“And there’s something else weird,” Grace said. Taliafero, who stood under the kitchen hole peering up at it, glanced around at her.
“What?”
She gestured at the couch and the floor. “Where’s the debris? There should be a pile of lathing down here, but there’s nothing. Not even dust.”
Taliafero frowned and gave the room a second look. “No nest-lining, either.”
“Huh?”
“This is a guy’s private hang-out zone. There should be chip bags, sports magazines, beer cans and stuff.”
“Maybe he’s the wine spritzer type.”
“There’s no remote for the TV. You think he’s a Luddite, too?”
It was all weird, Grace agreed privately. All part of the off-kilter feel of the place. Now that she’d seen the damage, Grace suspected most of the floors in the brownstone sloped a little. That was what she’d noticed before, at least subconsciously—perspectives gone skewy, her balance slightly disrupted. If a forensics team measured the place, they would probably find all of the furniture just a teensy bit out of position, and all the walls minutely warped. All pulled toward whatever had started eating its way through the Johnsons’ house.
“Whoa—hold up.” Taliafero, peering into a corner beside the couch, straightened with something in his hand. Grace came over. It was a child’s toy, or partly one. The outermost portion of the object was made of Legos, built into a boxlike frame. The inner portion was a mass of what looked like quartz, bits of it charred, threaded through with strands of colored spaghetti. Fiber optic wire? Or something else? Whatever it was, it seemed to be growing out of the crystals.
“Busted, whatever it is,” Taliafero said. He poked the burnt portions with the tip of a pencil.
“Bag it,” Grace said. “Maybe the lab boys can figure it out.”
****
The lab boys sent back a report a few days later. No blood traces, no fireworks residue, and the crystalline portion was simple rock sugar. The spaghetti strands were some polymer they were still trying to identify, but it would have to wait as three higher-priority cases had come in. Across the bottom of the report, some wit had scrawled,“Chalk this one up for the X-Files!” and a happy face.
Without a body or evidence that a murder had even occurred, they couldn’t charge the Hanson kid. The holes in the Johnsons’ floor could have been caused by anything. And although they had the kid’s confession, the assistant DA laughed at the notion of filing an indictment with the evidence they had. So Captain Dewitt ordered Grace and Taliafero off the case.
But the case lingered in Grace’s thoughts for the whole week afterward. She lay awake in bed contemplating little Jeffy Hanson’s unhappy face and the yawning pit where Timmy Johnson had last been seen. Finally, she decided to follow one last lead.
She got up early one morning and went over to the Hansons’. Mrs. Hanson met her at the door, looking more tired than ever. She didn’t seem surprised to see Grace.
“I’m keeping Jeffy home from school today,” she said. “He hasn’t been sleeping well lately. Do you have to talk to him again? I’d like to start putting this behind us.”
“A child is still missing, Mrs. Hanson,” Grace said.
The woman sighed and held the door open. Jeffy stepped into the hallway as Grace came inside.
“You didn’t believe me,” he said. He was scowling. “I don’t want to talk to you.” He stomped out of sight.
Mrs. Hanson sighed again and closed the door behind Grace. “Come have a cup of coffee at least.”
They sat in the claustrophobic kitchen, at a table whose center was piled high with bills. The one on top bore a past-due notice.
Mrs. Hanson caught Grace looking and offered a thin smile. “Haven’t quite mastered the financials of the single-mother thing yet.”
Grace sipped coffee. “Jeffy’s father doesn’t help out much?”
“Try ’at all.’”
“You can file a claim with the state, you know. They’d track him down for you.”
Hanson shook her head, running one hand over her graying hair. “No. I don’t need his money.”
Grace tried to use a delicate tone. “Jeffy might.”
“I know. But I can’t afford a lawyer right now.”
“All you need is proof of paternity.”
Abruptly that peculiar, anxious tension was there again in the woman’s body language. Grace watched closely as Hanson looked into her cup of coffee, fidgeted with the handle, shifted on her chair. “I don’t want Jeffy taking any blood tests. Besides, it’s not that important.”
“If Jeffy killed someone because he wanted to get money for you, it’s important, Mrs. Hanson.”
She winced. “He said he didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”
“It sounds like you believe him. His whole story, I mean.”
Now the woman’s face tightened in an odd expression—half proud, half rueful. “Oh, yes. Jeffy never lies.”
Tension gathered in the pit of Grace’s belly. “There have been other incidents like this?”
“No one’s gone missing or been hurt before, if that’s what you mean.”
It wasn’t, and the woman damn well knew it.
Grace leaned forward. “Mrs. Hanson, if you know anything about Timmy Johnson and you don’t tell us, you’ll be an accomplice in whatever’s happened to him.”
The woman shook her head. Curiously, she seemed to relax a bit as well. “I don’t know anything about that. Really. I’ll admit I didn’t like the boy much. This wasn’t the first time he’d taken advantage of Jeffy, though Jeffy’s the forgiving sort. But I certainly wouldn’t have wished harm on him.”
“You believe the Johnson boy is dead, then.”
Mrs. Hanson smiled, knowingly and utterly without humor. “I asked Jeffy about that last night. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“’Things are different in there, Mom.’” She imitated Jeffy Hanson’s solemn soprano perfectly. “He said Timmy still existed, sort of. That’s what he said, sort of. So I looked up black holes on the internet to try and understand. You see, the flow of time around Timmy, close to the black hole, is bent. It’s a matter of perception. To us, outside the hole, he vanished quickly but will slow down as he gets closer to the hole. Eventually, if we could see at the microscopic level, he’d look to us as if he was frozen in place. But for Timmy, time is stretched out. Only an eyeblink has passed since he started to fall in; he probably doesn’t even know he’s in trouble yet. It might take him years—by our reckoning—to fall in all the way. Or he might already be gone; it really depends on which theory you pick.” She sipped her coffee, then swirled the remainder around in her cup. The dark liquid swirled about the center in a miniature whirlpool.
Grace took a swallow of coffee as well, mostly to offset the chill that moved down her spine. “What are you saying? That Timmy’s not dead?”
“I’m saying Timmy Johnson may very well live forever.” Mrs. Hanson gave Grace another of those strange, bleak smiles. “You still want to arrest my son for murder?”
****
“Crazy son, crazy mother,” Taliafero said, later that day when Grace told him about the impromptu interview. “You didn’t believe her, did you? It’s not the first time she’s pulled this loon job.”
“What?”
“Check this out.” Taliafero woke up his computer and googled the name of Jeffy Hanson’s mother. The top of the list of responses was a site for THE AQUARIAN ASSOCIATION OF ABDUCTEES.
Grace groaned. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Ee-yep. Our black hole boy is, according to his mother’s testimony on this site, the ’demi-human result of a transcendental visitation by otherworldly beings.’ If this is what the kid’s father had to put up with, no wonder he booked.”
“No doubt. But…” The Hanson woman hadn’t seemed crazy, Grace recalled. Far from it. Neither had little Jeffy. “Any chance she might be telling the truth?”