THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BILLY DAWBER

by D. A. McGuire

Yeah, that’s me—Death Kid. Say it. Shout it!”

They were black and tireless, rolling up and down in the currents. Fresh chop broke against them, and a white foam fell over the dark undulating shapes, moving toward the bridge. The lights of the canal shone off them as they emerged from the water, sparkling briefly until they disappeared back under. There were at least six, maybe seven, maybe more. From the rocky edge of the canal it was hard to see exactly how many...

I woke with a start and a sharp intake of breath like a gasp. The guy on the other side of the room laughed.

“Just a dream,” I whispered, catching my breath.

“Some dream,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I’ve had it a few times this week,” I said, still remembering what I’d seen. I rolled over and sat up. “There are these things swimming in the canal. I don’t know what they are.”

“Swimming?” He only pretended interest; most of his attention was on the book in his lap, a notebook to one side, a calculator balanced on his knee. He was also drawing something in the margin of his notebook. I could just make out a black shape, a series of lines.

“Yeah, couple of nights in a row. Like ... plesiosaurs or...”

“Sea monsters.” He looked up at me, amusement in his dark eyes. Billy Dawber, my new roommate. We were foster kids together at the Wenlows’. “Loch Ness.”

“Yeah, maybe something like that, moving up the canal toward the bridge, but at night. And the bridge—the train bridge—it’s always down. They can’t pass under; they’re too big. Then it ends.” I looked over at Billy. He had gone back to his homework. Pre-calculus. The kid was a nut for math. He was a strange one, for sure, so into books, math, school. He studied and worked so hard, you’d think he was after a damn scholarship.

“It’s just a dream,” I said, lying back on the cot, hands under my head, eyes on the rafters overhead. Our room was nice enough, in a rustic sort of way, tucked up over the garage of a family who took in too many kids at once. But the state was short on good foster homes for teenage boys so concessions were made.

As wards of the state, so as long as we kept up our grade point averages we were guaranteed a slot in any of the state’s public universities. But, that was almost three years off.

“I think I just got it on my mind,” I heard myself saying. “I lived in Manamesset, you know, and that’s where the canal is. I love the canal. Lots of nice trails out there, through the bogs and marsh. And the canal road. You can rollerblade there and nobody bothers you.”

“Plesiosaurs in the canal.” He half laughed.

I rolled over, ignoring him, turned up the music on my mp3 player, and closed my eyes.

I would never see Billy Dawber alive again.

* * * *

I slammed my locker door hard, pretending not to see the teacher standing on the other side. I had things to do, was already late for class, hadn’t eaten since last night. I was in no mood for this again. Billy Dawber wasn’t my responsibility, never had been. He was just a kid I had roomed with for about a month, an earnest, studious, strange kid in the foster care system. We had never clicked, never bonded, never anything.

Yet there she was, Miss Emily Strangis, Standard Chemistry Grade 10, looking at me like a child lost in the woods. “Herbie, Dr. Morgans wants to talk to you,” she was saying. “Really, you need to go speak with him. About Billy.”

Why did they care, I wondered. About Billy, that is. He had been a runaway before, probably was a runaway again. In the short, half dozen conversations I’d had with Billy, I had at least gotten that much from him. He hated his life. He hated living in foster home after foster home. He hated dragging his belongings from one crummy house to the next, settling into a new school, meeting new kids, meeting new teachers, always having to accommodate himself to a new situation. I’d been in only one foster home, had only one set of foster parents, had had to move into only one new school, which was one town over from where I’d spent most of my life.

“Miss Strangis,” I began, looking into her pale blue eyes. “I’m late for class.”

“Herbie,” she said with strained patience, “you can miss class for this. Billy Dawber has been gone for five days. Dr. Morgans and I and all the staff are trying to help the police—”

“Find a missing kid who’s probably just a runaway?” I said, interrupting her, which was damn easy to do. She was so polite, so young, so naive. I sighed. “He’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t know where he is, and honestly—” I shrugged. “—I don’t care.”

Her whole face kind of dropped at that. It was disappointment, I guess.

“Now can you write me a pass? I’m late for geometry class.”

* * * *

“So where did Dawber go?” he asked, sliding into the seat opposite me.

I just looked at him, continuing to munch quietly and slowly on my carrot stick. I’d answer when and if I felt like. Another kid joined him, then two more.

I decided I felt like answering, “Beats me.”

He leaned across the cafeteria table toward me, drumming his fingers on its surface about two inches from the barely edible tuna fish sandwich that Mrs. Wenlow had made for me that morning.

“They say,” he began, peering at me through the thick mane of greasy hair that covered his eyes, “that you’re like a mystery solver or something. A kid detective. In fact—” He looked at his pals, all of them grinning, smiling, watching. “—some of them at your old school even had a name for you. They called you Death Kid.”

I stuffed another carrot stick in my mouth. “Yeah, some did.”

“They even said—” He leaned closer toward me. “—that someone tried to kill you once. Broke both your arms and tried to drown you.”

I just kept munching as I said, “Yeah, someone did.”

They all broke into laughter at that, two of them high-fiving each other. Obviously they believed none of it, but I didn’t care, not even when Mr. Greasy-Hair-in-His-Eyes swiped half my tuna fish sandwich, pushing it into his mouth as he laughed and walked off with his friends.

* * * *

“You have a certain reputation, Herbert,” the dean of students said to me as he sat back in his swivel chair. I was on the other side of the desk, sitting forward, hands on my knees.

After receiving summonses all day to come see him, I gave in when a senior girl, one of those perpetually cheerful blondes who does every sport and activity a high school has to offer, appeared in the doorway of my last class, announcing: “If Herbert Sawyer, Jr., is in this class, Dr. Morgans wants to see him.” Of course Herbert Sawyer, Jr., was in that class, and I finally had no choice but to follow this female model of peppiness to Dr. Morgans’s office.

“A reputation for—now correct me if I am wrong, Herbert—but for helping the local police solve certain crimes?”

He looked up over his desk at me in utter disbelief. Well, why shouldn’t he? And anyhow, what had that to do with Billy Dawber? So I had helped the police out a few times—okay, more than a few times. I just put that down to damn bad luck. I’d been in the wrong place the wrong time too many times to number and right now I wanted nothing more than to be allowed to crawl back to English class and listen to Mr. Wainstrum discuss themes of guilt and redemption in The Scarlet Letter.

“Well, Herbert?” He was waiting.

“Yeah, once or twice.” I shrugged.

“More than once or twice, Herbert,” he said, leaning over the desk toward me, almost accusingly. “You have a history of becoming involved in situations that I find quite alarming. Where were your parents in all of this?”

Now I was aggravated. He should have known this about me. It was obvious he had done some research on me. Hadn’t it said all this in my folder?

“My father is dead, sir,” I said dryly, “and my mother is currently in a psychiatric institution, but before she was, she was just as perplexed about me as you seem to be right now.”

