Ted’s phone rang.
Hey, that worked.
He motioned for me to cut the music, then put the call on speaker.
The little girl’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Baby, we’re here! Do you see us? I’m shining a flashlight.”
“The Night Wheel was scary! I screamed when it started spinning and everybody’s faces went away. We’re going to watch the flying goats. They let me lick the luck lizard and we’ve been eating hot dogs that squirm in the bun.”
“Maggie! Listen! I want you to yell for me. Yell anything, cry out real loud, so I can hear you.”
She’d hung up. Ted cursed, tried to dial back again, and once again it rang, and rang …
John held up a hand and said, “Shh.”
We all heard it.
A faint musical ringtone that I recognized as the theme song from a recent Disney movie. It was about a princess who has to learn to be independent or something.
The sound was coming from right below our feet.
Three flashlight beams swung down to illuminate the floor in front of us. There was a gap where the floorboards had been ripped aside. Below it was a patch of loose dirt, like a freshly dug shallow grave.
Ted dropped to his knees. He started digging away with his hands, flinging dirt behind him like a dog, crying out for his daughter.
But how would she have made the call from—
About a foot down, he found a phone.
Still on, smeared with mud. Ted tossed it aside and kept digging.
Something was moving in the dirt, in the shadows. Ripples in the clumps of muck, things squirming around his hands …
And then they were gone, as if having burrowed into the earth, hiding from the light. Or maybe it had been nothing.
Ted kept digging but there was no little girl down there, alive or dead. He sat back, chest heaving with the effort. He grabbed the muddy phone. He looked it over—it displayed only its lock screen.
He screamed, “Hey! Where is she? Nymph! You here, you son of a bitch?”
I shook my head. “She’s not here, and neither is Nymph. It’s a wild-goose ch—”
I had turned to walk away and immediately bumped into an inhuman figure that had been standing right behind me. I screamed and tumbled backward.
Ted jumped to his feet, whipped the shotgun off his back, and yelled for me to stay down. He fired and pumped and fired again, but John was yelling for him to stop.
“Hey! Hey! Cool it! It’s just the snowman.”
I looked up and the figure was of course just that stupid snowman mascot, now scarred across its chest from where the shotgun pellets had gouged the concrete and ricocheted away. Ted had succeeded in blowing one of its rebar arms off. In the panic and tension, we had forgotten that of course the MR FROSTEE mascot was there inside the factory, in the center of the storage room, where it had probably stood for eighty years. Where else would it be? I could now remember approaching it as we entered the room thirty seconds ago, plain as day.
Feeling ridiculous, I stood up and brushed myself off. I cursed when I saw that I had landed right on top of my iPod, smashing it. John was blinking at the snowman as if confused by it, then went to help Ted. He was sweeping his flashlight around each corner, determined to search every inch of the place before admitting defeat.
An hour of the three of us looking in and around the factory turned up no sign of either Nymph or Maggie. We rode back through town in silence, listening to the wipers squeak their complaints from the other side of the windshield.
Ted said, “What now?”
I said, “There are two threads to follow up on here. Who is Nymph, and where is Maggie? I’m guessing one will answer the other…”
John said to me, “You go to the library and see if you can find any reference to Joy Park, I’ll take Nymph, see if I can find anybody else around town who’s encountered him. If I track him down, I’ll give you a call after I’ve killed him.”
Ted said, “No. You get a bead on him, you call me. Not the cops, neither. I want to be the one to do it. I’m putting the word out for manhunt volunteers, get as many people lookin’ as we can. Got a friend I served with, he can be in town by this afternoon.”
“And I’m clearly not going to the library, John. I can search the Internet from my phone, from some place with free wifi, and pancakes. Speaking of which…” I was holding the muddy phone we’d found buried at the ice factory, turning it over in my hands. I turned it on, again just got the lock screen. “Anybody know how to hack a phone?”
“Amy probably does.”
“Yeah, I’ll ask. Wait, does that mean she can get into my phone any time she wants?”
“Only way to find out, put a bunch of pics of naked dudes on there and see if you can detect a change in mood afterward.”
As we pulled up to the Knoll home, Ted said, “If what you’re sayin’ about imposters and such is true, we should have a system. In case that thing tries to imitate one of us.”
I was taken aback. “Man, that’s a good idea. You should do this for a living.”
“You make a lot of money doin’ this? The password is ‘bushmaster.’ Don’t forget it, we encounter each other, we ask the password. Got it?”
John said, “Got it. Now, I figure we got forty hours before this goes from rescue to revenge, so there’s no time to lose. I’ll get on it right after I go to court on this public nudity thing.”
4. A MONSTER’S PICTURES, A GRIEVING WIDOW, SEX
I felt water squish out of my pants when I settled into my Saturn. Through my weeping windshield I watched Ted trudge up to his front door, knowing that inside he was about to be ambushed by the accusatory silence of that empty house. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I just had a feeling this one wasn’t going to end well. Maybe it’s because they pretty much never do.
I pulled away and considered heading straight for Waffle House, since I’m usually much more effective with a big wad of cheap comfort food in me, but instead headed toward the used bookstore downtown. In the basement they had a collection of odd, out-of-print, and “banned” books. I would probably find nothing pertaining to this case, but Amy’s birthday was next weekend and they had a signed copy of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’d noticed her gaze longingly at when we were there about six months ago. Look, I have a life outside of work, okay?
I dug out my phone and dialed as I turned down Brown Street. The driver’s side windshield wiper had a crack in the rubber blade that left behind an arc of rainwater right in the center of my field of vision—it had failed exactly in the way that would annoy me most.
Amy answered, “Hey! You’re up early.”
“Got a call from John, situation with a missing kid, thinks it might be a thing. Can you get a ride home?”
“A missing kid? Tell me everything.”
“I just did, there’s not much more to it. She just vanished, like she fell through a hole in reality. We followed up on one lead, turned out to be nothing. Not sure there’s much to be done, and I’m really not sure how we’re going to get paid.”
“There’s a missing child and you’re talking to me about payment? I’m going to reach through this phone and slap you. And you know that’s not easy for me. Did you find the muffin?”
“Already eaten. Did you say you could or couldn’t get a ride home?”
“Shawn will do it. Hey, I was thinking about the argument we had yesterday, and having slept on it I’ve decided that you are even more wrong than I thought you were then.”
“Looks like you need to sleep on it some more.”
The argument had been over whether or not Neo should have just left everyone in the Matrix, since their quality of life was clearly better inside it than out. I say no, she says yes. I should note here that Amy has seen The Matrix at least thirty times. When I got her the Blu-ray for Christmas, she became visibly upset when she saw they had done this odd color correction thing that gave the whole movie a weird green tint. She downloaded editing software on her laptop and has been manually correcting it, shot by shot.