Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(64)

Here was Merton Askew, DOB September 4, 1998. He had disappeared in 2010.

Here, halfway down the page, was a beautiful little Hispanic girl named Angel Barbera, who had disappeared from her Kansas City home at the age of seven and had already been gone for nine years. Abra wondered if her parents really thought this tiny picture would help them get her back. And if they did, would they still even know her? For that matter, would she know them?

Get rid of that thing, the Momo-voice said. You’ve got enough to worry about without looking at a lot of missing ki—

Her eyes found a picture in the very bottom row, and a little sound escaped her. Probably it was a moan. At first she didn’t even know why, although she almost did; it was like how you sometimes knew the word you wanted to use in an English composition but you still couldn’t quite get it, the damn thing just sat there on the tip of your tongue.

This photo was of a white kid with short hair and a great big goofy-ass grin. It looked like he had freckles on his cheeks. The picture was too small to tell for sure, but

(they’re freckles you know they are)

Abra was somehow sure, anyway. Yes, they were freckles and his big brothers had teased him about them and his mother told him they would go away in time.

“She told him freckles are good luck,” Abra whispered.

Bradley Trevor, DOB March 2, 2000. Missing since July 12, 2011. Race: Caucasian. Location: Bankerton, Iowa. Current Age: 13. And below this—below all these pictures of mostly smiling children: If you think you have seen Bradley Trevor, contact The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Only no one was going to contact them about Bradley, because no one was going to see him. His current age wasn’t thirteen, either. Bradley Trevor had stopped at eleven. He had stopped like a busted wristwatch that shows the same time twenty-four hours a day. Abra found herself wondering if freckles faded underground.

“The baseball boy,” she whispered.

There were flowers lining the driveway. Abra leaned over, hands on her knees, pack all at once far too heavy on her back, and threw up her Oreos and the undigested portion of her school lunch into her mother’s asters. When she was sure she wasn’t going to puke a second time, she went into the garage and tossed the mail into the trash. All the mail.

Her father was right, it was junkola.

5

The door of the little room her dad used as his study was open, and when Abra stopped at the kitchen sink for a glass of water to rinse the sour-chocolate taste of used Oreos out of her mouth, she heard the keyboard of his computer clicking steadily away. That was good. When it slowed down or stopped completely, he had a tendency to be grumpy. Also, he was more apt to notice her. Today she didn’t want to be noticed.

“Abba-Doo, is that you?” her father half sang.

Ordinarily she would have asked him to please stop using that baby name, but not today. “Yup, it’s me.”

“School go okay?”

The steady click-click-click had stopped. Please don’t come out here, Abra prayed. Don’t come out and look at me and ask me why I’m so pale or something.

“Fine. How’s the book?”

“Having a great day,” he said. “Writing about the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Vo-doe-dee-oh-doe.” Whatever that meant. The important thing was the click-click-click started up again. Thank God.

“Terrific,” she said, rinsing her glass and putting it in the drainer. “I’m going upstairs to start my homework.”

“That’s my girl. Think Harvard in ’18.”

“Okay, Dad.” And maybe she would. Anything to keep herself from thinking about Bankerton, Iowa, in ’11.

6

Only she couldn’t stop.

Because.

Because what? Because why? Because . . . well . . .

Because there are things I can do.

She IM’ed with Jessica for awhile, but then Jessica went to the mall in North Conway to have dinner at Panda Garden with her parents, so Abra opened her social studies book. She meant to go to chapter four, a majorly boresome twenty pages titled “How Our Government Works,” but instead the book had fallen open to chapter five: “Your Responsibilities As a Citizen.”

Oh God, if there was a word she didn’t want to see this afternoon, it was responsibilities. She went into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick and found herself staring at her own freckles in the mirror. There were exactly three, one on her left cheek and two on her schnozz. Not bad. She had lucked out in the freckles department. Nor did she have a birthmark, like Bethany Stevens, or a cocked eye like Norman McGinley, or a stutter like Ginny Whitlaw, or a horrible name like poor picked-on Pence Effersham. Abra was a little strange, of course, but Abra was fine, people thought it was interesting instead of just weird, like Pence, who was known among the boys (but girls always somehow found these things out) as Pence the Penis.

And the biggie, I didn’t get cut apart by crazy people who paid no attention when I screamed and begged them to stop. I didn’t have to see some of the crazy people licking my blood off the palms of their hands before I died. Abba-Doo is one lucky ducky.

But maybe not such a lucky ducky after all. Lucky duckies didn’t know things they had no business knowing.

She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn’t just him. There were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the last page of the Shopper like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did she know? Not even “How Our Government Works.”