Boy, 9, Missing

by Nic Joseph

  Delroy looked up in confusion, stopping himself midsentence. His eyes widened, and he looked back at the man in front of him.

  “Let’s continue this in a few minutes,” he said.

  I still didn’t speak.

  The man stood and turned, walking past me out of the room.

  “Yes, I could have called you, but it wouldn’t have done any good, you know,” Delroy said, standing up. Keith Delroy was fifty-eight years old, 225 pounds, and six feet tall, with weathered, dark-brown skin, and shoulder-length, peppered-gray dreadlocks. “I know you’re pissed, but you know I’m right.”

  “No, you’re not, Cap. You should’ve told me.”

  “Francis, we’re looking into it,” he said. “You know we are. I’m not taking this lightly. We have a few people on it—”

  “What did you think I was going to do?” I asked.

  “What? I didn’t think you—”

  “No, you had to. You had to think I was going to do something, like warn him, or what? Did you think I had something to do with it too?”

  “Too?”

  “Yes. Farr’s wife just showed up at my apartment with a fucking gun pointed at my face.”

  “Shit…”

  “Yeah. Shit. And maybe I would have been a little more prepared for that if you’d told me what was going on.”

  “We’ll get somebody on Mrs. Farr right away.”

  “No, don’t worry about it. We resolved it.”

  He frowned, walking around his desk. “Are you sure? Francis, we—”

  “No, it’s fine. How could you leave me out of this?”

  “I wasn’t trying to hide it from you. But you have to trust me. We’re looking into it, and we’re following every lead possible. He’s just a person of interest at this moment.”

  “Just a person of interest?”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “What the fuck is going on!”

  He scowled but didn’t say anything, looking quickly over my shoulder to see if anyone else in the station had heard me.

  “Look, the woman came to us three days ago and said her son was missing, and we started patrolling,” he said. “She also told us who she was and said she didn’t want any media attention ’cause they’d had ‘more than enough of that to last a lifetime,’ you know? Her words.”

  I nodded for him to go on.

  “She said Alex had been following them around for the past few weeks, just watching them.”

  “How did she know it was him?”

  “She got a good look at him, I guess. And there’s no one in this town who doesn’t know who Alex Scroll is. Especially someone married to Sam Farr.”

  “She said she talked to him?”

  “Yeah, I guess there was a confrontation a week ago, which we’re looking into,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Francis, there’s no point in you getting involved in all of this!” He looked over my shoulder again and leaned closer, lowering his voice. “You’ve got to trust me, okay? We’re doing everything we can to find that boy. Everything. But Alex didn’t have anything to do with this. That woman has it out for your family. That’s why she’s doing this. Okay? We got this.”

  I thought about the expression on “that woman’s” face as she stood in my living room, and I knew there was more to it than that. To be honest, Delroy’s outright dismissal of her worried me—he hadn’t seen the determination in her eyes, or the panic that was beneath it. I stepped back from him.

  “You don’t think it’s possible?” I asked. “Not even a small part of you?”

  I watched his face carefully. Delroy, and most of the Lansing Police Department, would probably do anything to protect my father, especially if Sam Farr was involved.

  “No,” he said softly without blinking. “You can’t be serious. Do you?”

  We stared at each other for a long moment. He was about to say something else when there was a knock on the door and a short, bulky cop walked in.

  “Cap, you should see this.”

  We left his office and followed the cop to a small television in the corner of the room.

  “They did it anyway,” the cop said, shaking his head.

  Delroy and I walked up to the television, and I heard him groan. It took me a moment to recognize the two individuals on the screen.

  When I did, I sucked in a deep breath, not sure I could handle what was coming next.

  It was Miranda Farr, sitting on a stool next to a thin, lanky man with his hands in his lap.

  He wore a light-brown suit jacket over a button-down shirt that cinched his neck. Miranda was staring at the camera, but the man beside her was staring at his hands, moving his lips slightly as he quickly tapped his thumb against each one of his fingers.

  Index, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie.

  Repeat.

  Sam Farr.

  I hadn’t seen him in years, since the day his trial ended. I’d avoided most of it while away at boarding school, but bad luck had brought me home to pack for college during the very week the trial ended. He looked the same—shaggy, oily hair curling around his ears and neck, bloodshot eyes, and, most noticeably, a twitchy nervousness that radiated from every part of his body. The only sign of age was the obvious rounding of his midsection; other than that, he looked exactly like the boy I’d last seen getting into his parents’ car on the day the verdict came in.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Delroy as I stared at the couple. “What does he mean ‘they did it anyway’?”

  “She said she wasn’t going to the press, that they couldn’t handle all of that attention again,” Delroy said, his jaw tightening in anger. “That she’d let us do our damned jobs.”

  I turned back to the screen, shocked that Miranda Farr had managed to go from my living room to being live on Channel 3 News in less than an hour.

