Lost Boy Lost Girl

by Peter Straub

  When he reached the spot, the ellipse disappeared at a click from the Maglite. He set down his board.

  “Okay,” Jimbo said. “One sec.”

  Indistinct in the wide lane of darkness between lampposts, he jogged toward Mark. The binocular case swung on its strap like a fat handbag. When he reached Mark, he passed the heavy flashlight into his hands. Mark switched it on, and a streak of yellow light cut through the air and pooled on an empty lawn. Jimbo hissed, “Turn it off!”

  “Don’t pee in your pants, Jim Boy,” Mark said, obeying. “All right, now what?”

  “Now I go over there and get ready to give you the word.” He was pointing back across the street to a position ten or fifteen feet down the mild hill. “Don’t do anything until I tell you to.”

  “You are so annoying,” Mark said.

  “Yo, who started this? Me? Wait for the signal.” The skateboard still clamped beneath his elbow, the leather case dangling from one hand, Jimbo swung away and sauntered diagonally down the street. He seemed to be moving with deliberate lack of speed, as if to maintain his own composure while shredding his friend’s.

  Jimbo mounted the opposite curb and took a few additional paces downhill to the western edge of 3323’s plot line. He lowered his skateboard to the narrow strip of grass between sidewalk and curb and fiddled with the strap of the case. Mark could barely see what he was doing. A small, bulky object that must have been the binoculars separated from its container, and Jimbo bent over to lower the case to the ground. He straightened up and toyed with the binoculars before raising them to his eyes. Mark thrust the Maglite out before him like a baton. He placed his thumb on the switch.

  Jimbo lowered the glasses again, shook his head, fiddled with the lenses, and once more raised them to his eyes. Getting the house into focus seemed to take him an eternity. Mark thought, I guess he isn’t so eager to look through that window after all. Then he realized that Jimbo would scarcely be able to see the porch, much less the window, until the Maglite played on them. Two, three slow seconds ticked by, then a fourth, a fifth.

  I was right, Mark said to himself. Now that he’s so close, Jimbo doesn’t want to do it.

  Neither did he, it came to him: not this way. They were doing it all wrong, coming at it from the wrong angle, invasive and clumsy. If he had truly seen the slow dance of advance and withdrawal he thought he had seen, that person, that young woman, that girl was going to hate what they were about to do.

  A millionth of a second earlier, the absolute certainty of having seen a young woman in the house had taken root in his mind.

  Jimbo steadied the field glasses. He commanded, “Now!”

  Unhesitatingly, Mark pushed the switch, and a fat ray of light from the eye of the Maglite cast a wide, dull yellow circle on the front of the porch. Even before Jimbo ordered him to do it, he raised the circle to the window. The flat circle of light spread across the glass like an oil stain.

  Jimbo stiffened and jumped backward. With uncoordinated, almost spastic movements, he lowered the binoculars and staggered to the edge of the sidewalk, dragging the binoculars along the ground. His feet wandered from beneath him. He folded over, went down, and struck the lawn bottom first. His trunk toppled backward, and his legs twitched.

  Mark hit the button on the Maglite’s shaft, and the light snapped off. In the sudden darkness, he could make out Jimbo lying like a corpse on the lawn in front of 3325. Fear probed Mark’s stomach. He was not sure he could move. A second later, he found that he had already begun to walk across the street.

  His mind felt curiously empty; he felt strangely empty all over, as if he were a blank sheet of paper waiting for a pencil’s rough, awakening bite.

  Jimbo’s hands lay limp at his sides, his head back against the grass. Mark knelt beside him and watched his eyelids fluttering. A combination of anxiety and fear made him want to kick his friend in his ribs.

  Jimbo blinked up at the sky. He licked his lips.

  “What did you see, man?”

  “Whoo.” Jimbo was staring straight up.

  “When I put that light on the window, you jumped backward about a foot. Then you fainted.”

