by Ed Markham
The Grows invited them into their white-carpeted living room, which contained a baby-grand piano, a large glass-topped coffee table, and various pieces of furniture upholstered in a swirling paisley pattern.
“I’m sorry to pull you both out of work,” David said to the couple. He and his father arranged themselves in the armchairs positioned across from the couch where the Grows sat down next to each other. Behind them, an oil painting of azaleas took up a large square of the wall.
“Not a problem,” Graham Grow said earnestly. One of his big hands settled on top of his wife’s, which were clutched together on her knees as though she were praying or holding on to herself for support. “Do you have any new information for us about our son?”
“We don’t,” David said. He paused, looking from Grow to his wife, and then added, “I’ll explain why we’re here in a minute. But first I was hoping you’d be willing to answer a few questions for us.”
“Of course,” Grow said, his expression open and unperturbed. “Anything we can do to help you find our son.”
Our son, David repeated to himself. He glanced at his father. Martin was staring flatly at the couple, his notebook and pen clutched in his hands.
“Tell me what you remember about the evening Joshua disappeared,” David said.
Graham Grow nodded quickly and said, “It was September twenty-fifth. Our son had soccer practice after school, and he should have been home by six-thirty. We had dinner ready—grilled chicken and pasta I think—but we started to worry around seven when he wasn’t back. I went out looking for him, and I was gone until about nine o’clock. When I got home we called the police to report him missing.”
As Grow spoke, David looked at a copy of the report the local police had completed the night of Joshua Grow’s disappearance.
“Had you or your wife had any arguments with Joshua before he disappeared?” he asked. He looked at Lori Grow, and her face crumpled.
Graham Grow nodded and put his arm around her shoulders, but he didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on David and Martin as he said, “He’d been acting up—not minding his mother and skipping school. We’d grounded him from seeing his friends for a week, and he and Lori had a big blow-up the evening before he disappeared.”
“We never used to argue when he was younger,” she blurted out, wiping at her eyes. “He’d threatened to run away so many times . . . I didn’t think much of it. I still don’t believe he would do that.”
“Are any of his things missing?” David asked, though he already knew the answer. “Clothes? Favorite possessions?”
Lori Grow looked at her husband, and he answered for her. “His baseball glove’s gone, and so are his favorite tennis shoes, though he wouldn’t have needed those at soccer practice. Also his backpack.”
“You told the police all this,” David said.
“Yes.”
“So you think Joshua ran away?”
Graham Grow gripped his wife’s shoulders more tightly. “Yes and no. I mean, maybe for a day or two, to make us feel guilty for grounding him. But he would never have stayed away. Not for this long. He would have come home. Something’s happened to him, or someone has him. I’m sure of it.”
Another sob escaped from between Lori Grow’s thin lips, and David waited quietly as her husband consoled her. “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he said, “but a few children have gone missing since Joshua disappeared—all of them about your son’s age.”
He watched the Grows closely. They both looked down at the top of the glass coffee table, and he felt something about them loosen, as though an unseen source of torque had relaxed.
After a few seconds of silence, Lori Grow emitted a sudden, gaspy sob.
“Jesus Christ,” her husband said. He shook his head, and his eyes lifted to David’s. “What can you tell us? Have any of the others been found?”
“I can’t disclose any details about the other missing children,” David said. He waited for an explosion, but it never came. The Grows just nodded and clutched at each other more tightly.
“Mrs. Grow,” David said, training his blue eyes on hers. “Is there something you’re not telling us about your son’s disappearance?”
The woman’s mouth fell open in shock. She started to speak, but her husband interposed. “Wait a second,” he said. “What are you—”
David raised a hand to silence him, and Graham Grow stopped speaking abruptly.
“I’d like to hear from your wife now,” David said. As he spoke, his eyes never left Lori Grow’s.
For a moment the woman’s face look surprised, and then it reddened with anger. “I don’t appreciate your tone,” she said, almost rising off the couch.
Graham Grow held her in an embrace that was half comfort and half restraint.
“Forget my tone,” David said, his expression and voice mellow. “Answer my question.”
“How dare you interrogate me this way,” she said, almost shouting now. “My only son is gone, and you’re supposed to be helping us find him. And instead you’re here in my house, accusing me of withholding something? You son of a bitch. You son . . .”
She couldn’t finish. She began to sob again, and she buried her face in her husband’s shoulder.
“I’d like you both to leave now,” Graham Grow said.
David turned to his father. Martin was jotting something in his notebook, but he stopped and nodded to his son. They stood, and Graham Grow left his wife alone on the couch in order to escort them to the front door.
“Mr. Grow,” David said as the man opened the door to usher them out. “I’m assuming you and your wife have no plans to travel, considering your situation. But if you plan on being anywhere other than here at home or at your jobs, I’d like you to let my office know.” He handed Grow a card with the number for his team’s switchboard.
The man scowled at David as he snatched the card from his hand, but he said nothing.
A minute later, as father and son pulled out of the Grow’s driveway, Martin shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
David said nothing, though his expression was grave.
