Disappearance at Devil's Rock (16 page)

Luis couldn't tell if Tommy tripped over his own feet or if he lurched at Luis purposefully, but Tommy was suddenly looming in his space, looking down on him. The two boys didn't make contact, but their bikes knocked their front tires, hard enough Luis almost lost his grip on the handlebars. Was the nicest guy in Ames attempting to physically intimidate him?

Josh jumped on his bike and pedaled quickly ahead of them. He stopped at the edge of one of the brackish ponds. He tossed his bike, bent down, and splashed dirty water onto his T-shirt.

Tommy and Luis both yelled, “What are you doing?” at the same time.

Josh: “My stupid shirt still smells like beer!”

Luis said, “You're being stupid,” when he knew that Josh wasn't being stupid. That he would do the same thing.

Josh: “My mom'll smell it and then she'll kill me and then she'll ground me forever.”

Tommy: “Don't forget to get behind your ears. Hardo Mom will check.”

Luis: “You're right. She'll never ask why your nipples are wet with pond.”

Josh: “My nipples
are
wet.”

Tommy: “Sexy!” He ran over to the pond's muddy edge, right next to Josh, put a hand on Josh's back, and pretended to push him in. Josh cupped water in his hands and threw it at Tommy.

They left the pond. Luis hung back behind Tommy and Josh. They flung mud and dirt off their sneakers at each other and resumed their deep discussion about the hows of Arnold's seeing and recounting their reactions to it. Tommy was back to being adamant that Arnold had psychic ability, and that he couldn't have guessed everything he guessed.

Luis went quiet and listened closely to his friends. His jealousy and anger passed into a resigned sense of unease. He wasn't unsettled because of Arnold per se; whether or not Arnold was actually some sort of psychic or a con man wasn't the main issue. Luis was afraid that he and his two best friends—his only friends, really—were such hopeless, desperate losers that they were an open book, open for anyone to read.

A
fter Detective Murtagh left the house with copies of Tommy's diary pages tucked inside a folder, Elizabeth's mother and daughter abandoned her in the living room. Kate slouched to her bedroom, and Janice said she was going to clean one of the bathrooms and maybe the kitchen floor, too.

With the avalanche of stress, the lack of sleep, continued red-line-level caffeine intake, Elizabeth's heart races through a two-minute punk song of beats. She thinks about how easy it would be for her to lie down on the couch or curl up on Tommy's bed and die of a broken heart, and she briefly indulges in a daydream where Tommy returns home to attend her funeral, and everyone there is happy he's back, and they recognize the Faustian sacrifice Elizabeth made on behalf of her son. The faceless Arnold is at the funeral, too, hiding in the back of the crowd.

Elizabeth shakes herself out of the daydream. She is not prepared to think about Arnold and the possibilities associated with him. He's
there now, though, looming like a threat that is a promise. She wants him to go away and to have nothing to do with her son, ever.

Elizabeth makes another cup of coffee, spastic heartbeats be damned, and dedicates the rest of her day to phone calls, e-mails, and social media outreach, trying to keep the suddenly weakening flame of media interest in Tommy burning. During the initial hours of Tommy's disappearance, all the Boston news crews reported live from Borderland and documented the police and their dogs and the search teams clad in orange vests as they scoured the park. With the search radius now extended beyond the park, it's as though the media no longer have a focal point beyond a missing boy. Without a singular setting for their saga of loss and hope, the reports and interview requests are waning. The Find Tommy Facebook page traffic is already down 50 percent from two days ago. There have been no new tweets (other than her own) with #FindTommy in the last ten hours.

Elizabeth reaches out to an online support group for parents of missing children and teens. She introduces herself with a terse any-advice-is-welcome post on the group's message board. Response is instantaneous, as though a group of parents are on standby, ready to swoop in the moment someone new reaches out. Elizabeth is grateful, but she can't help seeing herself a year from now, sitting hunched in front of the glowing computer screen, staring at this same message board thread waiting for the next post. Or maybe she'll become another voice in their chorus of the damned, haunting the message board for the chance to share her digitized cautionary tale with one more person on the off-off-off chance they might know something about what happened to her still-missing son.

