Prodigal

by TA Moore

“Not Shay’s call,” Mac said. “Will you do it? If she won’t do this, I’ll have to ask for an order to exhume Sammy’s grandmother. Once I do that, even if they don’t let me do it, she’ll never cooperate with me again. My relationship with her has always been tenuous. As much as she needs me to find Sammy, she hates me just as much because I didn’t. You know that.”

  Before Boyd could answer, the door to the hearing—because they all knew that was what it really was—opened, and Nate stepped out. He posed in the doorway for a breath, still lean and fit for a man in his fifties, and then looked around in annoyance as he realized he had no audience. His gaze fell on Mac and Boyd, and he hitched his smile back up as he strode toward them.

  “Boyd,” he said as reached them. He cocked his head to the side, aggressively sympathetic, and let his smile linger. It was how he’d talked to them all as kids when Robbie got in trouble, his “Let’s get to the bottom of this” face. Somehow it always turned out Robbie was being mistreated. Nate had been a good lawyer. Or, now Boyd thought about it, maybe it just wasn’t that hard to confuse a ten-year-old. “I thought you’d run out on us there.”

  “Just trying to take his mind off it, Nate,” Mac said. He put his hand on Boyd’s shoulder and squeezed. “It’s the kid’s career on the line.”

  Nate sucked air between his teeth. “He should have thought about that before he got involved with ex-cons and bail bondsmen, shouldn’t he?” he said. “Not exactly the sort of tourism we want to bring to town. Robert’s opening a hotel out on the Daley Farm, not a halfway house.”

  “So I’m fired?” Boyd asked. He expected to feel… something. Relief, regret, anger. Instead he felt a lot of somethings, too many to pick just one. “That’s—”

  Nate held up his hand. “No, although I appreciate that you’re taking responsibility for what happened. We decided to give you another chance. You’ve been reinstated, Boyd. Congratulations.”

  That didn’t simplify Boyd’s jumble of emotions. “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  Nate mirrored Mac as he reached out and awkwardly patted Boyd on his free shoulder.

  “Just don’t waste it,” he said. “The Calloway case has ruined too many lives. Let the boy rest in peace, let the con artist go home, and let the rest of us get on with living, huh? Once your rep is back, come back in, and we’ll officially give you the good news.”

  He squeezed Boyd’s shoulder, gave Mac a brisk nod in parting, and left.

  “I’ll try,” Boyd told Mac grimly. He wasn’t ten now. Nate Fernfield couldn’t talk rings around him anymore. “But if it doesn’t work, I think I know who she might listen to.”

  THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD front page of the Dispatch was blown up to poster size and framed on the wall. Boyd tried to ignore it, but it was hard. The oversized headline drew his attention like a magnet.

  Was He His Brother’s Keeper?

  Boyd doubted he actually read the article when it first came out. He’d been eight and still sounded out really big words. It didn’t matter. Everyone in town knew what the article said, and eventually it trickled down to him.

  “The editor put that up,” Sullivan said apologetically as he came out of the small kitchen with coffee cups. “That was the Dispatch’s bestselling issue, just ahead of the time Gwen Daly took first place with her prize ram at the State Fair. It was my first front page. I guess it seemed like a good idea.”

  “They probably didn’t realize that anyone who was mentioned in it would ever be in here,” Boyd said dryly. “It’s nice of them to let you stay here when you’re in town, anyhow.”

  “The owner is my uncle,” Sullivan pointed out. He handed Boyd the unchipped cup and perched his hip on the arm of the chair opposite. “I haven’t tracked anything solid on Morgan yet, if that’s why you’re here. From what you said, it sounds like he was rehomed—”

  “What, like a dog?”

  “There would have probably been more oversight if he were,” Sullivan said. “I tracked down the social worker who handled his case originally. She’s retired to Florida. It wasn’t a case that stood out to her—Morgan was adolescent and angry, the abuse was physical and situational, the boyfriend was new and drunk, and the pieces all made sense—but once I sent her the file, she did remember something. In one of the supervised meetings, the mother—presumed mother—said that she should have left Morgan in St. Louis with her ex. Since ‘he was the one who wanted to take you on, and we both know why.’ That’s when Morgan told her to fuck off and the social worker ended the contact. The woman doesn’t sound like a great parent, but possibly she did save Morgan from worse than what he got. If he was Sammy, she might have saved his life.”

