Went into private security because it paid more and he had three mouths to feed. Left without incident or animosity. I baked his good-bye cake. Vanilla with chocolate icing. Not my best work, if I recall. Anything else?”
“Is he still alive?” Nick asked.
“Last I heard he was. You can find him at Arbor Shade nursing home in Mercerville, because I know that’s what you’re going to ask me next.”
Kat gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. “You rock, Lou. Seriously, you do.”
Nick also approached Lou, but instead of a kiss, he stole one of her French fries. Lou slapped his hand until he dropped it.
“Try that again,” she said, “and I’ll break your other leg.”
Sitting on the back porch, Eric held his cell phone in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He lifted them simultaneously, placing the phone against his ear and the cigarette against his lips. Both made him inhale.
He blew out a stream of smoke as the phone rang. And rang. And rang. He had never been much of a smoker, limiting it to a few bummed cigarettes in college dive bars and during breaks at stultifying writing conferences. He didn’t start in earnest until after he returned to Perry Hollow to care for his mother. The excuse he told himself was that it was spurred on by stress. That might have been true, but the real reason was more complex. It was his own little rebellion—a reckless laugh in the face of the sickness all around him.
Eric inhaled again as the phone ceased buzzing. In its place was a small blip, the telltale sign his call was going to voice mail. It was followed by a voice more tired and hoarse than the last time he had heard it.
“This is Ken. I’m not around. Leave a message.”
Eric closed his eyes. He wanted to hang up but resisted the urge.
“Dad,” he said. “It’s Eric. I guess you’re on the road making a delivery. Or—”
Drunk. That’s what he almost said. Drunk in the living room of whatever crumbling trailer he now called home or in some shithole roadside bar outside some shithole town along his trucking route. Instead, he settled on the more generic “somewhere.”
“Listen. I hired someone to find out what happened to Charlie. Mom wanted me to. I guess she always wondered what happened. Anyway, this guy asked me to ask you if you knew anything about it. I told him you probably didn’t, but he—”
Eric heard a sharp beep, followed by a click as the line went dead. He had rambled so much he was cut off.
“Crap.”
He dialed his father’s number again and waited through the requisite ringing before being connected to voice mail again. This time he was brief.
“Just call me back.”
Eric dropped the cigarette, ground it out with his sneaker, and went inside. In the kitchen, he placed the phone on the table and stared at it, more to kill time than anything else. He didn’t expect his father to return the call. He and Ken rarely talked. Just the usual birthdays and holidays, and sometimes not even then. So his hopes weren’t high.
Even if he did call back, Eric was certain Ken would have no idea why his mother suspected something more sinister about Charlie’s disappearance. As far as Eric knew, they rarely communicated after the divorce. His mother never talked about him. Ken Olmstead was another part of her painful past. Just like Charlie and his sealed-off bedroom.
The bedroom.
Eric knew he needed to look there eventually. The house was his now. In order to sell the place, he’d have to clear the whole thing out, including Charlie’s room. If there was something inside that could help the investigation, that was even more reason to search it.
“No time like the present,” he told the phone. It responded with silence.
He trudged upstairs and stopped in front of Charlie’s room. Unlike the rest of the doors in the house, which had been replaced over the years, this one was an original. Brass doorknob. Old-style keyhole. Although he knew the door was locked, Eric tried the handle anyway. It barely turned. In order to open it, he’d need one of two things—a key or a crowbar. Mitch Gracey would have gone straight for the crowbar. Eric opted for the key.
Wherever that was.
Before his mother’s death, little had been done in terms of planning. Other than the instructions in her will, Maggie did nothing to ensure Eric knew what to do when she was gone. Some of it, like learning when bills had to be paid, he had picked up easily. Other bits, such as knowing where the key to Charlie’s room was hidden, had eluded him.
He started the search in his mother’s room, rooting through her dresser and closet shelves. Then it was on to the kitchen, where every open drawer yielded only utensils, household minutiae, and Betty Crocker recipes.
Eric decided the next place to look would be the only spot in the house where he knew there was a visible trace of his brother—the basement.
Creaking down the stairs, he saw that little had changed there since he was a snooping kid. It was still strewn with dust-encrusted junk. Crates sitting upon boxes sitting upon chests. An array of appliances that spanned decades. And books. Stacks of them, some almost as tall as Eric herself.
Cutting a swath through all the debris was a foot-wide path that led to the furnace. Eric followed it to the end before he turned left. With his back pressed against the wall, he had just enough room to skirt past the bulk of the more recent junk and reach a section of old junk.
He cleared a space on the floor and sat down next to an eight-millimeter film projector he never knew his mother owned and sifted through box after box. Each one unearthed a long-neglected memory—Halloween decorations, mothballed clothes, Christmas ornaments that tapered into silvery points and had once seemed as delicate as stained glass. After an hour of searching, he opened a box and saw his brother staring back at him.
Eric recognized it instantly as a school picture. His own class portraits had been taken in front of the same blue background at Perry Hollow Elementary School. In the photo, Charlie looked uncertain. He was smiling, yes, but it was slightly crooked, with a hint of sadness at the edges. Eric saw the same sadness in Charlie’s eyes. He looked like a boy who knew he didn’t have many class pictures left.
There were more school photos beneath it, each one taken a year earlier than the one before and showing Charlie getting younger in a distinctly Benjamin Button–like fashion. There were pictures of him at Christmas. Blowing out candles on a birthday cake. Posing one Easter in a powder blue suit that Eric would have torn off had he been stuffed into it.
Below that was a photograph of Charlie holding a baby in his lap. The baby, Eric realized, was him when he was only a few months old. He and his brother were on the brown couch his mother had kept until 1982. Charlie looked at the camera, beaming, as Eric wriggled in his arms. Charlie looked so happy then. Eric saw that he did, too. It reminded him that although he had grown up an only child, he once had a brother, and it might have been nice to grow up that way, too.
There was one more photograph in the box. So many years there had left it
