“Why wouldn’t he come?” I asked, frustrated at having to repeatedly ask for clarification of everything this man said.
“I probably shouldn’t be the one telling you this, but if you’re going to work with Steven, you need to know. Maybe sending you here is his way of letting you find out. He’s strange, that one, but brilliant, and a good man.”
“Steven’s sister was abducted by aliens,” Marcus said, rubbing his neck.
“Dr. Richards’s sister is missing?”
“Abducted. It’s the truth as he sees it, and it set him on this path, that’s for certain,” Dr. Roberts said. “I don’t want to gloss over the details, and perhaps one day he will tell you all about it. He was eight, maybe nine. Steven, his parents, and younger sister, Elise, went to spend a weekend at their family farm in northern Iowa. I think it was his uncle’s place. Anyway, there had been a terrible storm, and Elise and Steven were trapped in the house all day. When it let up a bit, they’d thrown on their boots to go play in the corn at dusk. Steven said his boots got stuck in the mud, and he was separated from Elise. He knew he would get in trouble for losing her, so he kept searching, until night. He was found by his parents, thanks to the farmers who saw his flashlight. A strong beam of light. Except that Steven wasn’t carrying a flashlight.”
Despite the heat, goose bumps rose on my arms. “His sister was never found,” Dr. Roberts continued. “His mother later committed suicide, and his father blamed Steven for all of it. I don’t know if Steven was a strange kid before that, but he certainly was afterwards, he even admits it. He became obsessed with trying to find Elise. It was only when he became a young man that he was able to get the police reports from that night. There was absolutely nothing to explain what happened. The assumption was that some kind of bobcat or something got her. The fields were even cleared to try and find her body. There was no sign of her. All the police report noted was that Steven’s uncle didn’t care if that particular stretch of land was cleared, because it was useless anyway. And it was useless, because something had flattened the crops in large circles.”
Dr. Roberts motioned around them. “Obviously, no one took pictures back then, but when Marcus heard about the missing kid, and that the farmer of this land reported someone had ruined large swaths of his crops—”
“I took my plane up, and I saw the circles, but I couldn’t take pictures while I had the controls. I had to get Max down here from Chicago, and when we went up, he took some pictures with my camera,” Marcus said. “Want to see?”
When he didn’t bother to stand, we walked over. He reached into the front of his bib overalls and took out a black-and-white photo and handed it to me. “I’ve only had time to print one of them.”
The photo clearly showed a series of large circles—ten in all—in a single row among the corn. At closer inspection, I could see they varied in size, the first much larger, gradually diminishing to a tiny circle.
“We’re standing in the middle of that row now,” Dr. Roberts said. “You keep following the circles, and they end at the farmhouse where the boy is missing.”
I looked closer at the photo. “It’s like they’re marking where they do it.” Marcus pointed. “An arrow straight to their target—”
“That’s my bucket.”
The voice caused us to turn around. In the row we had walked now stood a thin man.
He was filthy, with tattered, dusty clothes and hair that clearly hadn’t been washed for days. I couldn’t tell if it was the angle of the sun or his complexion that enhanced the dark circles around his eyes, which had caused me to misjudge his age. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
“Mama says we can take an ear or two,” the teenager said. “I need my bucket.”
“You live near here?” Dr. Roberts asked.
The boy flicked his thumb back down the row. “You done parked at my house. Why you’ins out here? You wit’ the cops? They ain’t gonna find that boy. Not them men in suits neither.”
“Shit,” Marcus said. “Max—”
“Why won’t they find him?” Dr. Roberts took a step forward. “Where is the boy?”
“You got money to pay me to tell you what I seen? Them suits had money.”
Dr. Roberts dug into his back pocket and pulled out a worn wallet. He slid out a few singles, handing them over.
The boy smiled, exposing rows of crooked teeth and squinting in the sunlight. “Mama says I’m lyin’, but I seen it. I seem ’em get dragged right up into them clouds. He gone. Straight up to heaven. That’s what I told them suits too.”
“When did you talk to these men in suits?” Dr. Roberts demanded.
“’Bout two hours ago.”
“Shit!” Marcus said, looking around wildly. “Shit!”
“Go,” Dr. Roberts ordered, motioning for me. “We’ve got to go.”
“But I haven’t taken a single picture,” I said, watching Marcus practically bulldoze into the corn after brushing past the teen.
“It doesn’t matter.” Dr. Roberts took me by the arm. I looked back one last time at the boy, who stared after us with dull eyes.
“They could be anywhere!” Marcus cried out.
“For Christ sake, keep it down, Marcus!” Dr. Roberts whispered.
“What is going on?” I asked.
Dr. Roberts didn’t answer. When we at last emerged at the house, Marcus was already in the truck, firing up the engine.
“Come on, Max!”
Dr. Roberts ushered me to my car. “Drive until you hit the interstate and don’t stop. Drive the speed limit. If anyone in a black suit tries to pull you over or talk to you, remember my sexist comment about Steven sending a woman. If you can, don’t stop, keep driving. Do you have enough gas to make it back to Champaign?”
“I filled up when I got off the interstate—”
“Then go. Right now. And take this,” he said, giving me the photo.
“Max, let’s go!” Marcus yelled.
“Give it to Steven, tell him what we saw.” Dr. Roberts ran over to the truck. As he got in, he leaned over Marcus. “Hide that photo in your purse, Lynn! Go now!”
I’d slid the photo beside my wallet, turned the keys, pressed the gas, and the car lurched forward. The engine died immediately. Even with Marcus’s truck gunning past and Dr. Roberts motioning at me wildly to drive on, I forced myself to calmly turn on the car once more, and drifted out onto the dirt drive.
I turned left, even used the blinker, and was once more on the road. In the rearview mirror, just as the corn hid the house from view, I saw the boy from the field point in my direction to a large woman with similar dark circles under her eyes who came out to stand on the dilapidated front porch.
As Dr. Roberts had instructed, I kept my speed at the limit. What is it, exactly, we’re running from?
As my pulse started to slow, I saw the lights from the police cruisers. I tapped the brakes to go at an even more casual pace, even giving a friendly, gentle wave to one of the officers stationed at the perimeter of the missing boy’s property. He tilted his hat.
I almost didn’t see the man in the black suit until he was right in front of me.
He stepped out so casually from beside the squad car, it was as if he was perturbed that a car had chosen to drive in his path. I hit the brakes, but I was already going so slowly that the car only took a moment to stop. The man rounded the hood and came over to the window. I rolled it down slowly.
“Sorry if I startled you there, ma’am.”
Everything on him, except for his crisp white shirt, was black. I imagined his eyes black as well, hidden beneath his dark sunglasses.
“I saw you drive down the road here a bit ago, I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said, leaning his arm on the door. “There’s a boy missing around here.”