I Shall Not Want

'There's no such thing,' Betsy said with confidence.

'Hey, you two.' Hadley and Betsy turned to see Reverend Fergusson striding toward them, looking more like a well-toned soccer mom than a priest in her sleeveless blouse and shorts. 'Have either of you seen Cody Burns?'

Betsy shook her head.

'Little guy with curly dark hair?' Hadley said. 'Two, two and a half?'

'That's him.' Reverend Clare's face relaxed.

'I saw him earlier with the kids playing around the tombstones, but I haven't noticed him recently.'

The relaxation disappeared. The rector muttered something under her breath that Hadley and Betsy pretended they didn't hear. 'C'mon,' she said grimly. 'We've got to find him.'

Across the wide and grassy field, Hadley could see the word passing, people talking in little clumps and then separating to wander away from each other, scanning the horizon or peering at the ground. Picnickers flung open their coolers and looked inside. At the minutemen encampment, drilling halted, there was a confusion of wool coats and rectangular backpacks, and then the play soldiers began crawling through their canvas tents.

'Go check the cars!' someone yelled, and several men ran off to the front of the field, where the St. Alban's cars had pulled off the narrow highway to park in a ragged, overheated row.

Hadley followed Clare into the center of the maelstrom, where the trees from the forest stretching beyond the old gathering place cast their deep green shadows over lichen-blurred stones. She looked at the wall, the practical leavings from the harvest of rocks that came out of every field here. In places it had tumbled down to a few smooth pieces of granite. Nothing that would stop an adventurous two-and-a-half-year-old.

'I thought you had him!'

Hadley knew Geoffrey Burns by sight from church and by reputation at the station, where the male half of the law firm of Burns and Burns was known as 'that officious little prick,' and the other officers all wondered what the good-looking Mrs. Burns was doing with such a short, slight spouse. Hadley figured it out the first time she saw the man, radiating power, decked out in a five-hundred-dollar camel-hair coat.

'Thought? Why didn't you check with me instead of swanning off to drink beer?'

She had never seen Karen Burns looking anything less than rich, well-groomed, and perfect. She guessed, by the look on other spectators' faces, that they would have said the same. Evidently no one had ever caught a glimpse of this mottle-faced woman screaming at her husband.

'Because I assumed you're competent to look after our son!'

'And I assumed you had the decency to get your head out of your ass and notice what's going on around you!'

More and more congregants and reenactors drifted within earshot. Several started to look more interested in the Burnses' fight than in finding the boy.

'Break it up,' Reverend Clare said, hooking Karen Burns's arm in hers and neatly turning her away from her clench-fisted husband. 'We need to organize now.' The rector raised her voice. 'Parents, let's get a head count of the other kids. I want to make sure no one else wandered off with Cody.'

Karen let out a terrible moan. Reverend Clare gave her a little shake. 'We'll find him, Karen.'

The remaining children were rounded up, some protesting, some demanding hot dogs and hamburgers. Genny wanted another soda, and after making sure she and Hudson were included in the count, Hadley sent them both off to the cooler, with orders to stay where they could see her. No one else was missing. None of the kids could remember seeing the preschooler leave.

'I want four volunteers to walk the road, one on each side, in both directions,' Reverend Clare said to the assembled throng. Several hands shot up. The rector pointed. 'Laurie and Phoebe, you go north. Judy and Terry, you head south.' She turned to a couple Hadley knew as Sunday school teachers. 'David and Beth, can you take charge of the other kids? Get some food into them and organize a game so they won't be underfoot?' They nodded. 'Can anyone get a cell phone signal out here?'

Three quarters of the crowd began digging in their pockets for their phones, including, Hadley observed, several Revolutionary war soldiers. Most people glanced at their screens and shook their heads.

'Shit! The sat phone!' Geoffrey Burns smacked himself on the head and tore across the field toward the Burnses' Land Rover.

Karen, her face twisted, yelled, 'Hurry, Geoff, hurry!' She turned to the rector. 'Digital satellite phone. So we can reach clients or the office no matter where we are.'

Reverend Clare raised her voice. 'We're going to have to walk the woods. I want everyone to spread out at the rear of the field, in front of the stone wall. Leave several feet between yourself and the person to your right or left.' She did not, Hadley noticed, specify 'everyone who's helping search.' Her assumption paid off when the crowd, St. Alban's people and reenactors alike, began to shuffle into a raggedy line.

Geoff Burns reappeared, panting and clutching a brick-shaped phone that looked like it had been left over from 1987. He thrust it toward the rector. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something, then shut it. 'Call nine-one-one,' she said. 'We're going to want the Search and Rescue team and their dog handler. I think she lives in Saratoga.' She shook her head, as if dislodging irrelevancies. 'Doesn't matter. They'll handle that.' Something caught her eye. 'Shoot,' she said, under her breath. 'Mr. Hadley.'

Hadley followed her gaze and sure enough, there was Granddad, stumping off to join the search party, as if hiking through the woods in 84-degree heat wasn't any different from walking the treadmill at his therapist's.

'Mr. Hadley!' Reverend Clare called, at the same time Hadley yelled, 'Granddad!' They jogged over and boxed him in, a woman on either side.

'Granddad, you can't do this,' Hadley said. 'Look at you, you're already all red and sweaty.' She clapped a hand to his forehead. 'You're overheated. You need to sit in the shade and drink something cold.'

'I ain't one to sit on my fanny while a little kid's out there wandering through the woods,' he said, sounding grumpy and short of breath.

Reverend Clare spoke up. 'Mr. Hadley, we need someone responsible to stay here and meet the Search and Rescue volunteers. Could you be our coordinator? You'll have to tell them we're walking a simple straight-line pattern, and that we don't have any whistles or signaling devices.'

He ran a palm over his bald head. Peered at both of them. 'Well. Okay, Father. If that's where you need me.'

Hadley shot the rector a look of gratitude. She got her grandfather into a chair by the ice chest, hollered at Hudson and Genny to behave themselves, and then trotted toward the human chain that now stretched to either end of the Muster Field.

Reverend Clare cupped her hands on either side of her mouth and paced down the line. 'Walk slowly,' she said, projecting her voice so that it echoed off the gravestones. 'Keep another searcher within sight on either side. That way, you'll be sure you're not missing anything. If you find the boy, pass the news down the line and return to the Muster Field. The search-and-rescue team is on its way, so if you hear three loud whistles, return to the Muster Field. Do not, under any circumstances, wander off alone! We don't want two people lost in the woods.'

By the time she finished, she was at the other end of the field from Hadley. A ripple of words flowed through the line. The woman to Hadley's right said, 'Let's go,' Hadley passed it on to her left, and they all stepped over the low stone wall more or less in unison.

It was no-tech compared to the last search in the woods she had undertaken, but despite the lack of topo maps, flashlights, walkie-talkies, and whistles, it was fundamentally the same-walking in line, a flare of excitement when you saw a human-shaped bump on a log, disappointment and the dawning realization that one piece of forest looks pretty damn much like another. People yelled 'Cody!' instead of 'No soy del