John Grisham - The abduction

Theo kept chewing. When he had to say something, he sort of grunted, “I’m okay, Mom.” It was not the truth, but at the moment it was all he could manage.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Ah, the perfect question. Theo shook his head and said, “No, I do not. That just makes it worse.”

She smiled and said, “Okay, I understand.”

Fifteen minutes later, Theo hopped on his bike, rubbed Judge’s head, and said good-bye, then flew down the Boones’ driveway and onto Mallard Lane.

Long before Theo was born, Ike Boone had been a lawyer. He had founded the firm with Theo’s parents. The three lawyers worked well together and prospered, until Ike did something wrong. Something bad. Whatever Ike did, it was not discussed in Theo’s presence. Naturally curious, and raised by two lawyers, Theo had been pecking away at Ike’s mysterious downfall for several years, but he had learned little. His father rebuffed all nosiness with a brusque, “We’ll discuss it when you get older.” His mother usually said something like, “Your father will explain it one day.”

Theo knew only the basics: (1) Ike had once been a smart and successful tax lawyer; (2) then he went to prison for several years; (3) he was disbarred and can never be a lawyer again; (4) while he was in prison, his wife divorced him and left Strattenburg with their three children; (5) the children, Theo’s first cousins, were much older than Theo and he’d never met them; and (6) relations between Ike and Theo’s parents were not that good.

Ike eked out a living as a tax accountant for small businesses and a few other clients. He lived alone in a tiny apartment. He liked to think of himself as a misfit, even a rebel against the establishment. He wore weird clothes, long, gray hair pulled into a ponytail, sandals (even in cold weather), and usually had the Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan playing on the cheap stereo in his office. He worked above a Greek deli, in a wonderfully shabby old room with rows of untouched books on the shelves.

Theo bounced up the stairs, knocked on the door as he pushed it open, and strolled into Ike’s office as if he owned the place. Ike was at his desk, one even more cluttered than his brother Woods’s, and he was sipping coffee from a tall paper cup. “Mornin’, Theo,” he said like a real grump.

“Hey, Ike.” Theo fell into a rickety wooden chair by the desk. “What’s up?”

Ike leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes were red and puffy. Over the years, Theo had heard snippets of gossip about Ike’s drinking, and he assumed that was one reason his uncle got off to a slow start each morning.

“I guess you’re worried about your friend, the Finnemore girl,” Ike said.

Theo nodded.

“Well stop worrying. It ain’t her. The body they pulled from the river appears to be that of a man, not a girl. They’re not sure. DNA will confirm in a day or two, but the person is, or was, five feet six inches tall. Your friend was about five one, right?”

“I guess.”

“The body is extremely decomposed, which suggests that it spent more than a few days in the water. Your friend was snatched late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. If her kidnapper tossed her in the river shortly after that, the body would not be as decomposed as this one. It’s a mess, with a lot of missing parts. Probably been in the water for a week or so.”

Theo absorbed this. He was stunned, relieved, and he couldn’t suppress a grin. As Ike went on, Theo felt the tension ease in his chest and stomach.

“The police are going to make the announcement at nine this morning. I thought you might appreciate a little head start.”

“Thanks, Ike.”

“But they will not admit the obvious, and that is to say that they’ve wasted the last two days with the theory that Jack Leeper took the girl, killed her, and tossed her in the river. Leeper is nothing but a lying thug, and the cops allowed themselves to chase the wrong man. This will not be mentioned by the police.”

“Who told you all this?” Theo asked, and immediately knew it was the wrong question because it would not be answered.

Ike smiled, rubbed his red eyes, took a gulp of coffee, and said, “I have friends, Theo, and not the same friends I had years ago. My friends now are from a different part of town. They’re not in the big buildings and fine homes. They’re closer to the street.”

Theo knew that Ike played a lot of poker, and his pals included some retired lawyers and policemen. Ike also liked to give the impression that he had a large circle of shady friends who watched everything from the shadows, and thus knew the street talk. There was some truth to this. The previous year, one of his clients was convicted for operating a small-time drug ring. Ike got his name in the paper when he was called to testify as the man’s bookkeeper.

“I hear a lot of stuff, Theo,” he added.

“Then who’s the guy they pulled from the river?”

Another sip of coffee. “We’ll probably never know. They’ve gone two hundred miles upriver and found no record of a missing person in the past month. You ever hear of the Bates’s case?”

“No.”

“Probably forty years ago.”

“I’m thirteen years old, Ike.”

“Right. Anyway, it happened over in Rooseburg. A crook named Bates faked his own death one night. Somehow snatched an unknown person, knocked him out, put this person in his car, a nice Cadillac, then ran it into a ditch and set it on fire. The police and firemen show up and the car is nothing but flames. They find a pile of cremated ashes and figure it’s Mr. Bates. They have a funeral, a burial, the usual. Mrs. Bates collects the life insurance. Mr. Bates is forgotten until three years later when he’s arrested in Montana outside a bar. They haul him back to face the music here. He pleads guilty. The big question is-who was the guy who got fried in his car? Mr. Bates says he doesn’t know, never got the boy’s name, just picked him up one night as a hitchhiker. Three hours later, the boy was reduced to ashes. Guess he got in the wrong car. Bates gets life in prison.”

“What’s the point here, Ike?”

“The point, my dear nephew, is that we may never know who the cops pulled from the river. There’s a class of people out there, Theo-bums, drifters, hobos, homeless folk-who live in the underworld. They’re nameless, faceless; they move from town to town, hopping trains, hitchhiking, living in the woods and under the bridges. They’ve dropped out of society, and from time to time bad things happen to them. It’s a rough and violent world they inhabit, and we rarely see them, because they do not wish to be seen. My guess is that the corpse the cops are inspecting will never be identified. But that’s really not the point. The good news is that it’s not your friend.”

“Thanks, Ike. I don’t know what else to say.”

“I thought you might need some good news.”

“It’s very good news, Ike. I’ve been worried sick.”

“She your girlfriend?”

“No, just a good friend. She has a weird family and I guess I’m one of the few kids she confides in.”

“She’s lucky to have a friend like you, Theo.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

Ike relaxed and put his feet on his desk. Sandals again, with bright red socks. He sipped his coffee and smiled at Theo. “How much do you know about her father?”

Theo squirmed and wasn’t sure what to say. “I met him once, at their house. April’s mother threw a birthday party for her a couple of years ago. It was a disaster because most of the kids didn’t show up. The other parents didn’t like the idea of them going to the Finnemores’ house. But I was there, me and three others, and her dad was hanging around. He had long hair and a beard and seemed uncomfortable around us kids. April told me a lot over the years. He comes and goes and she’s happier when he’s not around. He plays the guitar and writes songs-bad songs according to April-and still has the dream of making it big as a musician.”