  The off-camera reporter had just asked her a question, and Miranda nodded, her puffy brown eyes watery but her gaze resolute. “My son, Matthew, has been missing for three days,” she said, her voice shaky, “and the Lansing Police Department is not doing anything to find him. That’s because one of their own took him!”

  Both men beside me cursed.

  “Mrs. Farr!” the reporter exclaimed in a singsongy voice, barely able to mask her excitement. She sat across from the couple, one ankle tucked behind the other. She wore oversize, trendy animal-print glasses, and she tapped a pen furiously against her knee, even though she held nothing to write on. “That is a very serious accusation. Just what exactly are you saying?”

  The camera flashed back to Miranda Farr, who paused as she chose her next words. “I’m saying that Alex Scroll—the same man who has had it in for my husband for more than two decades—has kidnapped our son.” Her voice broke, but she straightened her shoulders, reached over to grasp her husband’s twitching hand, and stared directly into the camera. “And if nobody else in this town is going to do anything about it, you’d better believe me when I say we will.”

  Chapter Five

  Saturday, 10:42 a.m.

  As I walked out of the station, I glanced at my phone and saw that I had two text messages.

  Cam: The fuck? Call me.

  Amy: Leaving O’Hare.

  Amy’s text had come through more than half an hour ago, which meant she would be arriving at my apartment any moment now. I cursed, thinking about what she’d see when she got inside. The busted patio door, the glass. The lamp on the floor.

  Shit.

  I jumped in the car and sped home, dialing her cell phone on the way. It rang four times and went to voice mail. “Don’t do it,” she said in the message. “Just text me.”

  Sighing, I hung up and called Cam.

  “Hey, I just heard,” she said, skipping the pleasantries. “They can’t be se
rious.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but absolutely nothing but air came out.

  “Hey,” she said again, softer, and I could hear the concern. “Say something so I know you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m driving home from the police station. Amy just got here. She’s on her way to my place now.”

  “Did you go see Delroy?” Cam asked. “Can’t he do anything?”

  “Yeah, he’s looking into it,” I said. “Did you know anything about this?”

  She paused. “I heard a tip that Sam’s son was missing, but it wasn’t confirmed yet,” she said. “And definitely none of this about Alex. You know I would have told you if I had.”

  “I know,” I said. “I really don’t know what to do.”

  “You need to go see your dad.”

  “Well, I know that—”

  “And you need to talk to Amy.”

  “I’m going to—”

  “No. No more ‘going to.’ Seriously, Francis. When you get home, you have to tell her.”

  “I will,” I said. “Look, I’m going to need a couple of days off.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Someone will cover for you.”

  Neither one of us wanted to talk about the fact that we knew she would assign the story to someone else.

  I pulled up in front of my building and groaned when I saw Amy sitting on the front steps. “I gotta go,” I said into the phone.

  There were two suitcases by Amy’s feet. I slammed the door and walked over to her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.” She stood up. I’d seen her four months earlier during my last trip to New York, but she already looked older. A lot older. Her brown hair hung nearly to her waist. She wore a pair of burnt-red glasses and a dark-green peacoat, and she looked so…discerning. We stood there silently, shivering in the cold, trying to read each other. I had the feeling she was doing a better job than I was.

  I shouldn’t have been too surprised by her appearance. In what I can only imagine was a momentary lapse in teenage judgment, Amy had accepted my Facebook friend request about a year ago, and I’d been able to watch her journey toward adulthood from afar. I’d learned that instead of parties and booze, she spent her time supporting various human rights causes and volunteering to do things like clean beaches and build community gardens. Her passionate, public responses to social injustice both amazed and scared me—there was very little about Amy that was a kid anymore.

  After standing there for several seconds, I finally managed to speak. “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Where were you?”

  “I had to run out. Why didn’t you call me to pick you up?”

  “Would it have mattered?” she asked, and it wasn’t an accusation, just a question. “You weren’t here.” She grabbed her suitcases and turned to head up the stairs. I stepped forward to reach for them, and she shook her head. “I got it. Thanks.”

  She moved back when she reached the front door, watching me as I struggled to get the key in the lock. I felt clumsy, awkward. I finally opened it and let her inside, wondering how I would explain what had happened that morning.

  “See you up there,” Amy said, breezing past me toward the elevator before I could say anything else.

  I hesitated. I knew I should go with her, ride with her in the elevator to prepare her for what was upstairs, but in a second, she was gone, disappearing as the sliding doors closed between us. She knew I wouldn’t follow her. I turned and made my way to the stairwell, pulling myself up the three flights of stairs.

  “Daddy, why won’t you ride with us in the elevatuh?” Amy had asked me when she was six, gap-toothed and charming as all hell, her thumb glued to the down arrow in the elevator bank of a Queens parking garage.

  “Because the stairs are faster!” I’d said. “I’ll race you and your mom to the bottom, okay? Betcha I’ll make it first!” I could still hear her squeals of excitement as she raced into the elevator and jammed the buttons. When they’d emerged on the first floor, I was waiting for them, out of breath but ever the hero.

