6

Leila caught a strange burning smell from the bathroom’s closed door. “Corey, what are you smoking in there?”

She knocked politely, then harder. Corey was not responding.

She’d begun to sweat the moment she put on her Catwoman costume, and this was making things worse. She gripped the doorknob and shook it. “Ready or not, here I come.”

Slowly she opened the door. The light was still on, but Corey was nowhere to be seen. Leila’s eyes focused on the window, which was wide open.

She raced to the window in a panic. He’d been nervous, afraid he was losing his mind. Had he . . . ?

They were only on the second floor. If he had done something awful, he might still be lucky—a broken leg, maybe. Kneeling on the toilet, she stuck her head out the window and looked down. “Corey!” she screamed.

She looked up and down Central Park West, but there was no sign of him.

“Mo-o-o-om, have you seen Corey?” she shouted, running out of the room.

She could hear her mother’s desk chair rolling back on the wood floor of her home office just behind the kitchen. The Sharps’ apartment was long and narrow, with all rooms opening into one long hallway. So it took about two seconds for Jessie Sharp to come padding out of the little room by the kitchen and into the hallway. Leila could tell she’d been up most of the night writing. In her photo for her syndicated newspaper column, Sharp Eyes on Washington, Mom looked like Natalie Portman, all elegant and glamorous and put together. Schlepping out of the office in her purple sweats after a long day, she looked like an extra on The Walking Dead. “Heyyy, the costume looks great, sweetie—”

“Mom, Corey was in the bathroom and now I can’t find him,” Leila said. “Did you see him leave?”

Leila’s mom shook her head. “Nope. I mean, I guess I should have seen him if he did. My office door was open. But maybe not. I’m a little distracted with deadlines. Keep looking, Leila. He might have snuck out to put on his costume. Or he’s hiding, pranking you. You know Corey.”

Leila raced back down the hallway. She opened the small linen closet in the wall next to the bathroom. She pulled back the shower curtain and checked in the cabinet under the sink. Sitting at the edge of the bathtub, Leila looked at her phone, but there were no new texts from him.

That was when she saw the upside-down photo on the bathroom floor. She stooped to pick it up, and she turned it over. It was the black-and-white image she’d had on her windowsill, from Auntie Flora’s collection. She’d seen it a hundred times—the half-finished stone wall, the barren road under construction, the vast and featureless park, the crane.

But something was off.

The construction worker—the guy building the wall—wasn’t in the place she remembered him. In the photo, he’d been kneeling near the center, putting mortar on a block of stone.

Leila’s jaw dropped open. Now, in the photo, the block was resting on the ground. That same worker was sitting on a park bench, talking to a kid.

And the kid looked exactly like Corey Fletcher.