SCOUT

by Sanjiv Lingard

  “Even though a boy was missing?”

  “‘Live Aid’ had just happened, so it was on non-stop replay on the TV and radio.”

  “I don’t think that was it. She heard music as part of the trail and said it was the last thing Bobby ever heard.”

  “Did she say what kind of music?”

  “No. But d’you think it’s a clue?”

  “Could be, Scout,” sighing with a sadness that had followed her for thirty years. “I don’t know what it means, but it could be.”

  Chapter 24

  I listened.

  I forced my feet to remain motionless on the cold blacktop, ignoring the iron chime of pain that shot through my bones.

  I listened to the wind.

  “Can you hear anything?” asked Mike.

  He was shuffling from side to side to keep out the cold that seared his bare feet.

  “Shhh!” I whispered, not wanting to be disturbed.

  It wasn’t a date. Only a loser like me could even pretend this was a date, even though I was with ‘Woody’ Forrester and the last thing he had given me was a road map tattooed with the shape of a heart. No time to discuss that now, to find out whether it was a coincidence or whether there was a method to his plan.

  This wasn’t a date because we were standing in the icy waste of an empty parking lot looking for the traces of a missing boy, and it wasn’t a date because Mike’s mother was standing behind us, leaning on her black and white.

  We were in the municipal parking lot, and I was searching for traces of Marcus. When I tracked a person I used all five of my senses, but until now I had paid the least attention to my hearing. Eileen had told me that she’d heard a tune when she was tracking young Bobby, so I closed my eyes, concentrating on what I heard. Listening had helped Eileen find Bobby; maybe it would help me trace Marcus.

  All I found was the smell.

  The stench of decay was more unpleasant than the cold. As soon as my feet touched the asphalt, the fetid insult of garbage trucks assaulted me. Marcus has choked on it. It was the stink of maggots and shallow graves.

  I stood on the spot where Marcus had been lifted from the air by a blow to his head. For a moment my own vision blurred, as if an open palm had slammed into my temple. I must have cried out because Mike was beside me, dancing a jig to keep warm.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Can you tell where he’s gone?”

  Molly joined him, impatient for news, but my eyes would not focus. She was asking me a question about the vehicle that had abducted the boy. She wanted to know – did I get a flash of it? She had scoured video from security cameras in the day of the abduction, but the view had been blocked by the garbage trucks.

  I couldn’t reply, because right then I was with Marcus. I was drowned by his fear, as he was shoved into a tight space. His legs had to fold just to fit, and a heavy door slammed shut.

  “He was locked in something tight,” I said.

  “A car with a trunk, then,” said Molly, hanging on every word. “Not an SUV. That’s good, that’s very good.”

  “A trunk…” I repeated, turning the word in my mouth, savouring an unfamiliar smell. “But it’s not a trunk. It’s wooden. He’s in a wooden box.”

  Layers of varnish, years old, seeped into the air around the boy. I could smell it. A sweet aroma, comforting unless you happened to be trapped inside. A wooden box.

  Like a coffin.

  So I took off at a run. I couldn’t bear the thought of Marcus being trapped like the victim of a premature burial. I wanted to run the other way, but my legs wouldn’t let me. They had a trail to follow.

  Mike jolted in pursuit, as eager as me to be on the move.

  *

  Our feet echoed in the canyons of the city.

  Molly had insisted that Mike accompany me. She felt anxious enough as it was, asking a teenager to work her investigation, and she wasn’t going to allow me to track down Marcus alone.

  What if I came across the man who had taken him?

  It was an unspoken danger that I might stumble upon the man’s lair, or that he might spot me getting close. If he could harm a little child, he would not hesitate to silence me.

  Mike was my bodyguard.

  He ran a couple of paces behind, the sound of his breath never more than a gentle sigh. He could probably run forever, like the Duracell bunny. My batteries would give up long before that. I had limbered up, warming my muscles before I took off my shoes. But I was out of practice, and the jog around the heart-shaped course had taken more out of me than I had thought.

  If it was a heart that Mike had traced on our town map. If Mike had the slightest romantic feeling for me.

  If, if, if.

  I tried not to let his presence be a distraction, though I couldn’t help but be aware of his solid rhythm as he kept station behind me.

  He kept me warm, when all around was bleak.

  Marcus had been carried in a wooden box through deserted byways. His terror never diminished – it felt like a high-pitched scream. His abductor had avoided the main routes, sneaking down one-way streets and service roads.

  At every turn the boy had been thrown against the side of the box. I could feel each jolt with a startling clarity – the boy’s physical discomfort the strongest residue of that journey. Though I strained, I could hear nothing but the sound of our lonely progress.

  The route took us along shortcuts that taxi drivers knew well. They tooted their horns as they passed, amused at a girl running with no shoes.

  Their laughter buoyed me. Running is good – it’s about as close to flying as most people will ever get. I flew over the broken ground, following the trail of a young boy who had been buried alive.

  Every journey tells a story.

  That’s what Mike had said. If we knew what story was being told, then we could find our man and the little boy he had taken.

