AHMM, July-August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Herbert, I detect a certain attitude in you that I really don't appreciate. We're trying to find Billy and yet you seem to regard this with a certain ... detached amusement."

  I just looked at him.

  Dr. Morgans didn't know what to say then. Taking a pad of paper off the side of his desk, he examined it briefly, then looked back at me.

  "You said you went ‘online.’ What about Billy? Did he ever go online? I mean, did he ever talk to you about people that he talked to online?"

  Every time he said “online” it sounded like some heinous thing that we were doing.

  "I don't know. I think he had e-mail.” I shrugged. “Checked it now and then. He wasn't big into computers except for doing homework, or looking for stuff. He checked out science stuff sometimes, like what's happening on Mars and...” I shrugged. “He was a total math freak."

  "Math freak.” Dr. Morgans said the words like he'd never heard them before, like he hadn't any idea in the world who any of us—any of us under the age of eighteen—were.

  "Well, it has come to our attention that Billy did chat online, in certain ... chat rooms. There was a vintage car chat room and—” He was flipping through his notepad, and actually giving me more information than he should have. “—and the police are investigating that right now. In fact they have the Wenlows’ computer and are checking it for—"

  "The police took the computer?” I interrupted. I shook my head. “Crap."

  "Is there any particular reason you said that?” Dr. Morgans asked, sliding even closer to me across his desk. He reminded me of the greasy haired kid at lunch today.

  "Yeah, I'm using it to write a paper.” I frowned. “On the Byzantine Empire. History class?"

  "Really.” He finally sat back, sighing, looking at his notes. “Well, we are hoping he didn't talk to anyone he shouldn't have and, well, gone off to meet someone. The Internet is a scary place, Herbert, a very scary place."

  "Okay."

  He looked at me sideways. He didn't like me. He didn't like anything about me. Not my clothes, my face, my voice, my attitude. But I really didn't care.

  I didn't like him either.

  * * * *

  "Can I give you a lift home?"

  It was after school and I was leaving with my backpack slung over one arm, alone as usual. But I didn't want anyone, including the dean, who was watching me from a doorway, to see me go off with Jake Valari. Especially not with Jake Valari.

  Jake was okay, actually. He was the only detective on the Manamesset police force and an old friend. He had dated my mother for a while, helped her get a home and a job in Manamesset, and then watched as she deteriorated up to the point where she could no longer take care of herself. Or me. Or anything. Still, Jake, in plainclothes, leaning on his Firebird in the school parking lot—nope, just wouldn't look good for me to hop in his car and drive away with him. So I said: “No, thanks. I want to walk. The Wenlows are just a street over."

  "Then let me walk with you,” Jake said, and there he was. “So, what's your take on this William Dawber? Runaway? You think so?"

  "Jake...” I sighed, not again. But then I paused, turned, and looked at him. I was his height now; I could look him square into the eye. Kids were passing by all around us, some staring for a second, some curious, others just muttering as we blocked their way. “I told the Falmouth police all I know. Also told the dean. He's right over there.” I shrugged a shoulder toward the door where Dr. Morgans was still standing. “Billy was just a kid who bunked with me for four weeks. He didn't talk to me much.” I adjusted my backpack straps. “I didn't talk much to him."

  Jake nodded, then got into step with me as I left the school grounds. The way to the Wenlows’ was down a wooded road crowded with locust trees and flowering shrubs. Mostly year-round residents lived here.

  "So tell me what you do know, Herbie."

  "Why? Manamesset police are involved in this now? He's been gone now what, six days? He's just run away; he'll show up, Jake."

  "Tell me what you know."

  I sighed, began, “Okay. He moved into the Wenlows’ four weeks ago, middle of August. Quiet kid, minded his own business, didn't want to talk, and that was fine with me. Totally into math and science, read a lot. No friends, but he came from Truro last, or so he told me. Maybe he went back there."

  "Totally into math and science. Tell me about that."

  Another sigh. “He had science magazines, old ones. He spent a lot of time at the library. Went online to check out science sites, stuff like that. Took two math courses this term and chemistry. In fact, he carried a huge class load. Six major subjects plus phys-ed."