  “Well, that’s your story.” Jimbo’s face seemed drawn and sunken, as if suddenly aged. “Here’s my story. I didn’t see shit and I want to get out of here.” He folded his hands on his stomach, took a deep breath, and sat up. “Could you get my dad’s field glasses?”

  Mark got the glasses from the sidewalk and handed them to him.

  “Where’s my board?”

  Mark found it with the flashlight, and Jimbo got up and gathered it in so slowly it seemed that his joints ached. He turned around and held out a hand for the Maglite, which he shoved into his waistband. Mark walked around the corner and into the alley with him, but Jimbo remained silent until they reached the ruined fence and the concrete wall. “See you tomorrow,” he said, telling Mark to go no farther.

  A Rip

  in the

  Fabric

  PART THREE

  10

  After returning to Millhaven in response to Philip’s alarming call, Tim Underhill questioned nearly as many people as would a conscientious reporter doing man-on-the-street interviews in the week before an election. He would have flown to Alaska if he thought an Alaskan had seen Mark on the day of his disappearance, or could give him any information about that disappearance.

  As the days went by, Tim felt an ever-increasing desperation. He loved Mark more than he’d known, he discovered: for his promise, his striking good looks, the underlying sweetness of his character—and for his angers and frustrations and moments of reckless bravado. He was a kid, after all, and if you were to love him sensibly and well you had to take him as he came. Tim had wanted his nephew to visit him in New York. He thought a boy like Mark should see the great city and sense its million opportunities, begin to appreciate its gritty essential goodness, and come to understand that New York City was really the opposite of what people living in other parts of the country tended to imagine it to be, was more honest, more generous, and more considerate than other towns and cities. Such was his New York, anyhow, and that of most of the people he knew.

  In the days after he returned to Millhaven, during his encounters with men and women who might have seen more than they knew but probably had not, Tim Underhill was forced to acknowledge the extent to which he had thought of Mark, consciously or otherwise, as a kind of son. Of course he could not speak of this to Philip; two successive losses had shattered his brother and turned him into a hollow creature dependent on Tim for whatever hope he could permit himself to feel. In the absence of anything else to do, Philip continued to go to work, but since “work” had not involved anything serious for something like two weeks, the vice principal’s office represented chiefly a bolt-hole free of the emotional associations inevitable at home.

  Tim wished that Mark had fled 3324 North Superior Street for 55 Grand. He wished he had earned his brother’s rage. Rage, he thought, was better than hopelessness. Philip never confessed it, but he had settled for the bleak comfort of hopelessness the moment the voice of a WMTG newsreader coming from the portable radio on his desk had distracted his attention from an elaborate doodle with the announcement that a third name had been definitively added to that of Shane Auslander and Trey Wilk. This announcement had come at the top of the three P.M. local news. Within the hour, Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus of the Millhaven Police Department was reporting the discovery of the corpse of sixteen-year-old Dewey Dell in the underbrush along the eastern bank of the Kinninnick River. It was thought that the perpetrator had been forced to dump Dell’s body in haste before he could dispose of it as he had those of Auslander and Wilk. And Mark, Philip told himself, only half-consciously aware that he had just abandoned all hope of hope.

  Dewey Dell’s body was found along the neglected riverbank the day after Tim returned to Millhaven. On the day he arrived, Tim found Philip taut as a drumhead. If Philip were a smoker, he would have
been burning through four or five packs a day. Tim demanded that his brother join him for dinner at Violet’s, the show-offy restaurant carved out of the Pforzheimer’s lower depths, and for the sake of propriety Philip calmed down enough to eat a meal without jumping up to check in with the police. That night, he still thought his son probably had taken the Greyhound to Chicago, or some such place, fleeing from reminders of what he had seen. And Philip insisted on meeting Tom Pasmore; he wanted the detective’s voodoo to locate his son. For the first half hour in Violet’s, Tim labored to convince Philip that if they were to stand on Tom’s doorstep and ring his bell, Pasmore, friend though he was, would refuse both to meet them and to have anything to do with Mark’s case. Philip refused to be convinced, so Tim pulled out his cell phone and proved his point. Tom Pasmore did, however, agree to meet with Tim later that evening.

