He had then run faster than he’d ever run in his life. His legs had seemed to be propelled by a force that couldn’t have possibly come from him. The thing his father called the survival instinct, the superhuman power that arrived when death loomed.
Death.
The word had exploded in his mind, and somehow, he’d run even faster. When he’d broken from the trees, the glow of evening had barely registered. His feet had slapped the pavement in loud reverberating thuds.
He hadn’t dared to slow, to turn back, hadn’t even thought of his burning legs and aching lungs. He’d run until his feet hit his driveway, and even then, he’d raced to the door, pulled it open, before crashing into the foyer.
His brother looked up, startled. Headphones had covered his ears, and he’d been rifling through his bookbag.
He’d looked from Sid’s face to his shirt and then back to his face. Without taking off his headphones, he’d shaken his head and laughed. “Mom’s going to freak when she sees your shirt.” He’d traipsed out of the room without another word.
Sid had collapsed onto the rug and pressed his face against the welcome mat.
He’d made it. He’d survived.
A loud rapping sounded on the bathroom door, and Sid sat up, his heart pounding. He’d sunken low into the water, lost in his memory of that terrifying night. The water had grown lukewarm.
“You okay, Sidney?” his mother called.
“I’m good, Mom,” he told her, pulling himself up and stepping out of the bathtub.
His feet and hands had pruned. He stared at the puckered flesh and flashed again to that monster in the woods. Its skin had also looked wrinkled.
He’d told Ashley the story the very next morning on their walk to school. She’d listened, her dark eyes big and believing. That’s what he loved about Ashley. She always believed him.
If he’d told his parents, they would have scolded him for watching scary movies with Ashley and insisted he’d imagined it. His older brother would have laughed and come up with a new degrading nickname like wussy or namby-pamby.
Ashley did none of those things. Instead, she probed for more information. What did the monster look like, smell like, sound like? Were its hands more like claws? Did it seem hungry? Did it have sharp teeth?
That afternoon, they’d even gone back to that stretch of woods and searched for evidence of the creature. They’d found nothing, but Ashley still hadn’t doubted his story.
Sid toweled off and pulled on his brown Chewbacca bathrobe. He hurried down the hall to his room, slipping quietly past Zach’s closed door. Zack loved to pester him about the robe. Sid’s parents had offered to buy him a new, more adult robe, but Sid had refused. They wore itchy looking terrycloth robes that were bor-ing! He liked his bathrobe just fine - thank you very much.
4
“Help ya?” the man who sat behind the reception desk looked up as Max walked into the police station.
“I hope so. I was wondering if I could talk to whoever’s working the case involving the missing kids.”
The man crinkled his brow. “Missing kids?”
“Yeah, Vern Ripley and Simon Frank."
The man scratched at his raw looking chin. He’d likely shaved that morning according to the little red bumps dotting his skin.
He picked up his phone and hit a number.
“Someone here wanting to talk about some missing kids. Yeah, sure. I’ll send him back.”
The man cranked around in his seat and pointed to an open door.
“Detective Welch has a few minutes.”
Max thanked him and walked toward the open door.
The man behind the desk had a pockmarked face and salt and pepper hair. His large neck sat atop square shoulders. He looked like a jock, an aged high school football player who needed to continue his winning streak off the field.
Though he smiled at Max, it was a cold appraising smile that put Max on edge.
“Name?” the detective asked.
“Max Wolfenstein.”
“You related to Jake and Herman?”
“My brother and father.”
The detective smiled and nodded.
“Good folks. They insure my house. My wife thinks your brother’s a hoot. That baby come along yet?”
“Anytime now.”
“You in the insurance business too?”
Max shook his head.
“I’m a teacher at Winterberry Middle School.”
“Oh, yeah? Well convenient you came in. We were fixin’ to make our way around to the teacher’s next week. You know Simon Frank?”
“I had him in my English class last year.”
“English?” The detective looked at him as if he might be joking.
“Yes. Books?”
The detective offered a humorless chuckle.
“Sure, I’m familiar with books. But all of my English teachers were ladies. You just caught me off guard there.”
Max gritted his teeth and tried not to retort with a quote from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Simon Frank himself had been fond of quoting the year before, Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you, I wouldn’t let on. “Stereotypes rarely serve us,” he replied instead.
The detective laughed as if they’d shared a joke. “Ever hear Simon Frank talk of running off? Did he ever skip class, that sort of thing?”
Max looked at the detective, surprised. “Are you assuming he’s a runaway?”
“Assuming?” The detective leaned back in his chair and surveyed Max with a less friendly eye. “You know what people say about that word. So no, assuming I am not. Simply throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.”
“I wouldn’t peg Simon as a runaway. What concerns me is he’s not the only kid to go missing. Vern Ripley disappeared in January.”
“Whoa, pull back on the reins there, partner,” the detective told him, sitting forward and planting two large hands on a stack of papers as thick as a brick. “In my business, I’d call what you’re doing right now fishing. Are you a deep sea man, Mr. Wolfenstein? Because you’re clearly trying to hook a sea monster, and I’m here to tell you they don’t exist.”
Max blinked at the man and almost laughed. The absurdity of his comment brought another immediate memory of Simon Frank from the year before, when they’d been reading Moby Dick in second period English. At one point, he’d slapped his book and groaned. “They seriously never catch the whale? This book bites!” The memory sobered him and his smile fell away.
“I don’t think connecting two missing kids is akin to hunting for monsters at all, Detective Welch. They were around the same age and attended the same school. From the little I’ve heard, they disappeared without a trace. That doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a detective, but-”
“Exactly,” Welch punctuated the air with a single meaty index finger. “And I’ve been a detective for twenty years, Mr. Wolfenstein. I’m sure in your line of work, reading all that mumbo-jumbo, flights of fancy are a regular pastime for you. In my line of work, flights of fancy get people killed. Capiche?”
Max left the station feeling like he’d just been reprimanded by the principal. He climbed on his motorcycle and pulled onto the road, needing to put some distance between himself and Detective Welch.
ASHLEY HADN’T SEEN the boys, but Sid had. His feet slowed to a plod until he’d nearly stopped.
They’d set up makeshift ramps in the parking lot that bordered Wildwood Park. Sid watched as the boys bounded across the asphalt on skateboards, their low sneakers slapping the hard surface as they bent low and struck the plywood boards propped on paint cans.