  Jake opened a small pad of paper as we walked, looked at it, then me. “English, history, pre-calculus, geometry, French, and chemistry."

  "Yeah, he was a busy guy."

  "What'd he do for fun?"

  "Fun? He read. Went online. The Wenlows have some video games. We can use them if our schoolwork is up to date. He had no interest in them."

  "But he went online."

  "Well, yeah, we all do, but the Wenlows, they keep us on a pretty strict schedule, an hour a day after our work is done. They got all these parental locks and blocks on the computer, though—” I gave Jake a sidelong glance. “—we can get pretty much get around them."

  "Anyone come to visit him? Did he get any phone calls? Did he use chat rooms online?"

  "Nope, nope, and I don't know. I didn't stand over him when it was his turn to use the PC."

  "Herbie, Billy Dawber was at the Wenlows’ house last Saturday morning, he showed up for breakfast, then excused himself to go upstairs and do some homework. You last saw and talked to him around nine a.m. After that, no one saw him again."

  I stopped walking and turned and looked at Jake.

  "I was listening to music and went back to sleep,” I said. “What more do you want? I didn't keep track of him, Jake."

  Jake slapped the pad in his hand, looked up the street, then back at me. “Kid's just gone missing. Just like that. Gone.” He snapped his fingers.

  "Why are you asking me all this? This isn't your town, your jurisdiction, nothing. Wait...” I was ready to answer my own question. “My name came up. Someone said, Oh my god, the Sawyer kid was bunking with this runaway. Go question him. Maybe he knows something. Maybe he did something!"

  "I'm just doing this as a favor, Herbie. I know the chief over in Falmouth."

  I turned and started walking again. “Break through the wall that's Herbie Sawyer. He must know something he's not saying."

  "No, not at all. If you knew anything, you'd tell somebody. Me, somebody."

  "Thanks for your faith in me."

  "But do this one thing. For me.” He stopped; I stopped. A school bus came to a screech a few feet away. Full of cheerleaders en route to a game or something. They were screaming out the windows; I heard someone shout. “Sawyer!"

  "Do what, Jake?"

  "Think over carefully anything he said or did that might help us. Please. You of all people know that the smallest detail might be the key to figuring this out. I mean he could be at a friend's house in Truro, yes, or any of the other six towns he's been in during the last four and half years. He could be with a girlfriend. He could be with someone he met online, God forbid. But just think, Herbie, please? Think."

  "Will do, Jake,” I said as he closed the notepad. “Will do."

  * * * *

  Billy Dawber was almost six feet tall, dark hair and eyes, acne-scarred complexion. In fact, he was a decent-looking kid; some of the girls at school had thought so.

  The first day of school he'd thrown his books on his bed and said, “Got someone wanting my phone number already.” Then he had laughed as though it was all a big joke before heading off to take a shower.

  "Hope it's a girl,” I'd said after him, almost as a natural response. He'd laughed some more, but that was it. Nothing more.

  He was lanky but strong. I'd seen him lug groceries out of Mrs. Wenlo
w's car, three or four heavy bags at a time. He'd been quietly sociable, not friendly yet not overly aloof. He responded when spoken to; he didn't initiate anything, is what I mean to say. He spent hours after school lying on his bed, doing math problems, working on French assignments, reading, reading, reading. He read so much Mrs. Wenlow would yell up at us three, four times a night to turn the lights out.

  There were science and math clubs at school, as well as a chess club, but I didn't know if he'd joined any; something told me he hadn't been even remotely interested.

  But then something occurred to me, something a little bit odd. I was up in our room—my room now that Billy was gone—and I realized something. I walked over to his bed. The police had come and taken away some of his things already. His school books were still there, but not his notebooks. There was an old suitcase under his bed, as well. I knelt down, pulled it out. They'd gone through it two days ago. while I had lain on my bed, listening to my music, pretending not to notice as the police rummaged through his things.

