Boy Still Missing by John Searles

Author:John Searles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

DAY 3: BOY STILL MISSING

I hadn’t really thought of myself as missing until now. But I supposed to my father and Marnie I was. I wondered if that’s what had happened to Truman. If, like me, he had vanished. Maybe that headline in my uncle’s Bible was about him. “What’s the Burdan trial?” I said, skipping the hold-on-while-I-ask-him routine. “And what’s it have to do with my. . . his sister?”

The man on the other end was silent a moment. I could hear the dull murmur of what I assumed was a newsroom in the background. People pushing words around all day long. “May I ask who I am speaking with?” he said.

I took a breath, cupped my hand over the receiver, and said quietly, “This is Terry Pindle’s son, Dominick.”

“Well,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be MIA?”

“How do you know anything about me?” I asked.

“You’re news, kid,” he told me. “A lot of people know about you. At least in the state of Massachusetts.”

My Russian hat felt heavy on my head, and I started sweating in my coat, not knowing what to say next. Finally Joshua Fuller asked, “Would you like to meet? Maybe I could chat with you instead of your uncle.”

Newsweek wanted to meet. I thought of that headline again, this time twisting it my way—DAY 29: BOY STILL MISSING. What if he told my father where I was living? What if I was forced to go back to Holedo?

My mind spun with questions until I heard a voice in my head. It was the one I had been listening for that morning in the kitchen. The one I had heard when I saw those pregnant women walking into the hospital, when I found that name on the list. My mother. Stronger now than before, she whispered, Joshua Fuller will tell you everything you want to know. He will lead you to your brother.

“I’ll meet you,” I said, pushing my mother’s gum around the inside of my mouth with my tongue. “But only if you don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Joshua Fuller agreed without taking a moment to debate the deal. We set it all up. Nine the next morning. A diner on University Place, not far from Washington Square Park.

When I put down the phone, I stood in the silence of my uncle’s apartment listening for that voice to tell me more about what was to come next. But it was quiet again. The refrigerator hummed. Footsteps creaked in the apartment upstairs. I waited a while longer, feeling pressed to the floor in my coat and hat. Sweating. Listening. Finally I gave up and headed out the door, down the stairs, and uptown toward Edie’s.

The whole way I kept thinking of Joshua Fuller’s words.

About his sister, who I was sorry to hear recently passed on.

The Burdan trial.

A lot of people know about you.

I could have hailed a cab or grabbed a bus, but the instant replay of that conversation kept me walking straight up Eighth Avenue. I kept trying to connect the dots in my head but came up with only a scribbled mess.

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