I suppose the complexity of that sentence—and the fact that I had uttered it—kind of caught him off guard because he just stared at me a moment with his mouth hanging open. Get over it, I wanted to tell him. Just ask your questions and let me get back to class.

“Well, be that as it may—” He needed to catch his breath. “—I—the reason I called you here is to ask if you can shed any light, Herbert—” He started to find his pace. “—any light at all on your friend Billy Dawber. The police have reported him as a runaway, and we certainly want to help the police if we can. Don’t we?”

Okay, he was pulling himself together, but a certain part of him was still mystified. There I sat in my flannel shirt, scuffed-up jeans, and leather jacket, with my spiky hair, which had been magenta and black until a few days ago. Now my hair was a kind of off black with reddish brown roots. Anyhow, I just didn’t look the picture of a teenaged boy who helps out the police in his free time.

“Billy wasn’t my friend, and I don’t know where he is,” I said.

“Herbert—” he leaned over his desk, hands clasped together, arms out straight toward me. It was a gesture of appeal, of solidarity. “Did Billy ever talk to you about wanting to get away, about wanting to leave Falmouth, or the Wenlows? Did he talk to you about family or friends, or perhaps a girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

“We are very concerned for Billy’s welfare. According to what the police have told us, he’s done this before, just disappeared, and on at least one occasion, he stole a car. He was halfway home before the police pulled him over.” A shake of his head, a sound of measured disgust, then: “But this time—”

I cut him off: “This time he left all his stuff. Yeah, I know. Look, the cops have already talked to me, and the Wenlows and all the other kids at the house. We don’t know where he is or why he left. I don’t know anything.” I emphasized that last word in my best jaded-teenager voice, hoping he got the message.

“You last spoke to him...”

I sighed. I had been all through this before twice already. It was the same old story. “Saturday morning, yeah. He was doing math homework. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, he was gone. I went and did some work for a friend; I got back at dinnertime. Billy was still gone. Saturday night he never came home. I watched TV, listened to music, did homework. I went online a while using the Wenlows’ computer. Sunday Billy was still gone. Sunday evening, still gone. Monday morning still gone. Tuesday, Wednesday, and this is Thursday, still gone.”

“Herbert, I detect a certain attitude in you that I really don’t appreciate. We’re trying to find Billy and yet you seem to regard this with a certain ... detached amusement.”

I just looked at him.

Dr. Morgans didn’t know what to say then. Taking a pad of paper off the side of his desk, he examined it briefly, then looked back at me.

“You said you went ‘online.’ What about Billy? Did he ever go online? I mean, did he ever talk to you about people that he talked to online?”

Every time he said “online” it sounded like some heinous thing that we were doing.

“I don’t know. I think he had e-mail.” I shrugged. “Checked it now and then. He wasn’t big into computers except for doing homework, or looking for stuff. He checked out science stuff sometimes, like what’s happening on Mars and...” I shrugged. “He was a total math freak.”

“Math freak.” Dr. Morgans said the words like he’d never heard them before, like he hadn’t any idea in the world who any of us—any of us under the age of eighteen—were.

“Well, it has come to our attention that Billy did chat online, in certain ... chat rooms. There was a vintage car chat room and—” He was flipping through his notepad, and actually giving me more information than he should have. “—and the police are investigating that right now. In fact they have the Wenlows’ computer and are checking it for—”

“The police took the computer?” I interrupted. I shook my head. “Crap.”

“Is there any particular reason you said that?” Dr. Morgans asked, sliding even closer to me across his desk. He reminded me of the greasy haired kid at lunch today.

“Yeah, I’m using it to write a paper.” I frowned. “On the Byzantine Empire. History class?”

“Really.” He finally sat back, sighing, looking at his notes. “Well, we are hoping he didn’t talk to anyone he shouldn’t have and, well, gone off to meet someone. The Internet is a scary place, Herbert, a very scary place.”

“Okay.”

He looked at me sideways. He didn’t like me. He didn’t like anything about me. Not my clothes, my face, my voice, my attitude. But I really didn’t care.

I didn’t like him either.

* * * *

“Can I give you a lift home?”

It was after school and I was leaving with my backpack slung over one arm, alone as usual. But I didn’t want anyone, including the dean, who was watching me from a doorway, to see me go off with Jake Valari. Especially not with Jake Valari.

Jake was okay, actually. He was the only detective on the Manamesset police force and an old friend. He had dated my mother for a while, helped her get a home and a job in Manamesset, and then watched as she deteriorated up to the point where she could no longer take care of herself. Or me. Or anything. Still, Jake, in plainclothes, leaning on his Firebird in the school parking lot—nope, just wouldn’t look good for me to hop in his car and drive away with him. So I said: “No, thanks. I want to walk. The Wenlows are just a street over.”

“Then let me walk with you,” Jake said, and there he was. “So, what’s your take on this William Dawber? Runaway? You think so?”

“Jake...” I sighed, not again. But then I paused, turned, and looked at him. I was his height now; I could look him square into the eye. Kids were passing by all around us, some staring for a second, some curious, others just muttering as we blocked their way. “I told the Falmouth police all I know. Also told the dean. He’s right over there.” I shrugged a shoulder toward the door where Dr. Morgans was still standing. “Billy was just a kid who bunked with me for four weeks. He didn’t talk to me much.” I adjusted my backpack straps. “I didn’t talk much to him.”

Jake nodded, then got into step with me as I left the school grounds. The way to the Wenlows’ was down a wooded road crowded with locust trees and flowering shrubs. Mostly year-round residents lived here.

“So tell me what you do know, Herbie.”

“Why? Manamesset police are involved in this now? He’s been gone now what, six days? He’s just run away; he’ll show up, Jake.”

“Tell me what you know.”

I sighed, began, “Okay. He moved into the Wenlows’ four weeks ago, middle of August. Quiet kid, minded his own business, didn’t want to talk, and that was fine with me. Totally into math and science, read a lot. No friends, but he came from Truro last, or so he told me. Maybe he went back there.”

“Totally into math and science. Tell me about that.”

Another sigh. “He had science magazines, old ones. He spent a lot of time at the library. Went online to check out science sites, stuff like that. Took two math courses this term and chemistry. In fact, he carried a huge class load. Six major subjects plus phys-ed.”

Jake opened a small pad of paper as we walked, looked at it, then me. “English, history, pre-calculus, geometry, French, and chemistry.”

“Yeah, he was a busy guy.”

“What’d he do for fun?”

“Fun? He read. Went online. The Wenlows have some video games. We can use them if our schoolwork is up to date. He had no interest in them.”

“But he went online.”

“Well, yeah, we all do, but the Wenlows, they keep us on a pretty strict schedule, an hour a day after our work is done. They got all these parental locks and blocks on the computer, though—” I gave Jake a sidelong glance. “—we can get pretty much get around them.”

“Anyone come to visit him? Did he get any phone calls? Did he use chat rooms online?”

