when I was eight. Now I’m eleven. But some losses keep coming back, the way a shout echoes long after it’s gone. I still text him sometimes. The messages don’t go through, but writing them helps. I tell him about my day, or when I’m stuck on a math problem, or when Stan really drives me bonkers. Sometimes I just say, “I love you.” He never answers back.

  I could feel Stan glancing at me, waiting for me to say something about the missing boy, but I kept my eyes on the road and tried my best to look like I wasn’t freaking out, even though my mind was racing. What kind of kid got himself abducted right outside of his own school? Everyone knew about strangers. Don’t talk to them. Don’t take candy from them. And never, ever go anywhere with them. That way you don’t end up plastered all over the news.

  Or worse.

  I swallowed hard, trying to get some moisture moving in my throat.

  “Are you okay?” Stan asked. There it was again. The concern.

  I nodded, my face going hot.

  “I’m sure they’ll find him,” Stan said. “A large percentage of abductions turn out to be misunderstandings rather than actual kidnappings. Not that it’s bad to care about things like this,” he said quickly. “Your mom and I just want you to be happy.” He stopped speaking then, his pale cheeks pinking up like they always did when he tried to talk to me.

  It’s not that I don’t want to click with Stan. We’re just different. Mom and I eat oatmeal. Stan likes hard-boiled eggs. We take our shoes off at the door, but Stan always forgets. We use whole milk. He drinks skim. It feels like Stan is the wrong piece for our puzzle. No matter which way I turn him, he just doesn’t fit.

  Stan was still watching me, so I gave him a tiny smile to show him I was okay.

  He was right. The kid had to be somewhere.

  Things can’t just disappear. They can move, they can hide, they can get stuffed down inside you, but they have to go somewhere.

  Five minutes later, we pulled into the drop-off lane at school, but when I turned to shut the car door behind me, Stan didn’t give me his usual chipper wave good-bye. After a few seconds, he saw me waiting and smiled, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. He was worried again—about whether we would ever click, about whether this new family of ours would work, about whether he’d made a terrible mistake by signing up to be my stepfather. Stan liked to pretend his worries disappeared the day he married Mom, but they were right there in his eyes.

  Like I said, everything goes somewhere.

  2

  GHOSTS

  Six months later, I was going somewhere different—to a graveyard. It was the end of spring break and the daffodils were blooming, but it was still cold out. March in North Carolina is all mixed up. One day it’s eighty degrees and the next it’s freezing. I was more than halfway through sixth grade, but I didn’t feel any older than I had at the beginning of the year. Growing up is weird like that. You feel the exact same way for ages and ages, then suddenly you look back and everything is different. You leap ahead. Growing up is like a form of teleportation, only blindfolded. You can’t see where you’ve been until you get where you’re going.

  Normally, graveyards aren’t my thing, but it was the last Saturday before we went back to school and I still needed a rubbing from a gravestone to finish the list of dares Cress had left for me. I’d given her a list for while she was in Trinidad, too. Whoever won had to buy the other person ice cream for two whole weeks, and I love ice cream. Which meant a visit to the Roach family cemetery was in order.

  The Roach family cemetery is a super-secret graveyard that’s hidden in the middle of my neighborhood. People say it’s from the family who lived here before White Oaks became a proper subdivision with neat blacktop and streets named after trees. You wouldn’t think this place held any secrets, but North Carolina is full of old stuff like that. Especially old buildings. The oldest ones are crooked and missing half their boards, like picked-over skeletons. There’s no telling what you’ll find in places like that, though usually the answer is ghosts.

  Greensboro’s most famous ghost is Lydia, the phan-tom hitchhiker. On rainy nights, she shows up at the side of the road and begs people for rides, but she always vanishes before they reach her destination. They say that Lydia’s trying to get back home, but she never makes it there because she died on that road a long time ago.

  Sometimes I wonder why Dad didn’t come back as a ghost, or if maybe he did and I missed it. I don’t know if I would like it if he appeared out of thin air like that, but it would mean he was still thinking about me, even if he did scare me to death to show it.

  The graveyard is on the other side of the subdivision, so I rode my bike. In our neighborhood, the blacktop is smooth and hilly, and I alternated between standing on my pedals and coasting with my feet up. When the Jessups’ house came into view, I slowed down and kept my eyes peeled in case one of them was around. The Jessups’ house is enormous, with a rounded section like a castle. It also happens to be located right next to the Roach family cemetery. Our house is small and looks like a triangle on top of a square, but it’s big enough for the three of us, with a bedroom for me and one for Mom and Stan. Still, I can’t help wondering what it’s like to live in a place so big you could sleep in a different bedroom every night of the week.

  A little past the Jessups’ house, I stopped and stowed my bike in the ditch, where it would be less noticeable. The Jessups could be anywhere at any time, and the last time I’d seen Diesel—the biggest and rottenest Jessup of them all—he’d threatened to rip my arms off. That’s the way it was between us now. We used to spend our summers swimming in the pond behind his house, but the territory wars had made us sworn enemies. Diesel started it by charging admission to his pond, and I fought back by staking out our stretch of road and nailing him with sweet-gum burs. Now Diesel says no one can use the pond without his express permission, especially me, whi
ch is just one example of his rottenness.

  I snuck along the edge of their property until I reached the place where the woods got a little more wild, full of prickers and blackberry bushes. The Jessups kept an old double-wide back there, right up against the trees. I slipped past the trailer and slowed down, keeping an eye out for the tombstones. It always takes a minute to find them. They aren’t big slabs like you see in church cemeteries. More like worn granite nubs. The first time I saw them, I thought they were monster’s teeth sticking up through the leaves. Most of them don’t have any writing left, but a few have dates and names for anyone brave enough to brush away the leaves.

  Luckily, the ground was still clear. Once the fiddler ferns filled in, it would be impossible to find the tombstones. Here and there, baby sassafras trees offered new leaves to the sun. A sassafras tree has three types of leaves: oval, mitten shaped, and three-toed feet, which all smell like fresh oranges when you rub them between your fingers. Dad showed me that.

  I spotted a gray-green tombstone poking up between the leaves and pulled a folded piece of notebook paper from my pocket. All I needed was a quick rubbing and I’d be done with Cress’s list. She was almost done with hers, but there was no way she’d steal her sister’s favorite T-shirt. And if she didn’t, Cress would be the one buying me ice cream for two whole weeks.

  I grabbed a nice long stick to check for sunken spots before I knelt to scrape the gunk off the tombstone. Then I pressed the paper against the stone and rubbed my crayon over it. I was nearly finished when something moved over by the Jessups’ trailer. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, in that part of your vision where you aren’t sure if what you’re seeing is real or not.

  I jammed the paper in my pocket and hefted my stick.

  My first thought was that the Night Ghost had finally decided to make an appearance. When me and Diesel were little, we made up this story about a ghost who haunts the Roach family cemetery. We called him the Night Ghost and imagined he was angry because he lost the love of his life in a high-wire accident at the county fair. That might’ve had more to do with our obsession with daredevils at the time, but it sure made for a scary story.