  His clothes were still in his suitcase, not in the two bureau drawers—the bottom ones—that the Wenlows had said were his to use. Billy had never unpacked his clothes. He had four jerseys, two pair of sweatpants, two sweatshirts, some jeans, socks, underwear.

  I walked over to the closet. Six shirts, all mine, in a row; two pair of pants, over hangers, both mine. A jacket, a winter coat, a slicker, all mine. Nothing of his was here.

  I turned around, hands on my hips, and considered this. Was it important? And if so, why? And again, why did I care? He was a runaway; he had a history of just running off and coming back days later. But where did he go? Did he ever say? Did he have a friend or relative, a grandparent or someone that he ran off to be with? But if he had run away, why hadn't he taken any of his clothes with him?

  I scratched my head. It was getting too much, and it wasn't important anyhow. I had a paper to write.

  * * * *

  I sat up straight in bed, wide awake, so alert it made my head hurt. I turned, looked at the clock. Three a.m., Friday morning. Another three hours before I had to get up—to the sound of the alarm buzzing or Mrs. Wenlow's lovely voice up the stairs—but there I was awake, hearing, seeing, remembering...

  Billy Dawber, in the parking lot at the school, standing next to me, as alive as I was now with my heart racing, my head pounding.

  "Damn, Herbie,” Billy was saying to me, “I love Jaguars.” Then he said it again, this time adding a typically teenage descriptive term, “I so effing love Jaguars."

  I turned to look where he was staring, at a lean, low, black Jaguar, probably an ‘80- or ‘81-year model, parked in the teachers’ section of the lot. There was only one teacher at our school who could afford a car like that, vintage or not. Mr. Earnshaw, math department chair. Never married, no children, his parents had left him a “small fortune,” or so the gossip went. He was one of the rare ones, a rich teacher. Mr. Earnshaw.

  "Oh my God,” I said aloud to the empty dark room. “Why is he telling me this now?"

  * * * *

  "Yes, they took all of Billy's notebooks,” Jake said to me, his eyes heavy lidded like he had pulled too many late night shifts in a row. I knew from the paper that a lot was going on in my old hometown of Manamesset. There was a rash of burglaries in one of the newer upper middle-class areas, as well as in the high-end section of town where there were a lot of summer residences.

  "Can I see them?"

  "Don't be so cryptic,” Jake warned, reaching for his cup of coffee. It was only seven in the morning, and I yet had to find a way to get back to school. I had gotten a ride here with a kid on the football team who had a crush on one of the Wenlow girls. He showed up at the Wenlow house every morning around six fifteen to have breakfast, hang out, and then drive her to school. I had managed to convince this kid to detour over here, drop me at the police station, but then he had tooled off with the girl and a half hour to kill before driving her back to school.

  "Cryptic.” I grinned, settling back in the chair in front of his desk. “Let me see his damn notebooks, Jake."

  "We've been all through them, Herbie,” Jake snarled. Okay, he possibly had a headache, too, so I revised my earlier assessment. Seems more likely that Jake had pulled a late-nighter at one of our local saloons. “A lot of class notes, some doodles in the margins, some odd drawings here and there, but no phone numbers, no names, no e-mail addresses or anything like that."

  "You adults really have a thing about e-mail, don't you? As if that's all kids do online, e-mail each other.” It made me sort of laugh.

  "Do you possibly know something that I—or the big, bad, ignorant adult world—doesn't know, that we should?” he said.

  "If I say ‘chat room,’ Jake, what does it do to you?” I leaned forward, enjoying this in a kind of sadistic way. Jake was plainly hurting; he was obviously annoyed by me, and yet he knew, to some extent, I was worth humoring, at least for a while.

  "It doesn't do anything to me, Herbie, but if you said chat room and underage kids, it makes me very nervous, indeed it does."

  "You ever go into a chat room, I mean—” I emphasized this next word slyly. “—online?"

  "No, Herbie, I go into chat rooms offline, down at the corner bar, me and my buddies.” He tried not to smile.