“Nope, nope, and I don’t know. I didn’t stand over him when it was his turn to use the PC.”

“Herbie, Billy Dawber was at the Wenlows’ house last Saturday morning, he showed up for breakfast, then excused himself to go upstairs and do some homework. You last saw and talked to him around nine a.m. After that, no one saw him again.”

I stopped walking and turned and looked at Jake.

“I was listening to music and went back to sleep,” I said. “What more do you want? I didn’t keep track of him, Jake.”

Jake slapped the pad in his hand, looked up the street, then back at me. “Kid’s just gone missing. Just like that. Gone.” He snapped his fingers.

“Why are you asking me all this? This isn’t your town, your jurisdiction, nothing. Wait...” I was ready to answer my own question. “My name came up. Someone said, Oh my god, the Sawyer kid was bunking with this runaway. Go question him. Maybe he knows something. Maybe he did something!”

“I’m just doing this as a favor, Herbie. I know the chief over in Falmouth.”

I turned and started walking again. “Break through the wall that’s Herbie Sawyer. He must know something he’s not saying.”

“No, not at all. If you knew anything, you’d tell somebody. Me, somebody.”

“Thanks for your faith in me.”

“But do this one thing. For me.” He stopped; I stopped. A school bus came to a screech a few feet away. Full of cheerleaders en route to a game or something. They were screaming out the windows; I heard someone shout. “Sawyer!”

“Do what, Jake?”

“Think over carefully anything he said or did that might help us. Please. You of all people know that the smallest detail might be the key to figuring this out. I mean he could be at a friend’s house in Truro, yes, or any of the other six towns he’s been in during the last four and half years. He could be with a girlfriend. He could be with someone he met online, God forbid. But just think, Herbie, please? Think.”

“Will do, Jake,” I said as he closed the notepad. “Will do.”

* * * *

Billy Dawber was almost six feet tall, dark hair and eyes, acne-scarred complexion. In fact, he was a decent-looking kid; some of the girls at school had thought so.

The first day of school he’d thrown his books on his bed and said, “Got someone wanting my phone number already.” Then he had laughed as though it was all a big joke before heading off to take a shower.

“Hope it’s a girl,” I’d said after him, almost as a natural response. He’d laughed some more, but that was it. Nothing more.

He was lanky but strong. I’d seen him lug groceries out of Mrs. Wenlow’s car, three or four heavy bags at a time. He’d been quietly sociable, not friendly yet not overly aloof. He responded when spoken to; he didn’t initiate anything, is what I mean to say. He spent hours after school lying on his bed, doing math problems, working on French assignments, reading, reading, reading. He read so much Mrs. Wenlow would yell up at us three, four times a night to turn the lights out.

There were science and math clubs at school, as well as a chess club, but I didn’t know if he’d joined any; something told me he hadn’t been even remotely interested.

But then something occurred to me, something a little bit odd. I was up in our room—my room now that Billy was gone—and I realized something. I walked over to his bed. The police had come and taken away some of his things already. His school books were still there, but not his notebooks. There was an old suitcase under his bed, as well. I knelt down, pulled it out. They’d gone through it two days ago. while I had lain on my bed, listening to my music, pretending not to notice as the police rummaged through his things.

His clothes were still in his suitcase, not in the two bureau drawers—the bottom ones—that the Wenlows had said were his to use. Billy had never unpacked his clothes. He had four jerseys, two pair of sweatpants, two sweatshirts, some jeans, socks, underwear.

I walked over to the closet. Six shirts, all mine, in a row; two pair of pants, over hangers, both mine. A jacket, a winter coat, a slicker, all mine. Nothing of his was here.

I turned around, hands on my hips, and considered this. Was it important? And if so, why? And again, why did I care? He was a runaway; he had a history of just running off and coming back days later. But where did he go? Did he ever say? Did he have a friend or relative, a grandparent or someone that he ran off to be with? But if he had run away, why hadn’t he taken any of his clothes with him?

I scratched my head. It was getting too much, and it wasn’t important anyhow. I had a paper to write.

* * * *

I sat up straight in bed, wide awake, so alert it made my head hurt. I turned, looked at the clock. Three a.m., Friday morning. Another three hours before I had to get up—to the sound of the alarm buzzing or Mrs. Wenlow’s lovely voice up the stairs—but there I was awake, hearing, seeing, remembering...

Billy Dawber, in the parking lot at the school, standing next to me, as alive as I was now with my heart racing, my head pounding.

“Damn, Herbie,” Billy was saying to me, “I love Jaguars.” Then he said it again, this time adding a typically teenage descriptive term, “I so effing love Jaguars.”

I turned to look where he was staring, at a lean, low, black Jaguar, probably an ‘80- or ‘81-year model, parked in the teachers’ section of the lot. There was only one teacher at our school who could afford a car like that, vintage or not. Mr. Earnshaw, math department chair. Never married, no children, his parents had left him a “small fortune,” or so the gossip went. He was one of the rare ones, a rich teacher. Mr. Earnshaw.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud to the empty dark room. “Why is he telling me this now?”

* * * *

“Yes, they took all of Billy’s notebooks,” Jake said to me, his eyes heavy lidded like he had pulled too many late night shifts in a row. I knew from the paper that a lot was going on in my old hometown of Manamesset. There was a rash of burglaries in one of the newer upper middle-class areas, as well as in the high-end section of town where there were a lot of summer residences.

“Can I see them?”

“Don’t be so cryptic,” Jake warned, reaching for his cup of coffee. It was only seven in the morning, and I yet had to find a way to get back to school. I had gotten a ride here with a kid on the football team who had a crush on one of the Wenlow girls. He showed up at the Wenlow house every morning around six fifteen to have breakfast, hang out, and then drive her to school. I had managed to convince this kid to detour over here, drop me at the police station, but then he had tooled off with the girl and a half hour to kill before driving her back to school.

“Cryptic.” I grinned, settling back in the chair in front of his desk. “Let me see his damn notebooks, Jake.”

“We’ve been all through them, Herbie,” Jake snarled. Okay, he possibly had a headache, too, so I revised my earlier assessment. Seems more likely that Jake had pulled a late-nighter at one of our local saloons. “A lot of class notes, some doodles in the margins, some odd drawings here and there, but no phone numbers, no names, no e-mail addresses or anything like that.”

“You adults really have a thing about e-mail, don’t you? As if that’s all kids do online, e-mail each other.” It made me sort of laugh.

“Do you possibly know something that I—or the big, bad, ignorant adult world—doesn’t know, that we should?” he said.

“If I say ‘chat room,’ Jake, what does it do to you?” I leaned forward, enjoying this in a kind of sadistic way. Jake was plainly hurting; he was obviously annoyed by me, and yet he knew, to some extent, I was worth humoring, at least for a while.

“It doesn’t do anything to me, Herbie, but if you said chat room and underage kids, it makes me very nervous, indeed it does.”

