Last to Know: A Novel(68)

Wondering what Rose Osborne felt about all this, she Googled her too, but there was nothing.

She switched on the TV news. And there was Rose with Wally, standing on her porch, telling some young media guy with a microphone that her son had gone missing.

Mal sat up and took notice.

“His name is Diz,” Rose was saying, holding up his photograph for the camera. “He went fishing earlier and we have not seen him since. We feared an accident but Diz is an excellent swimmer and he knows Evening Lake well.”

“Does that mean you think your son might have been abducted?”

The reporter stuck the mike closer to Rose’s face and she took a nervous step back, grabbing her husband’s hand. Her white gypsy blouse slid off her shoulder and she pushed her long dark hair impatiently away as she hitched it back up. She had on old paint-stained jeans and flip-flops. Mal thought that it was probably the first time ever that Rose looked her age, as well as very worried. And very “womanly,” Mal thought, remembering Harry’s closeness to her.

Mal tried to get Harry on the phone but he didn’t answer. She left a message. “What else can fate have in store for this lovely woman? Have you tracked down the boy? Please, Harry, let me know.”

Harry’s response a couple of minutes later was terse. One word. “No.”

Mal knew not to push it and went back to her glass of wine, and to watch the news. She had been going to fix a tuna sandwich but suddenly was no longer hungry.

*

Harry and Rossetti were driving along the shore road with Squeeze in the back of the BMW, head sticking out the window, sniffing and making the yelping noises that, being a malamute, were his personal form of excited communication.

“We could use him as a tracker dog,” Rossetti said.

“I think we’re gonna need one,” Harry said. Rose had called him with the news Diz was missing. He’d immediately gotten a squad car out there to organize a search.

“You told me to trust you,” she’d said. Accusingly, he’d thought.

“And you still must,” he said, though he had no idea of what might have happened to Diz. “We’ll find him,” he promised. “He probably just got lost in the hills, he might have tripped, broken an ankle.”

“He had his cell phone.”

“There are many places around Evening Lake with no reception; most likely Diz couldn’t use it. I know it’s ridiculous to tell you not to worry, Rose, of course your whole family must be worried. A search party is on its way and Rossetti and I will be there as soon as possible.”

“Why do you always call him Rossetti?” Rose asked, out of the blue.

“I can’t get around to thinking of him as a real person,” Harry said, grinning at his friend, who had slipped on the black quilted vest, hand-tailored, over his dark blue custom-made shirt and removed his pink-flowered Liberty silk tie. Now he unbuttoned his shirt at the neck. He was ready to go search the hills for the missing boy.

“We’ll be there soon,” Harry told Rose. “Just hang on, okay?”

“Better put sneakers on,” he told Rossetti, eyeing his shiny brown loafers. “We’re going walking.”





52


It had not escaped Harry’s notice that the man who knew the terrain better than anyone had not shown up to help search for the missing boy.

“Len Doutzer knows this place like the back of his hand.” He frowned at Rossetti. “Better, even. He strides these hills like he owns ’em, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out he did, some of them anyway. Len is a mysterious character; I’m willing to bet if we search the land records we’ll find his name there.”

“Which means?” Rossetti leaned against the white brick wall of Tweedies Coffee Shop, throwing longing glances through its plate-glass window, where tired searchers were being treated to coffee or tea or hot chocolate, take your pick. Everyone was mucking in, showing support for one of their own. This was a small town, scarcely more than a village, perched on the edge of the lake where right now every house showed a light, and where a helicopter still hovered, its searchlight close to the steely water’s surface.

Harry said, “Which means Len might know where to hide someone.”

Rossetti unraveled himself from the wall. “You mean a body.”

Harry thought of Rose, distraught, waiting at her house, looked after by Roman and her girls while everybody else was looking for her young son. He said, “I still want to believe the kid could simply have gotten lost, fallen somewhere in the woods.” He glanced at the birch trees crowning the hill, silvery in the moonlight. He knew what he was saying was unlikely; this had all the earmarks of an abduction. He didn’t have to spell it out to Rossetti, who knew what he was thinking. “The question is why?” Harry said.

“Why is that always the question in abduction cases, and we know what the usual answer is.”

Harry didn’t need it spelled out either. He glanced round the lake with its necklace of lights, its small jetties where boats were returning and being moored. The search would restart at dawn. He wondered how Rose and Wally and the family were going to make it through the long night.

“I can’t give up now,” he said. “There’s something out there, some clue we missed. See those clouds?” The two men turned their eyes to where the sky seemed suddenly to have lowered itself over the treetops. “When that rain comes it will wash away any sign of what happened, we’ll be clueless and that kid might be dead. We can’t allow that.”