He knew that all too well. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about I step out into the hall? You can even lock the door behind you. Then you go down to my room, see what’s on my computer screen, and come back out and tell me. Would that be okay?”
She hesitated, then said, “Okay. Out you go.”
Boone stepped into the hall and she closed the door behind her. He heard the deadbolt engage with a loud clack. He waited. He heard a game show playing in her apartment. The studio audience let out a collective groan as someone just missed out on winning a new washer and dryer. If only she’d chosen a seven instead of a nine. A minute later the deadbolt disengaged and Mrs. Lang opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
“It looks like an e-mail,” she said. “From someone named Abby. She was responding to one from you.”
“Did you read them?”
“Wasn’t I supposed to?” She sounded defensive.
“Yeah, sure, that’s what I asked you to do.”
“Weird emails.”
“Yes, well, uh, about what the computer was saying?”
“Yeah, that’s weird, too. It was saying the same two letters over and over.”
“Letters?”
“Yeah, it kept saying the letters H and N again and again.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t saying something else?” Boone asked.
“Like what?”
“Like maybe ‘Hey Jen’ or something?”
“No, it was letters. H and N.”
“How do you know?”
“Because every time it said one of the letters, like H, then one of the H’s would glow brighter than all the other letters for a second. Same thing with the N’s. But a different one every time. Random-like. H, then N, then a different H, then a different N, over and over. Why’s it doing that?”
“I have no idea, Mrs. Lang.”
“Something’s wrong with your computer, I think.”
“I think so, too.”
“Damn thing woke me up at two thirty last night.”
“I know. Like I said, I’m sorry about that.”
“Yeah, well, you should get that thing fixed.” She shook her head and added under her breath, “Don’t know why you have it in the first place if you can’t see it.”
She left a cloud of smoke behind as she turned and went back into her apartment.
“Thanks for your help,” Boone said as the door closed.
Not “Hey Jen,” but H, N? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Boone knew for certain now that he wasn’t crazy. Well, he was a little nutty, given his agoraphobia, but he wasn’t rubber-room crazy. At least not yet. He knew for sure that something else was behind all this stuff. Because Boone knew very little about computers. He simply could not have programmed his computer to repeat the letters H and N over and over, nor could he have made the letters glow brighter as their names were spoken. Not only didn’t he have the technical computer skills to do something like that, he simply couldn’t see well enough to do it.
Boone went back into his apartment feeling both relieved and anxious. He was glad to prove that he wasn’t haunting himself. He was distressed to have proven that something else was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AFTER REALIZING WITH certainty that the blond boy she had been drawing—and perhaps having hallucinations of—was not, in fact, her little Henry, Alice sat for a while in the park, grieving just a little. It was irrational, she knew, but she felt the loss of her unborn son all over again, not as acutely as she had three years ago, but she felt it nonetheless. After giving herself time to process that the boy wasn’t Henry in some spirit form, she opened her sketch pad to the detailed drawing she’d done of the little boy—while thinking she was sketching a handsome, albeit chubby, man—and studied it. The face was definitely familiar. She knew beyond doubt that she’d seen it before but for the life of her she couldn’t remember where or when.
Perhaps she once knew him. Or maybe he was famous. Or maybe she merely passed him on the street one day and, without her realizing it at the time, his face had taken root somewhere in her mind. Wherever she’d seen him, though, why was he appearing in her drawings? And in her bathroom? And hanging outside her fifth-floor apartment? And why now?
What about “HN”? Even if they didn’t stand for Henry Norville, could they have been the boy’s initials?
A chilling thought suddenly came to her. Maybe she’d seen his face on a missing child poster. Maybe he was a runaway or an abducted child with the initials HN and something terrible had happened to him; maybe he was dead now and his spirit had, for some reason she could not fathom, appeared to her. Maybe he didn’t want his body left undiscovered. Maybe it lay in a ditch or shallow grave somewhere and his spirit was guiding her—but why her?—to its location. Or…
Alice’s heart skipped a beat. What if the boy wasn’t dead? What if, wherever he was, he was alive but in terrible danger? What if he needed help? Alice couldn’t imagine why the boy had chosen to appear to her. Maybe he indeed knew her somehow and thought of her in his time of desperate need, wherever he was. Or maybe his spiritual essence went looking for whatever help it could find and Alice’s mind was the most receptive one it came across in its random travels. Whatever had brought the boy to her, to her of all people, Alice knew she couldn’t turn away from him. If there was a chance he was in danger, she had to try to help. Besides, the boy wasn’t giving her a choice. He seemed to have no plans to leave her alone. Somehow she would have to get to the bottom of this or he’d drive her crazy.
BACK IN HER apartment, Alice entered her studio, saw the big, empty, white canvas on the easel, and gave it the finger. She sat down and opened the laptop computer she kept on one side of her big drawing table. The computer’s screen was highly reflective and in its dark surface she could see the circles under her eyes. The blond boy was taking his toll on her. She’d barely slept last night and the mystery was causing her more than a little anxiety.
