Boy, 9, Missing

by Nic Joseph

  I turned toward the arched opening that separated my living room from my front door.

  And my heart clenched as I stopped in my tracks.

  The lamp dropped from my hand and clattered noisily to the floor.

  Standing not three feet in front of me, her back pressed against my front door, was a woman.

  Tall, slender, and dressed in all black.

  Dark-brown hair floating around her face like a cloud, swirling from the gusts of wind that snaked past us.

  She was just far enough away that I couldn’t make out the details of her face.

  But close enough for me to see what she was holding in her hand.

  A small handgun.

  Pointed steadily and purposefully at my chest.

  Chapter Four

  “Who the—” I stepped back, tripping over my own feet, and toppled onto the carpet. Instinctively, my hands flew up to cover my head because maybe—just maybe—layered on top of each other, they would be enough to stop a bullet from entering my skull.

  The woman stepped forward.

  “Cover up.” Her voice was deep and confident, her movements controlled rather than forceful. It took a moment for her words to sink in. I hesitated before lifting my head slowly and peeking out from beneath my arms.

  “What—”

  “Cover yourself, Mr. Scroll. Please.”

  I was still frozen, my arms lifted high. I glanced at the patio door, which suddenly seemed miles away, and I was 100 percent certain I couldn’t reach it before she shot.

  Shot.

  She had a gun.

  “Wha…what are you doing?” I managed to choke out.

  She didn’t say anything, just held the gun steady in one hand and gestured to the couch with the other. I looked back to see my deep-burgundy throw tossed over the arm. I stared at it for a moment, then turned back to her, and she nodded.

  I swallowed and dragged myself over to the couch, reaching up to grab the throw and yanking it toward my body. I rolled and tugged awkwardly, wrapping the cover around my waist with shaking hands.

  She used the gun again and motioned for me to stand, which I did slowly, my hand still holding the blanket tightly.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked, my voice cracking on the last word, and she didn’t even flinch. “Take whatever you want, please.”

  She didn’t respond. She squared her shoulders and lifted the gun higher, aligning it with my face.

  “I’m going to ask you this one time,” she said, and my knees buckled again. I slumped back against the couch as she stepped forward, allowing me to make out just a little bit more of her strikingly angular face and tense but deliberate motions. Her eyes commanded mine, and I stared back, panic taking over. “I want you to tell me if you know anything about where my son is right now.”

  “What?”

  “And I swear to you,” she continued, coming even closer, “if you lie to me, I will shoot you through the head, and I don’t care what happens to me after that. I really don’t. So just tell me the truth, for your sake and mine: Where is Matthew?”

  I swallowed, and the room swayed around me. I was going to pass out. I am going to pass out…

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t. Really. I promise you.”

  Her jaw worked, and it occurred to me that this was some sort of lunatic who thought I was an ex-lover, and that lover had stolen her kid, and she, for some reason, thought it was me, and she was going to fucking kill me because of it, and—

  “Are you telling me the truth?” It was a whisper, the gun not moving an inch, and she didn’t sound like a lunatic at all. “Francis, are you telling me the truth?”

  It hit me only then that she’d used my name earlier.

  My real name.

  This wasn’t a random lunatic.

  She knew who I was, and she’d come here to find me.

  Me.

  “I swear to you, I have no idea what you’re talking about, or who you are,” I said. “But if you tell me, maybe…maybe I can help you find him.”

  She blinked, and for the first time, she looked away from me, her gaze dropping to the floor. I wondered if I could reach her and kick the gun out of her hand, but it seemed like too much of a risk. Besides, that probably only worked in the movies. I’d never kicked anything out of anyone’s hands, let alone a loaded gun.

  But I wouldn’t need to. After a couple more seconds of staring at the floor, the woman lowered the gun slowly and stepped back. She walked a few steps to my love seat and dropped down onto it, placing the gun in her lap.

  I was still frozen in place, the throw wrapped around my lower waist, too scared to move an inch.

  “If you don’t know, then…” She shook her head, the rest of her body completely motionless. “If you don’t know, then what am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t—”

  “What am I supposed to do, Francis, if you don’t know where he is? You were my last hope.”

  I stepped backward, inching behind the couch so as not to startle her. If I could keep her talking, maybe I could make it back into the bedroom and to my phone.

  Or maybe I should just go for the front door.

  Shit, or even out the patio door.

  “Who are you? Maybe…” I cleared my throat. “Maybe I can help you.”

  She looked up, blinking as if seeing me for the first time, and she stared, her face almost completely expressionless.

  “My name is Miranda Farr,” she said simply, and it hung there just long enough for me to choke on the air that had just entered my lungs. “I’m Sam Farr’s wife.”

  Just like that.

