The front door had a two-foot-square inlay of blue-and-white sea glass, which surrounded the word “Welcome” in shades of green. The windows were aglow, making the home look incongruously cheerful.
A makeshift shrine surrounded the mailbox: a pile of wilting flower arrangements still in their plastic, a few teddy bears, and a large sign that said “May God bless Jack and bring him home safe!”
The smell of brine and rotting fish assaulted Josh’s nostrils as he emerged from the vehicle and stretched out his long frame. He could hear the waves crashing against the shore. Patches of beach were lit by the dim glow of streetlamps, and beyond lay the vast black of the Pacific.
He tightened his tie and buttoned his suit jacket, then followed Carl up the path. A battered red Ford F-150 was tucked into the left side of the carport; the other side was vacant save the oil stain on the cracked concrete.
There was a tinfoil-wrapped casserole on the stoop, and Carl picked it up and took a peek at the attached card. It smelled like noodles and cheese.
“I let Mr. Barbetti know we were coming,” he said quietly as he knocked on the door.
They heard shuffling inside, and a moment later the door opened. Keaton Barbetti might once have been a handsome man, but grief and alcohol had taken their toll. His sandy hair was tangled and sticking up on end. His blue eyes were bleary and puffed with tears and lack of sleep.
He was barefoot, wearing gray sweatpants and an Oregon Ducks T-shirt with a rip near the left armpit. A week’s worth of scruff covered his face and the scent of whiskey rippled off him in waves, like cartoon stink lines. Josh did his best not to wrinkle his nose.
“The FBI is bringing me food now?” His voice was raw with grief.
Carl gave him a half smile. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want anything I managed to cook.”
Without another word, Mr. Barbetti stepped back from the door and headed into the living room, leaving the agents to close the door and follow him in. Carl left the casserole on the hall table on top of a pile of unopened bills.
The living room was a mess of scattered bottles, newspapers, and takeout wrappers from Taco Bell and Subway. Mr. Barbetti sat down on the couch and reached for a glass of amber liquid in which a couple of ice cubes were melting. They clinked against the side of the glass as he took a long swallow.
Despite its more recent neglect, it was obvious a woman had once lived in the home. The late Mrs. Barbetti’s touch was everywhere: in the seashell lamp on the side table, the overstuffed yellow cotton couch and chair, and the rainbow rag rug that covered the hardwood floor.
The walls were decorated with paintings of ocean and forest scenes. Josh spied an “EB” neatly scripted in the lower corner of the nearest painting, a beach scene in which a young boy was building a sand castle.
It took him a moment to realize the artist must have been the deceased wife, Emma Barbetti. To his untrained eye, she’d had talent. The ocean was deep and mysterious, the waves somehow alive, and the curve of the boy’s back managed to capture the brief innocence of toddlerhood. He wondered if the boy was Jack, and his chest tightened with frustration.
How many more? How many more innocent children would disappear into the abyss while he chased after them in utter futility? Would he go to his grave still chasing these shadow children, never knowing what had happened to them?
He turned back to Mr. Barbetti, yet another frantic and terrified parent in another sad living room looking at him with the same desperate hope. And once again, he had no hope to give. He never did. It was his life, and he felt like the worst kind of failure.
“Mr. Barbetti, I’m Senior Special Agent Joshua Metcalf of the FBI. I’m here to help find your son.” He tried to sound calm and authoritative, like an FBI agent should, but he felt like such a fraud.
“Oh yeah? And how are you going to do that?”
“The first thing I’d like to do is hear what happened the day Jack disappeared.”
“Look, I appreciate your help.” Mr. Barbetti dropped his empty glass onto the coffee table with a clumsy clatter. “I really do. I hear you came all the way from DC. But I don’t see how going through the whole story for the millionth time is going to really do anything.”
“New details often emerge during the retelling,” Josh explained. “And one new detail can make all the difference.”
Mr. Barbetti studied Josh with bleary eyes, debating. Josh closed his mouth and waited. In his experience, people felt compelled to talk after a tragedy. They needed to tell the story. It helped to process the horror and grief, to make sense of the unthinkable. Mr. Barbetti was no different.
With deliberation, he refilled his glass. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, Agent whatever-your-name-is. I can handle plenty more than this before my lights go out.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Josh said.
“Lots of experience,” Mr. Barbetti said, nodding into his glass. “Years and years . . .”
“Mr. Barbetti,” Josh said when the silence had stretched too long, “why don’t you start with that morning? When did you wake up?”
He made a noise that was more sob than sigh. “Nine, maybe? It wasn’t any different from any other morning . . .” He looked up, meeting Josh’s eyes with apparent effort. “I’d caught quite the Irish flu the night before.”
“Meaning you were drunk.”
Mr. Barbetti tipped his head in acknowledgment. “Yessir. That I was. Good old Jimmy Beam’s like a neighbor that keeps comin’ over and then ignoring the cue to leave at the end of the night. So the morning started with my head in the toilet.”
