THIRTY-NINE: SLOW-MOVING LIGHT

TEST HAD THE CORDLESS PHONE dug into the side of his head. He didn’t stop glaring at us. Faisal started to stand up with his hands out, ready to say something, but Test pointed at him and said, “Shut up. Sit down.” His attention returned to the phone. It was 5:08 in the morning.

We had checked around the ice-rimmed lake. We’d checked the barn. We’d looped back through the camp.

Matty’s hands were clamped in her lap and she wouldn’t look at any of us. Even after Michael had given up trying to make her feel better, Faisal had tried to tell her that it was going to be okay. They didn’t recognize the look on her face like I did though. The one that said, “We are immeasurably fucked.”

Test plucked his glasses off with his free hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose, and spoke into the phone. “Elaine. Hi.” His eyes were closed behind his pinched fingers. “No, not really. I need you to get the faculty together. Quietly.” He turned his back to us. The hair he still had stuck up in the back like a crown and the front collar of his white undershirt, beneath his Camp Jaye’k zip-up, had drool marks that were only just now drying.

We’d checked by the utility sheds. We’d checked by the main roads. We’d looked in the boys’ cabins; Michael and Faisal had both quietly gone through their own individual child-armies and gotten groggy answers that no one had seen Lump.

The TV in Test’s office was decades old. It had the thick plastic dials that gave you fewer than ten preset options, and someone at some point had dropped it because there was a starburst smattering of cracks across the middle of the screen.

We’d checked Lump’s bed again, hoping to find her fast asleep.

Outside the tiny office window there’d been snow falling in heavy sheets. The same snow that had covered any footprints we’d hoped to find when we’d circled the camp three times and realized we needed help because things were not okay. At just after five in the morning we’d knocked on Test’s door.

The snow had turned into a wet drizzle.

Faisal reached over and swatted at Michael’s arm and pointed at a picture on the wall. A vacationing Test stared back from the Dad of the Year frame posing with a daughter who looked hauntingly like her father.

“What a horrible co-winkie-dink,” Michael said, trying to smile.

“This isn’t funny,” Matty said. “Lump is missing.” She checked to see if Test was listening. “She is actually missing and it is our fault.”

My guts squirted sour. The ten-year-old in me wanted to believe that it was over and that things would be okay since we’d gotten an adult, but just because we asked for help didn’t mean that the situation was over or that Lump was okay.

“If there’s any kid I’m not worried about, it’s Lump,” Faisal said, his eyes straight ahead. “Trevor, sure. Bryce, yeah. Kid would, God willing, get eaten by dogs. She needs to be found, but she’s okay. We’ll find her.”

“I said shut up. All of you,” Test said, the mouthpiece of the phone pulled away from his face. “Sorry. Camp Buddies. I don’t think it’s anything like that. At least I hope it—no, not like that … right. But she’s MIA. Yeah. Yep. Good, all right, thanks.” He hung up the phone and stared at us. He leaned against his desk where the clues from Lump’s bed were spread out like you’d see in an old detective movie.

The DRAFT posters she’d made, the mockups of the deer, the codebook with the missing pages, and the pictures she’d drawn of a hero-child in an aviator hat. All the clues that we had, that weren’t pointing us where we needed to be pointed.

We stared back.

He kept staring.

“Shut up,” he said to me. He had seen my lips starting to move. “Elaine is getting the faculty and the Buddies together and we’re going to find her. And while she’s getting a search party together, I need some questions answered. Do I need to ask the very obvious questions?”

Matty took a deep breath and looked Test in the eye, but Michael cut her off.

“She snuck out after lights-out,” Michael said. Matty turned her head, slow, and looked at him with eyes that were all whites. Eyes that said, “She was in my cabin, I didn’t ask you to fucking answer for me.” Michael nodded at her, then at Test like it was common knowledge. Faisal ran his hand down his jaw, clicked it back and forth before blinking once, hard. “I mean, I assume it was lights-out. I talked to you on the phone a few minutes before you went to bed and everything was fine.”

Test turned to her. “Let me get this straight. She left the infirmary after lights-out,” he said, nodding condescendingly at us. “Then she came back to the cabin, found it empty, then went off into the night.”

“The cabin was empty because Shelly had the girls in the rec center,” Matty said.

He rubbed his eyes. “How’d you know she was missing, Ms. Gable? Room full of snoring kids, how’d you have her pegged as missing?”

“She called me,” I said. “I missed her calls and now her phone’s dead so I woke them up.” I pointed somewhere between the three of them. “Because they know the camp, and they know the kids.”

“And why are all four of you sitting here?” he said to me, still rubbing his eyes with his thumb and finger.

“She called us—”

“I’m asking him, Bachman.”

“Because I—we couldn’t find her.” I said, looking at the others.

Test dropped his hand and moved his head to catch my eye. “You couldn’t find her.”

“Right, and s—”

“—I’m not finished. You couldn’t find her and now she’s missing. She’s out in the freezing rain because you four chose to spend valuable time trying to save your own asses.”

Michael started to ask how we were trying to save our own asses when Test cut him off.

“Stop. No more shit. You were out after LO.”

“We were just trying to find her,” I said.

“What was that, Mr. Hill?”

“I sai—”

“I know what you said. All of you: get out of my office. The horn goes off at seven—that means we’re going to have a lot more kids to keep track of. Keep looking for her. When we find her, we sound the alarm—whistles, calls, whatever it takes to get everybody together. We reconvene at the rec hall at noon. Go, now.”

On the wall next to the old TV there was an old framed print of an even older Norman Rockwell painting where a kid in a huge, sagging uniform was saluting some flag or figure behind the viewer. The left half of the painting was yellowish white from years of sun damage, and it was like the kid in the picture couldn’t see the encroaching off-white that was slowly obliterating everything behind him, so he just kept saluting.