Lost Boy Lost Girl

room?”

“Yeah.” Jimbo swallowed and looked away. “That’s why I wanted to use the, you know, field glasses and stuff. I thought we could maybe catch her when she wasn’t expecting it.”

“Who did you think this girl might be?”

Jimbo gave him a quick sideways glance. “Maybe a runaway?”

“And what if you were right about that?”

“We could help her. Bring food. We wouldn’t turn her in, or anything.”

The earnest expression on Jimbo’s face told him that he was trying to put himself and Mark in as noble a light as possible. He was hiding something, and Tim thought that he was doing it for Mark.

“So did you see this girl?”

Jimbo crossed his arms over his chest.

“Sure doesn’t sound like it,” Tim said.

“I didn’t see any girl.” The boy screwed up his expressive face and stared at the gaudy little Coca-Cola can.

“Jimbo, do you think the house on Michigan Street was involved in some way with Mark’s disappearance?”

The boy’s head swung up, and his eyes briefly met Tim’s. His Adam’s apple jerked in his throat.

“I would really hate being forced to think that abduction by some homicidal creep was the only way to explain Mark’s disappearance. The only thing worse than that would be no explanation at all.” Tim smiled at the boy. He forced himself to proceed slowly.

“Look, Mr. Underhill, I don’t really know much. I don’t even know if Mark was making everything up . . .”

“If he was, he probably had a reason.”

In Jimbo’s frank stare, Tim could see that he was deciding to part with a share of his secret.

“You can’t tell anybody about this, okay?”

Tim leaned back and put his hands together.

“When the light hit the window, I thought I saw a guy in there. He was hiding way back in the room.”

Jimbo’s hands were trembling. He licked his lips and glanced at the door to the basement. “He was looking right at me.” A tremor like an electrical current moved through the boy’s entire body. “I was so scared.”

“No wonder,” Tim said.

“He was pretty big. Big head. Big shoulders. Like a football player.”

“He was just standing there?”

“It was like he stepped forward —like he deliberately moved into the light—and I saw his eyes. Looking at me. They were like ball bearings or something—silvery. Then I turned away, but he was already gone. I don’t remember anything more until Mark was bending down over me.”

“Did you tell Mark any of this?”

“I wanted to get home. He came over the next day, and that’s when I told him.”

“He must have been very interested in what you had to say.”

Jimbo enacted an entire series of you-have-no-idea gestures, looking skyward, raising his hands, shaking his head. When he looked at Tim, his eyes were the size of eggs. He really was a natural comedian, and under other circumstances, this little performance would have made Tim laugh out loud. However, what he said in response took Tim completely by surprise.

“Interested?He told me he looked out his window in the middle of the night and saw the same guy, looking up from his backyard! And after he got up that morning, he saw him again, standing at the top of Michigan Street with his back turned.”

“How could he tell it was the same man?”

Jimbo leaned forward and whispered, “This isn’t any normal guy. Believe me, you’d know him.” The boy’s face squeezed around a sudden access of fear, and his voice dropped. “Remember the party thing after Mrs. Underhill’s funeral?”

Tim nodded.

“Mark saw him there.”

“In his house?”

“Standing in the kitchen, with his back to Mark. Facing the door. Nobody else saw him.”

After struggling to find a question, Tim at last asked, “What did Mark think he was doing there?”

Margo Monaghan’s footsteps sounded on the basement floor. Jimbo leaned even farther forward. “He thought it was a warning.”

The cell phone trilled in Tim’s pocket. Both he and the boy jolted upright in their chairs. This time, Tim had no sense of suspended, heartbreaking possibility; he knew who had called him before he heard his brother’s voice. Unable to last out the rest of the day in his office, Philip was begging him to come home.

Embracing a woven yellow basket piled high with newly laundered clothes, Jimbo’s mother emerged into the kitchen. The odor of fresh laundry still warm from the dryer contrasted with the drawn, unhappy expression on Margo’s face. She moved alongside her son and said, “I hope you’re telling Mr. Underhill everything, Jimbo. I know there are things you think you can’t tell me, but this is your chance to get it all off your chest. Are you listening to me?”

Jimbo muttered that he heard her.

“This is serious stuff, kiddo. Your best friend is missing. Another boy was found dead. Am I getting through to you?”

“Uh-huh.” He could not meet her eyes.

Margo rapped the palm of her hand on the top of her son’s head and turned away. Soon her footsteps were moving up the stairs. Tim looked at the cringing boy on the other side of the table.

“Jimbo, even your mother knows you’re still holding out on me.”

The boy slumped deeper into his chair.

“But she doesn’t know anything about that house, does she?”

Jimbo sighed. He could not trust himself to look up at Tim. “We should have stayed away from that place.”

Tim remembered seeing the two boys walking through Cathedral Square and turning onto Jefferson Street. “You didn’t want to have anything to do with it, did you?”

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Jimbo said. “Mark went crazy, sort of. Of course, he had a really good reason to go crazy.”

“Tell me,” Tim said.

And Jimbo told him—told him more than he had intended to, certainly.

Mark, he said, had been kind of weird after the Maglite incident, seeming to be both angry and confused. He thought he had been warned away from the house on Michigan Street, and he had developed certain fixed ideas about it. At the same time, his mother had become a source of tremendous worry.

Two nights after Jimbo’s scare and subsequent fainting, Mark had come home half an hour after his curfew, and instead of getting the interrogation he expected, he had come across his mother sitting on the edge of the downstairs bathtub, dazed and blank with what he thought was fear. After that night, she seemed to deteriorate a little more every day.

“And, see, we thought there were two people hiding out in that house,” Jimbo told Tim. “That big guy in the black coat and a girl. We spent hours hanging out on the other side of the street, hoping to see the man leave the building. He had to buy food, didn’t he? Especially if he was keeping the girl prisoner, like we thought he was. Or maybe what Mark thought was a girl was really Shane Auslander, you know? He was a pretty skinny kid, after all. One afternoon, we called the police and told them the Sherman Park guy was hiding out in the house, but nothing happened. I don’t even know if they looked at the place.”

“They never checked it out?”

“We never saw ’em do it.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “They never called us back, either. That’s the last time I ever try to do anything for the cops, yo.

“So there’s that house, and there’s his mother. And his mother knows something about the place, he’s really sure of that. Every day, she gets a little worse. He told me, ‘It’s like she thinks the Black Death is in that place. She’s turning into one of those old peasant ladies back in Eastern Europe, where her