  She said it so simply.

  “Who?”

  I didn’t ask her because I hadn’t heard her, or because I didn’t know who Sam Farr was, or even because I didn’t believe her. I asked her because I needed a moment to let it sink in.

  And to catch my breath.

  “Sam Farr.”

  “What are you talking about?” It was nothing more than a hoarse whisper.

  “My husband is Sam Farr, and our son, Matthew, is missing.” When I didn’t respond, she continued, as if she knew how to twist the knife even deeper. “He’s nine.”

  That last sentence was meant to hurt me, to hit home, and it did. I struggled to catch my breath as we stared at each other.

  Could she be lying? Why would she lie?

  What was she talking about?

  Most important: Why did she have a gun?

  I glanced back and forth between her and the weapon. “How did you…” I swallowed. “How do you know who I am?”

  “I looked you up,” she said, as if I’d asked the world’s stupidest question. “Francis Scroll was an intern at the Madison Tribune in the summer of 2002, but he fell off the face of the earth after that. Coincidentally, Francis Clarke’s bylines began showing up at the same paper a few months later. When I found your name in the Lansing News, I knew you’d come back home. Why’d you come back, Francis?”

  It was an accusation, and I blinked rapidly. “It had nothing to do with your son, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Is that why you’re here?”

  She stared at me for a moment and finally sighed, her shoulders slumping forward. “I’m here because I need help finding him,” she said. “I’m sorry, I…” She raised the gun, then shrugged and put it back in her lap. “I’m sorry I brought this. I just needed you to tell me the truth.”

  I swallowed. “So it’s not loaded?”

  “Oh, it’s loaded,” she said, looking up quickly, and there was something like a dare there, asking me to come closer.

  I swallowed again. “If your son is missing,” I started, “why didn’t you go to the police?
”

  “I did,” she snapped. “They’re not doing anything. So I thought maybe you knew something about it, or maybe they suspected you and they just weren’t telling me…”

  “Suspected me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would they do that? Who did you see? Captain Keith Del—”

  “Delroy? Yes. I asked him if they would talk to you, and he said he would. Personally. But obviously, that was a lie.”

  “So you’re telling me you think I had something to do with your son’s disappearance?”

  “No, not you. Your father.”

  “What?”

  “Your father took him.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Do I look like I’m not serious?” she asked. “I broke into your apartment and pointed a gun at you. I’m as serious as you can get. Alex Scroll has my son. That old, drunk bastard has my child. And nobody in this town wants to do anything about it.”

  I still felt painfully close to losing consciousness, and I leaned forward against the couch.

  “When did…uh…”

  “Matthew.”

  “When did Matthew go missing?”

  “Three days ago. He went to the park with Sam, and then…” Her voice broke, and she looked out the patio door. “We were just getting it together, me and Sam,” she said, turning back to me. “It’s been hard, really hard. You can’t imagine what our life has been like—what Sam’s life has been like. Matthew was all we had, and now…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “But what makes you think my father was involved in this?”

  “Because he was following us.”

  “What?”

  “Your father has been following us for weeks. We’ve seen him. Confronted him, talked to him about it.”

  “You confronted him?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “I walked up to the bastard and told him to leave me and my family alone. But he didn’t listen, and now my baby is just…gone.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it, and outside of my open patio, a bus blared its horn. We both froze, staring out through the shards of glass as if there were an answer out there for us.

  “Did you press charges?” That would at least prove to me that she wasn’t making it all up, that she wasn’t absolutely insane, even though she seemed to be perfectly in control.

  “No, it never got that far. We never wanted it to. We just wanted him to leave us alone.” She shook her head and stared down at the gun in her hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t do anything about it. I never thought he would do something like this. I thought he would eventually go away once he realized he couldn’t hurt us anymore.”

  “When did you last see Captain Delroy?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. “I know how close he was—is—to your family, so I asked him, point blank, if he would check with you about your father. He said he would. Now he’s not returning my phone calls. So I came here myself.”

  During the year between Lucas’s death and my going away to boarding school, I’d spent most of my days with Captain Keith Delroy and his family. My parents had split their time alternately grieving and chasing lawyers to find out how they could best build a case against Sam Farr. Delroy and his wife, Dorene, had welcomed me with open arms.

  I’d seen Delroy only twice since coming back to Lansing. Like Cam, he’d been pushing me to reach out to my parents, especially my father.

  “He hasn’t called me,” I’d said the last time we’d met, and the words had sounded childish, even to my own ears. “He knows my number.”

  “You’re the one who moved back,” he’d said. “You’re supposed to make the first move.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says common decency.”

  The gun was still in Miranda Farr’s lap, but it seemed pretty clear that she wasn’t going to use it. My heartbeat was settling to a close-to-normal rate, and I knew I needed to take control of the situation quickly. I took a deep breath.