Jack was eating a bowl of Cheerios when Mr. Barbetti finally entered the kitchen, wearing yesterday’s sweatpants. It hurt his heart, he admitted, to see the quick once-over his nine-year-old gave him.
“He’s too young to have eyes that old, you know?” he said, and Josh nodded.
Shoving the previous night’s empty bottle into the garbage bin, he’d asked his son what was on tap for the day. But his attempt at cheeriness had fallen flat. Without a word, Jack had shoved a Costco bottle of ibuprofen across the counter and poured his dad a glass of water.
“I was thinking maybe we’d gotten to the point where he just wouldn’t talk to me anymore. But I kept pushing until he told me about those cyclo-cross races going on at the Clatsop County Fair. He loves those damn races . . .” Mr. Barbetti stopped, choking up.
“Would you like some water?” Carl asked, but he shook his head and took a sip of amber liquid instead.
“Jack was so excited when I said we could go,” he said hoarsely. “It’s been so long since he acted like a kid . . .”
“Since your wife passed away,” Josh said quietly.
“Yeah. Emma . . . maybe marrying her was a mistake; she was only just out of high school. But we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, and you know, being Catholic.” He shrugged. “My mom used to hold her rosary in one hand while she beat me with the other. Marriage was the only option.”
And he’d loved Emma, he told them. He’d loved her deliriously and blindly, and with his whole damn heart. For a time, they’d been happy. She’d painted, and he’d worked at the sawmill—and if he had too much to drink on occasion . . . well, in the early years it was under control.
“But Emma, she had her demons, too. Some days she seemed happy with our life; other days she wanted to move to an ashram in India or live ‘off the grid’ in the Ozark Mountains or some damn thing. Out of the blue, she’d disappear. She’d go for groceries and not come back for days.” He stopped, blinking into his glass.
“That must have been difficult,” Josh prompted.
“I was out of my fucking mind, thinking she was dead in a ditch or something,” Mr. Barbetti agreed. “But she always came home. She’d be bruised, exhausted, covered in filth . . .”
“Any idea where she’d
been?” Carl asked.
Mr. Barbetti looked down. “I learned not to ask. But that was all before Jack came along. She was a good mom to him . . .”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Barbetti,” Josh said softly.
He shuddered and drained his glass. “They found her car in the Barview Jetty off the 101. She drove full bore across the damn beach and straight into the water.”
“Mr. Barbetti,” Josh redirected as gently as he could. “Can you tell me about the cyclo-cross races? You said Jack was excited to go?”
He scrubbed hard at his face, pushing his hair up into spikes dampened by his tears. “Yeah, Jack was really excited. But I knew it was a mistake the moment we got there. It was so loud and hot in the arena.”
They had found seats at the back, and Mr. Barbetti had rolled his jacket into a ball and used it as a pillow.
“I was just trying to get through it without puking,” he admitted. “The next thing I knew, Jack was asking me for money to buy a hot dog.” He rubbed his eyes again. “I gave him a twenty, asked him to get me a Coke. I didn’t even watch him leave . . .”
After a moment, Mr. Barbetti turned glum eyes on Josh. “That’s everything I remember.”
“Thank you.” Josh glanced at Carl, who gave a small nod of encouragement. “This might seem like a strange question, so bear with me. Is your son, um, special in any way?”
“Special? What do you mean?”
“Does Jack have any abilities that would be considered abnormal?”
“He’s really smart. Tested at a genius level. The school keeps talking about skipping a grade, but he doesn’t want to move past his friends. Like that?”
Josh frowned. “That might be significant. But does he have any, um . . . psychic abilities? Like mind reading, or predicting the future, or being able to move objects with his mind?”
“Moving objects with his mind? Can people seriously do that?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“No,” Mr. Barbetti said with a smirk. “He doesn’t read my mind or change the channel without the remote.”
“What about when he was younger? Did he ever talk about dreams that came true, or ghosts visiting him, or anything?”
That seemed to stop him cold. He blinked at Josh, cheeks going pale. “Shit. Yeah, he did.”
Josh leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. No matter how many times he did this, it never got any easier. “What kind of ability does Jack have, Mr. Barbetti?”
“I don’t think he has any ability,” he said defensively. “It was a long time ago and I don’t see what this has to do with Jack’s kidnapping.”
“Please, just humor me,” Josh said.
Mr. Barbetti grumbled and reached for the bottle. It clinked against the edge of the glass as he poured himself another three fingers. He took a hefty swallow and Josh stifled the urge to beg him to go easy. Despite the amount of alcohol that must have been coursing through his veins, his eyes were surprisingly sober.
“When Jack was three, he started seeing people who weren’t there. He was saying all kinds of wacked-out things about angels and demons and something he called ‘the White.’ We took him to a priest. He wanted to do an exorcism.” He drained his glass, and Josh noticed his hands were shaking.
“Emma freaked out. She hauled us out of there, said no way was that priest getting near Jack. She told me she’d gone through the same thing when she was a kid. Spooks, she called them. They’d tell her to do or say something, and then laugh when she got in trouble. She said it took a long time to figure out no one else could see them. But she learned how to control them, shut them out. Or so she said. Now I have my doubts . . .”
