Sullivan pursed his lips and raised his cup in a toast. “I might.”
He probably should. It sounded good, and it made Donna’s sudden U-turn make sense. Boyd had put up ten grand he didn’t have to buy more time with Morgan—or Sammy—so why did it surprise him that Donna would stonewall Mac to get her chance?
“Do you think you can talk to her?” he asked. “Make her see that we have to know.”
Sullivan looked thoughtful. “Does she, though?” he asked. “I want to know. You want to know. But why does Donna?”
Boyd looked down at his hands and wrapped them around the cup to give them something to do.
“I don’t know.” He leaned down and set the coffee on the floor next to his feet. “But I think Morgan needs to know. He deserves to know.”
“That might work,” Sullivan said. “But why should I? If I’m the dick you all think?”
Boyd stared at him for a second. In his hoodie and jeans, dark hair scruffy and spiked, although maybe farther back from his temples, he didn’t look that old. Back during the first investigation, in Boyd’s head, he was just another adult. But he’d been a wet-behind-the-ears reporter with his first big story. He’d probably been younger than Boyd’s mom, and maybe not that much older than Shay.
Fifteen years had been a long time to Boyd, but maybe not when you looked back.
“Shay needs to know too,” he said, “even if he doesn’t think he does. And you do owe him.”
“I did my job.”
“Do you think that made him feel any better?”
Sullivan slowly shook his head. He worked his hands around his coffee cup, all knuckles and long fingers.
“She’s already agreed to talk to me tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter Sixteen
“SHE KEPTeverything in here just like it was,” Shay said. He hovered in the doorway, booted feet not quite over the threshold, and folded his arms over his chest. The flinty anger that usually hardened his eyes had faded as he looked around the room and revealed something haunted and gentle underneath. “If Sammy left it on the floor, it stayed on the floor. He left most of his stuff on the floor.”
“No kidding,” Morgan said dryly as he stepped over a tangled pair of kid-sized jeans.
When they hit the floor, the denim must have been crusted with mud, but now it had desiccated down to dirt scabs and faded coffee-colored stains worked into the fibers. There was a single sock, flat and neglected in the middle of the floor, a handful of toy cars scattered like landmines, and a dusty yellow walkie-talkie propped in the window. Morgan didn’t need to ask what kid had the mate.
It was just one more way that he was nothing like Sammy. Back in the B and B, he had unpacked his clothes and laid them out with regimented neatness in the drawers. Drawer. His hoodie was folded and laid on top of the dresser, and when he wasn’t wearing them, his boots were lined up under it with the laces tucked inside.
He’d always been able to grab everything he needed and get his boots on before his latest set of parents kicked him out of the house.
“Why—”
Shay shrugged and scratched his elbow. “I don’t know,” he said. “At first we had more important things to do—search parties to join, posters to put up. Then somehow it went from something we’d clean up one day to something we’d never touch. I guess it makes her feel like not so much time has passed, that it’s still just three weeks, not three years. Five years. Fifteen.”
The bed wasn’t made, Batman sheets twisted into a rope and shoved against the wall, and there was the dry, curled corner of a comic book just visible where it had been shoved under the pillow.
“Why show me this?” Morgan asked.
Shay glanced over his shoulder. His profile was all sharp bones and straight lines, even with the black scab of stitches that held his eyebrow together. It made Morgan feel thick and lumpy, all bad history and old breaks. He knew he was hot—there was plenty of evidence of that—but… put Boyd and Shay together, and they’d look like they belonged.
“You’re supposed to be Sammy,” he said quietly. “Start playing the part. He liked Batman, the bear was called Fred the Ted, and he still slept with him sometimes, and here.”
He leaned into the room and pulled a grubby-fingerprinted report from the corkboard over the desk. Looped handwriting was scrawled over the paper, mostly on the lines, and a big greenAwas circled at the top.
“‘Great work, kid,’” Shay read out. He tossed the pages to Morgan and finished the line from memory. “‘Hard work pays off. D.’”
“Deacon Hill?” Morgan asked.
“He was great with you, Mom said. Really connected.” Shay rubbed his thumb over his eyebrow and pressed down on the scabs. “I was pissed off because my teachers thought I was dumb as shit. They weren’t wrong, but….”