  “Miranda, I’m going to go get dressed, okay?”

  She looked up at me but didn’t say anything. I began to back up slowly, my knees less confident than my voice, and I walked shakily toward the bedroom.

  She tensed as I sped up and turned, moving quickly through my apartment in an awkward, clunky run.

  “Hey,” I heard her call out, but I didn’t stop, even as I heard her get up to follow me. “Where are—”

  I made it into my bedroom and grabbed the glasses off the nightstand. As I put them on, I spun around. She appeared in the doorway, the gun in her hand but, thankfully, still down at her side. I was shocked by her appearance, now that I could see her clearly. She was in her early thirties, and she was nice-looking, except for the puffy eyes, reddened nose, and mane of tousled, clumpy brown hair that obviously hadn’t been washed in days.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting dressed and going down to the station.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t. Believe me, I’m as pissed about this as you are—”

  “Believe me, you’re not,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  I nodded. “Look, I’ll have better luck with Delroy if you’re not there.” I walked over to my dresser and began pulling out clothes. “Do you mind?”

  Her eyes widened, and she turned around, stepping away from the door. “Are you going to press charges?” she asked, and it was almost conversational, as if she didn’t care how I answered the question.

  I stepped into my underwear, watching her back. It seemed like the moment could have been my best opportunity to take the gun from her. She didn’t seem like she wanted to use it, but she had brought it back with her. I straightened up and hesitated only a second before inching closer to the door.

  “Don’t do it, Francis.”

  I looked up and peered past her into the hallway, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw that she was staring at me in the large hallway mirror, right above the table from where I’d taken the lamp just a few minutes earlier. We locked eyes in the mirror, and I could see that she was tense but still in control and not as vulnerable as I thought she might be.

  I turned back to the bed and picked up a pair of jeans.

  “Well, are you?” she asked. “Going to press charges?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully as I finished getting dressed and grabbed my keys and wallet.

  She turned back to me as I strode toward her, and she walked backward into the living room, the gun still gripped at her side. I walked past her toward the front door and grabbed my jacket from the coatrack.

  “You’re just going to leave me here?” she asked.

  I turned back at the door. “What did my father say?”

  “What?”

  “When you confronted him about following you. What did he say?”

  She stared at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and her gaze moved to the floor for a second before coming back up to mine.

  “‘It’s not fair,’” she said softly, and I knew immediately she was telling the truth. “He didn’t deny it, didn’t apologize, didn’t seem upset. He just said ‘it’s not fair.’” Her voice wavered on the last word, and it was the first sign of weakness I’d seen since she arrived.

  I slipped on the jacket and zipped it up as I opened the front door.

  “Let yourself out.”

  With that, I turned and bolted across the threshold and down the stairs.

  • • •

  I cut the fifteen-minute drive to the station in half, barely hitting my brakes. As I pulled into the parking lot of the sprawling, brick-and-glass Lansing Police Department, my chest tightened, and I went all death grip on the steering wheel. A major upgrade six or seven years back had turned the structure into something far different than
the rundown station I remembered as a kid, and yet it was all too familiar. I got out of my car and walked quickly to the front door.

  As I stepped inside, I froze, the warmth and the sounds enveloping me. Even though the aesthetics were different—it was shinier, more modern, and brighter than the last time I’d been there—the station felt the same, smelled the same. I was immediately pulled back to the late afternoons I’d spent sitting in another officer’s chair, my feet barely touching the floor while my father finished paperwork.

  I took a deep breath and walked toward the front desk, my gaze darting through the crowds of tables, toward the captain’s office. From the entrance, I could see Delroy’s hulking frame behind his desk. There was another cop in the room with him.

  I was almost at the front desk when someone called out behind me.

  “Francis?”

  I turned and tried to hide a groan when I saw Vincent Jeffries, a cop who’d worked with my father for about a decade. There were more than fifty full-time Lansing police officers, and only a handful of them left who might recognize me. But that was my luck. Vince frowned, squinting at me. “Francis? Is that you? Wow, I haven’t seen you around here in a while!”

  “Hey, Vince,” I said quietly. “How’s it going? Yeah, long time. Look, I need to talk to Cap. It’s urgent.”

  He looked back at the office where Delroy was currently midconversation. “Well, geesh, I can take you back there, but he’s—”

  “No problem. It will only take a moment,” I said. He nodded and walked me through the scattering of tables but put up a hand as we approached Delroy’s door.

  “We can wait here,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll be done soon. So what have you been up to?”

  I glanced at the men through the glass wall. “I’m sorry about this, and thanks a lot, Vince,” I said before walking up to the door and opening it.