She put the sketch of the boy’s face next to the laptop, then booted up the computer. She had the detailed sketch and the initials HN to work with. She planned to search for stories about missing children with those initials. She could add his hair color, approximate age, and approximate height. She also figured that, if he went missing, perhaps he was wearing the blue Welcome Back Kotter retro T-shirt at the time, with tan shorts and sneakers, and this bit of information, being so specific, might lead her directly to the missing boy.
It didn’t. She started with very specific searches, using every scrap of detail she had, and came up empty. Gradually, she made the searches more generic until she was looking only for stories about missing boys with blond hair. Along the way, she tried every combination of details she could imagine and still got nowhere. She saw a heart-achingly depressing number of stories about children who had simply disappeared from the lives of the people who loved them. Every time a photograph was included in the story, she checked it against her sketch, regardless of what his initials were or what the boy had been wearing when he went missing. No matches.
“Come on, kiddo,” she said. “Who the heck are you?”
She tried more searches and met with more failure.
“You aren’t making this easy on me. You want my help, throw me a bone here.”
She racked her brain but couldn’t think of single search she hadn’t tried that might bear fruit.
She blew out a breath in frustration. “Come on, you little bastard, just appear to me, for God’s sake. Show your little face. You weren’t afraid to peep in my windows or watch me in the shower. Just materialize. I promise I won’t freak out.”
She wasn’t sure she could actually keep that promise, but if it meant getting to the bottom of this, she’d do her best.
She waited. The boy didn’t appear out of thin air. Nor did he come walking into the room. He didn’t show. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. When she opened her eyes again, she saw her tired reflection st
aring back at her from her shiny black screen. The computer had gone to sleep and Alice was a bit jealous. She could use a nap. She might as well take one, seeing as her Internet searches were getting her nowhere. She was out of ideas.
She was about to close the laptop when something caught her eye. In the dark mirrored surface, she saw the big white canvas on the easel behind her. Only it wasn’t as blank as it had been when she sat down. On its otherwise pristine surface, someone had scrawled two letters in red paint. The same letters as those the boy had drawn on the foggy shower glass last night. The letters H and N, though, just like before, the N was backward, the way kids sometimes write it, with the middle line running from lower left to upper right instead of the correct way.
Someone—and Alice had a pretty good idea who—had painted those letters while Alice had been sitting right there, just six feet away. Slowly she turned, expecting, hoping, dreading, to see the boy standing behind her. But he wasn’t there. The letters were, though. Two letters, crudely drawn, as though they’d been finger-painted. In fact, Alice thought she could see evidence of fingerprints in some of the strokes.
Interestingly, it wasn’t the appearance of the letters that most surprised Alice, though their appearance alone would have sent the average person screaming from the room. But Alice was getting used to such things. No, what surprised her were the letters themselves. They weren’t H and a backward N, like she thought. In reverse—like from the other side of a clear surface like her shower door, or in the mirrored surface of her laptop’s screen—they looked like that. But now she could see that the boy hadn’t written the N backward at all. She’d simply seen it backward. Viewed from the same perspective from which it was written, as she was seeing it now, it was a properly formed N. Also, when viewed from the proper perspective, the N was the first letter, not the second. So the initials, or whatever they stood for, read “NH,” not “HN.”
“Thanks for the bone, kid,” she said.
Alice actually smiled. Then she promptly checked every inch of the apartment to make sure she was alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NATHAN HAD RUN out of ideas. He’d called or visited every person whose name was on his list, just like he’d done a year ago, and the year before that, and the year before that. He’d started by phoning those who lived out of state, unfortunately without learning anything new, before visiting the two Connecticut residents on the list—two people with whom Jeremy had been friends and who might conceivably have had some idea where he might have gone camping that horrible weekend four years ago. Jeff Simmons, who was in Fairfield, only an hour’s drive from West Hartford, had been no help. Neither had the last person on Nathan’s list, Tad O’Connor, who lived only forty minutes from Simmons. O’Connor had been friendly and polite but was no more able to provide new information than Simmons had been.
So after striking out with O’Connor, Nathan drove home and called the Connecticut State Police. He took a worn business card from his wallet, dialed the number on it, and asked to speak with Lieutenant Lardner, who used to be both Sergeant Lardner and the detective in charge of Jeremy’s case. He’d since been promoted, which left Nathan wondering who was minding the store in the case of his missing son. When Lardner came on the line, Nathan exchanged greetings, then asked whether there had been any developments in the case.
“Mr. Zeltner,” Lardner said, and Nathan heard the effort the cop was putting forth to inject patience into those two words, “I promised you I would call the moment we heard anything new and potentially helpful.”
“I know, Detective,” Nathan said, “I remember. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately and I thought that maybe…I don’t know…something might have changed. That maybe something had happened that changed things.”
Lardner waited as though Nathan might tell him why he thought something might have changed, but Nathan had no intention of telling him about his dreams. He knew he’d annoyed the cops enough over the last few years to be labeled a pest; he didn’t want to be labeled a crackpot, too. After a moment, Lardner said, “Nothing’s changed, Mr. Zeltner. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, but there have been no new developments.”
“You’re still working on the case, though, right?”
After an almost—almost—unnoticeable hesitation, Lardner said, “Of course we are. We haven’t forgotten Jeremy. We continue to take every reasonable step to find out what happened to your son.”