“You ever go into a chat room, I mean—” I emphasized this next word slyly. “—online?”

“No, Herbie, I go into chat rooms offline, down at the corner bar, me and my buddies.” He tried not to smile.

“Right you do,” I said, tipping back the chair, laughing. “That’s just what you do, you hang out with your buds at the local bar, shooting the—” I paused, smiling wider. “—breeze. And that’s what kids my age do in chat rooms too. We shoot the breeze. We talk about music and the war and who we’d vote for in the next election, if we were old enough to vote.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Herbert Sawyer?” His patience was starting to grow thin.

“Billy did go online, but not just to check his e-mail, Jake.” I leaned on his desk. “E-mail is sort of, you know, so nineteen nineties. So maybe he did go into chat rooms; maybe he just went there to talk science—”

He cut me off: “And maybe he talked to the wrong people. Damn it, Herbie, if you know of any people he talked to, or places he went online that—”

“The Net is this big scary place to you, isn’t it, Jake?”

He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Herbie, I go online. I surf the Net. I use law enforcement sites, data banks. I read the news online.” He opened his eyes, looked straight at me. “But yes, it can be a scary place if it’s misused, and too often it is.”

“Let me see Billy’s notebooks, Jake.”

“I haven’t got them. They’re over at the Falmouth P.D.”

“Along with the Wenlows’ computer?”

Just a nod.

“I want to see that too. Think you can arrange it?”

* * * *

I knew I’d seen it, the last day I had spoken to Billy. I had told him about my strange dream, and he had paused, listening, looking up from his math for just a few minutes. I thought he had been drawing a plesiosaur...

Nope, not plesiosaurs, but jaguars—a leaping jaguar, and under it, a car. A Jaguar sedan. It was all right there, in the left margin of Billy’s pre-cal notebook, next to some fairly incomprehensible, (well, to me) math assignment he had been working on.

The Falmouth police had been a little more courteous, a little less gruff to me this time around. My first round of questioning by them had been at the Wenlows’ kitchen table, a series of short, curt questions about Billy and his “habits,” appearance, and “mood” just before he’d disappeared. Since then, however, the adults involved in this investigation had taken a heightened interest in me, and now I sat at a conference table at the Falmouth P.D. with a cup of cocoa on my left, and a stack of Billy Dawber’s notebooks on my right. There were also two officers with me, one at the table, and one leaning against a wall. Beside him on a low table sat the Wenlows’ home computer.

I looked up as Jake entered the room with another man, one I hadn’t yet met.

“So this Herbie Sawyer,” the man said, extending his hand to me. “Jake’s been filling me in about you, young man.”

As I shook the man’s hand, whom Jake introduced as Captain Barrows, I got a crazy sensation that perhaps they were expecting too much of me. But I kept my mouth shut as Jake informed me that he had called the school, talked to the dean, and told him I’d be in later. “I also spoke to Mrs. Wenlow,” he added.

I had nothing to say to that, just looked down at Billy Dawber’s drawings. All through the math notebook—and only the math notebook—were a series of drawings that were unmistakably of jaguars—both kinds: animal and automobile. It seems that Billy had quite a fixation with them.

There was a short pause of almost awkward silence, then I looked up at the two men hovering over me and said, “Can I look at the PC now?”

* * * *

It was an interesting scenario that was building in my mind that morning. Billy had been gone almost a week. The last time we were together he had been doing his math, listening to me. Then Billy had gone online. Billy loved Jaguars. Billy loved math.

Mr. Earnshaw was his calculus teacher. Mr. Earnshaw owned a black Jaguar.

So what if Mr. Earnshaw knew of Billy’s love of Jaguars? What if Mr. Earnshaw—never married and all the kids liked to gossip about that—had offered Billy a ride in his Jaguar?

I booted up the PC, adjusted the headset on my mp3 player, and rolled down the history logs.

Just outside the door a nervous police officer stood watch, looking in at me every now and then. Well I guess he was afraid I was going to mess things up, erase stuff, but if they had done their job right, they’d have made a copy of this whole hard drive...

Well, I hoped they knew what they were doing.

Anyhow, it was right there in the history: among the many URLs Billy, or someone in the Wenlow household, had visited in the days before Billy’s disappearance was one for You-Talk, Vintage Motors, the Jaguar.

I clicked on it.

* * * *

The captain was in the next room. I walked in, pulling the headphones off my head and letting them fall around my neck. I said to him, “Okay, do you have any leads? What happened last Saturday and Sunday? What about the police logs?”

Suddenly the captain, like the rest of them, was amused and condescending as he said, “Well, I’m sorry, son, but you know, I can’t do that.” Then he smiled at me and folded his arms, as did the other two officers in the room with him. I turned, looked through the open door back at the computer behind me. There was a third officer there already, pulling down menus, looking at where I had been, what I had done.

“I need to know...” I started to explain, but I felt like I’d run headfirst into a stone wall. I had a history with Jake Valari, an understanding and a past that he, despite all his best intentions, could never hope to convey to these men.

“Look, son, we know that to Jake you’re a kind of ‘wunderkind’...” A huge grin on the man’s face and I understood. Altogether too well. If they could use Jake or me to find Billy Dawber alive and well, then they would. But nothing beyond that, nothing. We were only to give; there would be no reciprocation.

And I knew in my heart that had Billy Dawber been William Dawber, son of a prominent businessman or elected official, they’d be throwing down everything they had before me.

“So help us to do our job,” the man went on, “by telling us what you found.”

I cut him off, clean and dry: “I found nothing on the computer.” Then I turned and went out the door.

* * * *

“It’s always the same, always the same,” I muttered as I headed out to Jake’s car, leaving him to hurry and scramble behind me. “They want me to help. They want me say what I know, even when I don’t know a damned thing, but then when I ask for the same back, it’s, ‘No, no, no, you’re just a kid.’”

Jake looked at me over the roof of his car. I was on the other side, hand on the door handle. I was so mad I was trembling, but strangely, too, I felt like a little kid about ready to break into tears.

Then Jake said, “Let me go talk to him.”

I shook my head angrily. There was no way I was going back into that building. I wrenched the door open, muttering, “Just take me to school, Jake.”

* * * *

Later that day around noontime, Jake picked me up at school, drove me back to Manamesset, and this time told me what he and the police in Falmouth were looking into so far.

In two of the chat rooms visited by someone at the Wenlows’ house were suspected pedophiles. The police in a nearby town were monitoring both chat rooms. Falmouth police were working closely with these officers.

There was a level-one sex offender living in his grandmother’s summer house about half a mile from the Wenlows. He had been picked up and brought in for an interview.

A couple of homeless guys who pick up soda cans along the town roads had told the Manamesset police they might have seen a kid matching Billy’s description walking along the canal road. They couldn’t agree on whether they had seen him on the preceding Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

A young couple who saw a story about Billy on the local news came into the station to report they saw a similar kid buying a burger near the canal in Bourne. They remembered him because he had to pull loose change out of both pockets to pay for the meal. A guy walking his dogs in the woods off the canal roads called in, saying he saw a kid out there late Saturday afternoon, maybe with a fishing pail and rod, maybe not. Another guy saw a kid who might have been Billy down on a marina in Manamesset, and yelled at him to get away from his boat.