Martin wiped a hand over his eyes and mouth. “I’ve been around the parents of missing children plenty of times,” he said. “They tend to look comatose with worry and lack of sleep—nothing like those two.”
David nodded. “When I mentioned that other children had gone missing you could almost hear the relief washing over them. And Graham Grow’s recounting of what happened the night his son disappeared . . . it exactly matched his statement to police, word for word. It was rehearsed.”
“And they never said their son’s name,” Martin said. “I know you caught that too. Not one Joshua or Josh. It was always our son.” He shook his head, and both he and David were quiet for a time as they replayed their chilling conversation with the Grows.
“I’ll have local police dig their teeth in,” David said. “We’ll keep an eye on them, but I’d be shocked if their boy has anything to do with our investigation.”
Martin silently gazed out of his window as they wound their way through the neighborhood, passing large homes and tastefully manicured lawns that resembled the Grow’s. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Both of them are real estate agents?”
“Right,” David said.
Martin tapped on his window as they passed a house with a “For Sale” placard staked in its yard. “The case file said the local police swept the Grow’s property. What about the places they were trying to sell?”
“Good idea,” David said. He pulled out his cell phone and called his team’s switchboard. When he had one of his people on the car’s speaker system, he said, “Have the local police take a look at the homes the Grow’s were trying to sell around the time their son disappeared. Tell them to start with the houses that were vacant.”
Chapter 13
“MATT! IT’S TIME for dinner, honey!”
Matt Crawford heard his mom calling him from the kitchen. H
e pressed PAUSE on the Roku player’s remote control, freezing Jean-Claude Van Damme just as his leaping roundhouse kick connected with a thug’s face. He walked to the kitchen and sat down at the table next to his younger sister, who was pretending to color in her forearm with the blunt end of her fork. At the head of the table, Matt’s father was leaning back in his chair with one leg crossed over the other as he read Time Magazine.
Matt watched as his mom spooned out some macaroni and cheese onto his plate, which already held garlic bread and green beans. “Why are we eating so early?” he asked her. It was still light out, and the clock on the kitchen wall told him it was just after five.
Matt’s father set down his magazine and took a sip from his cocktail, which was the only thing on his placemat. “Your mom and I are going out to dinner tonight with the Mayhews, remember? You’re in charge, pal.”
“Oh yeah,” Matt said. He took a bite of his garlic bread and washed it down with a large swallow of milk.
“I’m going upstairs to get ready,” his mother said as she breezed out of the kitchen.
After she’d gone, Matt’s dad drummed his fingers on the wooden tabletop and looked at his son. “So. On a scale from one to ten, how boring was school today?”
Matt grinned and shoveled a pile of macaroni into his mouth. He thought about how he and his friends had skipped class in order to spend the afternoon at the Flat Rocks. “Four,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” his father said. “Anything you learn get stuck in that brain of yours?”
“Not really,” Matt said.
His father smiled. “How’d you do on that Language Arts test I helped you study for last week?”
“I don’t know,” Matt lied. He didn’t feel like telling his dad he’d gotten a B-minus—well below his usual high marks. He’d smoked pot during his lunch hour before the test, and the weed had jumbled many of the grammar concepts he’d spent the previous afternoon studying. “We haven’t gotten them back yet.”
Ryan Crawford looked at his son and took a sip of his drink. He nodded slowly, letting Matt know he had an idea he was being bullshitted, but that he would let it go. He turned his attention to his daughter Katie.
As they talked and Matt ate his dinner, he found himself thinking about the man he and his buddies had seen in the woods—the guy who was carrying Carson What’s-his-name. He thought of the guy’s blonde beard. He thought of the way Carson’s hands had been draped over the guy’s neck. Thinking about it made him uneasy. He was almost sure the man wasn’t Carson’s dad.
He stopped eating and put down his fork, and for a second he considered telling his father what he’d seen. He thought maybe it would work if he claimed he saw the man sometime after school. But then he remembered soccer practice, and he knew there would have been no time to swing by the Flat Rocks in between the end of class and the start of afternoon practice. If he told his dad about the man, he’d also have to admit to skipping class.
Mr. Crawford looked at his son. “What’s up, pal? I can tell your gears are grinding.”
“Nothing,” Matt said. “I was thinking about soccer practice. I screwed up a ball drill today. I’m worried I won’t make the team.”
“There are worse things in life,” his dad said. “The point is to have fun—at least until you make varsity.” He smiled.
Carson nodded and took another bite of his dinner. As he chewed, he let the man in the woods drift out of his thoughts. It probably wasn’t anything, he told himself again.
Chapter 14
IT WAS COLD and windy outside, but the room was warm and still. Weak sunlight sifted in through foot-wide slats between heavy curtains, and a radiator clicked and hissed in a corner. A small circular table rested against one wall, its top littered with print media and empty food containers. Above the table, a long oval mirror gaped upward toward the ceiling.
Apart from doors leading to other areas of the house, there was nothing else in the room apart from the table and mirror.
