After a few minutes, Auggie drooped against the Corolla’s back seat. The car had a pleasant, pineapple-orange air freshener, and soft jazz played quietly through the speakers. Everything was nice and clean; Auggie had been in Ubers that looked like they’d come straight from soccer practice.
No matter how he tried to get comfortable, though, he couldn’t unspool the worry he felt in his gut. Getting the Uber, following the bus—those had been irrational decisions, motivated by the sight of Theo looking pale and upset. And, if Auggie were honest with himself, motivated by curiosity. Theo was always going places and not explaining why. He went somewhere every morning if he could, and sometimes he’d go again later in the day. Over the last five months, Auggie had stopped by his house too many times to count, and the pattern had quickly become obvious. But whenever Auggie had tried to get an answer, Theo changed the subject or shut it down completely. He could picture all the times he’d stopped by on Saturday mornings to find Theo dressed like he was going to work. All the times Theo had been late, or been in a bad mood, or been distracted.
Around Auggie, Wahredua was shifting and transforming. They left behind the trendier neighborhoods, many of them in the middle of redevelopment, that surrounded Wroxall. In their place came parts of the city Auggie had never seen before: small houses with asbestos siding or crumbling brick; quarter-acre lots that were well kept but unornamented; cars that were ten and fifteen years old, Chevys and Fords and Pontiacs. The house at the corner had a junker panel van parked at the back of the driveway, blocked in by trash cans, the tires flat, the paint that had once said EXTERMINATOR peeling from the door. In a vacant lot on the right, a trio of kids were having a snowball fight; Auggie was watching when one of the kids, probably eight, got pegged in the eye and started bawling and running home. Winter-brittle stalks of blue grama drooped and bent under the snowfall from earlier that week.
Between glances at the bus, to make sure Theo wasn’t getting off at any of the stops, Auggie kept working on the cloud storage account that he had uncovered. He was pretty sure it belonged to Robert McDonald because it had accepted the same ridiculous username that Robert had used for Instagram: mcdaddyr. Auggie had read up about the service and its app. It backed up everything on your phone: contacts, emails, notes, pictures, videos, messages. Anything it could get access to, it uploaded to the cloud. For someone like Robert, who thought of himself as an actor and a photographer and an artist, it made sense that he’d have something like this, a way of saving all those monologues and dramatic Missouri sunsets. The only problem was getting access. Auggie tried to think of what he knew about Robert: self-absorbed, treacherous, not very smart. He tried all the obvious ones: password, 12345, abcde, Robert’s birthday (which he’d seen on the pictures Theo had taken of the police report), and even variations on Jessica’s name. No luck. He kept trying as they followed the bus across town.
The bus’s route took them to what Auggie assumed was a major thoroughfare for this part of the city: Casey’s and QuikTrip and Amoco stations, a Walmart, a brick medical complex with thick plastic sheeting over the windows, a Dollar Tree, where two old men were standing in the parking lot, waving their hands at each other. Another half-mile later, the bus pulled to the curb in front of a sprawling compound of single-story buildings. Someone had tried to mitigate the bleak severity of the design—unadorned concrete, obviously built as cheaply as possible—with picture windows and bright yellow paint, but it hadn’t worked. The sign in front said Downing Children’s Healthcare Center.
Theo got off the bus.
“Here,” Auggie said, scrambling upright and unbuckling himself. “Pull over here.”
“Look, if he doesn’t want you to know where he’s going—” Imani said.
“Thanks,” Auggie said. “You were great, thank you.”
Theo didn’t even look around; his shoulders sagged, and he looked twenty years older as he shuffled toward the front doors of Downing. Auggie slid out of the Corolla just as Theo was stepping into the building, and Auggie jogged after him. He could taste the last of the bus’s exhaust; the smell of frying chicken came from the VFW Hall on the other side of the street. January wind cut across the sidewalk, levitating a cloud of snow, the crystals flashing like fool’s gold. Auggie kept looking at the sign, kept looking at the word Children’s, and he had to blink to clear his eyes. The wind kept coming, sharper and colder, and he kept blinking while snow drifted around his ankles.
When he got inside, the warmth and the quiet were a welcome change. The lobby had blond-wood furniture with polka-dot upholstery; everything looked very clean and Scandinavian, magazines neatly held in clear plastic trays on the wall, chrome baskets for toys. Auggie caught a whiff of something that made him think of Salisbury steak, and that took him back to elementary school and the brown slab of something covered with a brown sauce of something else on his tray. He pictured fruit cocktail in tiny cans. Cardboard cartons of milk. The thought running through his head was: Theo comes here every day. Every day.
“May I help you?” a man asked. He was wearing scrubs, but judging by how settled he looked at the computer behind the reception desk, Auggie guessed he was some kind of secretary or administrative assistant.
“Yes, hi. Sorry, I’m here with Theo Stratford. I missed the first bus, so I’m a little late.”
The man picked up a clipboard from the desk and examined it. Then he looked at Auggie. “And you are?”
“Auggie. August Lopez.”
“And who are you here to see?”
“Oh, I came here with Theo.”
“Mmhmm.” The man’s eyes flicked to
