“I guess,” the man shrugged out the answer. “Bickering. Brothers do. Can I go?”
Javi finished writing in his notebook and snapped it shut. “Sure,” he said.
Matthew snapped the shears closed again, thumbed the lock into place as he stashed them in his pocket, and scurried away. They both watched him go. His neck was pimpled and red from a fresh shave.
“Why did you ask if they were fighting?” Javi broke the brief silence.
“Apparently Drew had been telling the other kids that it was his last summer at the Retreat. He said it was his brother’s fault. Also he told Millie that he had a girlfriend, but I think he was trying to impress her.”
“Did it work?”
“Don’t think so.” That sent a flicker of humor through Javi’s hazel eyes, but it faded quickly. Cloister waited as Javi tucked his notebook back into his pocket and then cleared his throat. “It doesn’t mean anything. Brothers fight. Kids get the wrong end of the stick.”
“Or it means something,” Javi said. “Bill said he left his brother at the cabin, not that he followed him through the park.”
Fair enough. Cloister pushed himself off the fence, and the wood creaked as his weight shifted. He twisted the lead absently around his hand and felt the sweat on it.
“Do you want to head down to where we lost the scent?” he asked.
The corners of Javi’s mouth were tight as he stared over the Retreat toward the Hartleys’ cabin. After a second he nodded. “Go there first,” he said.
It was an easier hike in the daylight, with Bourneville padding at his heel instead of ranging ahead, but it was hotter. The wind rattled the trees and slashed ribbons of sand around their legs and up into their faces.
Cloister squinted and spat. Javi pulled a pair of aviator sunglasses out of his pocket—as though he weren’t hard enough to read without hiding his eyes behind dark glass.
A single yellow evidence tag was jabbed into the ground where Cloister had found the bottle of soda. The tag had been canary yellow to start with, but between the sun and the sandblasting, it had already faded down to old egg.
“Did he just drop it?” Javi speculated. He turned to look back at the distance they’d covered from the Retreat. “He walked a fair distance, he was tired, and there was no one to see him littering.”
Cloister squatted down, balanced on the balls of his feet.
“It was hot that night,” he said. “Dry. I was parched. I wouldn’t have thrown away a drink, and the bottle had a third left in it when it dropped.”
Javi turned to frown at him. In the polarized curve of the glasses, Cloister could see his reflection with one eye squinted shut against the glare.
“That wasn’t in the report.”
Cloister switched the eye he was squinting and cupped his hand over his nose. “It was in mine,” he said. “I took a picture.”
A muscle clenched in Javi’s jaw. “There were just dregs in the bottle when it got to the lab. What did you do? Drink it?”
Cloister braced his hand, fingers steepled against the ground, and pushed himself to his feet. He walked to the tree and scuffed his foot over the hard crust of dried dirt. Ants scuttled around, disturbed and irritated. “The bottle leaked,” he said. “He threw it away for some reason.”
“What?”
Cloister shrugged. “He’s ten. I’m not. Maybe he was angry about something? Or the soda tasted funny. Or….” He hesitated and then turned around and glanced toward where he knew the boundary was. In his mind a boy ran across the hard-packed dirt, sweating and swerving around obstacles an adult would have lumbered through. But it wasn’t dark, curly-haired Drew, who looked like his mother and brother but not at all like his father. “Maybe I was wrong? If Drew left the Retreat with someone, got to here, and realized something was wrong—”
“He throws away the bottle”—Javi took up the story and mimed the toss—“and runs. He gets as far as the road and then either trips, or whoever was chasing him caught up with him.”
The scenario sounded viable to Cloister, but it didn’t make Javi look any happier. Cloister supposed it didn’t sound good for Drew—or Billy, if Matthew was right about seeing them out together.
“The search parties are still out,” he said.
“Two days,” Javi reminded him.
They walked the rest of the way to the road. The ruts had been flattened by traffic, and a police van was parked on the shoulder to serve as a mobile HQ for the search. Tancredi was sitting on the bumper when they got there, her sleeves rolled up and sweat rolling down her face as she filled in a report. Across the road, yellow vests flashing as they went through the trees, the search party made their way down toward the main road.
At least Cloister didn’t have to crawl under the fence. It had been cut and peeled back to give them access.