  “Tell me, what would you have done if I weren’t here?” Reba had whispered in my ear as Amy ran ahead of us. “Let my daughter ride down in an elevator by herself, or carried her through that piss-stained stairwell?”

  As I stepped onto the third floor, Amy was waiting for me next to my front door. When she saw me, she moved back, waiting for me to let her inside.

  “Ames, something happened this morning that I need to tell you about,” I said as I inserted the key into the door and carefully pushed it open. Even though I knew Miranda had left, I scanned the room quickly.

  “Okay,” she said, walking quickly past me and dragging her suitcases through the living room. “Can we talk later?”

  “Shit, Amy, wait,” I started, but she walked into the spare room and shut the door. She’d stayed in that room only once before, when she’d come to visit me when I’d first left New York. If she saw the busted glass by the patio door, she didn’t say anything about it.

  I moved through the apartment, checking behind doors and in closets, but there were no signs that anyone else had broken in.

  Grabbing my cell phone out of my pocket, I called the building supervisor about the patio door. After a string of expletives, he promised to be upstairs within the hour to take a look.

  I walked over to Amy’s door and knocked on it.

  “Later, okay?” she called out. “I just want to get settled.”

  I opened the door and stepped in, and she looked up in surprise.

  “Really?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  She was sitting on her bed with her phone in her hand, and she frowned, waiting for me to go on.

  “Someone broke in this morning.”

  She blinked, but she didn’t say anything, and I walked closer to the bed.

  “To my—” I cleared my throat. “To our apartment. Someone broke in.”

  Still no response.

  “Did you see the broken glass?”

  “No.”

  “When you walked in, right now, you didn’t see—”

  “No,” she said again. “Did you call the cops?”

  “Yeah, of course—”

  “Okay,” she said. She looked back down at her phone.

  “Are you kidding me? You can’t take it lightly, Ames.”

  “I’m not taking it lightly. But if you called the cops, what exactly do you expect me to do?”

  “I need to go back out. Maybe you can go to a coffee shop?”

  “I just got here, and now you’re trying to get me to leave?”

  “Just until I get back,” I said. “You could go stay with my friend Cam for a bit, actually. Let me just give her a call—”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m not going anywhere. Just lock the—”

  “It was locked the first time,” I said.

  “Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. I really do,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was being condescending on purpose, but I suddenly felt embarrassed. “But I’ll be okay.”

  “You can’t stay here with the patio door bust—”

  Before I could finish, someone banged loudly on the front door.

  “Who is it?” I called out as I went back into the living room.

  “Frank! I’m here about tha door!” It was the building manager, and I walked over to let him inside. He stood there holding a bunch of tools and stared past me toward the patio door. “You gotta be kiddin’ me!” he said, shaking his head. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Frank,” I said, stepping back. I turned to see Amy standing in the hallway.

  “See? You can go,” she said. “I’ll be f
ine.” She walked back in her room and closed the door.

  Frank smiled and gestured toward the shut door. “Oh, your little girl’s here, huh?”

  “Yeah, she just got in.”

  “Francis the pop, huh?” Frank said, patting me on the back hard enough to make me take a step forward. “Neva really pictured you as much of a dad.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  “Well, if you really need to go, no problem. I’ll look out for her for a while.”

  I glanced at Amy’s door and then back at Frank.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s no problem.”

  I hesitated for a moment but finally nodded. I walked over to the coffee table and shuffled through some old mail until I found a relatively blank envelope. Grabbing a pen, I turned it over and wrote the word “Emergency” along with Cam’s name and phone number. I walked back to Amy’s room and shoved the note under her door.

  I stood up and turned back to Frank. “Thanks a lot,” I said. “I really appreciate it.” I walked quickly to the door. I’d met Frank when I first moved back to Lansing; he’d jump off the balcony before he’d let anything happen to one of his tenants or their guests. But, of course, he couldn’t be there all day. I needed only a few more hours to figure out what the hell was going on with my father.

  Just a few hours, and then I’d come back, and we’d have time to catch up.

  To have dinner.

  To talk.

  I jumped into my car and headed to my father’s apartment. He lived a few blocks away from the Lansing News office, which caused Cam to hound me at least once a week to go visit him.

  “How can you drive by his apartment every day and not stop?” she’d asked. “It’s crazy, even for you, Francis.” I didn’t tell her that I deliberately drove an extra five minutes out of my way each day to ensure that I didn’t drive by his place.

  It was, to be fair, a remarkably ridiculous standoff, one that even I was surprised had gone on this long.

  In the eighteen months that I’d been back in Lansing, I hadn’t seen my mother at all, and I’d seen my father only once, completely by accident. I’d been in Lansing for about eight months and was checking out at a Target about ten minutes from home when I turned and saw him file into line, two people behind me.