  As a kid Boyd had eavesdropped a lot. It was the only way to learn anything when everyone wanted to protect you or pretend you didn’t exist. He learned a lot of important stuff that way, like people only thought Mr. Hill was guilty because he liked to kiss other men, or that his dad wasn’t ever coming back, but it always left him hot-eared and uncomfortable.

  This felt the same. He wanted to know more, but it wasn’t his business.

  Sullivan took a drink from his coffee, winced as the heat caught his tongue, and pressed on, “I’ve made some inroads into tracking her down—”

  “That’s not what I called about,” Boyd blurted before the temptation to stay quiet won the day. “I mean, it’s not my business.”

  Sullivan raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to the side. “No offense, but I thought that’s what you wanted,” he said. “To find out who he was.”

  “I did. I do,” Boyd said. He rubbed his tender ear absently and turned down his mouth at the corners. “It just doesn’t feel right to know it first. Before him.”

  Sullivan laughed, a touch of bitterness to his voice, and looked down at his hands wrapped around the Dispatch mug.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I get that. It’s not easy sometimes. But if that’s not what you wanted to hear, what is?”

  The words caught in the back of Boyd’s throat. Shay was already angry at him because he’d talked to Sullivan. He’d see this as even more of a betrayal. It might be one he couldn’t forgive. Boyd was still pissed at Shay, but he didn’t want that.

  But if he had to, he would live with it.

  “Morgan’s met Mrs. Calloway,” he said.

  “And?” Sullivan asked with interest. He leaned forward, elbow braced on his knee, and his fingers twitched around his cup as though he needed a pen and paper for notes. “Did he remember anything?”

  “I don’t know. Mac said that he’s given him more information,” Boyd said. “Mrs. Calloway believes that he’s Sammy, but she won’t give Mac a DNA sample.”

  Sullivan raised his eyebrows. “And you think I can…?”

  “Talk her into it,” Boyd said. “Mac asked me, but when I went to the house, Mrs. Calloway wouldn’t even open the door.”

  That had stung more than he expected. Even when she hated the sight of him, alive and here, within his mom’s reach, she always answered the door, the same as she had every time he’d come to call for Sammy.

  “I can see that,” Sullivan said. “When I interviewed her for Missing, I asked her if it would be a relief, in a way, to just have a grave to visit. She said no, that the day she found out Sammy was dead, she’d kill herself.”

  Boyd flinched in surprise at the blunt statement. “That wasn’t in the book,” he said.

  Sullivan looked surprised. “You read it?”

  “Sure,” Boyd said. “Everyone in town did, in case it was their turn to be thrown to the wolves as the bad guy.”

  There was a pause, and then Sullivan sat back. He glanced over his shoulder at the framed print and twisted his mouth into a rueful smile.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “And I didn’t put it in the book. I didn’t think Shay needed to see that. I’ve already done enough to him, right?”

  Boyd swallowed the contemptuous snort that threatened to escape his throat. “I don’t see how that explains….”r />
  “C’mon, man,” Sullivan said. “Donna’s finally got her happy ending, even if it isn’t likely. She’s got Sammy back. Why would she want to give someone, especially Mac, a chance to take that away? A good lie feels better than a bad truth, at least for a while. It’s why we tell our children fairy tales.”

  “You going to put that in your next book?” Boyd asked.

  Sullivan pursed his lips and raised his cup in a toast. “I might.”

  He probably should. It sounded good, and it made Donna’s sudden U-turn make sense. Boyd had put up ten grand he didn’t have to buy more time with Morgan—or Sammy—so why did it surprise him that Donna would stonewall Mac to get her chance?

  “Do you think you can talk to her?” he asked. “Make her see that we have to know.”

  Sullivan looked thoughtful. “Does she, though?” he asked. “I want to know. You want to know. But why does Donna?”

