He heard the lieutenant sigh on the other end of the line. "We're both tired, Joe. I'm not asking you to stop searching. But we've known each other a long time and I know you take things like this pretty hard. I'm just trying to prepare you, that's all."
Keenan froze. Lieutenant Duquette trying to protect the feelings of one of his detectives? Wonders never cease, he thought. But then he realized that the sympathy might not be so benevolent.
"Yeah, I do take it hard if a child dies on our watch," Keenan said. "I don't think you can be human and not be affected by something like that. But if you're questioning my ability to do the job-"
"What are you talking about?"
"I just want to assure you that I'm fine. I'm up to it. All I need is caffeine. We're going to find this kid, Sam."
"I hope like hell that we do, Detective. But you can't spend the next two days out there looking for him. You have other work to do."
"I'm not chasing down ghost stories," Keenan snapped, heart racing. "You want to spend time on nutjobs who saw UFOs or fairies, you can send uniforms to take their statements. I've got a few open robberies that you and I both know we're never going to solve with the evidence I've got, and that assault case from yesterday, which turned out to be the woman's ex ransacking her place for drugs. That guy's already in custody, as of yesterday afternoon. Given that, do you really want to pull me off the search for a kid who escaped the car his parents died in?"
"I'm not pulling you off the search," Lieutenant Duquette said. "But you need to be practical. I can keep you out of the detectives' rotation today and maybe tomorrow. But if something else comes up that I need you for, you're going to have to do your job."
"That's exactly what I'm doing."
The lieutenant sighed loudly again.
"Word's going on to the media about the Strouds. There'll be pictures of Zachary on TV and online all day. If someone picked him up, even if the kid can't remember his own name, they'll know it by dinnertime for sure. But I'll tell you what's worrying me."
"What's that?"
"If someone picked the kid up, why haven't they called us already? If he's injured, why haven't they shown up at the hospital?"
Detective Keenan had no answer for that. The same questions had been gnawing at his gut all night and had only grown worse as morning arrived.
"If Zachary Stroud's alive," the lieutenant went on, "chances are he's still out there somewhere. I hope you find him, Joe. And I sure as hell hope you find him hiding in some bushes somewhere instead of at the bottom of the river."
"So do I."
"Call me the minute you find anything," Lieutenant Duquette said. "I'm keeping the chief informed."
The call ended before Keenan could reply. Not that he had anything more to say. Sam Duquette was a good man and a good cop, though he could be one hell of a ballbuster at times. Like everyone, his nerves were frayed. Bad enough this family had to suffer such a crushing tragedy, but if the boy was alive and they couldn't find him, the Coventry police would look completely inept. Detective Keenan wasn't much worried about the city's reputation, but his higher-ups had to be.
Slipping his cell phone into his pocket, he crossed the street and headed for the food truck. His craving for coffee-for anything other than finding Zachary Stroud alive-had vanished, but if he didn't get some caffeine into his body, his addiction would punish him with a splitting headache, and he couldn't afford that. He needed to be awake and alert, not just to search for the boy but to figure out what to do if the search became a mystery. He didn't believe the boy had gone into the river, but if he wasn't in the woods and hadn't wandered into one of the surrounding neighborhoods, then where had he gone? People didn't just vanish.
The thought made him freeze, standing in front of the food truck, drawing curious glances.
Sometimes people do vanish, he thought, remembering Carl Wexler. Sometimes they do.
Jake Schapiro dreams of his dead brother. They're watching TV in the living room, some ancient episode of SpongeBob that they've seen a thousand times before. Their mom sits in her chair in the corner, correcting school papers and telling them stories about the crazy kids in her class. She never names the kids, always starts her tales with "one of the girls" or "one of the boys," but Jake and Isaac can usually figure out whom she's talking about.
Mom looks tired tonight. Even more so than usual, and that's saying something considering how little sleep she gets during the school year. Summers aren't really vacations so much as opportunities for Allie Schapiro to catch up on her sleep. Teachers and the children of teachers understand the dynamic better than other people, understand how much work it is to go in and face the kids every day, keep them thinking and keep them entertained and try to inspire them to give a damn about their futures. She earns those bags under her eyes. Truth is, Jake doesn't mind those bags. A couple of the boys in his class have told him they think his mom is hot, so anything that makes her look older and less attractive is okay with him. Even as he thinks this, he knows it's unkind, but he can't help it.
