TAMMY WENT TO make coffee. I stood up and began pacing and peppering Bob with questions.
“So you said no signs of foul play, nothing like that. You talked to his friends, and their parents?”
He nodded. “No one has seen him. No one has heard from him. They will call if they do.”
“Did any of them notice anything unusual about his behavior lately? Has he seemed worried? Scared?”
He shook his head. “Not that anyone said.”
“Does Jimmy drive?”
“He’s fifteen. Learner permit, no license.”
“Does he drive, though? I mean, he knows how, right? If he got his hands on a car, he could drive it?”
“Yes.”
“Does he have a passport?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No, none so far. He’s not old enough to date. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“So he’s not allowed to date.”
Bob’s jaws tightened. “It’s our job to raise him right. To make sure he’s fully prepared before he takes on—”
“I’m not judging,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out why Jimmy might have left. Teens don’t usually do that unless there is a reason. Fifteen-year-old boy, the reason might be a fifteen-year-old girl. It happens.”
He planted his face in his hands. “I know. No girlfriend, though. Not that we know of, anyway, and I don’t know how he’d have arranged anything like that.”
“He’s shy,” Tammy said, entering with a tray of coffees with sugar packets and a carafe of milk. “He’s always been shy.”
She passed out cups. The coffee was strong and dark, the way I like it. “Thanks. This is good. Jimmy took his phone, you said, but he’s not answering. Does he have a laptop, or an iPad, anything like that?”
“No, just his phone and the family computer.” Bob pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the older-model Mac on the desk behind him. “We all use the same one.”
“Jimmy uses that a lot?”
“Yes.”
“Does he have his own private log-in?”
“Yes, but we know the password. That was a condition for him using the computer.” Tammy sipped her coffee, which she’d loaded with milk. “We try to keep things focused on Jesus in our family. No outside distractions, like those games and those movies. So we know his password, so we can check on him.”
I nodded. I’d had time to scan the bookshelves in Bob’s study while we talked. A dozen versions of the Bible, and the titles of almost every other book contained the words God, or Jesus, or Christianity, or faith. A few were devoted to debunking atheism, and several offered junk science, especially the variety that tries to pretend humans aren’t just apes that learned to wear clothes and copy sitcom plots from one another.
“The police had a girl log on, she hooked up a machine, they made a clone of the computer,” Bob said. “Copied everything that’s on it, they said. They are going to comb through that for any messages Jimmy sent that might give us a clue. They didn’t see anything right away, though.”
“I’m going to want to look, too, if you don’t mind, before I go.” There was no way I could be as thorough as the police in examining the computer, but I could get lucky. “Who does Jimmy hang out with?”
“Church friends, mostly. Church, school, it’s all the same for us and other families we’re close with. We’re all pretty tight-knit.”
But none of you know why Jimmy left, or where he went, I thought.
I heard a phone go “ding” nearby. Tammy was looking at it. “The police are talking to all of those people. Anne just texted me—the police left there a little while ago.”
Bob nodded emphatically. “Good.”
I interrupted. “Who is Anne?”
“Family friend, from church,” Bob said. “I know all those people very well, and they know us. If any of them knew anything, I know they’d give an arm or a leg to help us. Good people, all of them.”
“OK. Any influences outside the church? Boy Scouts, library book clubs, anything like that?”
“Chess club,” Tammy said.
“He plays chess?”
Bob’s eyebrows lifted. “Yes. He’s pretty good at it. Plays online with people all over the world. It’s fine, though. Chess, you know? Develops the mind instead of rotting it, like all those shooter games full of aliens and monsters and who knows what.”
I nodded. “I try to play, but I stink at it. Does Jimmy play actual people, too, face-to-face, I mean?”
“There’s the local club. They play at the middle school on Saturdays. I wasn’t sure about letting him do that, you know.”
“It’s not affiliated with the church,” his wife said, almost whispering. “Kids from the secular high schools play, too.”
That sounded promising to me. Maybe somebody outside the family’s circle would know something Jimmy’s parents didn’t know.
“Jimmy wanted to play against an opponent he could see, not just someone online,” Bob interjected. “He said that was part of the game, to be able to play your opponent, and intimidate him.” Despite being worried about his son, Bob’s pride showed through. “So, even though it’s not church-oriented, we thought, why not? He’s really very good. I can’t beat him anymore, and I taught him to play. I can’t even come close to winning anymore.”
“When does this chess club meet?”
“Saturday mornings. Ten. Middle school library.”
“I’ll be there. Maybe one of his chess friends will know something that will help.”
I asked more questions, then asked if I could sit down at the computer to see what Jimmy had been up to online.
“Go ahead,” Bob said.
“We don’t have his email credentials,” Tammy said, almost apologetically. “We wanted to show we trust him.” She began weeping.
