Come Find Me(81)

Agent Lowell sighs. “Hunter says he confided in another volunteer—one who looked about his age. When he didn’t see that volunteer again, he took off, afraid.”

Liam. It had to be Liam. Liam must’ve asked Mike about it, maybe not realizing it was him. Or maybe he did realize, but he wanted to believe the best of Mike, that there was some mistake. Liam must’ve debated going to the police, turning Mike in. His hand shaking that morning, the razor falling, the drop of blood. When he saw Mike at the picnic, Liam must’ve agreed to hear him out. If you take not only a person but also a dog, it seems like a runaway. Mike knew this. He knew this, and he used it.

“Is it enough?” It’s the first time I’ve heard my mother ask Agent Lowell a question.

“It will be,” he says. “We know what questions to ask now about Mike’s work at the shelter. We’ve heard that he worked closely with the teen runaways. And now we think he must’ve operated by threatening to turn them in to authorities, or turn them in back home, unless they did what he asked—distributing for him, collecting the money. Problem was, there was so much turnover there anyway. Sometimes they came back to the shelter, sometimes they didn’t. I guess, if things didn’t go Mike’s way, he thought no one would look too closely when they didn’t turn up again.”

    Until Liam.

There are witnesses this time. Me, and Kennedy, and now Hunter Long. Hopefully, with the support of the police, we will have more.

We don’t have proof, but we have enough.

Agent Lowell looks up at the ceiling, at the scratching I also hear, coming from my brother’s room. It’s becoming a habit. “Is that who I think it is?” he asks.

“We keep finding him in there,” my mom says, almost smiling.



* * *



—

Turned out, all the press was good for something. The phone call we received after the service—the woman on the other end who’d been trying to reach us for days. “I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said.

Then she described Colby—the brown-and-white coat, the tail that was a solid brown. “One day, two years back,” she explained, “I saw this scrawny thing digging in my garden. He looked too skinny, and he seemed frightened.”

My back straightened; even my parents noticed.

“Well, he had no collar, you see. I thought he was a stray. I put up signs, just in case. But, you know, it’s not really near you. And I think…”

“Nolan?” my dad said, stepping closer to the table. “What is it?”

    I shook my head, dropping the phone to my side, barely able to believe it. “Colby,” I said. “Someone found Colby.”

And now he’s back, half ours, half belonging to someone else. And he keeps gravitating to that empty room. He spent the first day pawing at the door until I let him in, and then he sat in the middle of the room, staring at something no one else could see.

He’s in there again now.

Sometimes I think he can sense something we don’t.

And sometimes I think how things can still come back, even after we stop looking for them.





In the hallway of the shadow house, everything is too new. The paint, the lightbulb, the handrail. A terrible history we’ve been trying to ignore. So that when I look at it, I can only imagine the horrors and the dark.

The first picture that goes up is the hardest, my hands trembling as I hold the nail. But the second goes up quicker, and then the next, and the next. Until the stairway is lined with them—images of my mother, and me, and Elliot, smiling back. All the photos the Realtor took down and left in storage.

I think there’s something to it, in Nolan’s house—the faces of the missing lining the walls. A reminder, or a hope, that keeps you going.

There’s a knock at the front door, but I didn’t hear a car pull in. It’s officially summer break for me, but Joe still has to be on campus, and Nolan was meeting with the detectives on his brother’s case, going through the latest developments.

I peer through the living room window first, but I can only see a sliver of a body, fidgeting back and forth on the front porch. When I open the door, Marco seems surprised to see me standing there. He’s half turned away already, though he was the one who just knocked on the door, so.

    “Hey,” he says, “I saw your bike.” He points to the side of the house.

I open the door wider, and though he hesitates, he eventually steps across the threshold, looking around.

“The For Sale sign is gone,” he says. “Does that mean you’re coming back?”

“We’re not sure yet,” I say. But it’s possible. We’re all in one big holding pattern, waiting to see what happens with Elliot; waiting to decide where we’ll all be comfortable living, if he comes home soon, like the lawyer believes will happen.

But if he comes back, and he steps inside this house, I want him to see beyond the shadow house, to what else might be possible.

Marco looks around once more, running his hand through his hair, in the way I once used to love. “Lydia told me what you guys are doing tomorrow.”

I nod, putting my hand on my hip, not sure whether I should be on the defensive.

I don’t know what he’s doing here, only that he’s here.