“Since your wife’s suicide,” Josh said softly.
“My wife didn’t kill herself. Suicide is a mortal sin.”
Josh noted the stubborn set of Mr. Barbetti’s shoulders and nodded. “All right. What happened with Jack?”
“Emma said she could teach him to block them out. I don’t know all that went on between them; I didn’t get involved. But Jack stopped talking about that kind of stuff and Emma was happy. She said Jack was really strong.”
“Mr. Barbetti, do you think Jack was still seeing these ‘spooks’?”
“He never said so. Why?”
“Do you think he would have talked to anyone else? A teacher at school, or his friends?” Josh pulled a pen and notepad out of his breast pocket.
“I don’t know. Maybe. What’s this about?”
“I need to talk to Jack’s friends. I’ll also need access to his medical and school records. Has he seen a psychologist or anyone else? If so, I’ll need to talk to him or her as well.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to know if anyone had knowledge of Jack’s abilities.” Josh snapped his fingers and made a note in his book. “The priest you took Jack to. What church was it?”
“What the hell is this about?”
“Sorry,” Josh said. He took a deep breath and pocketed his notebook. “For the past decade I’ve been heading a large missing-children investigation. Since the 1960s, over seven hundred kids have gone missing across the US. I believe, although not everyone agrees, these cases are linked. And I think your son might be one of them.”
“How? Why?”
“Because all these children have some form of ESP, whether it’s telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, or something else.”
“I don’t know what those things are. You seriously think Jack was kidnapped because he used to talk to ghosts?”
“Yes, I do. That’s not the only connection. The lamb’s blood left at the scene is a major clue. Sometimes there’s just a drop, sometimes more. But it’s always there, like a calling card of some kind.”
“Seven hundred kids? Are you fucking serious?”
“Seven hundred and seventy-eight, actually. Not including your son.”
“Why is this not on CNN or something?”
“Because over fifteen thousand kids go missing every year. Seven hundred and seventy-eight kids seems like a lot, but over the course of fifty years it’s just a drop in the bucket.”
“Fifty years? This has been going on for fifty years?”
“Yes, sir. I believe so.”
“So . . . what? Do you know who took Jack?”
“I wish I did. I suspect this is being done by a large organization. They have a lot of resources, and many people involved. The kids always disappear without a trace. I believe they are being taken because of their special abilities, but for what purpose? I just don’t know. But I do know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I strongly believe your son is still alive. I think they all are. No bodies have ever turned up, not ever. Not one. So that gives me hope. And if we can find just one of them, I think we’ll find them all.”
“But you’ve never found any of them, right?”
“That’s true. But it only takes one.” Josh spoke with more confidence than he felt. It had been ten years since he first linked the cases, and his confidence was pretty much shot. But he would never give up.
“Somehow, this organization is finding out about these kids. Finding out what they can do. If I can figure out how they’re getting their information, that just might be the bit of thread I need to unravel this whole thing.”
CHAPTER SIX
“The telekinetic kids were extra special. They got taken somewhere else.”
“What? Rowan . . . Red! Can you hear me?”
“They were the Inner Circle . . .”
“Rowan? You are freaking me out! Wake up!” Dan sounded like he was yelling through miles of pillowy cotton.
Slap!
Distant fire prickled my right cheek.
“Uhhhhh . . .”
“Rowan, wake up!”
Slap!
/>
The left cheek this time.
“Whaaaaa . . .”
I couldn’t open my eyes. My eyelids had bricks on them. Why were there bricks on my eyelids?
“Rowan!” Dan’s worried face swam into focus, hovering over mine.
“Oh, shit. They are open.”
“What?”
“My eyes.”
“What? Can you see me? Are you all right?” Dan’s worried face floated above me like a balloon.
“You have a booger in your right nostril.”
“Red, seriously . . . what the hell?”
“Did you slap me?” My cheeks were burning.
“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. Are you okay?”
“I could fire you for that.”
“You go right ahead. Can you sit up?”
“I think so.”
He helped me anyway, supporting my back and not letting go until he was certain I wasn’t going to flop backward and concuss myself on the floor.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. That card . . .”
“Right.” He grabbed it off the floor. “‘Ricordare, Ritornare.’ I didn’t know you spoke Italian?”
“I don’t.”
“Then how did you know it meant ‘Remember, Return’?”
“I don’t know. Can I see it?” Dan pulled it into his chest, clearly wondering if I would pass out at the mere sight of it. Again.
“I’m okay, I promise.”
He handed the card over. There was nothing else on it. Just those two words, in bold print on white card stock. How sinister could that possibly be?
And yet dread was pounding its spikes through my temples like coffin nails. I handed the card back to Dan with a shudder.
“Get rid of it for me?”
“Of course.” He stuffed it into the pocket of his cargo pants and helped me to my feet. I was shaky; my legs felt like rubber. Dan shoved a chair under me and I sat down with an embarrassed laugh.
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