A cheerleader called the police at the urging of her family to tell them Billy was supposed to have called her Saturday night, but that he never did.

Jake had also gotten me copies of the police logs from Saturday afternoon through to Sunday evening: drunk driving arrests, a lost dog, complaints of loud party noise, two house break-ins, a report of a suspicious-looking person talking to people leaving church services. Around ten p.m., they got a call from a motorist reporting a dark car traveling at extremely high speeds without its lights on.

But all in all, it was like Billy Dawber had stepped into a huge black void, and it had swallowed him whole, sealed itself shut, and was now like Billy, just gone.

“Thanks, Jake,” I said. I had my feet up on his desk as I nursed a lukewarm cup of cocoa between my hands. It was only late September, but already it felt like winter was on its way. The Wenlows had complained this morning about “having to put the heat on” in their house.

“Wunderkind, huh?” Jake was holding a cup himself of steaming hot coffee. “Is that what you are, Herbie?”

“No, I’m ‘Death Kid,’” I answered sourly. I frowned. “They gave me that name at my old school, and you know, maybe it fits, Jake.” I looked over at the police logs, knowing I could have waited until the weekend, when most of this information would be printed in the local papers. But I had wanted it now.

I wanted to know now.

“Herbie—” Jake’s voice was soft. “—we are still operating on the premise that Billy is a runaway because that has been his past history. We want to find this boy alive.”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “I know.” I closed my eyes, saw pictures of jaguars, leaping, running, gliding, and purring along the highway—and along the margins of Billy Dawber’s notebook. “I know.”

* * * *

Mr. Craig Earnshaw was a tall, balding man who was in fairly good shape for being over forty. He was coach of the girls’ field hockey team, advisor to the math team ... I stopped my thoughts cold. Girls’ field hockey. Well, okay, a pretty good cover. Might be too obvious if he coached a boys’ team.

“Can I help you?” Mr. Earnshaw stood at his desk. He definitely knew he didn’t know me, and it was going on four on a Friday afternoon. And although the school still buzzed with activity—after-school clubs, teams, a few kids even hanging out in the halls where they were yelled at by the custodians—this man was cautious. What teacher in this day and age wasn’t cautious?

But then again, maybe Mr. Earnshaw had more to be cautious about than the ordinary teacher.

“My name is Herbie Sawyer. I knew—I’m a friend of Billy Dawber’s.”

I almost tripped up, but I managed to keep a cold, calm expression on my face. Truth is, and though the kids in the cafeteria would never believe it, I had looked a few killers in the eye. Yes, I had.

Of course, I can’t rush to judgment. I had no proof, not an iota of evidence, that Mr. Craig Earnshaw was a killer, that he was anything but a math teacher who had never married and drove a Jaguar.

“Oh, you are?” He came around his desk, walked toward me. “Is there any word? Has anyone found out where he went?”

That was odd. The man shouldn’t have asked that. He should have asked: Has anyone found out what happened to him? And my next line was supposed to have been: Why? Do you think something happened to him? He’s just a runaway.

Now I stood there, looking at this man, not really knowing what to say, but then out came the words, “Billy liked Jaguars, you know.”

“Yes. I know,” the man admitted almost sadly. “We only had two tests so far, but he drew a Jaguar on both, underneath his name.” Then he just looked at me, his whole face seemed to drop. The silence between us was almost awkward.

“What happened to him, Mr. Earnshaw?” I asked, following the man as he walked to a filing cabinet. There was nothing there, no answer, no shock, no turn to me to deny or admit or say anything, no confusion at why I was standing there, asking this of him—a grown man, a teacher—such a question. I prepared my question, wishing I could get more of Clint Eastwood or Al Pacino into it, but I failed. I was just Herbert Sawyer, Jr., trying to act tough, trying to trick this man into saying or doing something incriminating. In fact, he did nothing but look sort of miserable standing there.

“Billy ever come to see you after school, you know, for extra help?”

“Extra help?” Why did the man blanch, as my English teacher might have said, for it seemed the color just bled out of his face. “Why would he need to do that?”

“What happened to him?”

“Well, he ran away, I mean...” Now the man was confused. “Well, are you asking me, or are you telling me something? I admit, I’m kind of ... puzzled.”

“Did Billy ask for a ride in your car?”

His frown deepened, and I saw something else on his face—anger, shock?

“Or did you offer him one?”

“What are you implying?” The man immediately moved away from me, toward his desk where the phone connecting to the main office was. “I think you need to leave, young man, right now.”

“Did you offer him a ride in your Jag, Mr. Earnshaw?”

“Please, get out now!” The man was nervously reaching for the phone, but before he could dial anything I was out of there.

* * * *

“Why do you do these things?” Jake asked in abject frustration.

“Why do you come and ask me to help you sometimes?”

“Because I am a fool.” Jake reached for a cup on his desk, but this time it wasn’t full of coffee. It fizzled and bubbled, some kind of seltzer drink. He looked at me grimly, said, “Headache and a bellyache. Time I saw a doctor. I think I have that acid reflux.”

“You watch too much TV.” I leaned on his desk toward him. “The guy was plainly nervous, Jake.”

“Look, a man owning a car, which just happens to be the kind of car a missing kid likes.”

“Loved,” I corrected. “Billy loved Jags. Plus the guy is a bachelor, never married, just teaches. He has all this money his parents left him and he still teaches? Not normal, Jake, just not normal.” I sat back in the chair, figuring at that moment I had cracked the whole case, and if the police just went in, talked to this teacher, put a little pressure on him, the guy would spill.

“You—” Jake now came forward in his chair. “—have absolutely no evidence, nothing. If you had anything, if people saw Billy talking to this man after school, or in his classroom alone before school, or out by his car, or anything, anything at all—”

“Just a matter of time, Jake.” Then I got a sudden sensation. It was disgust at myself, at what I was saying, thinking, suspecting, believing. I must have gone from my normal coloring to white in two seconds, and Jake saw it too.

“You just now realized, right, what you are concluding?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t take it any further. Don’t even try, Herbie, please. You’re smarter than this.”

“But, Jake, you didn’t see how the guy reacted when I—”

“No further,” Jake demanded.

I sat back in the seat, feeling sicker than I had in a long time. “Billy is probably just ... chilling at some friend’s house somewhere. Yeah, probably.”

* * * *

I carry things around in my head I shouldn’t. Memories of other people missing, or hurt, or worse, and the deep dead void they had fallen into—and most often because they quite, amazingly so, trusted the wrong person.

Trusted the wrong person.