  He was heading west. It would have been a quicker journey on the Expressway, but the trail led under the iron girders that held up the eight-lane artery that fed the city. Down here was a forgotten world. Derelicts made camp against the concrete pillars, their possessions in supermarket trolleys. Thin sheets of plastic flapped in the wind, scanty protection against the cold.

  When the sidewalk ended, we jogged along the middle of the street, avoiding shattered glass that gathered at the kerb.

  You’d think that running would keep us warm. After a while that was no longer the case. As I became tired, the cold found its way in. I had lost feeling in my feet almost immediately, but the chill crept yet higher, until my joints protested and my kidneys began to ache.

  Still I ran. I couldn’t abandon Marcus, not when I had such a strong trail to follow. Not when there was a chance I could save him.

  *

  Eventually, we ran out of city.

  The streets became wider, and the lots became emptier, until there was nothing ahead but an unbroken ribbon of country road. And that’s when my legs buckled.

  Mike must have caught me, and his mom could not have been far behind, because I woke from a black faint in the front seat of the Crown Vic. She had wrapped a space blanket around me. The engine ticked over, and the heater blasted warm air onto the icy blocks of my feet. Seeing my eyes flutter open, Molly leant in from the door.

  “How’d you learn to run like that?” she asked. “Must’ve been ten miles you covered.”

  My jaw locked, too tired and cold to talk.

  Mike shoved a Snickers bar into my hand. The candy went down in a single, ravenous chomp.

  As my vision cleared, all I could see was my failure. Beyond the windshield lay the featureless prairie. A million frozen acres, and not a sign of where Marcus had been taken.

  I stirred myself, trying to pull up out of the seat. Molly pushed me back down with the slightest of touches. I didn’t ha
ve the strength to resist.

  “You rest there for a while,” she said.

  “But we can’t stop now. We’ve gotta find him.”

  “And we will,” she said. “You’ve given me enough for today.”

  That’s when I saw the map.

  Mike had a city map spread out on the hood. He’d weighed the corners down with stones, and was carefully tracing the route we’d taken from the municipal lot to the city limit.

  “You’ve given us the best lead we’ve had so far,” explained Molly. “We know at what time of day he took the boy, and now we know where he was headed. There’ll be a camera somewhere along that trail, and an eyewitness maybe.”

  Mike’s pen slid across the surface of the map, the nib mimicking our route – up and left, then a sharp right turn, scooting under a bridge.

  “You’re a brave girl,” said Molly. “Ten miles you’ve run today, and in this weather.”

  “Mike came too.”

  “He’s a lunk. Don’t worry about him. It’s you who should be proud. This is the break we needed.”

  There were cameras everywhere in the city – on the interchanges, in shops, at ATMs and gas stations. As the kidnapper escaped with the boy he would have left a trail as indelible as DNA. All the police had to do was search through the data.

  “And that’s what cops do best,” explained Molly. “We look at the evidence, and we find our man.”

  Mike had finished the trace. He held the map up for Molly to see. His black pen had drawn a shape on the rectilinear grid of the city. It wasn’t a heart shape, but more like the jagged outline of a lightning bolt.

  Every journey tells a story.

  And this one would give up the man who had taken Marcus.

  Chapter 25

  The varsity soccer team was invited to play in a tournament in California. Mike would be away for two weeks, so no more coaching and no chance to check out whether the heart-shaped route was coincidence or design.

  Mike sent me photos of the boys playing in the sun. I was jealous, of course, as here the mercury just dropped and dropped. It was too cold for snow. The team won their first game 2-1, which I assumed was a good score.

  Note to self: Learn more something about soccer.

  Mike never featured in the shots (being the photographer) so in the end I had to send him a carefully phrased request for a snap of his gorgeous torso. What I texted was this –

  ‘How’s the suntan?’

  Luckily, Mike was a show-not-tell kind of guy, and within minutes I got what I wanted – a picture of Mike and The Drifter making gangster poses by the hotel pool. Both were in swimming shorts, basking in the hot sun. Mike had some way to go before he was a golden beach god, but he would do very nicely for now.

  I loved this cell phone!

  *

  With my dreams of romance put on hold, I could concentrate on a more immediate priority:

  Jobhunting.

  I coaxed the PC into life (‘Windows Vista’, anyone?) and printed off a resumé on the cranky inkjet. I volunteered Molly as my reference and decided not to explain why I’d lost my previous job.

  It soon became clear that canning myself from The Bean Counter was the most stupid thing I have ever done. In every coffee shop, or small store, to which I went begging for work, I was asked the same question – “Why d’you leave?” To this I came up with a series of ever more evasive answers:

  “It was time to move on. You know – pastures new.”

  “I want to work for a small independent – I became sick of the whole corporate thing.”

  “I want to put something back into the community.”

  “I wanted to try something more exciting.”

  To this last explanation, which I tried out at the bagel bakery, Mr Dinkel raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Something more exciting?” he exclaimed. “Ha! And this from the girl who has no shoes! I’ll tell you exciting. Nearly sixty years of the same thing – get up at four, boil the bagels. Then bake the bagels, and roast the coffee. Grind the coffee, and take in the deliveries. Take Mrs Dinkel her coffee, and God forbid if I’ve burnt the roast. Take the bagels out the oven. Six am, start to cut and fill the bagels. Open at seven for the early trade. Does that sound exciting to you?”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “What do you know? You’re seventeen! When I was seventeen I wanted to ride the rails down to the south and meet all those girls in bikinis.”

