“He liked to escape from the bath.”
I remembered Ben’s squeals of delight when he’d escape bath time, one of his harmless games. He’d get out and run, and the next thing you knew, you were chasing a naked boy, trying to grab him while he was slippery as a fish. “He loved that game,” I said.
The flash popped again, and Vail straightened. He’d gotten all the shots he could. “It might just be a memory. But he also could be directing us somewhere.”
I put down the lamp and we contemplated the footprints, which were almost gone. They began in the middle of the hall in front of the bathroom, as if Ben had been placed there from above, soaking wet. From there, they traveled in a straight line away from the landing behind us, in the direction of the bedrooms, before they stopped, as if Ben had been lifted up again. It was uncannily like he’d been set down by aliens, then beamed up. That was why Vail had asked me about lights.
I knew that Vail believed, at least partly, that our brother had been abducted by aliens. I didn’t think so myself, and it was easy to make fun of Vail for it, to think of him as credulous or pathetic.
But even though I didn’t believe what Vail did, I envied him for that belief. The thought of Ben being taken into an otherworldly ship was more comforting than the thought of the other, more mundane, more garden-variety evil things that could have happened to him.
These footprints, though—they weren’t the product of alien abductions. They were made by Ben, and Vail was right: He was trying to tell us something.
“Where is he sending us?” I asked, pulling my robe more tightly over my chest.
“They don’t lead to his bedroom, or away from it,” Vail said. We glanced at the closed door of the room that had been Ben’s. His things weren’t in there anymore; we had cleaned them out at some point. Had we finally believed he wasn’t coming back? I remembered Vail and Violet hauling Ben’s small bed down the stairs to get rid of it while I hid in my room, unable to watch. We’d had to dispose of his clothes, his sheets. I remembered staring at his soft-bristled hairbrush in the bathroom every morning for at least a year, until one morning it wasn’t there anymore. I still didn’t know who had finally moved it, but my money was on Vail.
“Then where is he leading us?” I asked. “My bedroom? Mom and Dad’s bedroom?” The prints didn’t point to Vail’s bedroom, and they might point to Violet’s if you used a lax interpretation of their direction.
“You didn’t see or hear anything strange in your room last night?” Vail asked.
Except for the water? Its cold, dirty depths threatening to close above my head as I lay in bed? No, sir. Nothing strange except for that rosy piece of my childhood. I shook my head.
“We didn’t sleep in Mom and Dad’s room, and we haven’t gone through it,” Vail said. “He could be implying…” He trailed off.
“What?” I asked. Every room in this house had been searchedwhen Ben disappeared. Every drawer, closet, under every bed. Was Ben telling us there was something to look for that we had missed?
Vail went still and quiet, his body tense. He tilted his chin back and pointed. I looked up.
Right above the place where the footprints ended was the door that led to the attic.
12
Violet
Bradley Pine ate half of his father’s sandwich like it belonged to him, then started on the french fries. There was a reason Gus had only eaten half of his lunch. He’d been saving the other half for his son, who he’d been expecting from the first.
“I believe you two went to high school together,” Gus said. “You should know each other.”
I struggled to come up with something to say. Bradley looked the same as he had in high school, yet different. He’d thickened, much of his teenage muscle turning to bulk, though he was still obviously strong. The edge of a blurry, badly inked tattoo snaked over his biceps from under the sleeve of his T-shirt. The handsome face I’d mooned pathetically over was still good-looking, though the cheekbones were less sharp and there were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. He was clean-shaven, his dark blond hair cut short and neat under his baseball cap. His brown eyes fixed on me with a complete absence of curiosity as he chewed.
“Hi, Bradley,” I said.
“Hey,” he replied, and put another fry into his mouth.
That seemed to be all he had to say, so I turned back to Gus. “You set this up,” I said.
Gus crossed his arms. “I don’t meet strangers in diners. So I brought my son.”
“And he just happened to be free?”
“Bradley is between jobs right now. He has a lot of spare time.”
“What did you think I would do? Mug you? You don’t even know me.”
“You’re damn right I don’t,” Gus shot back. “Do you know how many people have showed up wanting to talk about the Ben Esmie case in the last twenty years? Zero. No one at all. It’s too weird that you showed up now, and I don’t trust anything in this town. A good cop calls for backup before going into a situation he isn’t sure of, so that’s what I did. And it was a smart thing to do, since you’ve been talking about ghosts.”
Bradley seemed to have no problem being spoken of as if he wasn’t in the room. He also didn’t react to the ghost comment. He devoured the last fry on the plate and sat back, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