So I stood there in the light rain, early Monday, staring at the teachers’ parking lot. Administrators, guidance personnel, and department chairs had their own parking spaces, so the Jag was unmistakable. It was up near the school gym, between the gold SUV the principal drove and the nondescript minivan the attendance officer owned. But this was a different Jag. It wasn’t the black one Billy had stood and admired about two weeks ago. This was one was dark green.

Mr. Earnshaw? How many Jaguars did the guy own?

* * * *

“I don’t know, three or four.” The kid shrugged. Captain of the math team, he had to know something. “Why?”

“Why would a teacher have three or four Jaguars?”

“He has money. Everybody knows that. And why are you asking?” Now the kid, a good six inches and forty pounds my superior, turned to face me, a scowl on his face.

I had nothing to say, but my mind was doing handsprings. Why did a guy who could afford those kind of wheels need to, or even want to teach?

The possible answers to those questions turned my stomach.

So I said to the kid, “No reason.” Then I added, “But thanks,” and quickly went to class.

* * * *

I stood outside Mr. Earnshaw’s house a long time, leaning on the fence across the street. I had bought an ice cream bar, unwrapped it, ate it slowly, just staring at the house. It was a large Cape Cod farmhouse, all restored and modernized. Its huge wraparound porch on three sides was rimmed with hanging plants. Brick walks. Ancient white picket metal fence. Oversized barn out back.

That intrigued me. It was big enough to garage three to four vehicles.

Well, I had nothing to fear, right? I wasn’t a cop, just a kid. I didn’t need a warrant to look through a window. The worst anyone could accuse me of was trespassing, give me a warning, tell me to get off the property. I jumped over the fence, strolled around back, found a window in the barn that I wiped clean with my hand, and took a look inside.

It was a clean, spacious area with two cars in it; both were Jaguars. One was the dark green model I’d seen in the school parking lot earlier today. The other had a canvas over part of it and looked as though it might have been in disrepair, or possibly Mr. Earnshaw was restoring it. Anyhow, it wasn’t black; it was a pale cream color. There was no black Jag in the barn.

Could he have sold it? Given it away? Removed it for some other reason?

There was noise behind me, a slammed door, footsteps.

“What—who are you?” Then he recognized me. “You’re the kid from school on Friday. What are you doing here?”

I turned and faced him. I don’t know why I felt so fearless, but I did. “How many Jags do you own, Mr. Earnshaw?” I said.

“Why are you asking me that?” he demanded, his face turning a sudden brilliant red. The sun was coming down behind him, the direction of the sea, and suddenly it was cold. “And what business is it...” He took a couple steps toward me and for a moment I realized that even if he was forty or forty-five, he was still much bigger than me and in quite decent shape. I wondered whether I could outrun him to street. But then he said, “Get out of here. Get out off my property now before I call the police.”

* * * *

“Damn it, Herbie, you trespassed on the man’s property.” Jake sank down into his chair behind his desk, with literally, his hands on his head. “I should have known better, damn it, damn it.” He raised just his eyes to look at me.

“You came to me,” I said.

He refused to answer to that, said instead, “There is nothing which indicates that this man, this teacher, with a very good reputation, did anything wrong, Herbie. Nothing.”

“He’s nervous.”

“Well, sometimes people do get nervous, especially around you,” he retorted.

I refused to answer to that, said, “Billy loved Jags. The guy has two in his barn, and at least one, the black one, is missing. Jake, come on!” I leaned over the desk. “It’s something you need to check out.”

Jake took his hands off his head, raised it, looked at me.

“It’s a no-brainer,” I insisted. “Look, the guy is a bachelor, never been married, never even had a girlfriend. That’s what everybody says. Like he’s a loner, a quiet guy, and the guy is freaking rich.”

“I’ll talk to him—” Jake said.Then he paused, his forehead wrinkled as he stared at me. “—because he is Billy’s teacher, but I don’t see it going anywhere. You’re drawing conclusions where there is no—not one—shred of tangible evidence that this man had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.”

“Maybe he took Billy for a ride in his black Jag. Maybe Billy and the black Jag are somewhere in the same place.”

Jake just shook his head, but I knew Jake Valari. I knew the wheels were spinning in his head, the same way they were spinning in mine. “Maybe the black Jag has been sent to a repair shop. Maybe the black Jag—”

“Has been stolen?” I offered.

“You don’t think he would have reported a stolen Jaguar?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s stolen. I think he knows right where it is, Jake.”

* * * *

“Billy came to my house two weeks ago, said he needed help on some math work and I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t see students at my home. Just not safe in this day and age.” The man looked fearfully from Jake to me. “What he really wanted was to talk about cars, not math. He wanted me...” A look at me, then back to Jake. “Really, Sergeant, does this boy have to be here? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I told you, Mr. Earnshaw ... Craig,” Jake said gently, perhaps too gently. “It would be better if you spoke to me first. And this is just an interview, nothing formal, just a chat. Herbie stays.”

The man was clearly flustered, and yet I knew the look on his face. He felt backed into a corner. He was both upset and irritated, but the irritation was overshadowed by something else. This man clearly knew something, and just as Jake had intimated, it would be better to tell Jake before Jake spoke to the Falmouth P.D.

“Of course, if you want to wait, have your lawyer present?”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Craig Earnshaw blurted out. “Really, Detective, Billy...” He paused, swallowed, started again. “Billy wanted me to drive with him when he took his driver’s ed training, you know, for practice.” He paused, as though Jake and I needed time to digest that. “He said that the people ... who were his foster family were too busy to do that.”

“What did you say?” Jake asked.

“I told Billy no, sorry, but no. I couldn’t afford to be seen driving around town with a sixteen-year-old boy who ... who is no relation to me. Can you imagine what that would do to my career? And that would be the least of it. I just said sorry, no. But Billy was persistent; he asked for a ride.” The man ran a hand over his face, and I could see him shudder.

“Craig—” Jake moved his chair, leaned closer to the man. “—did you do anything to this boy?”

“No.” It looked like the man wanted to cry. “God help me, I didn’t. I made him leave. I made him promise not to come back, and that if he needed help with his schoolwork, to see me after school, at school.” He looked at me. “I am so sorry your friend is missing. But I had nothing to do with it. I was just his teacher.” Back to Jake.

“You have three Jaguars registered to you, Craig, including the one you’ve been doing some work on. But only two are accounted for. Where is the third?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pardon?”

“Two weeks ago the lock on the barn was broken, and one was missing. The keys are in a lockbox right inside the door; that was broken as well. Maybe ... Billy ... when he was talking to me that day, I don’t know. The box was open. He could have seen the keys were there.”

“And you didn’t report this theft? Why?” Jake asked.

The man leaned forward, hands on his forehead. “Because I was worried it was Billy who came back and took it. He was too interested in the cars, too insistent. I just kept hoping that it would turn up somewhere.”

“And you would what? Say you had forgotten to report it?”