  Boyd looked down at his hands and wrapped them around the cup to give them something to do.

  “I don’t know.” He leaned down and set the coffee on the floor next to his feet. “But I think Morgan needs to know. He deserves to know.”

  “That might work,” Sullivan said. “But why should I? If I’m the dick you all think?”

  Boyd stared at him for a second. In his hoodie and jeans, dark hair scruffy and spiked, although maybe farther back from his temples, he didn’t look that old. Back during the first investigation, in Boyd’s head, he was just another adult. But he’d been a wet-behind-the-ears reporter with his first big story. He’d probably been younger than Boyd’s mom, and maybe not that much older than Shay.

  Fifteen years had been a long time to Boyd, but maybe not when you looked back.

  “Shay needs to know too,” he said, “even if he doesn’t think he does. And you do owe him.”

  “I did my job.”

  “Do you think that made him feel any better?”

  Sullivan slowly shook his head. He worked his hands around his coffee cup, all knuckles and long fingers.

  “She’s already agreed to talk to me tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “SHE KEPT everything in here just like it was,” Shay said. He hovered in the doorway, booted feet not quite over the threshold, and folded his arms over his chest. The flinty anger that usually hardened his eyes had faded as he looked around the room and revealed something haunted and gentle underneath. “If Sammy left it on the floor, it stayed on the floor. He left most of his stuff on the floor.”

  “No kidding,” Morgan said dryly as he stepped over a tangled pair of kid-sized jeans.

  When they hit the floor, the denim must have been crusted with mud, but now it had desiccated down to dirt scabs and faded coffee-colored stains worked into the fibers. There was a single sock, flat and neglected in the middle of the floor, a handful of toy cars scattered like landmines, and a dusty yellow walkie-talkie propped in the window. Morgan didn’t need to ask what kid had the mate.

  It was just one more way that he was nothing like Sammy. Back in the B and B, he had unpacked his clothes and laid them out with regimented neatness in the drawers. Drawer. His hoodie was folded and laid on top of the dresser, and when he wasn’t wearing them, his boots were lined up under it with the laces tucked inside.

  He’d always been able to grab everything he needed and get his boots on before his latest set of parents kicked him out of the house.

  “Why—”

  Shay shrugged and scratched his elbow. “I don’t know,” he said. “At first we had more important things to do—search parties to join, posters to put up. Then somehow it went from something we’d clean up one day to something we’d never touch. I guess it makes her feel like not so much time has passed, that it’s still just three weeks, not three years. Five years. Fifteen.”

  The bed wasn’t made, Batman sheets twisted into a rope and shoved against the wall, and there was the dry, curled corner of a comic book just visible where it had been shoved under the pillow.

  “Why show me this?” Morgan asked.

  Shay glanced over his shoulder. His profile was all sharp bones and straight lines, even with the black scab of stitches that held his eyebrow together. It made Morgan feel thick and lumpy, all bad history and old breaks. He knew he was hot—there was plenty of evidence of that—but… put Boyd and Shay together, and they’d look like they belonged.

  “You’re supposed to be Sammy,” he said quietly. “Start playing the part. He liked Batman, the bear was called Fred the Ted, and he still slept with him sometimes, and here.”

  He leaned into the room and pulled a grubby-fingerprinted report from the corkboard over the desk. Looped handwriting was scrawled over the paper, mostly on the lines, and a big green A was circled at the top.

  “‘Great work, kid,’” Shay read out. He tossed the pages to Morgan and finished the line from memory. “‘Hard work pays off. D.’”

  “Deacon Hill?” Morgan asked.

  “He was great with you, Mom said. Really connected.” Shay rubbed his thumb over his eyebrow and pressed down on the scabs. “I was pissed off because my teachers thought I was dumb as shit. They weren’t wrong, but….”

  “Him,” Morgan said.

  “What?”

  “He was good with Sammy, not me,” Morgan said. “I never got an A in my life.”

  “You got a life, though,” Shay said. “I figure Sammy would swap that report for one of those. Just give her something. It won’t need to be much. Then tell Mac that you’ve remembered Deacon Hill, or whatever. Whatever he’ll buy.”

