by Nic Joseph
If he was surprised that I knew it, he didn’t react.
“When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.
He smiled, just slightly. He didn’t take his coat off, and I wondered if that was because he didn’t plan to stay long. “About a week ago. We had lunch. It was a long time overdue.”
“What did you talk about?”
He smiled again. “You mean, did he tell me he had plans to kidnap a child? No, he didn’t.”
“Detective Younger, I’m just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.”
He maintained eye contact for a moment, and then took a long, slow breath. “Look, Francis,” he said, and he paused as the waitress returned with his coffee.
“You guys need anything else?” she asked.
“No, we’re good for now,” I said, and she left. I leaned forward, waiting for him to finish.
“Obviously, I wouldn’t have come today if I didn’t have something to share,” he said, “but before I do, I need your word you’ll check it out before you go to Delroy.”
“I—”
“Your father and I don’t talk that much anymore, but we became good friends after the trial. I’m worried about him. I just need to know you’re looking out for him.”
I didn’t know what he meant exactly, but it seemed like the right time to agree. “Of course,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
He took another deep breath.
“You know when people say things like ‘I could just die right now’ or ‘Just shoot me’ and they don’t really mean it? That’s what I thought was happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“When we met, your father told me he wanted to try some sort of memory retrieval on Sam Farr. That he was working with some psychologist he thought could help. I actually thought it was a good idea,” he said.
“You did?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I did. See, I’ve always understood your father’s need to know what happened that night. As you know, I testified against Sam at the trial. And to this day, I still think he had something to do with your brother’s death. I’ll never backtrack from that. But at the end of the day, our legal system did what it was supposed to do. He had a fair trial. I said my piece—everyone did. And he was found not guilty. That’s where I couldn’t agree with Alex.”
“But you just said you thought what my father wanted to do to Sam was okay.”
“I did, if Sam agreed to it. I didn’t really see the harm. Sam should have wanted to prove us wrong, once and for all.”
“But he didn’t agree.”
“No, and when Alex said he could make him do it, I thought he was joking. And then a week later, I saw the news.”
“You didn’t tell anybody?”
“There’s nothing more to tell than that,” he said. “I have no idea where he is. When you called, I figured I owed it to you to tell you that. But that’s all I know.”
I left the diner disappointed that he hadn’t been able to tell me anything I didn’t already know. As I was driving home, I made a split-second decision and turned the car toward my mother’s. She still hadn’t called me back, and I knew my best bet was simply to show up. I pulled up in front of her house and got out of the car.
I was about halfway up the walkway when I first heard the yells.
“I don’t know why I’ve put up with this for so long. You’re nothing but a whore, and an old whore at that!”
My mother’s boyfriend, Jimmy, came bursting out the front door, and a suitcase came flying out behind him. His face was red, and he was carrying a backpack and a tool bag. He barreled down the front steps in my direction.
“Hey,” I said, bumping into him with my shoulder and catching him off guard. He had been so focused that he hadn’t seen me approaching. Jimmy stopped and stared at me, his eyes wild and angry.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked. “Is there a problem?”
He continued to stare for a moment, frowning.
“You’re kidding me,” he said, spinning back toward the house. “You called your son?” he yelled. He turned back to me. “Nothing, man. I’m out of here. She’s a liar, and a cheater, but I didn’t do anything to her.”
My mother walked out onto the porch. She was crying and carrying something in her hands, but she seemed okay. I hesitated before letting Jimmy walk by and hurried up the steps toward her.
My mother’s eyes were glassy as she stared off the porch at Jimmy. She turned and looked at me for a moment, and I could tell she didn’t quite recognize me. When she did, she gasped and stepped back, grabbing the corners of her sweater.
“Francis,” she said, and it was nothing more than a whisper. “What are you doing here?”
“Is everything okay?” I asked, stepping closer. “Did he hurt you?”
“No, no,” she said, moving back and looking down the stairs as Jimmy got in his truck and drove away, his belongings still scattered over her front lawn.
“No, he didn’t.” She watched as his car disappeared. “I mean, he hurt my heart!” she yelled after him and then turned back to me. “What the hell are you doing here? You should leave. It’s obviously not the best time.” She looked at everything on her porch in disgust before turning and walking quickly back to the house.
I followed her, stepping over the discarded items, my mind racing as I tried to piece together what had just happened.
“You wouldn’t answer, so I just came here on my own.”
“Well, I told you, I’m fine, but I need a little privacy right now.”
“Please, Mom, I need to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Okay, look, your life, it’s none of my business. If you say he didn’t hit you, I’ll believe you—”
“He didn’t,” she said. “Goodness, am I not allowed to get into a fight? If he’d hit me, you know I would have hit him back, that asshole.”
“That seemed like a pretty big fight.”
