John Brandon - Citrus County

Shelby had been through this in Indiana. She knew that eventually she would go back to school and when she did everyone would be cautious around her, every teacher and every coach and every student. They would all be scared to say the wrong thing. Shelby would be like a bully in the hallways; everyone would hush when she neared. She would be expected to fall back into a regular routine, but her routine would have no chance at feeling regular. And then there was the time between now and then. There was today. Shelby wanted to find her sister hiding in the hamper, but her sister was not in the hamper. Shelby wanted to be spared this. She wanted everyone to get away from her house and for the world to be different than it was.

It had quit raining but the sun had not returned. Leftover drops fell ponderously from tree branches and the spider webs looked like strings of dull crystals. Everyone milled about on the edge of the woods. There were a couple bumbling dogs — not trained hounds by any stretch, just lazy mutts who wouldn’t know their asses from a drumstick. Toby was going out with one of the baseball teams, a JV team or something, on a search. He wanted to see this firsthand, to see what was working against him. This was what everyone else was doing — the normal people, the innocent. They were helping with the search.

The other kids were about Toby’s age. The guy who appeared to be the coach, a guy with long sideburns who wore a jersey that said new zealand, stood to the side of the crowd talking in low tones to a woman in fancy shoes. The woman shifted her weight gingerly, her heels scraping into the pebbly ground. No one paid attention to Toby. He stood by and observed as the team, in a graceful fashion that didn’t seem intentional, split into two groups. Toby didn’t know if it was the infield separating from the outfield, or pitchers from position players, or whether, like a middle school, a baseball team contained cliques. He was surprised at how disorganized and lax an affair this was. He was surprised, also, that the kids were wearing regular clothes. He’d pictured all the baseball teams picking through the brush in their uniforms and cleats. He’d pictured the Boy Scouts, whose searches were being held in a different part of the county, covering ground in those humiliating outfits with the red scarves.

One of the groups abruptly mobilized, and Toby hurried over and joined their ranks. They didn’t have an adult with them. They slipped into the woods with no fanfare or goodbyes, leaving the other half of the team and the dogs behind. These kids didn’t seem surprised by Toby’s presence at the rear of their procession, didn’t say anything to him or give any strange looks. There was no plan to the turns the group took, no leader, no discussion. They cut through the woods on the path of least resistance. This was another activity, like church or school, something expected of them that they weren’t going to complain about. Toby recognized a few of the kids. He’d gone to grade school with them. He could remember when he’d been more or less the same as everyone else. It seemed a very long time ago. That was before every kid Toby had known became a straight-backed kiss-ass or a troublemaker. These were the choices. They all had to study and eat their green beans and jump back in line at the slightest throat-clearing, like these baseball kids, or they had to vandalize Green Key Beach and shoplift and give old security guards a hard time.

Toby knew this area of the woods, and these kids apparently did not. They were walking in a circle, not a large one. At this rate, they’d be back to the road the cars were parked on in twenty minutes. Toby had wondered what he’d do if he was out with a search team and they started nearing the bunker, but he saw that wasn’t a concern on this day, with this group. The searches, in general, seemed to be fanning out in the wrong direction, inland and north. Toby felt disappointed. He wanted the searches to be organized, regimented. He wanted these baseball kids to be consumed with Kaley. They weren’t carrying photos of her, weren’t even mentioning her. Of all the searchers, they were the nearest to Kaley, yet they had no belief, no spirit for the search.

When the group tightened up, turning a corner, Toby said, “So, where you think this little girl is?”

The group didn’t break stride. The shortest one said, “Lot of good guesses, but the best is that she’s dead.”

“Why do you say that?” Toby asked.

“She could be on a boat to Thailand or in some hillbilly’s basement, but probably not. That stuff’s for the movies.”

“There’s no basements in Florida, you dumb Yankee.” This kid had a head of bushy curls. “I’m with you, though. She’s dead as disco.”

“Where’d you hear that? Dead as disco?”

“I’m not certain. I don’t always keep track of where I hear things.”

“I think she’s alive,” Toby broke in. “And I bet she’s not far away.”

“She’s dead, but she could be close by,” a third kid said. This one wore aviator sunglasses. “It’s not that easy to get rid of a body.”

“Sure it is,” said the short kid.

“Whoever finds her will be a hero,” Toby said.

“Okay,” said the kid with the sunglasses. “How do you get rid of a body?”

“Take it ten miles out in the Gulf and weigh it down and toss it overboard. You can incinerate it. You can feed it to animals. Like pigs. I saw a movie where they fed bodies to pigs.”

“You’ve seen a lot of movies, I bet,” said Toby. “I bet most of what you know comes from watching movies.”

The kids finally looked at Toby. They kept walking.

“If you guys think she’s dead,” he said, “you shouldn’t be out here.”

“We have to be,” said the one with the bushy hair. “Our coach counts a search as a practice. You miss a practice, you don’t play that week.”

“Our coach is a dick,” said the kid with the sunglasses. “He always hits on my mom, and if he doesn’t stop it he better fucking watch out.”

“I don’t blame him,” the short kid said. “Your mom’s hot.”

The kid with the sunglasses reached up and shook a branch, soaking the short kid, and the short kid stiffened, nodding in appreciation, water dripping off his chin.

Toby felt like screaming, telling these kids to quit horsing around because Kaley was alive and she needed them. Toby felt slighted. These kids didn’t know who he was and were treating him like any old rubberneck who wanted to get in with a search party. And Toby felt annoyed, in a sharper way, at himself. He had the feeling that as long as no one knew what he’d done, it hadn’t really happened. He was allowing himself to care about what people knew or didn’t know. Toby felt like he could fall asleep in class one day and when he woke up at the end of the period none of this would be real.

Action 7 kept leaving Cracker Barrel on the front walk. The Registers’ fridge contained stacks of foam boxes — chicken and dumplings, grits, cheese-topped potatoes. Shelby had eaten none of it except the tiny tubs of apple butter, which she spooned into her mouth with her finger.

The church groups had stopped lighting candles on the front walk. That many candles were probably expensive and it was tough to keep them lit with the wind blowing. Four days in and they’d given up on finding Kaley, whether they knew it or not, and were now going through the motions of church folk, wondering how long faith was supposed to linger in a situation like this, how long faith was supposed to compel you to trip around in the woods getting eaten alive by bugs. It was almost time for them to say something about Kaley being an angel and return to planning their ski trips. The church folk had given up on Shelby, as well. The day before, they’d sent a girl about her age, a squinty thing with a million barrettes, right up the walk and onto the porch with a backpack full of Christian music. Shelby recognized her from school. She stared at the girl through the window by the door and the girl stared back. Shelby eased the door open.