  “You could still go south,” I suggested.

  “Mrs Dinkel wouldn’t like the heat,” he replied, shaking his head. “Okay, listen, little miss – I’m gonna give you two things: the first is a lox and cream cheese bagel, on the house; the second is some advice - don’t wait for me to call. You don’t want to spend your life serving coffee. Get out of town, go to college, make something of your life.”

  *

  At lunchtime I sat on a bench and ate the bagel from Mr Dinkel’s. Salmon and cream cheese is my thing – soft, salty and smoky. The wind eased up, and the sun poked out, and from where I sat I could see Grace Street Elementary. At recess the kids erupted into the schoolyard, let loose after a morning being imprisoned in the classroom. There was no expression of freedom quite like the pent-up energy of a couple of hundred elementary school kids. It was mayhem.

  A garbage truck drove past. Far enough away so that I didn’t catch a whiff of its infernal stink. All the same, I lost my appetite for the bagel, tore the last remnants into crumbs and scattered them onto the path for the pigeons.

  Turns out that pigeons also like kosher.

  The brake lights flared at the rear of the garbage truck as it turned onto Main Street.

  A garbage truck.

  The sweet stink came back to me from that empty parking lot in the city. Eileen had heard music, but I had smelt decay.

  Molly had told me that she was checking on the drivers and operators. If you were a murderer, a garbage truck is good cover. The operators, working out of the back, are forever wheeling bins into alleys and carrying strange bundles. He probably doesn’t care if he stinks – he probably quite likes it, because he relishes death.

  I looked at the children running in joyful circles in the playground.

  Why were the kids outside? Who was protecting them?

  I wanted to shout and tell them that they were in danger. But if I screamed a warning, all that would happen is that I would be dragged away to join Eileen in Bethesda.

  Molly explained it to me. She said:

  “No one cares about Marcus. They don’t think it can happen to them. They think they’re safe – because the abduction was thirty miles away, and because Marcus is black. Didn’t even make the evening news, ‘cos black kids go missing all the time. They’re saying maybe it’s a family thing, skipping on the rent, or maybe it’s gang related. Only the local cops care.

  “The thing is, Scout, no one’s safe – not when someone’s taking kids. We thought we were safe in ’85; but a month or two after Robert Tumey disappeared, a boy was taken from a schoolyard here in Vermillion City.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “It was Grace Street Elementary.”

  I breathed through my mouth as I walked home, not wanting to catch a whiff of that garbage truck.

  Chapter 26

  Day two of my fortnight of Mike-lessness, I went to see Shona Macready, attorney-at-law.

  As requested, I’d written a statement of how I intended to care for Eileen, and printed it on the Jurassic computer. Shona struggled to read the faint writing, eyes squinting through her Walmart reading glasses.

  Shona’s glossy skin pretty much ruled her out from being Scottish, and if that was not enough of a clue to her background there was her proud Afro, streaked with grey, and pictures on the wall of Alice Walker, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King. She was older t
han Eileen and wore brightly coloured layers – a cardigan on top of a jersey, a scarf floating above.

  “Sit down, honey,” she said, and I got to look around the office as she studied what I’d written. Behind her hung a tapestry of Africa, and a painting of an African woman, her neck strung with beads. Personally, I thought she had overdone the decor, but nothing about Shona was understated.

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The skin was darker there, as if she never had enough sleep.

  “Okay, Scout,” she said, getting my nickname straight away. “This is going to be a long haul. And expensive. You ready for that?”

  “I’m looking for a job.”

  “Good,” she sighed.

  I was trying to square the tired woman I saw before me with the walls that reflected a more radical history. Maybe she had lost the fire in her belly? I could see how living in this town would do that to a person. There was an auto repair shop next to her storefront office, and the ratchet of a power tool came through loud and clear.

  “I want to look after my mom,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do. But who’s gonna look after you? The thing is, Scout, you shouldn’t have had to look after Eileen, not while you were in high school. You should’ve asked for help.”

  “I can manage. I even graduated early.”

  “I’m impressed, and so’ll be the court. They’re gonna look at the teenage years that you devoted to your mom, and they’re gonna feel guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “These guys, they’re good at feeling guilty after the fact. They’re gonna wonder why no one from the school ever picked up on your mom’s illness. Didn’t they notice at parent/teacher conferences? You slipped through the net, Scout – which is something to be admired, I suppose. You grew up without a parent, running wild–“

  “I didn’t run wild.”

  “I know that, honey. But that’s what they’re gonna say. These social workers have a favourite word, and it’s ‘chaotic’. They’re gonna label your household ‘chaotic’, however well organised it is. A seventeen-year-old running the show? They ain’t gonna buy that. Fact is, you’re too young to look after your mom, but at seventeen you’re too old to be looked after by the county.”