The Narrows(45)

Chapter Six


1


Ben spent Sunday morning on the phone with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, trying to convince one of the sheriff’s deputies of the need for warm bodies to help conduct a search for the missing Crawly kid. The deputy, an obstinate bumpkin with a faint lisp, was not too keen on wrangling together a bunch of his guys on a Sunday to wander around the woods looking for a kid who’d probably run away from home and was currently holed up in some friend’s tree house.

“That may very well be,” Ben assured him, “but on the slim chance that something else has happened to that kid—like maybe he fell out of some friend’s tree house and is lying with his leg or his neck broken somewhere—I think we should get out there and look for him.”

The deputy grunted. “Where’s Harris, anyway?”

“The chief’s on vacation.”

“Leaves you holding the bag, huh?”

Ben frowned at the phone. “We got a nice little diner in town,” Ben went on, unperturbed. “The Belly Barn. I wouldn’t mind treating your men to some good home-style dinner for giving us a hand. Bo makes a helluva meat loaf.”

The deputy sighed. Ben could hear a radio or a television in the background. “Yeah, okay,” he said eventually, more bored than agitated. “How many men you think you need?”

“As many as you can spare,” Ben said. “This way we can get done quicker.”

“What time is it now?”

It was six thirty in the morning. Ben told him so.

“Jesus,” the deputy said. “All right. We’ll be out there around eight o’clock, okay?”

“Great.”

“My name’s Witmark, by the way. George Witmark.”

“Thank you, George.”

“That better be some grade A meat loaf,” Witmark said and hung up.



2



The guys from Cumberland arrived at the station at a quarter till nine—three squad cars with two uniformed officers in each car, the sheriff’s logo emblazoned on each door. George Witmark got out of the first squad car. He was tall and thin, his sunken jowls crosshatched with the remnants of teenage acne. He surveyed the Stillwater police station with something akin to disdain. He had a toothpick wedged in the corner of his mouth.

Ben gave a cursory briefing to the officers in the Batter’s Box then they all headed out to the Crawly house. Ben went to the front door while the other officers waited near their cars, climbing into latex gloves and forester boots. Wendy Crawly was home. She answered the door and the sight of her caused Ben’s capillaries to constrict. She looked like something that had crawled recently from the grave, her face colorless and her hair a frizzy tangle. Sylvia Marsh stood behind Wendy, her plain country face a mask of worry.

“My God,” Wendy said, nearly croaking.

Oh, I am an idiot, he thought, instantly realizing how this must look.

“We haven’t found him,” Ben said quickly, holding out two placating hands. When it looked like Wendy might collapse, Sylvia Marsh came up behind her and slid an arm around her waist. “I didn’t mean to catch you like this. We just wanted to search the property. Is there someplace you could go for a while?”

“We can go to my house,” Sylvia said. The Marshes lived in the next farmhouse over.

Ben thanked her then waited in his car for the two women to leave. They finally came out the front door and walked, arm in arm, up the road to the Marsh house.

The officers searched the property first, including the detached garage. From there, they spread out in four small teams to cover more ground, moving behind the Crawly property and into the Marshes’ cornfield, which separated the two properties. They searched in a gridded fashion, two teams combing the field east to west while the other two teams moved north to south. The entire time, Ben conducted the search with his heart in his throat. A feeling of detachment carried him through much of the morning and well into the afternoon.

By three o’clock, with the men sweating through their uniforms, they had searched the entire cornfield and the surrounding pastures, straight up to the foothills of Haystack Mountain, with no sign of Matthew Crawly. Ben did not know how to feel about this. Of course, he was relieved that they hadn’t found a body…but now he was faced with the increasing mystery of where the boy had gone. They hadn’t even found a scrap of clothing or a goddamn footprint. No evidence whatsoever.

Exhausted, they regrouped in the Crawlys’ backyard just as the sun began to creep behind the peaks of the mountain. Shirley arrived with cheese sandwiches wrapped in cellophane for all the men, a grim expression on her face. The men ate in mutual silence and most of them did not look very hungry. Peeling off his latex gloves and smoking a cigarette, Witmark approached Ben, who sat on the porch steps examining the fresh abrasions on his palms.

“You talked to the mother, right?”

“Sure,” Ben said.

“My guess is they had a fight and the kid will come back once he’s had time to cool off.” Witmark shrugged, as if he dealt with this sort of thing on a weekly basis. For all Ben knew, maybe he did. “You know how kids are.”

Ben nodded and looked back down at his hands.

“Shit,” Witmark went on, a hint of compassion in his voice now. “I remember when I was a kid, I’d have some blowout with my old man and I’d jet out for Lovers’ Leap with a six of Pabst and wouldn’t return till the next morning.”