“Francis…”
“Okay, but it’s not why I’m here. I swear. I need to ask you something else. It’s about Dad.”
She stopped, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve never said those words to me in your life.”
I bristled. “Well, I’m saying them now.”
She finally sighed and led me into the house. It looked a lot different than the last time I’d been there—it was almost completely barren, with only a few scraps of furniture in each room.
“Are you moving out?”
“No,” she said. “And I thought you were going to only ask questions about your father. If you ask me one thing about Jimmy, I swear, I’ll have you out of here—”
“Okay,” I said. I swallowed. She walked into the kitchen, and I counted—actually counted—the pieces of furniture we walked by.
Six.
She gestured to one of the chairs in the kitchen, and I hesitated before sitting down. She grabbed a coffee mug and leaned back against the sink. I was pretty sure there wasn’t coffee in the cup.
“Did you hear about the Farr boy?”
She froze and then nodded. “Yeah, I did.” She shook her head. “It’s terrible. That’s why you’re here?”
“Yeah, they think Dad took him.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s all they can talk about.”
“I try not to watch the news all that much. Why the hell would they think that? I mean, Alex’s lost it, but he wouldn’t go that far.”
“He was following them around.”
“He what—”
“He’d been following their family for about a month.”
“No…”
“I found pictures of them too. In his cabin.”
She blinked and looked
down at the mug.
“You knew about the cabin, didn’t you?”
Her eyes refocused on me, and I couldn’t tell if she was angry, sad, or nothing at all.
“Of course I knew about the cabin. Nobody has that many golf trips.”
I shifted uncomfortably.
“Well, the family is accusing him of taking the boy.”
“Did you go by Alex’s place?”
“Yeah, he’s missing. It looks like he hasn’t been there in a couple of days.”
“Wow, I didn’t know that. I haven’t talked to your father in years, since before he moved to San Francisco.”
“You knew about that?”
“Of course,” she said. “And don’t look at me like that. Like I was supposed to send you a card and let you know. This is the first time you’ve come here in years, and it had to be for something like this.”
“I’ve tried to call you.”
“Sure. Sorry I missed that one call, that one time, Francis. I need to sit down.” She walked out of the kitchen. I got up and followed her to the living room, where she sat on the couch. I sat beside her in an armchair, the only other piece of furniture in the room. She grabbed the remote control and flipped on a small television, which was sitting on the floor beneath the windows.
“Great, more news,” she mumbled, gesturing to the TV. For a few moments, we sat silently, watching as a news anchor droned on about the upcoming snowstorm.
“So what did you want to ask me?” my mother finally said, turning to me. “Do I think he did it? Not really, but I wouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore.”
“Mom, I know this is going to sound weird, but…was Dad ever into…hypnosis?”
She laughed and then frowned, tilting her head to the side. “You’re right, that is a weird question.”
“It’s an important one. Was he?”
“Your father was into a lot of things once. I guess hypnosis was one of them…” She looked out the window, but her unfocused eyes landed on nothing in particular. “Yeah, I think he was into it for a while. He was into any- and everything. He was sure there was some way to find out what happened to Lucas. Positive. I think he would have tried magic if he could,” she said with a laugh. “If he could summon Lucas back from the dead just to ask him what happened, I think he would have.” She shook her head and continued to stare out at nothing.
“I need you to think long and hard. Did Dad keep any notes about the hypnosis? Did you ever hear him talk about someone named D. B. James?”
She frowned and seemed to give it some thought. “D. B.? No, that doesn’t sound familiar. I do remember that he was reading about a lot of different therapies, but he didn’t want us to know about them. I found some papers under the bed once, and he got so mad. He said something about how it was so dangerous, he never wanted me or you to get involved. I let it go.”
“Do you know where those papers are?”
“No clue. It wasn’t the kind of thing I packed up and took with me after the divorce. I’m assuming they went into the trash.”
“What was so dangerous about them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I know he used to talk about someone, a name…”
“You sure it wasn’t D. B.?”
“No, it was John something. The last name was a flower… I think it was Rose. Yeah, John Rose. From Tennessee. He always talked about the Rose incident. I don’t know—it was something he really didn’t feel comfortable talking to me about. But I once heard him talking to someone on the phone.”
“But you don’t know who that was?”
“No.”
I sighed.
“What’s this all about, Francis? You’re freaking me out.”
“They really think he had something to do with it, and I’m just looking into it.”
“And Delroy is okay with that?”
“No, he doesn’t know. And it needs to stay that way.”
“Why are you doing this now, Francis?” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I mean, don’t you think it’s a little too late to get involved? We could have used you fifteen years ago.”
I shook my head and shrugged. “I’m sorry, but I’m here now. And everybody I talk to seems to want me to let this go.”