“I don’t know what I was going to say,” the man said, the tone of his voice changing, growing less tremulous suddenly. He looked across the room like he was in a daze. “Perhaps that ... a man in my position, living alone ... society doesn’t...” He looked straight at Jake. “I just am happy with the way I live my life. I like kids, and I like math, but...” The man shrugged. “Seeing Billy there, in the barn, it scared me.”

I jerked forward, looked at Jake but said nothing.

As Jake said: “Did it scare you enough to make you do something?”

“Yeah,” the man said, “I told him to get the hell out and go home.”

“You should have reported the car stolen, Mr. Earnshaw.”

“I know.”

Jake turned now, looked over at me. I had promised to remain silent, seated in the corner of the room, but was Jake now regretting his decision to let me remain? Nothing this man had said could legally be used against him, and yet I knew there was enough here now...

Jake looked back at Mr. Earnshaw, said, “Craig, I want you to contact your lawyer. You and he, or she, need to report to the Falmouth P.D. and tell them everything you just told me. Can you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything to the boy,” Mr. Earnshaw insisted, his voice shaking.

“I know,” Jake said, but there was no conviction in his voice. “We just need to get all this sorted out and this is the only way to do it.”

* * * *

“Billy Dawber had been fingerprinted in a school safety program when he was six. His fingerprints were on the lockbox,” Jake said to me the next morning.

“Jake...” I felt I would explode—I was so full of questions.

Jake knew it, too; he waved me silent, and then over to a chair at the Wenlows’ kitchen table. It was a hectic time of day in the Wenlow household. Mr. Wenlow was already out the door, which left his wife busy getting seven kids—only two of which were her own—off to school. But somehow Jake had charmed her enough to give us this quick ten minutes. She had even made Jake a cup of coffee before shooing the younger kids, with their cereal bowls and plastic cups, out of the kitchen and into the living room.

“Herbie—” I knew by the way Jake said my name he had a lot to say, so I shut up. “—after he talked to us, I contacted Ben Barrows over at the Falmouth P.D. Ben immediately put Craig Earnshaw under twenty-four-hour observation.” Jake paused, as though considering how much more to tell me. But how could he keep me out of any of it now? He couldn’t. “A warrant was issued late last night; the barn and house were searched. The lockbox tested for fingerprints, which as I said, had Billy’s on it. Craig Earnshaw’s computers were seized. He has a laptop and two standard machines. Right now there are police officers specially trained in computer investigation checking them out.”

He sighed, took a sip of coffee, surprised by how good it was. He raised his eyebrows and took another sip. “Also, an APB has been issued for the Jag, which it is now being assumed that Billy stole.”

“Assumed,” I echoed doubtfully.

“It is possible that Earnshaw did give in to Billy and take him for a drive. It’s also possible that Earnshaw invited Billy to his house, and not that Billy showed up on his own. Craig Earnshaw could have broken the lockbox, then hidden that Jag somewhere himself. There are a dozen more ‘possibles,’ as we both know. At the moment we are keeping all options open, hoping for the best and yet remaining realistic.”

“So where is Billy?” I asked. “In the worst possible scenario you can imagine.”

Jake just gave me a long, cool look. “Do I have to say?”

I swallowed hard. “Find the Jag, and you’ll probably find...”

Jake nodded.

* * * *

It was in all the local and Boston newspapers the next day, as well on the television news. Even CNN had a brief story on the teacher taken in for questioning with regard to the missing teen. People love those stories, I guess, and by afternoon the next day there were news trucks parked up and down the street outside my high school.

Fifteen-year-old Billy Dawber, foster child, honors student, math freak, and Jag lover, was missing with suspicions focused squarely on a well-known, and up till now, well-respected math teacher and department chair. You could read all about it in the papers. You could read how Mr. Craig Earnshaw had protested his knowledge of Billy Dawber’s whereabouts, and that, though he had admitted that Billy had come to his house two weeks earlier professing an interest in the teacher’s three Jaguars, that was the only connection he had with the boy outside of school.

And a tenuous connection it was, indeed. Craig Earnshaw was brought in for questioning three times by the Falmouth P.D., and all three times he was sent courteously on his way. He consented to a full search of his property, his barn, his cars, his home. His friends and family were all questioned. But they found nothing. Nothing.

All they had was a missing teenage boy and a nervous unmarried teacher, a notebook full of calculus problems and images of Jaguars that connected the two. So the bloggers got busy and the editorials were full of people making all kinds of crazy speculations. The heat was on, and innocent or guilty—or just frazzled and confused, which was the image the harried math teacher presented to the reporters who came to his door—shortly thereafter, Craig Earnshaw requested a leave of absence. With the recommendation of the school superintendent, it was quickly granted by the town school board.

As for me, those were strange days. I seemed to be walking the corridors of the school with a gray cloud over my head. Nobody bothered me. No one stood in my way. No one said anything to me. But they looked. I felt the eyes on the back of my head. As I walked to my locker, or to class, or to lunch, heads turned and people spoke softly to one another. My reputation had finally settled in and taken up sordid residence in the halls of Falmouth Park High.

Passing out chemistry exams, Miss Strangis’s eyes lingered on me a little longer than they did anyone else. When I left school in the afternoon, Dr. Morgans stood in the open door, hands on his hips, watching me until I left his sight.

In gym class, the gym teacher tossed me a volleyball when it was my serve, then stared at me. It was only a few seconds, but it was longer than he stared at anyone else. You would have thought they had a killer in their midst, and the killer was me.

As for the greasy-haired kid and his gang, they watched me, too, nudging each other as I walked by, books under my arm. I met their eyes briefly and they quickly turned their heads, though I heard one of them murmur, “Death Kid.”

Yeah, great, that was me, Death Kid.

“Shout it!” I said. It was the fourth day of this nonsense. I spun around, opening my arms out, then dropping them. They just looked at me. “Shout it out. Yeah, that’s me. Death Kid. Say it. Shout it!”

But just silence, as one, then a second, then all of them turned their heads away from me, shaking them. I swore under my breath, turned back around, and went to lunch.

I sat on the curb outside the Wenlows’ house with my head in my hands. I hadn’t wanted supper, hadn’t wanted company, hadn’t wanted anything. The Wenlows had been strangely calm through all this, suffering the occasional reporter or news team with something that was quite close to grace. In fact, Mr. Wenlow even came out to the road to make sure I was all right, and after assuring himself that I was, left after squeezing my shoulder.

Or maybe they were hoping I was involved in something terrible and huge and sordid, something they could use to their benefit.

Nah, that was a rotten thing to even consider. I folded my arms on my knees, wishing I had a smoke, a couple of pills, anything at all that would take the edge off what had been a pretty lousy two weeks. Because I found myself wishing—more than almost anything else—that Billy would just come walking down the road, laughing at us all.

“He’s just a runaway,” I found myself saying out loud. “That’s all. He hated it here. He...” I turned my head to look back at the garage, over which had been the room I had so briefly shared with him. “But why didn’t he take his clothes, his books, his things? It’s like he just walked out as if...”

