Харлан Кобен: The Boy from the Woods

So she held her grandson and squeezed her eyes shut. The teen patted her back, almost as though he were humoring her.

“Nana?”

That was what he called her. Nana. “You’re really okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Matthew’s skin was browner than his father’s. His mother, Laila, was black, which made Matthew black too or a person of color or biracial or whatever. Age was no excuse, but Hester, who was in her seventies but told everyone she stopped counting at sixty-nine — go ahead, make a joke, she’d heard them all — found it hard to keep track of the evolving terminology.

“Where’s your mother?” Hester asked.

“At work, I guess.”

“What’s the matter?” Hester asked.

“There’s this girl in school,” Matthew said.

“What about her?”

“She’s missing, Nana. I want you to help.”

“Her name is Naomi Pine,” Matthew said.

They were in the backseat of Hester’s Cadillac Escalade. Matthew had taken the hour-long train ride in from Westville, changing at the Frank Lautenberg Station in Secaucus, but Hester figured that it would be easier and smarter to drive him back to Westville. She hadn’t been out to visit in a month, much too long, and so she could both help her distraught grandson with his problem and spend some time with him and his mom, killing the allegorical two birds with one stone, which was a really violent and weird image when you stopped and thought about it. You throw a stone and kill two birds — and this is a good thing?

Look at me, throwing a stone at a beautiful bird. Why? Why would a person do such a thing? I don’t know. I guess I’m a psychopath, and whoa — I hit two birds somehow! Yay! Two dead birds!

“Nana?”

“This Naomi,” Hester said, pushing the silly inner rant away. “She’s your friend?”

Matthew shrugged as only a teenager can. “I’ve known her since we were, like, six.”

Not a direct answer, but she’d allow it.

“How long has she been missing?”

“For, like, a week.”

Like, six. Like, a week. It drove Hester crazy — the “likes,” the “you-knows” — but now was hardly the time.

“Did you try to call her?”

“I don’t know her phone number.”

“Are the police looking for her?”

Teenage shrug.

“Did you talk to her parents?”

“She lives with her dad.”

“Did you speak to her dad?”

He made a face as though that was the most ridiculous thing imaginable.

“So how do you know she’s not sick? Or away on vacation or something?”

No reply.

“What makes you think she’s missing?”

Matthew just stared out the window. Tim, Hester’s longtime driver, veered the Escalade off Route 17 and into the heart of Westville, New Jersey, less than thirty miles from Manhattan. The Ramapo Mountains, which are actually part of the Appalachians in every way, rose into view. The memories, as they have a habit of doing, swarmed in and stung.

Someone once told Hester that memories hurt, the good ones most of all. As she got older, Hester realized just how true that was.

Hester and her late husband, Ira — gone now seven years — had raised three boys in the “mountain suburb” (that’s what they called it) of Westville, New Jersey. Their oldest son, Jeffrey, was now a DDS in Los Angeles and on his fourth wife, a real estate agent named Sandy. Sandy was the first of Jeffrey’s wives who hadn’t been an inappropriately younger dental hygienist in his office. Progress, Hester hoped. Their middle son, Eric, like his father before him, worked in the nebulous world of finance — Hester could never understand what either man, her husband or son, actually did, something with moving piles of money from A to B to facilitate C. Eric and his wife, Stacey, had three boys, aged two years apart, just as Hester and Ira had done. The family had recently moved down to Raleigh, North Carolina, which seemed all the rage nowadays.

Their youngest son — and truth be told, Hester’s favorite — had been Matthew’s father, David.

Hester asked Matthew, “What time will your mom be home?”

His mother, Laila, like grandmother Hester, worked at a major law firm, though she specialized in family law. She’d started her career as Hester’s associate during summers while attending Columbia Law School. That was how Laila had first met Hester’s son.

Laila and David had fallen in love pretty much right away. They’d gotten married. They had a son named Matthew.

“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Want me to text her?”

“Sure.”

“Nana?”

“What, hon?”

“Don’t tell Mom about this.”

“About...?”

“About Naomi.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Stop it,” Hester said with a little snap that he needed her to say this. Then, more gently: “I promise. Of course, I promise.”

Matthew fiddled with his phone as Tim made the familiar right turn, then left, then two more rights. They were on a storybook cul-de-sac called Downing Lane now. Up ahead was the grand log-cabin-style home Hester and Ira had built forty-two years ago. It was the home where she and Ira raised Jeffrey, Eric, and David, and then, fifteen years ago, with their sons grown, Hester and Ira decided that it was time to leave Westville. They’d loved their home in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains, Ira more than Hester because, God help her, Ira was an outdoorsman who loved hiking and fishing and all those things that men named Ira Crimstein were not supposed to like. But it had been their time to move on. Towns like Westville are meant for raising children. You get married, you move out from the city, you have a few babies, you go to their soccer games and dance recitals, you get overly emotional at their graduations and commencements, they go to college, they visit and sleep in late, and then they stop doing even that and you’re alone and really, like any life cycle, it’s time to put this behind you, sell the house to another young couple who move out from the city to have a few babies, and start anew.

There was nothing for you in towns like Westville when you got older — and there was nothing wrong with that.

So Hester and Ira did indeed move on. They found an apartment on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan facing the Hudson River. They loved it. For almost thirty years they had commuted on that same train Matthew had taken today, changing in Hoboken back in those days, and now, in their advancing years, to be able to wake up and walk or quickly subway to work was heaven.

Hester and Ira relished living in New York City.

As for the old mountain home on Downing Lane, they ended up selling it to their son David and his wonderful wife, Laila, who’d just had their first child — Matthew. Hester thought that it might be odd for David, living in the same house he’d grown up in, but he claimed that it would be the perfect place to start and raise a family of his own. He and Laila did an entire renovation, putting their own stamp on the house, making the interior almost unrecognizable to Hester and Ira during their visits out here.

Matthew was still staring down at his phone. She touched his knee. He looked up.

“Did you do something?” she asked.

“What?”

“With Naomi.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t do anything. That’s the problem.”

Tim pulled to a stop in her old driveway at her old house. The memories didn’t bother swarming anymore — they just full-on assaulted. Tim put the car in park and turned to look at her. Tim had been with her for nearly two decades, since he’d first immigrated from the Balkans. So he knew. He met her eye. She gave him the slightest of nods to let him know that she’d be okay.