  After Philip’s reluctant departure, Tim piloted the swan boat of his rented Town Car to Tom Pasmore’s house on Eastern Shore Drive, and Tom, who was exceptionally pleased to see him, did some mild voodoo with his computers and reported that, as far as he could see, Mark had not taken a bus to Chicago or anywhere else in the past month. He promised to be as helpful as he could, but, as predicted, he declined to meet Tim’s brother unless the meeting became absolutely necessary.

  The next day, Tim joined Philip for breakfast, watched him go off to work, and started the laborious process of ringing the neighbors’ doorbells. When that grew tiring, he went to Sherman Park and joined two police officers, Nelson Rote and Tyrone Selwidge, engaged in the task of questioning people about the missing boys. Rote and Selwidge had three photographs, and he had two, both of Mark. When they showed their photographs, he showed his. No one could remember seeing any of the boys leaving Sherman Park with anyone, although two women pushing baby strollers said that Mark’s face was familiar. They did not know his name, but they had seen him in the neighborhood.

  “He’s such a good-looking boy,” said one of the young mothers. “I mean, really. I have this friend, she’d—oh, sorry.”

  Shortly after three P.M., Tim’s cell phone burst into tinny song, and he ripped it from his pocket, startling Jimbo Monaghan, whose house he had reached after his return to Superior Street. No, the caller was not Mark, as had seemed possible for the space of approximately two seconds. Philip had just heard about the fate of Dewey Dell on WMTG.

  “Mark used to go for walks down there,” Philip told him. “Right where they found the body, on that riverbank. We thought it was so safe! They had a walking trail and a bicycle path. Doesn’t that sound safe to you?”

  Tim guessed it did.

  “Nothing’s safe,” Philip said. “Not these days.”

  Tim could hear in Philip’s voice that he no longer believed that Mark was still alive. The pain of his death was more bearable than the pain of uncertainty.

  “They have a name for the guy,” Philip said. “The Sherman Park Killer.”

  Having heard that a boy’s body had been discovered, Jimbo Monaghan was staring pop-eyed at Tim.

  Tim lowered one hand through the air, palm down and fingers splayed, telling the boy to wait another few seconds. “The press always gives sexy names to psychos who haven’t been caught,” he said to Philip. “Listen to me. I haven’t given up on Mark yet. This new kid wasn’t found anywhere near Sherman Park, right? And so far, nobody really knows what happened to Auslander and what’s-his-name, Wilk.”

  “You have to talk to Tom Pasmore again.”

  “He’s doing what he can.”

  Tim broke contact and slipped the little phone back into his jacket pocket.

  “Sorry, Jimbo. We were just getting to the good part. You’re standing there with the binoculars, Mark switches on the Maglite and . . . what, everything goes black?”

  “The next thing I know, I’m lying on the grass, and Mark is looking down, talking at me.”

  “Saying what?”

  “‘You jumped about a foot and you passed out, man.’ Like that.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  Jimbo stirred on his chair, for a moment resembling a mouse under the gaze of an attentive cat. There was a cold can of Coca-Cola before him, a glass of ice water before Tim. From the basement stairs came the sound of Margo Monaghan opening the door of the dryer.

  “I guess,” Jimbo said.

  “And that was because of something you saw?”

  Jimbo looked away and shrugged.

  Tim leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Mark told you he thought he’d seen a girl in that room?”

  “Yeah.” Jimbo swallowed and looked away. “That’s why I wanted to use the, you know, field glasses and stuff. I thought we could maybe catch her when she wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Who did you think this girl might be?”

  Jimbo gave him a quick sideways glance. “Maybe a runaway?”

  “And what if you were right about that?”