“Maybe because it’s too late to try to fix our family.” She leaned back in her chair and tapped her hand against the armrest. “You know, Francis, sometimes, it’s best to leave the past in the past. What good is opening this stuff up now going to do?”
“I’m trying to find that little boy, wherever he is.”
“So this is all about Sam Farr,” she asked, frowning.
“No, it’s about Matthew Farr. You do realize there’s a child involved, right, Mom? Even if you still hate Sam…you can’t possibly want to see his son hurt?”
She didn’t say anything and looked past me out the window.
“Of course I hope they find that boy,” she said as she put the cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “But am I going to go out of my way to help? No, Francis, I’m not. If you think that makes me a bad person, that’s too bad. I wish I had something left in me to care about Sam Farr’s son, but I don’t. I hope you find him, but that’s the extent of my involvement in all of this. Now”—she cleared her throat—“I really wish you would just let all this go.”
We both turned back to the television, because there was nothing left to say. After a few moments, I stood up to leave.
“I guess I should get going.”
My mother nodded, standing, but she didn’t say anything.
I was stepping into the entryway when the sound on the television changed.
The previous monotone sounds of the anchor reading off a teleprompter changed suddenly to a loud, up-tempo song. We turned back as a colorful breaking-news graphic flashed across the screen.
“We have an update for you now in the case of missing nine-year-old Matthew Farr,” the on-screen reporter said, and my mother gasped. My stomach lurched as we both inched back toward the screen.
“We have a report that Matthew Farr has been spotted at a gas station off of I-57 in Midlothian!”
The reporter said this eagerly to the camera, one hand pressed against a microphone in her ear. “I repeat, missing nine-year-old Matthew Farr has reportedly been seen at a gas station on I-57 in Midlothian, and…” The anchor paused to look at someone off camera.
“Oh my God,” my mother said, the cigarette falling out of her mouth and landing on the carpet.
There was an awkward lapse as the reporter continued to speak with someone behind the camera. Finally, she turned back to the screen. “Yes,” she said, nodding, “and it’s now confirmed he is said to have been seen in the presence of his accused kidnapper, Alex Scroll. Authorities are on their way to the scene at this very moment.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.
The gas station off exit 349 in Midlothian was a rundown relic, with a modest but steady stream of daily traffic. There was nothing special about it: eight pumps, an attached truck stop, and a convenience mart with row after row of dust-covered potato chip bags. As I exited the highway, I slowed behind a line of cars that were pulling up to the station, which was anything but ordinary today. Cars were tucked into nearly every empty space—news vans, police cars, and the rest of us inching closer to the action. People swarmed about, and I sucked in a breath, terrified I’d see Alex’s face in one of them, and the nightmare would reach its inevitable conclusion.
The cars behind me were honking viciously, and I strained to see what was holding up the line. A lone police officer stood where the road turned into the station, and I could almost see the sweat on his brow, the panic on his face. He held up a hand to direct traffic, but there was nowhere for the cars to go. After a few more moments of waiting, I veere
d off onto the barely existent shoulder and hopped out of the car.
“Hey, you can’t leave that there!” someone yelled, but I ignored the voice and began to jog toward the station.
I stepped onto the concrete and tried to fight through my rising anxiety as I moved through the crowd. I was sidestepping a man with a camera on his shoulder when I heard someone call my name.
“Francis?”
I spun around and was eye to eye with Cynthia Green, the reporter from the Lansing News, who was covering the Farr case.
“Did they find him?” I asked immediately, the words thick in my mouth, the sun and the swarms making me nauseous, but the need to finally know overwhelming.
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes scanning the crowd behind me. “I just got here too. What are you doing here?” She seemed suspicious.
“I was just in the area and heard the report,” I said. “Thought I’d stop by.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Cam has been trying to box me out for a year now,” she said. “Did she send you?”
“No,” I said, surprised at her concern. Cam hadn’t mentioned anything to me about that. “I’m just curious about what happened to that little boy.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said.
She turned to walk away, and I followed closely, craning my neck to see over the crowd. Most of the action seemed to be taking place near the small building, and I inched closer. I was about twenty feet away when I spotted a tall figure with salt-and-pepper dreadlocks.
Delroy.
My first instinct was to duck out of sight, but I froze when I saw who he was with.
A young boy with sandy-brown hair stood with his back to me, staring up at Delroy. As I watched Delroy lean down to say something to him, the blood drained from my face, and I dug my fingernails painfully into my palms to keep from passing out. Delroy put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said something else before straightening to face the reporters.
“That’s enough!” he yelled. “Keep moving! There’s nothing else to see!”
I opened my mouth to take in more air, and suddenly, everything was swimming in front of me, the people moving too fast, the sun blazing too hot on the back of my neck. As I moved into Delroy’s line of sight, he looked up, and the expressions that crossed his face ranged from confusion, to anger, to exhaustion.