Much of the advice the group shares with her is common sense, but still it's good to hear. None of the members speaks in platitudes or prayers. No one spews the things-happen-for-a-reason bullshit. Thank God. These parents care, commiserate, and offer a tougher brand of
emotional support. They are hardened realists who categorically do not trust the system that failed them and continues to fail them and their missing children. They tell Elizabeth that given Tommy is a teenage male and not a young boy it will become increasingly difficult to keep the media's long-term interest, which is her only real chance of ever finding him or finding what happened to him.

Inspired and terrified by the group, Elizabeth makes one more phone call before dinner, and it is to Dave Islander, a townie who is an editor and a reporter for the local weekly newspaper. Dave promised her a weekly update/feature on Tommy until they found him. That is very kind of him, and she is sure he meant it when he said it.

She once played on a co-ed softball team with Dave five or six summers ago at the urging of two coworkers at the DPW who were not-so-subtly trying to play matchmaker. It was a ridiculous idea, but the kids were a little older, and Elizabeth really hadn't done anything social for herself and by herself since William died. She agreed to play and was relieved to not be the worst player on the team. She hit well and could play first base and pitch adequately. Dave was the best player on their not-so-good team. He was in his early thirties, short, fast, and hilariously reckless with his body on the base paths and with his prodigious throwing arm from the outfield. The team went out for drinks after a handful of their games. The bars were always too loud or too crowded, and no one on the team knew Elizabeth well enough to know that a bar was the last place in the world she wanted to be. Elizabeth went anyway, mainly because she felt the pressure of the whole team willing her and Dave to make a connection. She didn't drink any alcohol and kept looking at her watch the whole time, wondering if Kate and Tommy were in bed or if they'd ganged up on the overmatched teenaged babysitter, and it all made her feel like such a mom and twenty years older than her teammates instead of her actual five to ten. Still, she looked forward to those stolen hours of games
and occasional postgames. Dave was self-deprecating, charming in an Eeyore kind of way, pleasantly quirky, but not quirky enough for her to ask him on a date. She got the sense that the feeling was mutual, as he never asked her out, either. He ruptured a disc in his back the following summer and had since put on some weight that he carried with the oversized shame and regret of a scarlet letter.

She says, “Hi, Dave? It's Elizabeth.”

“Hey there, Elizabeth.”

Now that she has him on the phone, she isn't sure what she wants to say or should say. There isn't much Tommy news that she can share, really, so she says, “How's your back doing?”

Dave says, “Fucking horrible. I want to take it out to the parking lot and curb-stomp it.” He chuckles softly at himself and Elizabeth smiles at his inability to dial down the Eeyore act. “Anyway, I'm glad you called. I'm actually working on a column about Tommy as we speak. Haven't been able to get much from the police department. What do you got?”

“What do I got? A whole lot of crazy.” She has the urge to unzip herself and let everything spill out as though he's an intimate confidant: tell Dave that she saw Tommy in her house or some form of Tommy, and was initially so sure what she saw was him, had to be him, but with each hour that passes she doesn't know what to think. What if she tells Dave diary pages are being left in the house by the spirit or ghost or double of Tommy? Saying that out loud would sound totally ludicrous, even though she believes it, or is still willing to believe it. Is there a difference? What if it is Kate leaving the pages? Why would Kate do that? If it was someone else, who? And how did they get the pages there? She wants to tell Dave no one in the house is really talking to the others when they've never needed one another more. They're all exhausted, broken, and struggling, or not struggling, but drowning, failing, crumbling, whatever goddamn
–ing
you wanted to use. Maybe Elizabeth
should insist she and Kate see a counselor. There is no maybe about it. Elizabeth has rewatched for the four-hundredth time the surveillance clip her app recorded. That shadow isn't there anymore and would Dave want to take a look and see if he can find Tommy in there, anywhere?

“I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I really don't know what to say. Can't imagine. Um, you still there?”

