Lost Boy Lost Girl

A Rip

in the

Fabric

PART THREE

10

After returning to Millhaven in response to Philip’s alarming call, Tim Underhill questioned nearly as many people as would a conscientious reporter doing man-on-the-street interviews in the week before an election. He would have flown to Alaska if he thought an Alaskan had seen Mark on the day of his disappearance, or could give him any information about that disappearance.

As the days went by, Tim felt an ever-increasing desperation. He loved Mark more than he’d known, he discovered: for his promise, his striking good looks, the underlying sweetness of his character—and for his angers and frustrations and moments of reckless bravado. He was a kid, after all, and if you were to love him sensibly and well you had to take him as he came. Tim had wanted his nephew to visit him in New York. He thought a boy like Mark should see the great city and sense its million opportunities, begin to appreciate its gritty essential goodness, and come to understand that New York City was really the opposite of what people living in other parts of the country tended to imagine it to be, was more honest, more generous, and more considerate than other towns and cities. Such was his New York, anyhow, and that of most of the people he knew.

In the days after he returned to Millhaven, during his encounters with men and women who might have seen more than they knew but probably had not, Tim Underhill was forced to acknowledge the extent to which he had thought of Mark, consciously or otherwise, as a kind of son. Of course he could not speak of this to Philip; two successive losses had shattered his brother and turned him into a hollow creature dependent on Tim for whatever hope he could permit himself to feel. In the absence of anything else to do, Philip continued to go to work, but since “work” had not involved anything serious for something like two weeks, the vice principal’s office represented chiefly a bolt-hole free of the emotional associations inevitable at home.

Tim wished that Mark had fled 3324 North Superior Street for 55 Grand. He wished he had earned his brother’s rage. Rage, he thought, was better than hopelessness. Philip never confessed it, but he had settled for the bleak comfort of hopelessness the moment the voice of a WMTG newsreader coming from the portable radio on his desk had distracted his attention from an elaborate doodle with the announcement that a third name had been definitively added to that of Shane Auslander and Trey Wilk. This announcement had come at the top of the three P.M. local news. Within the hour, Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus of the Millhaven Police Department was reporting the discovery of the corpse of sixteen-year-old Dewey Dell in the underbrush along the eastern bank of the Kinninnick River. It was thought that the perpetrator had been forced to dump Dell’s body in haste before he could dispose of it as he had those of Auslander and Wilk. And Mark, Philip told himself, only half-consciously aware that he had just abandoned all hope of hope.

Dewey Dell’s body was found along the neglected riverbank the day after Tim returned to Millhaven. On the day he arrived, Tim found Philip taut as a drumhead. If Philip were a smoker, he would have been burning through four or five packs a day. Tim demanded that his brother join him for dinner at Violet’s, the show-offy restaurant carved out of the Pforzheimer’s lower depths, and for the sake of propriety Philip calmed down enough to eat a meal without jumping up to check in with the police. That night, he still thought his son probably had taken the Greyhound to Chicago, or some such place, fleeing from reminders of what he had seen. And Philip insisted on meeting Tom Pasmore; he wanted the detective’s voodoo to locate his son. For the first half hour in Violet’s, Tim labored to convince Philip that if they were to stand on Tom’s doorstep and ring his bell, Pasmore, friend though he was, would refuse both to meet them and to have anything to do with Mark’s case. Philip refused to be convinced, so Tim pulled out his cell phone and proved his point. Tom Pasmore did, however, agree to meet with Tim later that evening.

After Philip’s reluctant departure, Tim piloted the swan boat of his rented Town Car to Tom Pasmore’s house on Eastern Shore Drive, and Tom, who was exceptionally pleased to see him, did some mild voodoo with his computers and reported that, as far as he could see, Mark had not taken a bus to Chicago or anywhere else in the past month. He promised to be as helpful as he could, but, as predicted, he declined to meet Tim’s brother unless the meeting became absolutely necessary.

The next day, Tim joined Philip for breakfast, watched him go off to work, and started the laborious process of ringing the neighbors’ doorbells. When that grew tiring, he went to Sherman Park and joined two police officers, Nelson Rote and Tyrone Selwidge, engaged in the task of questioning people about the missing boys. Rote and Selwidge had three photographs, and he had two, both of Mark. When they showed their photographs, he showed his. No one could remember seeing any of the boys leaving Sherman Park with anyone, although two women pushing baby strollers said that Mark’s face was familiar. They did not know his name, but they had seen him in the neighborhood.

“He’s such a good-looking boy,” said one of the young mothers. “I mean, really. I have this friend, she’d—oh, sorry.”

Shortly after three P.M. , Tim’s cell phone burst into tinny song, and he ripped it from his pocket, startling Jimbo Monaghan, whose house he had reached after his return to Superior Street. No, the caller was not Mark, as had seemed possible for the space of approximately two seconds. Philip had just heard about the fate of Dewey Dell on WMTG.

“Mark used to go for walks down there,” Philip told him. “Right where they found the body, on that riverbank. We thought it was so safe! They had a walking trail and a bicycle path. Doesn’t that sound safe to you?”

Tim guessed it did.

“Nothing’s safe,” Philip said. “Not these days.”

Tim could hear in Philip’s voice that he no longer believed that Mark was still alive. The pain of his death was more bearable than the pain of uncertainty.

“They have a name for the guy,” Philip said. “The Sherman Park Killer.”

Having heard that a boy’s body had been discovered, Jimbo Monaghan was staring pop-eyed at Tim.

Tim lowered one hand through the air, palm down and fingers splayed, telling the boy to wait another few seconds. “The press always gives sexy names to psychos who haven’t been caught,” he said to Philip. “Listen to me. I haven’t given up on Mark yet. This new kid wasn’t found anywhere near Sherman Park, right? And so far, nobody really knows what happened to Auslander and what’s-his-name, Wilk.”

“You have to talk to Tom Pasmore again.”

“He’s doing what he can.”

Tim broke contact and slipped the little phone back into his jacket pocket.

“Sorry, Jimbo. We were just getting to the good part. You’re standing there with the binoculars, Mark switches on the Maglite and . . . what, everything goes black?”

“The next thing I know, I’m lying on the grass, and Mark is looking down, talking at me.”

“Saying what?”

“‘You jumped about a foot and you passed out, man.’ Like that.”

“Is that what you did?”

Jimbo stirred on his chair, for a moment resembling a mouse under the gaze of an attentive cat. There was a cold can of Coca-Cola before him, a glass of ice water before Tim. From the basement stairs came the sound of Margo Monaghan opening the door of the dryer.

“I guess,” Jimbo said.

“And that was because of something you saw?”

Jimbo looked away and shrugged.

Tim leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Mark told you he thought he’d seen a girl in that