Remembering their last encounter, where the sight of him in a uniform made her think that something had happened to her husband, Rusty offered her a smile and asked to see Eric. “He’s not in trouble — I just heard a story about some of the town kids hassling him and his friends the other night and wanted to check it out.”
Though Merrill’s expression tightened slightly, she invited him in and led him to the dining room, where Ruston realized there was one meal he’d forgotten about: brunch. Gathered around the dining table were not only Eric and his little sister, but two other boys his age, and two women who he assumed were their mothers. He also assumed that the boys had been with Eric the other night, when Adam said he and his own friends tried to scare them in the woods.
Merrill made a quick series of introductions, then waited expectantly. Picking up his cue, Ruston got directly to the point, but decided to direct his first words to all three of the boys and see what happened. “I heard some of the boys in town tried to give you guys a scare in the woods the other night.”
Three pairs of eyes darted toward one another, then Eric nodded. “Something like that, yes.”
“All three of you?” He indicated the two other boys with a nod of his head.
Eric nodded.
“Anything come of that?”
“Do you mean did we kick their butts?” Kent asked.
Ellen glared at her son. “Kent!”
The sheriff, though, smiled at the three boys. “Basically, yes, that’s what I’m asking. And I’m not saying you’re in trouble if you did, either. From what I’ve already heard, it sounds like they had it coming to them.”
“Well, we didn’t,” Kent said, “but we should have.”
“You didn’t come all the way out here just to ask my son if he was in a fight,” Merrill Brewster said. “Something else is going on, isn’t it?”
Ruston shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, but saw no point in not telling them what they were bound to hear within a few hours anyway. “Ellis Langstrom has been missing since night before last.”
Tad Sparks paled and slumped in his chair.
“Ellis Langstrom?” Ashley Sparks breathed, her face as pale as her son’s. “Carol Langstrom’s son?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ruston said.
“Oh, dear, that’s terrible.” Ashley said, sinking into one of the empty chairs at the table. “Poor Carol. I’d better call her.” She looked back up at the sheriff. “Where is he? I mean, what happened to him?”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine.”
“Well, we sure didn’t have anything to do with it,” Kent said.
“All that happened was that they were trying to scare us the other night in the woods,” Eric explained. “You know — cracking twigs, and growls and moans and all that kind of stuff. And it worked — we got spooked and they got their laugh. But that was it — it was nothing, really.” He looked at his mother, who was frowning at him as if there must be something he wasn’t talking about. “Really. Nothing happened at all!”
Kent turned to the sheriff. “And if I was gonna make someone disappear, it’d be Adam Mosler, not Langstrom.”
“Kent!”
Ellen Newell looked like she might slap her son, and Ruston quickly smiled at her. “Some of our kids can get kind of frisky in the summer. School’s out and they don’t get much supervision from their folks.”
Tad was still slumped in his chair, staring into space. Nothing about either his posture or expression suggested guilt. In fact, he looked more scared than anything else, and none of the boys showed any obvious cuts or bruises on their faces or their hands. At least not the kind they would have had if they’d gotten into a fight with Adam Mosler and Chris McIvens, and he was sure that Kent Newell’s remark about going after Mosler rather than Ellis Langstrom was absolutely true. Ellis might have gone along with Mosler’s harassment, but if it came down to a fight, Ellis was far more likely to run than stand. Which, in Ruston’s book anyway, at least made him smarter than his two friends.
“Well, I guess that’s it for now, then,” he said. “If you hear or see anything, give the office a call, okay?”
“Of course,” Merrill said. She walked the sheriff out the door to the edge of the porch, then put a halting hand on his arm. When she spoke, he could hear the fear in her voice. “You don’t think an animal did something to him? I mean…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes shifted to a spot near the woods, and after a second or two she spoke again, though her words were barely audible. “I was just thinking about our cat.”
He followed her gaze to a makeshift cross over a little plot of cleared earth near the garage, and a shiver ran the length of his spine as he remembered the way the cat had been ripped open, gutted, and left on his doorstep.
He cut the thought short, unwilling to complete it. “I think some kind of animal got your cat,” he said quietly, “but between you and me, I still think Ellis took off for Madison or Chicago or someplace. I’m pretty sure his mother will hear from him within a few days.”
Merrill shook her head sadly. “Every mother’s nightmare. I’m not sure I could stand it at all.”
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Ruston said. “Try to enjoy your day, okay? I’m sure everything’s going to be just fine, and you can be proud that your boy and his friends were big enough to just ignore Mosler’s crowd. I wish we had more kids around here like yours.”
Merrill managed a smile and stepped back to the doorway, staying there until he had driven out of the driveway. He could still see her in his rearview mirror as he made the turn toward the highway.
There was a woman, he decided, who worried too much. Today, though, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she wasn’t right to worry.
What if the same thing that had happened to the Brewsters’ cat had, indeed, happened to Ellis Langstrom?
Rusty Ruston didn’t even want to think about it.
Chapter 21
TAD SPARKS PEERED uncertainly around the small clearing. It looked sort of like the one where Moxie had found the heavy stick the day before yesterday, but so had the two others they’d already explored in the hour since they escaped from their mothers. But he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to find the stick or not.
“It’s got to be here somewhere,” he heard Kent Newell say. “I know it was right around here. It was under a—”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that,” Tad cut in sourly. “We all know it was under a bush, but all the bushes look alike.” He turned to Eric. “You sure you just dropped it, or did you throw it?”
Eric shrugged. “I thought I dropped it, but now I’m not sure.”
“Even if we find it, what are we going to do with it?”
Kent looked at Tad as if he was an idiot. “Tell the sheriff, of course. I mean, what if someone used it to kill that kid?”
“Doesn’t it seem like maybe if we were going to do that we should have done it the day before yesterday?” Tad countered.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s not here.” Kent sighed. “Who knows? Maybe a bear found it and started gnawing on it or something.”
“Or whoever left it here came back for it,” Eric suggested. “And even if we found it, so what? I mean, it’s not like the sheriff even said someone killed that kid—”
“Can we talk about something else?” Tad broke in as the memory of his nightmare — the nightmare in which he himself had killed someone — rose up in his mind.
“How about the room?” Kent asked, and saw a flicker of fear in Tad’s eyes. “You know, the one you won’t go into anymore?” When Tad’s face reddened, he took another jab: “The one you’re too