  "Right you do,” I said, tipping back the chair, laughing. “That's just what you do, you hang out with your buds at the local bar, shooting the—” I paused, smiling wider. “—breeze. And that's what kids my age do in chat rooms too. We shoot the breeze. We talk about music and the war and who we'd vote for in the next election, if we were old enough to vote."

  "What are you trying to tell me, Herbert Sawyer?” His patience was starting to grow thin.

  "Billy did go online, but not just to check his e-mail, Jake.” I leaned on his desk. “E-mail is sort of, you know, so nineteen nineties. So maybe he did go into chat rooms; maybe he just went there to talk science—"

  He cut me off: “And maybe he talked to the wrong people. Damn it, Herbie, if you know of any people he talked to, or places he went online that—"

  "The Net is this big scary place to you, isn't it, Jake?"

  He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Herbie, I go online. I surf the Net. I use law enforcement sites, data banks. I read the news online.” He opened his eyes, looked straight at me. “But yes, it can be a scary place if it's misused, and too often it is."

  "Let me see Billy's notebooks, Jake."

  "I haven't got them. They're over at the Falmouth P.D."

  "Along with the Wenlows’ computer?"

  Just a nod.

  "I want to see that too. Think you can arrange it?"

  * * * *

  I knew I'd seen it, the last day I had spoken to Billy. I had told him about my strange dream, and he had paused, listening, looking up from his math for just a few minutes. I thought he had been drawing a plesiosaur...

  Nope, not plesiosaurs, but jaguars—a leaping jaguar, and under it, a car. A Jaguar sedan. It was all right there, in the left margin of Billy's pre-cal notebook, next to some fairly incomprehensible, (well, to me) math assignment he had been working on.

  The Falmouth police had been a little more courteous, a little less gruff to me this time around. My first round of questioning by them had been at the Wenlows’ kitchen table, a series of short, curt questions about Billy and his “habits,” appearance, and “mood” just before he'd disappeared. Since then, however, the adults involved in this investigation had taken a heightened interest in me, and now I sat at a conference table at the Falmouth P.D. with a cup of cocoa on my left, and a stack of Billy Dawber's notebooks on my right. There were also two officers with me, one at the table, and one leaning against a wall. Beside him on a low table sat the Wenlows’ home computer.

  I looked up as Jake entered the room with another man, one I hadn't yet met.

  "So this Herbie Sawyer,” the man said, extending his hand to me. “Jake's been filling me in about y
ou, young man."

  As I shook the man's hand, whom Jake introduced as Captain Barrows, I got a crazy sensation that perhaps they were expecting too much of me. But I kept my mouth shut as Jake informed me that he had called the school, talked to the dean, and told him I'd be in later. “I also spoke to Mrs. Wenlow,” he added.

  I had nothing to say to that, just looked down at Billy Dawber's drawings. All through the math notebook—and only the math notebook—were a series of drawings that were unmistakably of jaguars—both kinds: animal and automobile. It seems that Billy had quite a fixation with them.

  There was a short pause of almost awkward silence, then I looked up at the two men hovering over me and said, “Can I look at the PC now?"

  * * * *

  It was an interesting scenario that was building in my mind that morning. Billy had been gone almost a week. The last time we were together he had been doing his math, listening to me. Then Billy had gone online. Billy loved Jaguars. Billy loved math.

  Mr. Earnshaw was his calculus teacher. Mr. Earnshaw owned a black Jaguar.

  So what if Mr. Earnshaw knew of Billy's love of Jaguars? What if Mr. Earnshaw—never married and all the kids liked to gossip about that—had offered Billy a ride in his Jaguar?

  I booted up the PC, adjusted the headset on my mp3 player, and rolled down the history logs.

  Just outside the door a nervous police officer stood watch, looking in at me every now and then. Well I guess he was afraid I was going to mess things up, erase stuff, but if they had done their job right, they'd have made a copy of this whole hard drive...

  Well, I hoped they knew what they were doing.

  Anyhow, it was right there in the history: among the many URLs Billy, or someone in the Wenlow household, had visited in the days before Billy's disappearance was one for You-Talk, Vintage Motors, the Jaguar.