Me: I think you are fairly sung. I’ll read it today I gotta go Ms. Park is looking at me weird.
—
Throughout bio, each time Ms. Park turned to the blackboard, I read the missing persons report from my phone.
The report went on only for a few pages, and over the course of the school day, I was able to read all of it. The mp (missing person) was fifty-three, male, gray haired, blue eyed, with a tattoo reading Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” apparently) on his left shoulder blade, three small surgical scars in his abdomen from a gallbladder removal, six feet in height, approximately 220 pounds, last seen wearing his standard sleeping attire: a horizontally striped navy-and-white nightshirt and light-blue boxer shorts. He was discovered missing at 5:35 A.M. when the police raided his house in connection with a corruption investigation.
The report was mostly “witness statements” from witnesses who had not witnessed anything. Nobody was there that night except Noah and Davis. The camera at the front entrance had captured two groundskeepers driving away at 5:40 P.M. Malik the Zoologist left that day at 5:52. Lyle left at 6:02, and Rosa at 6:04. So what Lyle told us about Pickett not having nighttime staff seemed true.
One page was devoted to Davis’s witness summary:
Rosa left pizza for us. Noah and I ate while playing a video game together. Dad came down for a few minutes and sat with us while he ate pizza, and then went back upstairs. There was nothing unusual. Most nights I only see Dad for a few minutes, or not at all. He didn’t seem anxious. It was just a regular day. After Noah and I finished dinner, we put our dishes in the sink. I helped him with some homework and then read on the couch for school while he played a video game. I went upstairs around 10, did some homework in my room, and looked at a couple stars with my telescope—Vega and Epsilon Lyrae. I went to bed around 11:00 P.M. Even looking back, there was nothing weird about that day.
[Witness also stated that he did not observe anything unusual via the telescope, adding, “My kind of telescope isn’t for looking at the ground. You’d be seeing everything upside down and backward.”]
Noah’s statement came next:
I played Battlefront for a while with Davis. We had pizza for dinner. Dad was with us for a bit, talked about how the Cubs are doing. He told Davis he needed to do a better job of watching out for me, and then Davis was, like, I’m not his father. He and Dad were always sniping like that, though. Dad put a hand on my shoulder when he got up to leave, which felt a little weird. I could really feel him holding on to my shoulder. It almost hurt. Then he let go and headed upstairs. Davis helped me with my algebra homework and then I played Battlefront for another couple hours. I went upstairs around midnight and fell asleep. I didn’t see Dad after he said good night.
There were also pictures—almost a hundred of them—of every room in the house.
Nothing appeared disrupted. In Pickett’s office, I saw stacks of papers that seemed to have been left for an evening, not for a lifetime. A cell phone could be seen on his bedside table. The carpets were so clean I could see a single set of footprints leading to Pickett’s desk, and a single set leading away from them. The closets were full of suits, dozens of them perfectly aligned from lightest gray to darkest black. A photograph of the kitchen sink showed three dirty dishes, each with little smudges of pizza grease and tomato sauce. To judge from the pictures, Pickett didn’t seem to be missing so much as he seemed to have been raptured.
The report did not, however, contain any mention of the night-vision photograph, meaning we had something the cops didn’t: a timeline.
—
After school, I got into Harold and screamed when Daisy suddenly appeared in the backseat. “Shit, you scared me.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been hiding, because Mychal and I are in the same history class, and I don’t want to deal with it yet, and also I’ve got a bunch of comments to reply to. It’s a hard life for a minor fan-fiction author. Did you notice anything in the police report?”
I was still catching my breath, but eventually said, “They seem to know slightly less than we do.”
“Yeah,” Daisy said. “Wait. Holmesy, that’s it. That’s it! They know slightly less than we do!”
“Um, so?”
“The reward is for ‘information leading to the whereabouts of Russell Davis Pickett.’ We may not know where he is, but we have information they don’t that will help them find his whereabouts.”
“Or not,” I said.
“We should call. We should call and be, like, hypothetically, if we knew where Pickett was the night he disappeared, how much would that be worth? Maybe not the full hundred thousand, but something.”
“Let me talk to Davis about it,” I said. I worried about betraying him, even though I barely knew him.
“Break hearts, not promises, Holmesy.”
“Just . . . I mean, who knows if they’d even give us money for that, you know? It’s just a picture. You need a ride to work?”
“As it happens, I do.”
—
While eating dinner with Mom in front of the TV that night, I kept thinking about the case. What if they did give us a reward? It was valuable information the police didn’t have. Maybe Davis would hate me, if he ever found out, but why should I care what some kid from Sad Camp thought of me?
After a while, I begged homework and escaped to my room. I thought maybe I’d missed something from the police report, so I went through it again and was still reading when Daisy called me. She started talking before I’d finished saying “Hi.”
“I had a highly hypothetical conversation with the tip line, and they said that the reward is coming from the company, not the police, so it’s up to the company to decide what is relevant, and that the reward would only be given out after they found Pickett. Our info is definitely relevant, but it’s not like they’ll find Pickett just with the night-vision picture, so we might have to split the reward with other people. Or if they never find him, we might not get it. Still, better than nothing.”
“Or exactly equal to nothing, if they don’t find him.”
“Yeah, but it’s evidence. We should at least get part of the reward.”
“If they find him.”
“Crook gets caught. We get paid. I don’t see why you’re waffling here, Holmesy.”
Just then, my phone buzzed. “I have to go,” I said, and hung up.
I’d gotten a text from Davis: I used to think you should never be friends with anyone who just wants to be near your money or your access or whatever.
I started typing a response, but then another text came in. Like, never make a friend who doesn’t like YOU.
I started to type again, but saw the . . . that meant he was still typing, so I stopped and waited. But maybe the money is just part of me. Maybe that’s who I am.
A moment later, he added: What’s the difference between who you are and what you have? Maybe nothing.
At this point I don’t care why someone likes me. I’m just so goddamned lonely. I know that’s pathetic. But yeah.
I’m lying in a sand trap of my dad’s golf course looking at the sky. I had kind of a shitty day. Sorry for all these texts.
I got under the covers and wrote him back. Hi.
Him: I told you I was bad at chitchat. Right. That’s how you start a conversation. Hi.
Me: You’re not your money.
Him: Then what am I? What is anyone?