Page 99 of Intrepid

From the kitchen counter, she lifted a black bag, its zipper open around the bundles of bills stacked inside, right up to the brim of it.

“Holy shit. You’re selling meth. Look, I said I’d figure something out—”

“Somebody left this. I found it on Jo’s nightstand this morning.” She lifted one of the stacks from inside—all hundred dollar bills. “Sera, this is … this is enough to keep us going for a couple years! There’s gotta be over a hundred thousand dollars in here.”

“Lilia, thieves don’t leave money, they take it. This isn’t Robin Hood. Someone broke in and forgot to take their loot with them. I guarantee they’re coming back.” My body froze at that. “Which means we have to get Jo out of here.” Rushing past her, I entered Jo’s bedroom, where she lay with a smile on her face. “What’s up with her smile?” I called out to Lilia, and peeked around the corner to catch her stuffing the stacks of cash she’d begun to count back into the bag.

“I don’t know. I found her like that. She’s been smiling all morning.”

With careful steps, I searched Jo’s small space, eyes peeled for anything that looked out of place. Everything sat neat and perfect, as always, including Jo. Huffing, I closed the cracked window and locked it, shaking my head. “You can’t leave the window open at night! This is Detroit, not Bloomfield.”

“And this is our home, not a prison. She likes the fresh air.”

Perplexed, I sat down beside Jo on the bed and pushed the hair from her face. “I wish you could talk. At least tell me what the smile’s all about.”

She turned toward the sound of my voice, but didn’t show any sign of understanding.

Still stumped, I turned away from her, and a flash of something caught my eye. No, not something. The absence of something. The collage on the wall behind her was missing a picture.

“Hey!” I called out to Lilia, rolling my eyes as she shuffled about in the other room, likely trying to count the cash again. “Did you take the picture from the wall?”

“What picture?” Lilia appeared at the doorway, and I stared at the empty spot of cork, trying to remember which picture had been tacked there.

The board had lived at Joanne’s old place, a collage she’d put together years back, and when I’d moved her to the new apartment, I merely hung it as it was up on her wall, hoping she’d find it a comfort. Every time I’d come over, I’d seen the damn thing, but for some reason, I couldn’t remember which picture had once been there.

“That one? It was a …. Eli and some kid. A boy. Looked about his age.”

As she talked, a string of thought filtered through my brain and struck like a baseball bat to my skull.

Eli’s friend.

I gulped and slid my gaze to Lilia. “I need to use your computer.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Elijah Trombley had gone missing on October 21st of 2009. His mother had suspected he’d snuck out of the house with his best friend, to roam the Packard Plant just up the street from them, as he’d done so many times before. Of course, she hadn’t known that for sure until later that night, when she went to check on the boys and couldn’t find them anywhere. Earlier that afternoon had been the last she’d seen her son.

I’d just turned twelve the week before, and remembered watching the news, catching a picture of Eli and some other boy I hadn’t recognized. The reporter had asked for any information leading to the whereabouts of the two, and I remembered my stomach curling at the sight of my housekeeper’s son, a boy I’d grown quite fond of, staring back at me from the screen.

For weeks, I’d passed out flyers everywhere, to my father’s dismay. He’d chided me every time we’d gone somewhere, and I’d posted one of the many Missing Persons flyers Jo had given me wherever it might catch someone’s attention. All over my school. At the mall. At dance. I didn’t care if Eli had gone missing in Detroit, miles away, somebody might’ve seen him. Recognized his face.

I clicked on the search engine of Lilia’s laptop and typed in the headline that’d made his story stand out from all the other kids who’d gone missing in Detroit.

Boy In A Box Murdered In Meth Home.

“Whoa. What the hell?” The couch dipped as Lilia plopped down beside me. “What’s this?”

“Jo’s son.”

“That was her son?” The incredulous tone of her voice had me feeling bad for keeping it a secret for so long. It was a creepy story, and trying to find good help in Detroit wasn’t exactly easy. A story like that would’ve definitely raised some flags, so I’d told her Jo had a son who’d died, but left out the details.

“He wasn’t literally found in a box. Kind of metaphorical. They’d found a box-cage-looking thing in some meth abuser’s house that contained a bunch of Eli’s hair and blood, but unfortunately his body was never found.”

“Wow. I’ve been working here two years, and I’m just now finding out about this?”

“I know, I’m sorry. Anyway, there was another kid, Eli’s friend. He was dumped in some field close by, all beaten up with signs of torture. He’d survived. They’d given him the same moniker, since he’d claimed to have been held prisoner in a box of some sort. And—”