The Disappearance by Franklin W. Dixon

Author:Franklin W. Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

7

TRUTH AND LIES

JOE

I LOVE MY FATHER, BUT I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see him in my entire life as I was when he walked into Gomez’s office at the Margate police station.

“Detectives,” he said, nodding at McGill and Gomez. “Boys.”

They’d taken us out of the little interrogation room, and now we were crammed into Detective Gomez’s not-large-or-luxurious office. I noticed photos of her with two smiling kids, around preschool age, on her desk. There was also a little statue of Snoopy dressed as a police officer.

These things made me like her more, I’ll admit.

McGill cleared his throat. “I understand you have some information for us,” he said.

“Better than that,” Dad said, pulling a flash drive out of his shirt pocket. “I have hard evidence. Evidence that I think will make clear what these boys were up to that night.”

Gomez took the drive. “Let me plug this into my laptop,” she said, sitting down at her desk and opening up the slim Mac she’d brought with her from the interrogation room. There were a few weird moments where she fiddled around on her computer, and we all looked at one another awkwardly.

“You made good time,” Frank said to my dad, all faux-casual.

Dad looked at him, stone-faced. “I had good reason,” he said simply.

“Aha,” said Gomez, clicking a key and turning the laptop around to face us all. “Here we go.”

The screen showed a window of footage from a security camera. In black and white, it showed our driveway, our basketball hoop, Aunt Trudy’s rosebushes. A clock in the lower right-hand corner kept track of the time. We watched for about thirty seconds until Frank’s car pulled into the driveway at precisely 11:08 p.m. The car was parked and the lights went out, and then Frank and I climbed out and walked toward the house.

“Huh,” said McGill. He didn’t sound entirely happy.

“Yes,” said Dad.

McGill coughed. “Do you have the raw footage from the camera?” he asked. “We’ll have to look it all over, and just make sure it wasn’t doctored. . . .”

Dad nodded at the flash drive. “It’s all on there,” he said. “You can watch the entire night, if you like. It will show that the boys didn’t leave the house until the next morning at precisely 7:12 a.m. Which means . . .”

Gomez looked at McGill. “Frank and Joe were telling the truth. They went home that night.”

McGill did not look happy about this. He didn’t meet Gomez’s eye, and instead seemed to stare into some middle distance, his expression souring. “They could have . . . ,” he began.

“Snuck out the back door?” Dad supplied. “And gotten there how—taken a bus? A train? From Bayport to Margate, in the middle of the night?” He shook his head. “Unless you know of a different New Jersey Transit system that runs twenty-four hours a day, I think they were out of luck.”

McGill looked even more annoyed. “Another car?” he suggested.

Dad shrugged. “I guess,” he allowed. “They could have snuck out a back door into a waiting vehicle elsewhere on the block and gotten a ride.

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