Taliafero stared at her.
She felt her cheeks grow warm. “That Jeffy isn’t her ex-husband’s kid, I mean. You know, maybe his mom had an affair—” with Steve Hawking“—and came up with this to explain it.”
“Hell of a way to tell the kid he’s an accident.” He sat back in his chair. “We could always call Child Protective Services.”
Grace shook her head. “I don’t think there’s any abuse or neglect here. This sounds like just another of those gentle lies parents tell their kids. ’Fido ran away’ instead of ’Fido got creamed by an eighteen-wheeler.’”
“Either way, now we know who’s been putting ideas in the kid’s head. Just as well we gave up on this one.” He leveled a look at her then. “You should let it go, too.”
He was right, of course. Though it troubled Grace deeply that the Johnson boy was still missing, he was just another of the ugly little loose ends that never seemed to get tied up in her job. She had done the best she could; it was time to move on.
And yet.
Another week passed. Timmy Johnson was put on the state and national lists of missing and exploited children. His father went on the evening news, weeping and begging his son to come home. Several dozen Timmy sightings poured into the division after that, then trickled off in twenty-four hours; all of them were false alarms.
Grace wrote one last report for the file. The most likely theory of the crime was that Timmy Johnson had used some sort of explosive to severely damage his parents’ home, then run away rather than face the music. There were ten thousand predators on the street who would target a scared, vulnerable little boy. The confession by Timmy’s friend Jeffy was assumed to be a lonely, unhappy child’s bid for attention, fueled by his lonely, unhappy mother’s long term quest for same.
She put the file on her captain’s desk, then got out a phone book and started making some calls.
That afternoon, Grace took off work early. She made one stop along the way, then drove to P.S. 1138 around 3 p.m. She waited while children filled the courtyard and began trickling away on foot and in buses and carpools. After a half hour she caught a glimpse of a familiar dark head of hair. Jeffy Hanson walked away from the school alone, his head down, bookbag sagging and hands in pockets. Grace got out of the car and trotted over to join him.
He spotted her coming and stopped. “I still don’t want to talk to you.”
“Just one last thing, Jeffy. Can I walk with you, at least? Won’t waste your time that way.”
He heaved a sigh. “Okay.” He resumed walking, still at the same slow pace.
“You usually walk home alone, Jeffy?”
“No. I used to walk with Timmy.” There was deep sorrow in the boy’s voice. That, more than anything else, reassured Grace that she’d made the right decision.
“Tell me something, Jeffy. What happened to the black hole?”
He paused for just a step, though he resumed walking quickly. “You didn’t believe me before.”
“Well, you can’t really blame me for that. Nobody’s ever made a black hole before. But I did some reading on it, after I met you.” She slipped her hands into her pockets, looking up at the bright autumn sky. “The black hole started to fall into the Earth, didn’t it? After it ate Timmy. It would have gone to the center of the planet and kept growing there. It might have eventually eaten us all. But you stopped it.”
He said nothing for several seconds, and then finally: “Yeah. It went kind of slow at first. So I ran down to the basement and built something to stop it. Then I built something else to hold it, and I took it away.”
Grace felt her heart speed up; she swallowed. Never mind the sensible, skeptical questions. Never mind how he’d stopped it or how he’d contained it or how he’d created the damn thing in the first place. Those weren’t the important questions right now. “Where, Jeffy? Where did you take it?”
“I haven’t figured out where I can put it that’s safe.” He slipped his backpack off one shoulder, reached inside, and pulled out a lidded coffee can. Or at least, part of the strange object was a coffee can. The rest was a bizarre conglomeration of crystalline masses, colored spaghetti, assorted oddities—she glimpsed a silver chewing-gum wrapper twisted into an odd shape inside one of the crystals—and components from what had to be Mr. Johnson’s TV remote. A“mute” button poked out of the object’s side.
“I’m scared to leave it at home,” he said very softly. “Sometimes my mom cleans my room.”
Grace stared at the can, aware that if she once looked inside it, the universe would change. Not in the ways that mattered. Murders wouldn’t stop, bad things would still happen to good people, and kids whose only crime was selfishness would still suffer fates they didn’t deserve. But her place in the universe, her conceptualization of it, would be altered beyond all recognition, and perhaps destroyed. For how important could her job, her life, her very existence be in a world where seven-year-olds carried black holes around in their school bags?
Then the moment passed, and she lifted her eyes from the coffee can to look at the solemn face of the boy beyond it. A boy whose eyes were ringed in dark circles because he hadn’t slept well in weeks. A boy who held the earth’s death in his hands, too afraid to let go.
“You can’t destroy it?” she asked.
“No. Not yet. Maybe when I’m older. I’ll understand it better, then. Maybe I’ll be able to get Timmy out, too.”
She made herself reach out and take hold of the can. The crystals felt slightly warm under her fingertips.
“Then I’d better hold onto this for awhile,” she said. “In the interest of public safety—at least until you’re old enough to get rid of it. But you have to promise not to make any more. Agreed?”
Jeffy brightened at once, the burden of responsibility lifting from him almost palpably. “Really? Okay!” Then his small face clouded. “But you have to promise not to play with it. Not even a little. You’re a policewoman, so you have to do what’s right.”
“Not even a little,” Grace agreed. ”In fact, I won’t even open it.”
Then she reached into her blazer pocket and pulled out a small paper bag, which she handed to him.
He frowned, opened it, and took out the Monster Fusion King card. His mouth formed a big silent“o”.
“That’s the one, right?”
“It sure is! But…” He frowned in confusion. “It can’t be the same one.” Timmy had taken that one with him.
“It’s not. But the original deal was the card for this, so I figured the price was the same.” She lifted the coffee can. “Fair is fair.”
He grinned up at her in delight. Grace couldn’t help grinning back. One day, when Jeffy grew up and came into the full power and genius that was his true father’s gift, she hoped he would remember this day. Maybe one small act of kindness would stay with him despite the abandonment and loneliness and cruelty he’d experienced in his life. Maybe his destiny could be shaped by the small joys of human life: a mother’s love, the games of childhood, the satisfaction of making someone else’s life a little easier. Maybe then little Jeffy would grow up to build miracles instead of nightmares.
“Now.” Grace put a hand on his shoulder. “I hear the comic book shop around the corner buys rare cards. They’re expecting you.”
“Okay!” He tucked the precious card into his backpack. “And I’ll come find you when I know how to get rid of it. I promise.”
“All right.”
He waved and ran off. Grace watched him go, then headed back to her car, where she tucked the coffee can into the storage net in her trunk. That would do until she could take it up to Poughkeepsie and stow it in her mother’s attic. It would be all right there for a decade or two.