A commercial comes on. Isaac jumps up and zooms around the room in that irritating way he's been doing since he could walk. He sings a song he knows only because it's on Jake's iPod.
"Isaac, is all of your homework done?" Mom asks.
Jake smiles. He has math practice questions to do but intends to dash them off in homeroom. He relishes the knowledge that Mom won't ask him-he never gives her reason to worry about his schoolwork-but Isaac is a little ADHD and when he starts acting like a little spaz, she worries.
The little goofball rushes from the room, arms out like he's an airplane, totally lost in his own brain. Isaac-world, they sometimes call it.
"Isaac?" Mom calls.
Jake rolls his eyes. He doesn't much care about SpongeBob these days, but he just wants them both to chill.
"Ike!" he shouts.
There's a pause, like his little brother has skipped a beat. Like the way the TV sometimes seems to freeze and become pixilated and then catch up with the sound and image of whatever Jake might be watching.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jake sees Isaac come back into the room. He continues to make his airplane buzz for a couple of seconds and then interrupts himself. "Yes?"
"Did you do your homework?" Jake asks, not looking at him.
Wake up, Jakey.
Isaac's voice sounds strange, suddenly. Like it's a whisper in his ear instead of coming from across the room. Jake frowns.
"I'm not asleep, dumbass."
"Hey!" Mom snaps. "Watch that. You know I don't like when you two speak that way to-"
Wake up, Jakey. Please, wake up.
"My homework's all done," Isaac says, in a whiny sort of why-don't-you-leave-me-alone voice.
"I wish mine was," Mom mutters.
Reluctantly, because it's easier to think of himself instead of someone else-even his mother-Jake turns to his brother, thinking that he'll make nice with Isaac and the two of them can go upstairs and watch TV or read comics or something in order to give their mother some quiet time to work.
Jake cannot breathe. His heart races and a scream begins to build in his chest, right in the middle where he thinks his heart must be.
"What?" Isaac demands, pouting angrily and crossing his arms. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
The scream bursts from his lips in a wordless babble of terror. Jake scrambles, falls from his chair, and then lurches to the other side of the room, taking cover beside his mother's chair. He's screaming and crying at the same time, shouting out words that his mother doesn't even realize he knows, calling out to God in the same breath as he mutters ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck.
Then the pain of it hits him, the grief, the terrible sadness beneath his fear.
"What happened to you?" he cries.
"Stop it," Isaac says. "You're scaring me."
But Isaac is blue-white and rigid in death. His eyes have collapsed into his head and there is ice in his hair and frost on his skin.
"Stop it, Jake," the little dead boy says.
Jake keeps screaming, and somehow in his ear he hears the whisper-the other Isaac voice-speak again.
Please, Jake. You've gotta wake up.
He woke with a cry, gasping for air as if somehow in sleep he had been suffocating. In his bed, snow falling outside, he lay wide-eyed and stared up at the ceiling, trying to steady his pulse and his nerves and forcing himself not to fall back to sleep too quickly for fear that he would drift back into the same dream.
Jake often dreamed about Isaac. Sometimes they were sweet dreams that broke his heart as he woke, remembering the tree fort they'd built in their backyard and the way that-though Isaac had driven him crazy sometimes-Jake had always loved sharing his room with his brother. Together in the dark, when they were supposed to be trying to fall asleep, they would share their secrets and talk to each other with a kindness and joint sense of aspiration that they never would have while awake.
And sometimes the dreams were nightmares.
He thought about his mother. For the first time in a while, he wondered how often she dreamed of Isaac and how often she had nightmares about searching for Niko Ristani. As far as Jake knew, his mother had never fallen for anyone after Niko's death. He wasn't sure she would ever allow herself to be in love again. Instead she spent her days teaching school and her nights drinking too much wine, and Jake thought that was a tragedy. He wanted his mother to be happy. She deserved that.