“As if he were going to come back later.”

I looked up at Jake, standing over me.

“Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t run away, did he?”

“Kids do take off and leave everything behind, but the other times Billy took off, he took a bag.”

“But you know, if you were going to run away—” I felt sort of sick as I talked. “—would you finish your homework? I don’t think I would.”

“Let’s take a walk and talk,” he said.

* * * *

“They look at me at school like they blame me. For Mr. Earnshaw, I mean, for what he’s going through. They know Billy was my roommate, that the dean questioned me, that the police questioned me, and that it was me who fingered Mr. Earnshaw.” I sighed, ran my hands through my short hair. “And they all think he’s innocent. I know they do by the way they look at me.”

“Craig Earnshaw is very well liked and highly respected,” Jake said, almost in a detached sort of way. “From everything we can find on him, he’s perfect. Not so much as a parking ticket in twenty years. As far as his conduct and reputation, it’s unimpeachable. Not one complaint about his teaching or his behavior in class. If anything, he comes across as upstanding in every way: professionally, ethically, morally.” He paused to look at me, eyebrows raised. “But Falmouth P.D. has asked him to take a lie detector test.”

“The people at school want him to be innocent, Jake, even though they know he might not be. Billy’s prints were found on that lockbox. Mr. Earnshaw admitted Billy came to his house, asked for a ride in one of the Jags. And when the Jag went stolen, Earnshaw did nothing. He says he knew Billy had probably taken it, but...” I shook my head, felt sick again. “No, no, it doesn’t add up. His story is too pat, Jake. It’s fake. I know it’s fake.”

Jake just looked at me, eyes darkening, then he said, “You don’t know how much we want to catch Billy Dawber tooling around in that big black Jag somewhere. Boston. New York. L.A. Anywhere, anywhere at all.”

“I want that, too, but it’s not going to happen,” I said. “That man took Billy for a ride, and something happened and...” I shuddered, shut my eyes, then, shoving my hands down into my pockets, walked quickly away from Jake, back toward the Wenlows’ house. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

When I looked back a few minutes later, Jake had gone.

* * * *

I had the dream again, which I hadn’t had since the day I last talked to Billy. They were there again, though, the dark shapes moving up and down, toward the train bridge across the canal. The water was dark blue, almost black, and the lights along either side of the Cape Cod Canal twinkled off their sleek, dark bodies. I was at the edge of the canal, my hands in the pockets of a slicker as I watched them move. Up and down, breaking the water, serpentine in shape, or rather...

One slowly reared its head and turned it to me. But I was frozen; I couldn’t move my legs. And as I stood there, watching it, trying in the dream to convince myself that this was just a dream, I saw that the head wasn’t that of a plesiosaur, or any kind of sea monster at all. It was the head of a jaguar, the animal, and its brilliant eyes were staring at me.

I turned and looked up the canal road. Along the other side were railroad tracks, woodland, then bogs and marshes. “I love the canal,” I heard myself saying. “Lots of nice trails out there, through the bogs and marsh. And the canal road. You can rollerblade there and nobody bothers you.”

Nobody bothers you. Billy, the loner, the math freak, and Jag lover.

I awoke with a start in bed.

* * * *

I might have told Jake what I thought, but then I was tired of being the center of attention in issues that were not mine to begin with. So I hitched a ride out to Manamesset the following morning, regardless of the fact it was a Friday. I got dropped off at the post office and walked the half mile to the canal.

It was a bright, clear, sunny day, with just a touch of cold in the air and off the water. Along the canal a half dozen people were fishing, throwing in lines, though it didn’t look like they were catching much of anything. One old fellow shouted up to me as I walked along the canal road: “Hey, kid, shouldn’t you be in school?” But I ignored him.

* * * *

There are pieces of the truth, of what really happened. And they are scattered in different places, and different people own the pieces. Me, I owned a few of them. I just hadn’t known it until that dream.

So I struck out off the canal road, which was blocked from regular traffic by a wooden barrier. I saw that the barrier had been moved and replaced, but anyone might have done that. So I hopped over the fence, headed off down a dirt road and toward the marshes and the abandoned cranberry bogs that laced the area along the southeastern edge of the canal.

It took me all morning, but I found Billy just before noon.

* * * *

There are two roads that run the length of the Cape Cod Canal, the one on the east side, the Cape side, runs through my old hometown, Man-amesset. It’s really just a service road, accessible only to town workers and their trucks or the occasional maintenance crew. But it’s also used by bikers, rollerbladers, hikers and so on. But that’s in summer; in the early fall it’s a quiet road and especially at night, it’s long, dark, and peaceful.

Billy must have heard me that day and heard me altogether too well. It became obvious to me that he had driven out to the ranger station near the train bridge, which crosses the canal, moved the wooden fence, and taken a drive along the canal road in Mr. Earnshaw’s black Jag. He must have done that two weeks ago, on that Saturday afternoon. His was the car—the black Jag—which had passed a motorist on the main road without its headlights on. Billy had been heading here, to the canal and the peaceful, dark road.

Unfortunately, he had left the canal road, struck out onto a narrow, unpaved dirt road that meandered through a wooded area, then struck out across marshland and grown-over cranberry bogs. It had been there, in the dark, that he had gone down a hill, banked left to avoid a tree, and driven into a kettle pond.

I had found the Jag, its front half in the water, its rear end sticking up out of it.

* * * *

After a brief, but thorough (according to Jake) investigation, Billy’s death was determined to be due to injuries received when the Jag went into the water and hit a rock. Billy was found at the wheel, his neck broken, one hand still gripping the Jag’s clutch.

I went to Billy’s funeral, as did the Wenlows and Jake Valari.

By the middle of the next week the disappearance of Billy Dawber, foster kid from Falmouth, Mass, was no longer in the news, except for one small item on the front page of the second section of the paper.

NOTED TEACHER TAKES EARLY RETIREMENT

Mr. Craig Earnshaw, math department chair and instructor, coach and math team advisor, and 25-year veteran of the Falmouth Public Schools, has decided to retire from the public schools, citing “personal reasons.” Friends and colleagues lament the loss of what one called “a deeply committed and gifted educator.” Another colleague, however, admitted to this paper that “the unfairness of the accusations against Craig have made it impossible for him to keep working at the high school. Once a teacher has been accused of something this heinous, there is no way that teacher can ever return to the classroom. Even though Craig was totally exonerated of all wrongdoing, there are just too many people who have convicted him in their minds.”

Over the next few weeks I was pushed against a locker several times, threatened repeatedly, and tripped in lunchroom. Girls spit at me. Kids muttered things at me under their breaths. My books were stolen during gym class; I found them in a urinal. There were other things too. The same teachers who had stared at me so inquisitively a few weeks ago could now barely look me in the eye.

Eventually Jake and the Wenlows intervened and I was transferred to a different high school. A new school. A start over. Another kind of running away.