“Hey,” Grandpa barks. I gulp down bite number three and dart my focus toward him with my fake satisfied grin plastered in place. He’s uninterested in my culinary opinion, though, and nods toward the window above the sink. “There’s a lot of coppers over at that house you’re always staring at.”
I’m both embarrassed and rushed with intrigue.
“I’m not . . .” I shake my head as I get up and move toward the window, knowing that finishing that statement is pointless. I am always looking at that house across the street.
Grandpa Hank slides back toward the stove and cracks more eggs to serve himself, but he leans to the left to stare out the window alongside me. He wasn’t exaggerating. There are five squad cars outside the Trombley home, two in the driveway and another three pulled up alongside the curb. There aren’t any lights flashing, and we would have heard sirens. Weird that they showed up sometime between me being upstairs and making my way down here.
“I bet that pretty blonde you’re always looking at is up to funny business,” Grandpa says. He waits for my sideways glance to pretend to pinch a doobie and draw in a hit. He follows it up with a cackling laugh as he elbows me in the ribs.
“Eleanor isn’t like that,” I defend. I don’t know for sure that she isn’t, but my instincts tell me she plays by the rules—mostly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her stumble into her house after a late Friday or Saturday night. Her older sister did that plenty of times. The only thing Eleanor does is get kissed in the car. Shamelessly, I’ve watched most of those goodnight kisses. At least the beginnings of them.
Why am I thinking about all of this now? Damn Grandpa Hank! Old fart didn’t even wait for the whiskey to start in on me today.
I stare on, partly because there’s no way I’m going back to those eggs when they’re cold, but mostly because I’m glued to the scene unfolding across the street. Two officers pace around the front of the yard, stopping to squat and look closely at the grass every few feet or so. Another cop walks toward the back of the house with a German shepherd. The dog’s nose is fixed in the blades of grass, his head weaving methodically from left to right along the ground.
“Hey.” My voice is hushed as I alert my grandpa. I feel as if I’m on a stakeout or something. “Look, there’s another.”
Dumping his egg mush onto a plate, he abandons the pan in the sink then sidles up next to me, eating while we stand squared with the side-by-side window panes. A woman dressed in a black suit gets out of the new car, and walks up the center path in the Trombley front hard. I catch a glimpse of her gun at her side as she shifts her jacket. She stops to talk with one of the officers who’s been fixated on something in the flower bed. I hadn’t noticed before, but he’s wearing blue gloves.
“I don’t think this is good, Jonah.” My grandfather’s words are dulled, and as I turn to glance his way, his expression is just as void. He finishes his eggs and clears my plate once he’s done, not even bothering to ask if I want more. I don’t. And for once, it’s not because I can’t stand the texture passing over my tongue.
No. Right now, I feel strangely sick. My gut is heavy with a sense of doom. And a selfish paranoia. The pretty blonde girl I like to stare at across the street hasn’t come outside since I’ve been looking out this window.
Two
Events like this have a way of grabbing everyone’s full attention in a matter of hours. Oak Forest isn’t a big city. It isn’t even that close to Chicago, the city we all say we’re from when anyone asks. This place is a suburb of a suburb, a clustered grid of streets that look the same at every turn. Giant oaks line wide, uneven sidewalks that have been cracked from years of snow storms and massive root systems. Before today, the biggest news to happen in Oak Forest was the arrival of the actual car used in the original Ghostbusters movie. Orson Symanski won it in an auction six years ago. He brings that sucker out for every New Year’s parade.
Today’s news is a little different. The first media truck showed up in front of our house about two hours after the cops arrived across the street. Grandpa Hank isn’t afflicted with the same debilitating social anxiety I am, so he ran out to offer the camera guy and reporter lady coffee and got the scoop before the news officially broke on Channel 7 thirty minutes later.
Addy Trombley is missing.
Somehow, eight hours have passed since the beginning of all this, or at least the beginning as Grandpa Hank and I know it. For the Trombleys, it’s been a harrowing thirteen or more. It’s the more that is full of mystery. Nobody seems sure exactly how long the nine-year-old has been gone. That’s the hook the media is hanging on to for now, and it’s playing out in living rooms up and down our street—throughout Chicagoland, really, thanks