“Yeah, sorry, still here,” she says and then tells him about the police search expanding to other towns, malls, and the like. Dave asks if there is anything else. She tells him about going to some of those local towns herself and passing out fliers and how most people were friendly and helpful.

He asks, “Is there anything else?” It's the second time he said that.

She asks if he saw that the sign at Split Rock had been vandalized to read
Devils Rock
. He hasn't been out to the park yet because of his back, of course, but he heard the police were having a hard time keeping older kids from hanging out there and that they made a kind of shrine to Tommy.

She says she heard a folk story about Eastman facing and then tricking the devil out at Split Rock.

“Huh. Where'd you hear the story?”

“From, um, Tommy?” She pauses and when Dave starts to fill in the gap for her, she talks over him. “Yeah, he, uh, he wrote a little about it in a diary of his.”

“Lived here all my life but never heard anything about a Devil's Rock. I'll look into it. E-mail what he wrote about that story, okay? Anything else?”

She can't tell if his
Anything else?
is what a reporter is conditioned to ask and continue to ask until there's nothing else to say. She's worried that the expanded search and Devil's Rock story isn't enough for him. With the support group instructions still ringing in her ears, Elizabeth decides to tell Dave about Arnold.

She says, “We just today found out that Tommy and his friends were hanging out at Borderland with an older boy earlier this summer.”

“Older boy?”

“Yeah. Or a guy, a man. A young man, in his early- to midtwenties, maybe. The boys don't know his age for sure. They, uh, ran into him at the 7-Eleven in Five Corners and they—” she's not sure how to describe what happened on that afternoon “—they hit it off, I guess.” She winces at the awkward-sounding phrase. “And then went to Borderland.” She stops there and isn't going to tell him about the boys drinking beers with him. There is no way she will chance having Tommy painted as some early-teen alky and give the media and public a chance to conclude
Oh, he's just another troubled teen who should've known better, should've been taught better
and turn up their rocks-in-glass-houses noses and give themselves permission to forget about Tommy forever. “We, um, don't know who this guy is yet and we don't know, obviously, if he has anything to do with, you know, the disappearance, but still, we—” she pauses again, aware that she's making it sound like she's Robin to the police's Batman “—the police are looking into him. They're looking into everything possible, you know.”

“Okay. This is good.”

Is it good? Seems like an oddly terrible thing to say. She hears him scribbling notes down. She can't help but feel like she's making a mistake or betraying a trust. Why shouldn't that information get out there? It can only help. When his column hits, maybe other news outlets will come calling again with this new character added to the story.

Dave says, “What else do you know about this guy? Can I have a name?”

“I only know his first name and that's it.”

“Can I have it?”

“No. I don't think so. Not yet.”

“You sure?”

“I'm not sure about anything. I gotta go, Dave. Thank you for everything. Really.”

“Hey, yeah, okay. Please. Least I can do. You call whenever, okay? I'm here and I don't sleep.”

“Me neither. Bye.”

After she hangs up her phone rings almost instantaneously. It's Allison. She says that according to Luis and Josh, Tommy may have communicated with Arnold via the Snapchat app. The detective admits she's never contacted Snapchat before and isn't sure how much they'll be able to recover, given the app is famous for images and messages that disappear within ten seconds, but they are going to request any and all information they can get from Tommy's account.

Janice leaves late that afternoon, soon after Elizabeth gets off the phone with Allison. She says she has to go home, take care of a few errands, check in on her cats. Janice uses the phrase
has to go
as though there is no other choice. Yes, her neighbor Charles is watching the house, but her cat, Bear, will get mad and stop using the litter box if Janice is gone for too long and the other one, Moose, will refuse to eat or show her black-and-white face for days after Janice's return. Mom is under no obligation to relocate to Ames for the duration of Tommy's disappearance, and Elizabeth assures her that she has already been a huge, life-saving help. Janice promises to be back within a day or two, if not sooner, especially if there is news. Still, her leaving feels like an admission of defeat. Their little three-person vigil is as ineffectual as everything else that has been done in the ongoing search for Tommy.