When the man entered, the November air tried to follow him inside. He closed the door quickly, blocking out the cold, and set down his grocery bags. He stripped off his jacket and winter hat and dropped both on the floor. The room was comfortingly stuffy, like the inside of a mouth.
He walked to the radiator and twisted the knob, ensuring the flow of hot water was at its maximum, and then he walked to the window. Dust particles briefly filled the air as the man clutched the curtains. He pulled them completely shut, blocking out the sunlight, and the dust particles vanished.
He picked up his groceries and walked toward a narrow, carpeted staircase that lead up to the second floor. He passed the stairs and disappeared through another doorway leading to the back of the house. He was gone for several minutes. When he returned to the room, he held in his hands a tray containing a sandwich and a cup of water.
His face was now hidden behind a white mask.
He walked to a thick oak door on the far side of the room. He set the tray down on the carpet and pulled out the towel he’d stuffed into the crack beneath the door. There was a small numeric keypad wired to the door’s heavy bolt locks. The man pressed a few buttons and the electronic locks slid to the left. One. Two.
He coughed once and called into the basement. Although the man was slight, his voice was deep and resinous.
“Turn away,” he said.
He waited for a few seconds, and then he picked up the food tray and took several steps down the basement stairs. From the first-floor room, only the man’s head and shoulders were visible. The white mask was held in place by a string tied at the back of his head.
The man peered into the basement, then he descended the rest of the way. A few seconds later, he returned empty-handed to the ground-floor room. He closed the basement door and pressed two buttons simultaneously on the keypad. The locks slid back into place.
He walked to his cluttered table and stood before it, looking into his long oval-shaped mirror. At first he kept the mask on, but eventually he removed it. The face that looked back at him was nearly as expressionless as the mask. After a few seconds, the man turned his mouth upwards and downwards. He tightened his lips and let them go slack. He worked on moving the tops of his cheeks, trying to do so without changing his mouth. He squinted and opened his eyes wide.
After a time the man began searching through the clutter on top of the table below the mirror. When he found the photograph of Joshua Grow, he wedged it into the mirror’s frame. The photo was black and white, and had been torn from a weeks-old newspaper story.
In the picture, the boy was holding some type of videogame controller. He wore an oversized T-shirt and sweatpants—and his blonde hair was mussed. Although he was looking directly into the camera, Joshua wasn’t smiling. His eyes turned down at the corners, and his mouth was drawn up into a small and perfectly straight line.
Beneath the photo appeared the caption: Joshua Grow, an eighth grade student at Perry Middle School, missing since September 28.
The man stared at the photograph and into the boy’s large eyes.
Chapter 15
“YOU WANT A beer?” Martin asked as they stepped into the familiar yellow light of Cutie’s Bar, located a few blocks from his South Philly row house.
David nodded, and his father shouted their order to the bartender as they made their way past the half-occupied barstools, lined up in front of the oak counter as neatly as the taps and liquor bottles were lined up behind it. There was an order to the place—an order to most bars—that David found comforting.
Along with the ancient bartender, a woman with soft eyes and a perpetually downturned mouth that matched her deep age lines, several of the other patrons threw them welcoming nods or salutes.
It was evening now, and they’d just returned from the FBI’s Philadelphia field office. David had spent much of the afternoon reviewing the interview transcripts local police had conducted with the friends and neighbors of the missing boys’ parents. Meanw
hile, his father had looked over the report their CITU team had compiled on James Ganther. Martin had refused to discuss the mystery man with his son.
“I’ll tell you when I feel like it,” he’d snapped when David asked again who Ganther was.
As they worked, David had watched his father, who seemed pensive and withdrawn as he looked over the Ganther files. Occasionally, Martin would stand and pace along one side of the conference table, hands tucked deep in the pockets of his jacket, his eyes lost somewhere on the far wall of the room. At other times, he would pause to write something in his notebook.
Now they took a seat across from each other in one of Cutie’s booths and sat in silence until the bartender brought their drinks.
“Good to see you again, handsome,” she said to David as she set down his beer. She turned to throw some friendly palaver Martin’s way, but she could tell by his face it wasn’t the night for chitchat. “And the regular for the regular,” she said as she set down his George Dickel on the rocks. She patted him on the shoulder as she turned to reclaim her station on the other side of the bar.
When she’d gone, Martin turned to the briefcase at his side. He pulled out the Ganther file and set it down on the table between them. He looked at it for a moment before taking a drink. He leaned back, spreading his shoulder blades against the cushion of the booth. “You know my first Bureau assignment was here at the Philadelphia field office, back in 1978? I was twenty-eight years old.” As he spoke, his eyes never left the Ganther file.
David nodded.
“They called me and the other greenhorns FOAs,” Martin continued. “That stood for first office agents. In those days, you were only allowed one year at your first post. After you got your feet wet they’d transfer you somewhere else.” He pursed his lips at the passage of time. “I started here with three other newly minted graduates. The older agents called us Webster’s kids, because we came on right after Martin H. Webster replaced Clarence Kelly as FBI Director.”