Lost Boy Lost Girl

to be great detectives like your friend Pasmore. I should have known.” He looked as though he were going to spit on the floor.

“Did you know they called the police?”

“What, you think they’d tell me?” Here I got a flat, triumphant glare. “That’s why he was interested in the place. They must have seen someone in there.” He looked at Pohlhaus, whose impervious demeanor had not changed since Philip and I had come into the “bullpen.” “You guys checked it out, I’m sure.”

“We went over and had a look. The place was locked up. Had been for years.”

“You never got back in touch with my son?”

“He gave us a tip, we checked it out, and it went nowhere, like most of the tips we get from the public. We don’t follow up unless we find something useful.”

“It went nowhere, huh? Is that what you thought after my son disappeared?”

“Mr. Underhill, I am very sorry about your son, and we’re doing everything we can to find him.”

“You sit here and say that to me. Didn’t it occur to you that my son could have drawn attention to himself by his investigative efforts?”

“Not if our bad boy wasn’t there,” Pohlhaus said.

My brother looked back at me. “But that’s what all this garbage in the e-mails is about, isn’t it? These crazy ideas, and feeling like he’s in one of your books? He wants you to know he’s playing detective.”

“He could be talking about something else,” I said.

“I certainly hope you’ll let me in on whatever it is you have in mind.”

I glanced at Pohlhaus. “It seems to me that you should go back to that house and give it a much closer inspection.”

“Another country heard from,” Pohlhaus said.

The day after the break-in, Mark took the photograph album with him when he returned to the empty house. He did not want to leave it at home. His father was getting weird enough to start searching his room, and the album would be impossible to explain. Best to stow the album in its original hiding place, where it would be safe from parental discovery. Also, he wanted to consult the photographs, to go over them many times, dredging for whatever information he could pick up; since he planned to spend most of the day in that house, he more or less had to bring the pictures with him.

Late that morning, he and Jimbo had worked out the day’s schedule on their cell phones. They were both basically still in bed. Mark, having showered and dressed, was lying supine on top of the blanket while Jimbo was still prone between his sheets.

“Phase Two, I get it,” Jimbo said. “Let’s get together at the Sherman Diner around lunchtime and compare notes, okay?”

The Sherman Diner, two doors down from the former site of the old Beldame Oriental Theater, was an unofficial hangout for Quincy students. Jimbo’s mentioning it meant that he wanted to swap information with Mark but felt like seeing other people afterward. At this time, all the students in the area were constantly gabbing on their cell phones about the local murderer.

Mark said, “You go, if you want. I don’t think I’m going to be very interested in food, and I don’t feel like explaining myself to the kids who’ll be there. We’ll talk later.”

“When, like.”

“Whenever I’m done for the day, Jimbo. You have plenty to keep you busy.”

“I know.” Jimbo sounded a bit aggrieved.

He probably sensed that his best friend was holding out on him. Mark was indeed holding out on him, and he intended to keep on doing just that. While going through the house the day before, Mark had noticed many curiosities that he had not mentioned to Jimbo. In a sense, he had given Jimbo the key to understanding these oddities (if, that is, he was right about them, as he was almost certain he was), so technically perhaps he had withheld nothing. But Mark had known that Jimbo would not understand what to do with the key, or what it meant, or even that it was a key. The house, Mark had concluded, held an immense secret that had been built into it by the same madman who had added the ugly little room and created the giant’s bed.

After getting off the phone with Jimbo, Mark went downstairs and prowled through the refrigerator. Mark’s father shopped only when forced to do so, and he tended to buy unrelated items like bottles of olives, peanut brittle, pickles, lite mayonnaise, and Wonder Bread. On his first foray through the shelves, Mark thought he might have to go over to the 7-Eleven before getting down to business, but his next pass took in the sliding drawer, which yielded cheddar cheese, cream cheese, and some sliced salami that still looked edible. He made a salami and cheddar cheese sandwich with mayo and slid the gooey thing into a plastic bag. Then he put both the sandwich and the photograph album into a paper bag that already held a crowbar, a ripping hammer, and the Maglite, and went outside, rolling down the top of the bag to make it look smaller.

Out into the hot white sunlight he steps, our heroic boy, out into the oven the sun has made of these poor streets, moving like a jockey toward the winner’s circle, like a conqueror toward his mistress’s tent. For once in his life, he feels locked in, prepared for the first stage of whatever destiny will turn out to be destined for him. His fear—for he is actually filled with fear—seems to energize him, to increase his sense of purpose.

Such a manner invites rather than repels notice, and not long after he turns onto Michigan Street and begins his purposeful march toward the fourth house up the block, one Michigan Street resident inclines his head toward his living room window and immediately takes him in.

There’s that good-looking Underhill kid,thinks Omar Hillyard, on his way to the old Kalendar house again, I bet. Where’s Sancho Panza, the little Irish bulldog who goes everywhere with him?

God, what a handsome kid. Bold as brass! Look at him come cutting right up alongside that house . . . he’s breaking in, for sure. Little demon! If I were the Irish bulldog, I’d be wildly in love with him.

I bet he finds more than he bargained for inside the Kalendar place.

Enjoying the sensation of light warming his arms and shoulders, Mark moved onto the grass. His legs carried him along, stride after rhythmic stride. If he wanted to, Mark could walk to the Rocky Mountains, jump up one side, down the other, and roll on until he was standing ankle-deep in the Pacific.

He plunged through the tall grasses and parched weeds, bounded up the broken wooden steps, and after the slightest hesitation, opened the back door. Here was the giant’s house, and here was he, Mark the giant killer and his little bag of tricks. He had half-expected some form of resistance to his entrance, but his coming alone did not invoke the invisible spider webs and the emotional miasma of his first visit. He passed unimpeded through the door, and without bothering to check out the room containing the obscene bed, carried his laden paper bag up the stairs to the master bedroom.

An excellent carpenter had once lived in this house. The sloppiness of the addition amounted to a deliberate deception: anyone who saw it would be unlikely to guess at the extent of the adjustments its maker had made to the fabric of his house. The sheer monstrosity of the torture bed also had to be deliberate—the carpenter had built an object commensurate with the enormity of his feelings. However, when free to exercise the full extent of his skill, he had set in place a kind of builder’s tour de force. This was what Mark had not revealed to his best friend.

Up in the bedroom, he took the crowbar from his bag and used it to pry away a section of the panel in the back of the closet. Plaster and bits of broken lathe rattled to the floor.

He had found the photograph album within a small, square, tablelike construction to the side of the vacancy he had just enlarged. The little table looked as though it had been built to hold a lamp, but Mark knew it had two very different purposes. It provided a perfect place to sit unseen and listen to what was going on in the house. It was a seat for a domestic spy and terrorist, and that it had been built at all demonstrated the extent of the builder’s psychosis. By means of a secret, sliding catch, the little box also opened up to become a concealed vault or safe.