There was a pause for a second. Cloister could feel Javi studying his profile. He rolled the name over his mental tongue to try it out. It was shorter than “Special Agent,” anyhow. Eventually Javi went, “Huh,” as though he’d worked something out, and changed the subject.
“That’s not something the parents would know,” he said. “At home, maybe. But a camp where they’re spending a week or weekend a couple of times a year? They’re too busy making the most of their free time and the yoga workshops to map out the children’s time. The whole point of going somewhere like the Retreat is that it’s a safe environment to let the kids run around in nature.”
“Maybe Drew was on his own when he left the cabin?” Cloister suggested. He had to struggle to resist the urge to bring his mother up again. The whole point of being disconcertingly frank with people was to make them uncomfortable, not to make them think they knew something about him.
“Then who gave him the soda?” Javi asked.
Cloister hung his arm out the window. The metal was hot against his arms, the wind hotter as it sanded dust against his forearm. The radio that morning warned about forest fires.
“You said the lab results weren’t back,” he said. “He could have just taken a drink with him.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Javi turn to look at him. “Then why did you lose his trail at the road?”
Maybe there was a good reason for that. But if there was, Cloister couldn’t think of it. He grunted and shifted gear.
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“It’s like fishing,” Javi said. “You have to throw out a lot of lines before you get a bite.”
Cloister took his eyes off the road for a second and gave Javi a dubious look.
“You fish?” he mocked.
“Not much these days. My uncle used to take us out on the boat when we were kids, fishing for marlin.” Javi paused. “You?”
The question hung in the air like one of those lines Javi had been talking about. Baited and waiting for Cloister to fall for the hook with a story. Or it was, he reminded himself, just someone making conversation by talking about family. That wasn’t a sore spot for everyone.
“We got our food in the store.”
Javi went, “Huh,” again. It made Cloister shift, and tension pulled tightly across his shoulders, but he tried to ignore it. It wasn’t as though there were any secrets. He might avoid talking about his family, but if Javi was that interested, the whole mucky story was recorded in black and white in his various records. His juvenile records should have been sealed, but he knew better than to believe that mattered to the Feds.
“Did you have a lot of friends when you were a child?” Javi asked.
Change of topic or more prying? Cloister took a deep breath of dry, hot air and tried to react like a sane person.
“No,” Cloister said.
“Me neither. I wonder if Drew did.”
IT WASin the eye of the beholder. What was a fuck-off scary, big black dog to Bozo the Meth-head was a cute puppy to a bunch of kids. Given permission to be friendly, Bourneville was in her element. Her ears had been petted, her tail tugged, and she had chased balls. She flopped down over Cloister’s feet and gnawed on an old tennis ball while he talked to one of her new friends.
Children liked him. He’d never been sure why, but it was the same effect his stepdad had on them. Kids and dogs loved Vincent Witte. Everyone else had more sense.
“Did you know Drew?” he asked.
Millie wrinkled her nose and glanced at her worried-looking mom and got an encouraging nod in answer. All the parents looked worried. At the trailer park, kids ran around all day with no supervision. Up here none of them were allowed out of the reach of a parent’s arm. Millie heaved a sigh and pushed her glasses up her nose.
“We were friends last year,” she said, “but not this year.”
“Oh?”
She rolled her eyes. “He said he doesn’t play with girls or little kids anymore,” she said. “He called me specky.”
“You didn’t tell me that, Millie,” her mother said.
“I didn’t care,” Millie said sagely. “He was just stupid. He said he had agirlfriendnow, but he wasten.”
Older-than-her-years Millie had no more stories. Three kids later Bourneville delicately accepted a bacon chip from the sticky hand of a toddler named Sean. His brother petted her the way kids did, like he was playing drums on her shoulder. His dad kept saying “gently” and giving Cloister apologetic grimaces. It didn’t bother Bourneville, but she was clearly contemplating sticky toddler fingers, and Cloister tapped her hip to remind her to behave.