  “You’re sure he did it?”

  Shay shrugged. “Someone had to,” he said. “I know I didn’t, and everyone who doesn’t think it was me thinks it was him.”

  Downstairs the oven slammed, and Donna’s voice filtered up through the floor along with the smell of burned meat. “I’m ordering pizza, boys,” she said. “What do you want?”

  For a second, Morgan’s mind went so blank it echoed.

  “Cheese, nothing else,” Shay stepped in with his cue. Then he pitched his voice to carry down the stairs. “Hawaiian for me, Mom.”

  Morgan hesitated. Guilt tasted like dust and matches against the roof of his mouth, but he forced the words out past it. The fear of what would happen if he didn’t—of locked doors and shared quarters and the press of bodies around him—pushed it through. He didn’t think he’d survive another stint behind bars. The first had scared him as straight as he could survive.

  “Plain cheese,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  Donna laughed in relief before she caught herself. “It won’t be long. The Pie Place closed a few years after… a few years ago… but there’s a Domino’s in town now.”

  Shit.

  Morgan sat down on the rumpled bed, the old report that had pride of place on the wall for fifteen years dangling between his knees, and shook his head.

  “Look, I know you want someone to pay for what happened to your brother,” he said. “But isn’t there some other way to do this? Can your mom really handle it if she thinks she’s got Sammy back and then never sees him again when I skip town? Or worse… when she finds out we all lied to her after Sammy turns up one day?”

  Shay looked away from Morgan and stared at the walkie-talkie by the window. He clenched his jaw as he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe I’ll wire you money and you can call her once a year, tell her you’re okay, and that’ll be enough for her to live on. Or it won’t. What I know is that she can’t handle it now, and neither can I. You know why my marriage broke up?”

  “You know I don’t care?” Morgan checked.

  The tips of Shay’s ears went so red it looked as though someone had pinched them, but he pushed on.

  “You want a reason to do this? Then you listen,” he said roughly. “I loved Sarah, and she loved me. People warned her off, told her all the old theories, but she didn’t care. Until one day she did. You see,
she wanted kids, and she didn’t want them with me—not because she thought I’d done it, but just in case. Just in case I’d murdered my little brother and hidden him somewhere.”

  The faded horror in Shay’s voice was somehow more vulnerable than a denial would have been. That “just in case” felt like something Shay had kept picked open over the years. Until he just got used to the raw meat of it.

  Morgan shifted uncomfortably on the bed. The last thing he wanted was a glimpse at the Shay who wasn’t just an asshole with a perfect profile. One thing should stay simple.

  “That sounds fucked-up,” he said. “But she was just cracked.”

  “It wasn’t just her,” Shay said. “The whole damn town looks at me and thinks, Just in case before they don’t ask me to fix a car or have a drink. It’s not just me and Mom either. Boyd has spent his whole life guilty that he wasn’t murdered in Sammy’s place. You think I didn’t want to bring my brother home? You think I don’t want to know what happened to him. I do, but I’m never going to get those answers. So I’ll make my own, and I can live with that.”

  Morgan looked at his hands. He’d rolled the old report into a tight tube, and he let it unfurl again.

  “Will Boyd be able to?” he asked.

  “That won’t be your problem.”

  Shay stepped away from the door and headed downstairs. Left to himself, Morgan took one last look around the messy little shrine and waited. Just in case.

  Nothing. It was just some kid’s room. He didn’t remember being tucked in under Batman sheets or writing some report on—he glanced at the now-curled paper—how elections worked. Or he did, but Batman sold a lot of sheets, and everyone did reports at school. There was nothing distinctly Sammy about any of it.

  “Sorry, kid,” Morgan muttered as he got up off the bed. He pinned the report back in place on the brittle corkboard next to a sun-faded picture of Sammy and a lanky teenager Morgan assumed was Shay. “I didn’t mean to get in your space.”

  He left the room to the ghost of the memory that clung to it and headed downstairs. Time to remember something useful for Mac.