David Silva - The Disappeared

“What’s the matter? What happened?” Walt sat next to her on the couch, and she melted into his arms, her body an emotional wafer in danger of crumbling. He held her and did his best to comfort her, feeling all the while hopelessly inadequate.

“I’m sorry,” she said eventually, wiping her eyes with the crumpled tissue.

“No need,” he said. “So what happened?”

A sad smile passed across her lips, then quickly disappeared again. “He wasn’t the only one, Walt. Gabe wasn’t the only one.”

“The only one?”

“There was another boy. I went to see some of my old friends today, like we talked about.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And one of them, Cindy Breswick, she had a son by the name of Cody, who was a little younger than Gabe. This was the first I’d ever heard about it. I didn’t even know Cindy had a little boy. And then today she told me that she had lost him. He had just disappeared one day.” Teri’s eyes began to fill with tears again. “And… and I asked her about it… and she told me how he’d just gone across the street to play… and… and he had never come home again. Just like Gabe.”

“When was this?” Walt asked.

“That’s the scary part. Both boys… they both turned up missing in the same month. March of ’85. The same month. Both of them.”

“Cody Breswick,” he said, remembering.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“I’d almost forgotten,” he said honestly. “But, yes, we knew.”

“Why didn’t you do anything?”

“We did the best we could at the time, Teri. Believe me, no one took it lightly. We had a huge debate in the department about whether or not there was any kind of a link between the two cases. It was just that most of us—and I admit, I was one of them—felt there just wasn’t enough evidence to make that connection.”

“Didn’t anyone think it was a little unusual? Two boys in the same month?”

“Of course we did. That’s why we had the debate.”

She shook her head in disbelief. She had stopped crying now, and he could see that she had managed to replace her tears with something a little closer to anger. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though he would have found it a little more palatable if the anger weren’t directed at him.

“We might have solved this thing years ago, do you realize that? I mean, who knows how many other children might have been saved?”

It was a good point, one that Walt tried not to think too long about. There were some things in life you simply couldn’t change. It didn’t matter how much you wished you could, once the card had been turned it was yours. This card had been a particularly painful one. They had missed an important link, and it might very well have cost some children their lives.

“Jesus, Walt, I trusted you!”

“We just didn’t know,” he said quietly. His throat tightened, and when he swallowed it was as if he were swallowing a lump of burning coal. “There were two others after Gabe and Cody.”

“What?”

“A couple of weeks later. The same thing. They went out to play and never came home again.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“The department soft-pedaled it. They were afraid things would get out of hand, that people would panic and vigilante groups would start popping up everywhere. Some innocent people were going to get killed if that happened. And no one wanted that. So the department kept the wraps on the second two disappearances.”

“They didn’t do any investigating at all?”

“Of course they did. They just kept it quiet. They put together a task force of – I can’t remember exactly, but I think there were eleven, maybe twelve detectives. And there was nothing to go on, Teri. These guys worked around the clock for the next six months, and they couldn’t come up with anything. Not a license plate number. Not a witness. Nothing.”

“And no connection between the boys?”

“No,” Walt said regretfully. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “So am I.”

They both fell silent for a time after that. Teri stared vacantly out the window, across the city lights, into the darkness beyond. She had stopped crying, and Walt didn’t think she was still angry with him. But she was mournful—they were both mournful—and that wasn’t going to go away for a good long time.

He came crawling up out of the depths like a salamander out from beneath a rock. His eyes fluttered open, caught a faint glimmer of light, and shut again. In that glimpse, he realized he didn’t know this place, and he didn’t know what he was doing here.

A sound came up from his throat, raw and dry.

He rolled onto his side.

A deep, spiraling soreness dug into the muscles of his legs, feeling—oddly enough—both good and bad at the same time. It made him momentarily aware of its presence, like a knock at the door, and then the soreness gradually evaporated as if it were a visitor who couldn’t stay.

Somewhere far away, a rhythm tried to draw him even further out of his sleep. He listened to it, briefly, wondering what it was that made a sound like that. Then bit by bit it slipped away from him and he found himself drifting back into the silence that had already kept him for so long.

It was safer here, more comfortable.

No bright lights.

No loud noises.

Just peacefulness.

Quiet.

Comforting.

Peacefulness.

The phone rang half-a-dozen times before Teri gave up.

“Not there?” Walt asked.

She shook her head and slumped back against the couch. She had been trying to reach Michael for the past two hours, getting nothing more than that irritating ring at the other end that went on and on, unanswered.

“Worried?”

“A little,” she said honestly. A lot had happened the last few days, and she had wanted to catch Michael up on everything. Even more than that, if she were going to be honest with herself, she had silently held out the hope that Michael might volunteer to fly back and help out for awhile.

“Is there someone else you can call? Maybe someone who could check on him and make sure he’s all right?”

“No, no one I can think of. We haven’t exactly kept in touch the last few years.” Michael had left because he felt like he had not only lost his son, but he had also lost his wife. And to a large extent, he had been right. Teri had never missed a beat. She had gone right on looking for Gabe, barely noticing Michael’s absence. But it hadn’t been because she didn’t love him. She did. Even to this day, she felt she loved him. It had simply been a matter of priorities. That’s why she had let it happen, and that’s why they had never gotten a divorce. In the back of Teri’s mind, she had always thought that once Gabe had come home again, then Michael would eventually follow him back and things would return to the way they had been before .

“I might be able to get someone from the department to call back there tomorrow,” Walt suggested. “Maybe have a patrol car stop by and check his place.”

“Have them check with his office. When I talked to him the other day, Michael said someone had been watching the house. I told him to spend a couple of days at a motel just to be safe. Maybe he actually listened to me.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” she said softly.

“Hey, what are friends for?”

Dr. Timothy Childs ,who had been stooped over a microscope the last thirty minutes, sat up and stretched his arms. The effort wasn’t enough to satisfy the stiffness that had taken control of his body, though. He stood up, arched his back and stretched again, letting out an audible groan this time. When it had happened was hard to tell, because in his head he was still a young man, but sometime over the years his bones had grown into the bones of an old man. Less flexible. Noticeably more defiant. And nearly always cranky.