Come Find Me(40)

    “No one’s here,” Nolan explains. “Yesterday, we had like half the state investigators at our house.”

I remember the phone message, calling him home. “What happened last night?”

“Long story. Basically, two years later, there’s suddenly a picture that was sent to my brother’s old girlfriend that shows him at four p.m. on the day he disappeared. Which is four hours after he supposedly disappeared.”

“Couldn’t he have gone missing and, like, officially disappeared after?”

“Yeah, but then, what was he doing for those four hours when we were looking for him? We were all together when he…”

I see it then, in his face, in his words. The first crack. Uncertainty.

“The date means something, Nolan,” I say. “December fourth, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding to himself. As if he needs to convince himself. My stomach twists, but I follow him through the front yard.



* * *



—

He leads me inside the house, and I was wrong. There is nothing normal about this house. At first, there’s the living room, which seems normal enough. But it doesn’t take long before you realize something is definitely weird here. Only part of the downstairs looks like a home. The den on the other side of the living room doesn’t have any couches. Instead, it has a long table with a row of computers and a cluster of phones between each monitor. There are whiteboards covering the walls, instead of family portraits or paintings.

    Oh, but then I see the pictures. In the dining room, in the kitchen, they line the walls. It looks like what I’d imagine the inside of a police investigation room to be like, except this is a house, and they seem to be looking into dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of cases all at once.

“Right, so, my parents run a nonprofit for missing youth,” Nolan says, as explanation. He walks straight past it all, like it’s normal. And I guess for him, at this point, it is.

Missing children lining the walls, in place of family photos, or paintings of fruit baskets or something. It puts me on edge, but I nod, like it’s cool, totally normal, no big deal.

I try not to look as we head for the stairway. There are so many of them. Which means, there are so many people like Nolan, too. Left behind. Searching for answers. For signs of what happened.

As I pass them by, the words keep hooking me from the corner of my eye. Last reported seen at a gas station in Cedarwood, NC; Missing since February 23, 2015.

All these people, where do they go?

At first, they blend together, in a mass; regardless of age or sex or race or features. But step closer, and the eyes look back, one by one.

“Don’t look too close,” I hear from Nolan behind me. “Or else you’ll keep seeing them.” And then I understand. It’s not normal for him, either. It’s inescapable. This is what greets him, every morning. I have the shadow house. And he has this.

    So I take his advice and turn away. But then my eye catches a single photo, alone on the wall of the kitchen. Like they’ve run out of space and are just beginning a new section. I step closer. Blue eyes stare back, straight into my own. Freckles across the nose and cheeks, all the way to the narrow chin, the forehead. High cheekbones.

I take another step, until I can’t see the face all at once, but only features, one at a time.

The hair is dark, wrong.

The hair is wrong, but.

My hand reaches out, my fingers tracing the words below. Hunter Long…

“Nolan,” I say, in warning. He circles back slowly as I cycle through the features again.

I never thought that much of Elliot’s friends. In high school, they were sort of like him—quiet, studious, building things in the basement together in their free time. When we moved to West Arbordale last year, he didn’t really know anyone until he started college in the fall, and most of them lived there. Campus living was unnecessary for Elliot, since our mother taught history there. They commuted in together most days, or Joe would give him a lift, or Mom would leave him the car keys for after school and Will would drop her home later in the evening. So I remember this face. I remember Hunter Long. This is the kid he brought back home from college.

He stuck out, I noticed, because he was the only friend of Elliot’s I’d seen at the house. I’d gotten home from school, and they were in the kitchen, raiding the fridge. Neither noticed me as I walked by.

    It was later, when I was alone in my room, and my door opened slowly—he stood in the entrance, like he was surprised to see me there. His hair was bleached pure white, a sharp contrast to his eyebrows, and the dark roots growing in.

I jutted my thumb to the left. “Bathroom’s that way,” I said, and he shut the door again.

By the time I came out of my room later, they were both gone. But they must’ve been looking at the radio telescope, because later that night, I heard Elliot’s laughter, and when I peered out my window, they were lying back and looking up at the sky.

I didn’t mention it to Elliot; he didn’t mention it to me. It was a brief, forgotten moment. But looking at the image, I’m sure now.

“I know him,” I say, my finger pressing into the photo, to make sure it’s real. “I’ve seen him.”

And suddenly, the room fills with a warm, prickly feeling. Like I’m surrounded by static. Like everything’s connected somehow.