  “We could help her. Bring food. We wouldn’t turn her in, or anything.”

  The earnest expression on Jimbo’s face told him that he was trying to put himself and Mark in as noble a light as possible. He was hiding something, and Tim thought that he was doing it for Mark.

  “So did you see this girl?”

  Jimbo crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Sure doesn’t sound like it,” Tim said.

  “I didn’t see any girl.” The boy screwed up his expressive face and stared at the gaudy little Coca-Cola can.

  “Jimbo, do you think the house on Michigan Street was involved in some way with Mark’s disappearance?”

  The boy’s head swung up, and his eyes briefly met Tim’s. His Adam’s apple jerked in his throat.

  “I would really hate being forced to think that abduction by some homicidal creep was the only way to explain Mark’s disappearance. The only thing worse than that would be no explanation at all.” Tim smiled at the boy. He forced himself to proceed slowly.

  “Look, Mr. Underhill, I don’t really know much. I don’t even know if Mark was making everything up . . .”

  “If he was, he probably had a reason.”

  In Jimbo’s frank stare, Tim could see that he was deciding to part with a share of his secret.

  “You can’t tell anybody about this, okay?”

  Tim leaned back and put his hands together.

  “When the light hit the window, I thought I saw a guy in there. He was hiding way back in the room.”

  Jimbo’s hands were trembling. He licked his lips and glanced at the door to the basement. “He was looking right at me.” A tremor like an electrical current moved through the boy’s entire body. “I was so scared.”

  “No wonder,” Tim said.

  “He was pretty big. Big head. Big shoulders. Like a football player.”

  “He was just standing there?”

  “It was like he stepped forward—like he deliberately moved into the light—and I saw his eyes. Looking at me. They were like ball bearings or something—silvery. Then I turned away, but he was already gone. I don’t remember anything more until Mark was bending down over me.”

  “Did you tell Mark any of this?”

  “I wanted to get home. He came over the next day, and that’s when I told him.”

  “He must have been very interested in what you had to say.”

  Jimbo enacted an entire series of you-have-no-idea gestures, looking skyward, raising his hands, shaking his head. When he looked at Tim, his eyes were the size of eggs. He really was a natural comedian, and under other circumstances, this little performance would have made Tim laugh out loud. However, what he said in response took Tim completely by surprise.

  “Interested? He told me he looked out his window in the middle of the night and saw the same guy, looking up from his backyard! And after he got up that morning, he saw him again, standing at the top of Michigan Street with his back turned.”

  “How could he tell it was the same man?”

  Jimbo leaned forward
and whispered, “This isn’t any normal guy. Believe me, you’d know him.” The boy’s face squeezed around a sudden access of fear, and his voice dropped. “Remember the party thing after Mrs. Underhill’s funeral?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Mark saw him there.”

  “In his house?”

  “Standing in the kitchen, with his back to Mark. Facing the door. Nobody else saw him.”

  After struggling to find a question, Tim at last asked, “What did Mark think he was doing there?”

  Margo Monaghan’s footsteps sounded on the basement floor. Jimbo leaned even farther forward. “He thought it was a warning.”

  The cell phone trilled in Tim’s pocket. Both he and the boy jolted upright in their chairs. This time, Tim had no sense of suspended, heartbreaking possibility; he knew who had called him before he heard his brother’s voice. Unable to last out the rest of the day in his office, Philip was begging him to come home.

  Embracing a woven yellow basket piled high with newly laundered clothes, Jimbo’s mother emerged into the kitchen. The odor of fresh laundry still warm from the dryer contrasted with the drawn, unhappy expression on Margo’s face. She moved alongside her son and said, “I hope you’re telling Mr. Underhill everything, Jimbo. I know there are things you think you can’t tell me, but this is your chance to get it all off your chest. Are you listening to me?”

  Jimbo muttered that he heard her.

  “This is serious stuff, kiddo. Your best friend is missing. Another boy was found dead. Am I getting through to you?”