I thought maybe they’d go to the living room while I poked around on the Mac, but they sat on the loveseat and supplied random facts as they came up. From them, I learned Jimmy preferred Batman to Superman, which I understood but Bob didn’t. I also learned Jimmy is a picky eater and Mom wondered what he’d eat wherever he was. And I heard several times that Jimmy would not ever use drugs. No no no no no.
Jimmy’s browser history was scant. Clearly, his online time was limited mostly to homework for Doan Road Christian School. I went way back in his browser history, but found no chat sites, no porn, no image searches for Hollywood hotties or anything like that. And he had not cleared the history recently. It went back for more than a year. If he was looking at things he shouldn’t, he was doing it in private mode to avoid leaving tracks. The cops could probably find that out when they went through the forensic image they’d made, but I wasn’t able to check that out myself.
One thing seemed conspicuously absent. “I don’t see a chess site on here,” I said.
“He plays that on his phone,” Tammy answered. “I don’t know the app he uses.”
“His chess club friends will know, probably,” I said. “I’m sure they talk about such things, probably play one another outside club meetings. Do you all monitor his phone use, too?”
“Well, some,” Bob said. “But we’ve eased up the last couple of years. We used to do random spot checks, you know, hand it over and we’ll take a look. He always handed it right over, never an argument, and we never found anything objectionable.”
“Those atheist videos, Bob.”
He shrugged. “He was watching those to learn what they had to say, to sharpen his apologetics. Know thine enemy.”
“They’re not the enemy, they’re lost,” Tammy muttered.
I changed the subject. “I’ll keep looking. Never know what’s going to prove useful.”
I spent an hour searching for phone backups or chats or photos that might be relevant, but found nothing. I hadn’t really expected anything different. If I had been Jimmy, I’d have made goddamned sure my parents wouldn’t find anything, too.
“Do you mind if I see his room?”
“It’s a mess,” Tammy added.
“My room’s a mess, too. I won’t judge.”
They led me out of the study, around a corner, and down the hall that ended in three bedrooms and a bathroom. “That’s Jimmy’s room,” Tammy said. “Police already looked in there.”
“It’ll save me time if I can see for myself, and not have to go combing through the police reports. I’ll do that, too, of course.”
I stepped into the room and flipped on the light. There were no immediate revelations. There was a bed, a small computer table without a computer on it, and a shelf full of minor league baseball caps, including a Carolina Mudcats cap I thought about stealing. I opened drawers in the desk, but I did not expect to find anything. If Jimmy was a chess wizard, he was smart enough to know Mom and Dad search his room.
There was a chessboard on the desk. White had mated Black. “Does he have friends over to play chess?”
“No,” Jimmy’s dad said. “Well, not very often. He plays on his phone. But he uses the board here to do puzzles and things like that, or to visualize a position. He says he can see it better on a real board.”
“Smart kid,” I said. I looked in the closet. “Did he take clothes?”
“Just what he was wearing,” Jimmy’s dad said. “Reds T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, Buckeyes jacket, a Reds cap. He doesn’t go anywhere without that cap.”
I lifted the mattress, just to be thorough, even though I doubted I’d discover anything. I saw Jimmy’s reading material, then shifted my position to block dad’s view.
I used to hide Playboy under my mattress. Jimmy had hidden The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, a book that pretty much eviscerates the notion that evolution and science are bunk and treats religion as so much superstition. I wondered whether Jimmy’s parents might prefer him to be reading Playboy.
Tammy Zachman entered the room. “Bob … did you take money from my purse?” She was carrying a large bag, and digging around in it.
“No, I never do that. Why?”
“I went to get cash to pay Mr. Runyon. I had an envelope in my purse, almost seven hundred dollars.”
“I didn’t take it,” Bob said.
“Then maybe Jimmy did,” she muttered. The tears started again. “What kind of trouble is he in?”
“Hey,” I said, “that might not be a bad thing. If he took money, that indicates he left on his own, and had a plan, as opposed to any kind of abduction or something like that.”
She blinked. “You think?”
“Could be, yeah. Any credit cards missing? Debit cards?”
“No,” she said. “I checked that as soon as I noticed the money missing.”
“So, he has a lot of ready cash but no cards. He’ll be able to buy food or pay for a hotel room, at least for a little while.” It occurred to me he might have grabbed the money to pay for some extravagance, like a pair of fancy basketball shoes or a collectible comic or some other dumb thing a fifteen-year-old might spend his mom’s money on. It also occurred to me he might have taken the money to buy something for a girlfriend. Maybe jewelry. Maybe an abortion. Who knows? But I did not mention that to the parents, of course. “Anyway, if he has money then he most likely isn’t starving somewhere.”
“Well, that is some hope, right?” She sighed heavily. “Thank you. I’ll write you a check.”