The Wrong Family(22)

Juno got up from the chair with some difficulty and walked over to the family computer. The screen was dark, but she knew that if she gave the mouse a little nudge it would spring to life, revealing the family vacation screen saver. She hadn’t touched a computer in years—well, except when she’d nudged Sam’s mouse much the same way the other day—but her life before had held all of those things: computers and jobs and credit cards. She didn’t miss it. She had very little and having very little yielded fewer complications. It had taken Juno time to adjust to a life without—stuff—but once she had, she found that she preferred it.

She sat down in the chair facing the computer, flexing her fingers. It was no big deal; Juno knew how to work a damn computer. She wasn’t one of those timed-out old people who poked at an iPhone screen with a shaking index finger. She just didn’t want to be part of that world anymore. She almost got up right then and there, but Nigel’s words played again in her head. Call it human curiosity.

There they are! Juno thought as the photo of the Crouches appeared on the beach. She tried not to look at them as she pulled up the internet browser, but she could see them out of the corner of her eye, staring at her with their sunburned faces. Her fingers found the keys easily. Slipping right back into it, she thought, sitting up a little straighter. Not bad for a sixty-seven-year-old, not bad at all. She typed missing children Seattle Washington, and then, as an afterthought, added the year into the search box. Sam was thirteen years old. That would have made him an infant in 2008.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children was the first site to appear, and Juno clicked on it. She was given the option to search for a missing child by name, but since Juno didn’t know what Sam’s real name was, she scrolled past that and saw there was a section where she could search by the city and state from which a child had gone missing. She typed in Seattle Washington and entered the year 2008 into the missing date option. Then Juno hit the return key and waited.

There weren’t many. She scanned through the single page of results in less than five seconds. There were no infants reported missing in Washington in 2008, but that didn’t mean anything. If the Crouches had kidnapped Sam, they could have taken him from anywhere. And maybe he wasn’t an infant infant; Nigel could have used that word “infant” and meant it broadly. She widened the search to all fifty states, which yielded a considerable number of results.

She leaned back in the chair—think, Juno. She knew that of the nearly 800,000 children under age eighteen who went missing each year, more than 58,000 were nonfamily abductions and only about 115 were stranger kidnappings. That was almost two stranger-danger kidnappings to a state every year. That calmed Juno’s nerves. Her previous thoughts sounded kooky, even to herself. A kidnapper’s emotional motive was desperation, and Winnie and Nigel were hardly desperate—selfish, mostly, with a side of entitlement.

Just because she was already on the web page, she copied down a list of names on the notepad Winnie kept next to the computer—names of children who went missing in the US and were never recovered. Recovered was the word the website used. Juno thought that was a silly police word; no parent whose child had been kidnapped would use such gentle words as “never recovered” to describe the lack of closure to their personal tragedy. What she did know was that if a baby had gone missing in 2008 from a perfect little family, it would have been national news, she was sure of it—especially if it were a white baby. That was how the world worked. But there was something else not sitting right with Juno. She tapped the desk with her index finger, lips pursed and eyes narrowed. It was a little like staring at shadows in the dark: she could make out the shapes but the full picture of what was there was missing. “You’re getting old, girlfriend,” she said, exiting out of the internet windows. “But you still have time to expose the truth.”

She groaned as she lifted herself from the chair and limped off to put her laundry in the dryer, but not before tucking the list of names into her pocket.

That night, Juno lay in bed listening to them fight again as she held the piece of paper in her fist. Their fight was the same old, same old. Nigel and Winnie making the rounds, revisiting the wrongs. She was bored of it; she didn’t know how they weren’t.

“I can’t even believe you’re guilting me about something I do for myself after you spent all of that money on the addition!”

“The addition that would be making us money if you let me rent it out!”

“And I made it very clear that I don’t want a stranger in my home—then or now.”

“Well, you got your way, Winnie, per usual. The three of us, secluded in this little world you’ve made for us. I suppose you want thanks, too. Sam is so very grateful that you’ve forced him to be a vegetarian. I am so very grateful that you choose my underwear brand, and schedule my weekends, and tell me how to use my time off.”

“Rent your stupid apartment out,” Winnie said. “But I’m not living here if you do.”





      Part Two


   THEN





      11


JUNO

At first, she had only followed them around the lake, staying a few yards behind as they bickered—or on the very rare occasion, chatted amicably. More often, they walked with their faces turned away from each other, and when they did, Juno would remember the way Nigel had wrapped his fingers around her biceps that first day and squeezed gently. She’d believed in them in that moment, cared about their outcome. She was content to have something to do, to have something to study. The depression that choked her on most days ebbed back in the wake of new purpose. At a quarter to six, Juno would find a bench near the theater and wait for them to begin their loop around the lake. It became a game to spot their faces among the walkers, and then she would get to her feet, which suddenly seemed lighter, and stroll behind them for the rest of the way.