“If I knew where he was, he wouldn’t be missing,” Isabel said, and some of her friends laughed.
“A three-year-old boy disappeared from his parents’ beach blanket,” Mitzi Caruso explained to me. “He’s got light blond hair and is wearing blue trunks.”
I looked around me at the beach. Nearly everyone was standing now, talking with one another, holding fast to their children. Women had their hands to their mouths, frown lines across their foreheads as they stared at the water. From where I stood, I searched the beach for a towheaded little boy and spotted several of them, but they all appeared to have at least one parent close by. I felt sad and I prayed that the little boy had not drowned. I had to do something to ease my feeling of helplessness.
“I’m going to check the playground,” I said, even though the teenagers were not paying much attention to me. I ran toward the swings, my mother’s request to return to her and Lucy forgotten.
I began my search for clues in a methodical fashion, using my foot to mark off areas in the sand to examine. I found a man’s watch almost immediately. It lay in the sand near one of the swings and had probably come off when a father had been pushing his child. I found a playing card—the two of clubs—along with numerous Popsicle sticks. And then I found a clue that sent a chill up my spine: a small piece of blue cloth!
I ran back to the lifeguard stand just as Ned was climbing down the ladder.
“Ned!” I called as I neared him. “Look what I found near the swings.” I held the piece of cloth out to him and he took it from my hand but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. His face looked grim, his mouth a straight, tight line.
“It might be from the boy’s trunks,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “No. His trunks are plaid, not solid.”He looked distracted as he handed the cloth back to me. “But thanks for trying and for keeping your eyes open.” He started toward the parking lot at a run, and Isabel walked up to me, frowning.
“Don’t bug him, Jules,” she said. Lifting her hair off her neck, she slipped a rubber band around it to form a sloppy ponytail. “This is an emergency. There’s no time to fool around.”
“I know it’s an emergency,” I said, and I walked away from her, annoyed.
“Come on, Julie,” my mother called again. She was folding the blanket and I walked over to help her.
“I want to stay, Mom,” I said, taking the hem of the blanket in my hands.
“You’ll only get in the way.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
My mother took the folded blanket into her arms and looked around us. People were still huddled together in small groups, talking. Some of the adults were racing this way and that, searching for the boy, I guessed, although the beach was so small you could nearly see all of it from where we were standing. The only areas hidden from view were the patches of tall beach grass at either end of the sandy crescent, and I watched a couple of women disappear into them, calling, “Donnnnneeeee! Donnnnneeeee!”
I heard sirens in the distance and looked toward the road. Ned and Isabel and a few other people stood in the parking lot, and Ned waved at the ambulance and the police car as they came into view.
Lucy hated the sound of sirens. They must have reminded her of riding in the ambulance after the long-ago accident she’d been in with our mother.
“All right,” Mom said. “Pick up the thermos and we’ll leave. Julie, you can stay, but be sure you let the police do their job.”
“I will.”
“And be home by three. Not a second later, all right?”
A couple of men walked past us, one of them saying to the other that the bay might need to be dragged.
“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.
“Never mind,” my mother said. She picked up her beach bag and I saw tears in her eyes. She probably thought the boy was dead.
My mother and Lucy headed for the parking lot and I looked around me, trying to figure out what to do. My gaze lit on the pier. No one was out there, and I wondered if I could get a better look at the water from the end of it. I started running in that direction as a second police car pulled into the parking lot.
By the time I reached the end of the pier, there were no children at all in the water. Adults waded in the shallow section, eyes downcast as they looked for the little boy’s body. I studied the water below the pier, thinking that if the boy had made it onto the pier and then fallen in, I might see him under the water’s surface. But the water was too dark and, after a while, my eyes hurt from trying to pierce it.
I walked back down the pier toward the beach, and when I reached the area where the wood of the pier met the sand, I saw small footprints. They headed away from the beach toward the parking lot and they were the only set of footprints going in that direction. I followed them to where they disappeared into the crushed shells of the parking lot. Even when I got down on my knees and looked very closely, I could see how the bleached white bits of shell had been disturbed by tiny feet. I followed the footprints across the entire width of the parking lot, heading toward the clubhouse which was a nice, woody-smelling building where the kids in the area could play bingo and other games on rainy days. I picked the footprints up again in the sand at the other end of the parking lot. It was almost too easy. The footprints led directly to the rear of the clubhouse and stopped short at the lattice that enclosed the building’s crawl space. I tugged at one of the seams in the lattice and it pulled away easily. Kneeling down, I crawled inside, and there I found little Donnie Jakes, sound asleep on the cool, shaded sand.
I got a ride home a little after three from a policeman named Officer Davis, to whom I’d turned over the boy after I found him. Officer Davis walked me to my front door and told my mother that I had found Donnie Jakes, alive and well. Mom burst into tears, and it took me a while to realize it was not my role in finding him that made her cry, but rather that the child, even though he was a stranger to her, was safe.
“We’d have found him eventually,” Officer Davis said to her, once she’d mopped the tears from her face with a
