Joseph Finder - Vanished

Gabe lay in bed reading a paperback called Joker by Brian Azzarello. The front cover was a grotesque closeup of the Joker’s feral grin, with jagged yellow teeth and smeared lipstick. Gabe was wearing headphones hooked up to an iPod Touch. Music blasted in his ears so loud that I could hear it, tinny and distorted and really awful.

My thoughts were still careening, still trying to make sense of Roger’s strange and cryptic e-mail. If you get this, that means they finally succeeded, he’d written. So he was expecting to be killed. I’ve taken precautions to protect you and Gabe, he’d said. The means to hold them off. What could that be? Would Lauren know? And what was that bizarre postscript-Please say good-bye to the librarian-supposed to mean? A code, surely, but what?

I sat on the side of Gabe’s bed, and he pulled the headphones off and hit the PAUSE button on his iPod.

“Whatcha listening to?” I asked.

“Slipknot.”

“Well, obviously. Which cut?”

“ ‘Wait and Bleed,’ ” he said. “But you knew that.”

He didn’t smile, but there seemed to be a twinkle in his eye. He enjoyed the game. He knew I didn’t get the emo-screamo stuff he’d started listening to recently, and never wanted to.

“You call that music?” I said. Just like old farts have been saying to teenage kids for generations. I imagine Mozart’s dad said something like that, too.

“What do you listen to?” Gabe said. “No, wait, let me guess. Coldplay, right?”

Busted. But I just gave him a steely stare.

“And what else-Styx? ABBA?”

“All right, you win,” I said. “How’s the comic book?”

“It’s a graphic novel,” he bristled.

“Same thing, right?”

“Not even close.”

“When do I get to see it?”

He blushed, shrugged.

“Not for public consumption, huh?”

He shrugged again.

“I’d love to read it sometime.”

“Okay. Maybe. I’ll see.”

“Anyway. You wanted to talk to me?”

He wriggled himself around until he was sitting up. I noticed he was wearing a black T-shirt with Homer Simpson looking into the barrel of a nail gun. It said CAUTION: MAN AT WORK. He also had a stuffed animal in the bed with him, a ratty-looking giraffe Beanie Baby he’d named Jaffee.

Gabe was a strange kid, no doubt about it. He was fourteen, almost fifteen, and had only just entered adolescence. He was a remarkable artist, entirely self-taught, and he spent most of his time-when he wasn’t reading comic books-doing panel drawings with an ultrafine black pen. He was scary-smart, brilliant at math and science, and he affected a world-weary cynicism. But every once in a while a crack would appear in his brittle shell, and you’d catch a fleeting glimpse of the little boy. He didn’t seem to have any close friends. They called him a dork and a nerd at school, he told me once, and I felt bad about what he must be going through. Adolescence was hard enough for a normal kid.

He wasn’t easy to spend time with, which was why I made a point of spending as much time with him as I could. I’d take him to the Air and Space Museum or the Museum of Natural History or the National Zoo, or just for a walk. When he was younger, I taught him how to throw a baseball, and for one disastrous season I coached his Little League team (at the end of which he decided he wasn’t cut out to be an athlete). We tried fishing once, but we both found it boring. Recently, I’d been taking him to comic-book stores a lot, and once, a year or so ago, he made me take him to a comic-book convention at a Quality Inn somewhere in Virginia, for which I truly deserved a purple heart.

“That e-mail was about Dad, wasn’t it?”

I looked at him for a few seconds while I decided how to reply.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I figured it out.”

“Were you spying on your mom?”

“Of course not. I don’t have to.”

“You don’t read her e-mail, do you?”

“No way.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Uncle Nick. He left us, didn’t he? He ran off with someone.”

“Why in the world would you say that?”

“I can tell. I know things. What did his e-mail say?”

“That’s between you and your mom. But no, he didn’t run off. Nothing like that.”

“Don’t lie to me, Uncle Nick.”

“I won’t. And I’m not.”

“Are you going to take off, too?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like Dad.” He said it with a kind of scalding hostility, but that was only to mask the fear, the vulnerability.

“You wish,” I said. “But sorry. You can’t get rid of me that easy.”

He smiled despite himself.

From downstairs I heard Lauren calling, “Nick?”

“All right,” I said, standing up. “Good night. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll find your dad.”

“Nick?” Lauren said again, her voice distant and muffled.

Gabe hit the PAUSE button on his iPod and put his headphones back on.

I closed his bedroom door behind me.

“Nick?” Lauren’s voice echoed in the stairwell. Something in her tone made me quicken my pace. “Can you come here?”

Lauren was standing in front of her computer, hunched over. “Take a look,” she said, swiveling the screen toward me.

I looked, saw nothing unusual. “Yeah?”

“Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Right.” She began scrolling through her e-mail in-box. “It’s gone.”

I leaned over, watched her move her cursor up and down the list of messages she’d received that day. Roger’s e-mail did seem to have disappeared.

“You think you might have accidentally deleted it?”

“No. I’m positive. His e-mail is gone. I don’t understand this.” Her voice rose, approaching hysterical. “It was right here.”

“He sent a copy to your work address,” I said. “Can you sign on to your work e-mail from here?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Then: “Jesus.”

“It’s not there either,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Did you print out a copy?”

“Of course not.”

“Or save it on your computer?”

“Why would I? Nick-” She turned around. “I’m not imagining this, right? You saw it.”

“Maybe there’s a way to get it back. We have someone at Stoddard Associates who’s a whiz at data recovery.”

“It’s like someone reached into my e-mail and just deleted it.” She opened a browser on her computer and went to InCaseOfDeath.Net. It was the cyberequivalent of a funeral home-floral bouquets in the borders. Photos of somber people coming up, then fading in flash animation-elderly folks, young parents, and kids-and quotes about death and grieving scrolling across the window. “Never leave anything unsaid!” a banner shouted. “The things you mean to say, the things you haven’t said.”

There was a MEMBER LOGIN box, and below that a line: “Forget password?”

We both saw it at the same time. “He must have had an account,” I said. Even before he could finish, she was typing in Roger’s work e-mail address, then she clicked SEND PASSWORD.

A line came up in red:

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

“Try his home e-mail,” I said. She typed it in.

INCORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS WAS ENTERED.

“He must have used some e-mail account I don’t know about,” Lauren said. “Damn. But what could we find out anyway, come to think of it?”

“Who knows,” I said. “When he opened the account. What address he used. Maybe nothing. Maybe we’re just grasping at straws.”

She walked into the living room and sat on one of the giant cushy black leather sofas. I followed her in and sat on another couch facing her. Some entertainment news show was on their huge flat-screen Sony. The sound was off. Paris Hilton or one of those interchangeable Hollywood celebrities dodging the paparazzi.