it toward the ground the instant she realized who I was.
“Chris.
Oh, God.”
“What’s wrong? ” I asked again as I got off my bike.
“Jimmy’s gone.”
“Run away? ”
“No.” She turned from me and hurried toward the house.
“This way, here, look.” Lilly’s property is ringed by a white picket
fence that she herself built. The entrance is flanked not by gate posts
but by matched bougainvillea that she has pruned into trees and trained
into a canopy.
Her modest Cape Cod bungalow lies at the end of an intricately patterned
brick walkway that she designed and laid after teaching herself masonry
from books.
The front door stood open. Enticing rooms of deadly brightness lay
beyond.
Instead of taking me and Orson inside, Lilly quickly led us off the
bricks and across the lawn. In the still night, as I pushed my bike
through the closely cropped grass, the tick of wheel bearings was the
loudest sound. We went to the north side of the house.
A bedroom window had been raised. Inside, a single lamp glowed, and the
walls were striped with amber light and faint honey-brown shadows from
the folded cloth of the pleated shade. To the left of the bed, Star Wars
action figures stood on a set of bookshelves. As the cool night air
sucked warmth from the house, one panel of the curtains was drawn across
the sill, pale and fluttering like a troubled spirit reluctant to leave
this world for the next.
“I thought the window was locked, but it mustn’t have been, ” Lilly said
frantically. “Someone opened it, some sonofabitch, and he took Jimmy
away.”
“Maybe it’s not that bad.”
“Some sick bastard, ” she insisted.
The flashlight jiggled, and Lilly struggled to still her trembling hand
as she directed the beam at the planting bed alongside the house.
“I don’t have any money, ” she said.
“Money? ”
“To pay ransom. I’m not rich. So no one would take Jimmy for ransom.
It’s worse than that.” False Solomon’s seal, laden with feathery sprays
of white flowers that glittered like ice, had been trampled by the
intruder. Footprints were impressed in trodden leaves and soft damp
soil. They were not the prints of a runaway child but those of an adult
in athletic shoes with bold tread, and judging by the depth of the
impressions, the kidnapper was a large person, most likely male.
I saw that Lilly was barefoot.
“I couldn’t sleep, I was watching TV, some stupid show on the TV, ” she
said with a note of self-flagellation, as if she should have anticipated
this abduction and been at Jimmy’s bedside, ever vigilant.
Orson pushed between us to sniff the imprinted earth.
“I didn’t hear anything, ” Lilly said. “Jimmy never cried out, but I got
this feeling …” Her usual beauty, as clear and deep as a reflection
of eternity, was now shattered by terror, crazed by sharp lines of an
anguish that was close to grief. She was held together only by desperate
hope.
Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight, I could hardly bear the
sight of her in such pain.
“It’ll be all right, ” I said, ashamed of this facile lie.
“I called the police, ” she said. “They should be here any second.
Where are they? ” Personal experience had taught me to distrust the
authorities in Moonlight Bay. They are corrupt. And the corruption is
not merely moral, not simply a matter of bribe-taking and a taste for
power, it has deeper and more disturbing origins.
No siren shrieked in the distance, and I didn’t expect to hear one. In
our special town, the police answer calls with utmost discretion,
without even the quiet fanfare of flashing emergency lights, because as
often as not, their purpose is to conceal a crime and silence the
complainant rather than to bring the perpetrator to justice.
“He’s only five, only five, ” Lilly said miserably. “Chris, what if this
is that guy on the news? ”
“The news? ”
“The serial killer. The one who … burns kids.”
“That’s not around here.”
“All over the country. Every few months. Groups of little kids burned