“I see. And what does that mean? ‘Every reasonable step’?”
A sigh drifted over the phone line. “It means we are trying, Mr. Zeltner, but there’s only so much we can do. We still have posters with his face on them out there. They’re hanging in rest stops and post offices and even some supermarkets. You’ve probably seen them. And we watch the wires to see if any word of Jeremy appears in communications with other law-enforcement departments or agencies. Now and then I make phone calls when I can think of one to make that might be helpful. So you see, we’re still trying.”
“But?”
A long pause this time. “But unless and until we learn something new, there’s not much else we can do. I’m sorry.”
“I see.”
“Wait. I don’t think you do. We are not giving up on Jeremy, Mr. Zeltner. We are not. We’re simply going to need some help if we’re going to find him.”
“Okay,” Nathan said. “Help, fine. So what should I do?”
When Lardner spoke again, the forced patience in his voice had been replaced with genuine kindness. “You should try your best to live your life, Mr. Zeltner. To move on.”
Nathan wanted to shout things no old man had any business shouting at anyone, much less a policeman. “Move on?”
“I’m not saying you should forget about Jeremy,” the cop said quickly, “but you should try to go on with your life as best you can. I’m sure Jeremy would want that.”
Nathan was silent for a moment.
“Do you think he’s dead, Lieutenant Lardner?”
Silence.
“Do you think he’s dead?” Nathan asked again.
Lardner sucked in a breath. “I think it’s possible he’s dead. Four years is a long time. It’s also possible, though, that he simply chose not to come home for whatever reason. You probably don’t want to hear that, either, but it happens sometimes. Either way, you have to prepare yourself for the idea that Jeremy might not be coming back.”
Nathan said nothing and Lardner closed by adding that he’d certainly let Nathan know if there were any new developments in the case. Nathan was tempted to hum along to the familiar tune.
He hung up. He looked at the clock above the TV and was thankful again that it wasn’t ticking.
Nathan was tired of being alone. Maggie was gone. Jeremy was gone. Burt next door was all Nathan had, but Burt wasn’t all that much—no offense, Burt—certainly not enough to rub even the smallest bit of salve on Nathan’s wounds. He liked Burt, but he also resented him. He could hear through the wall that separated their apartments sometimes, could hear when one of Burt’s sons had come to visit. The apartment was filled with conversation and laughter, filled with the sounds that people make when they care about each other. Nathan had no one left in his life about whom he cared like that, and there was no one who cared about him, not like that.
So if there was even the slimmest chance that Jeremy was out there somewhere and he needed help to come home, then Nathan was going to find him. And when he did, he’d find his own home again. Because this apartment wasn’t his home. Neither was his empty vacation house. No, his home would be where someone cared about him, and where he cared about someone. That was a home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BOONE SAT AT his kitchen table nursing a Beck’s beer. Talk radio played in the background. He had pressed the channel up button several times to tune the radio to a random station. He did that sometimes to bring variety to the background chatter of his life. At the moment, a preacher on a religious station
was warning about greed and lust and other sins that he was almost certainly guilty of himself when he wasn’t at the microphone—or maybe even when he was.
“Hell is the place for you, if that is the way you want to live your life. But if you want to turn away from the Devil, just say no to the Devil, then God will be at your side to help you. God will be your advisor, your counselor. He’ll be your big brother and your best friend. He’ll hold your hand, keep you strong. The Devil will call to you, my friend, never forget that. He will call to you. He will lie and make promises he won’t keep. And when his empty promises fail to deceive you, when they fail to turn you from God, the Devil will turn to threats…”
Boone nearly changed the station, but he was barely listening anyway. He was thinking about the pictures he’d found on the floor of the living room. And about the H and N that had been glowing intermittently on his screen as Robert said the name of each letter, over and over, until Boone had finally walked in and shut him up with a press of the mute button. Now, on his second bottle of Beck’s, Boone had an epiphany. He stood, bottle in hand, and returned to the computer in his bedroom.
“Okay, Robert,” he said, “let’s see what you can find for me.”
He gave the verbal command to open Google, then told Robert to search the Internet for the terms “old man” and “no face” and “mountain” and “H” and “N.” The first several results were for the Old Man of the Mountain, which, for decades, was the official symbol of the state of New Hampshire. Having grown up around Boston, Massachusetts, maybe an hour from New Hampshire’s border, Boone was familiar with the Old Man of the Mountain. Located in Franconia Notch State Park, the Old Man of the Mountain was a series of five granite outcroppings and ledges over a thousand feet up the side of a mountain. These formations, only about forty feet high together, when viewed from a certain angle looked remarkably like the profile of a craggy face gazing out over the mountains around it. Boone couldn’t see the photo of the “face” that he was certain would be on the screen before him, but he didn’t need to. He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. Long before he lost most of his sight, he had seen the famous face in person several times—its prominent brow, strong nose, and sharp, jutting jaw—and to him, it always looked like the face of one of the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots he played with as a kid. He’d also seen the famous profile on nearly every New Hampshire tourist brochure, highway marker, and official state document, and many, many other things New Hampshire–related.
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