Agent Lowell sits across from me and my parents, on that same couch where Abby and her parents once sat, setting everything in motion again. He’s told us there have been new developments. Some questions, some answers, he said.
“Did he talk?” my dad asks.
It was Elliot who provided the missing link. Who let us know that Hunter Long had been in that shelter at the same time as Liam. That he might’ve known something about what happened two years ago.
Agent Lowell spreads his hands apart. “His mother brought him back in yesterday, and we were able to fill in a few more holes.”
Kennedy told me the police found Hunter, managed to convince him to talk after promising not to bring any charges, but he was still afraid.
“The timing adds up,” Agent Lowell says. “His mother says Hunter first ran off right after she remarried. He’d gotten into a fight with his new stepfather and disappeared for months. Hunter told us that soon after he arrived at the shelter, he noticed that one of the volunteers was taking money from the younger people who were living there. Money they should not have had. He realized they were working for him, most likely distributing drugs.”
“Liam found out?” I ask. Mike had told me, leaning over me in the middle of the clearing above the quarry, that Liam didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.
Agent Lowell sighs. “Hunter says he confided in another volunteer—one who looked about his age. When he didn’t see that volunteer again, he took off, afraid.”
Liam. It had to be Liam. Liam must’ve asked Mike about it, maybe not realizing it was him. Or maybe he did realize, but he wanted to believe the best of Mike, that there was some mistake. Liam must’ve debated going to the police, turning Mike in. His hand shaking that morning, the razor falling, the drop of blood. When he saw Mike at the picnic, Liam must’ve agreed to hear him out. If you take not only a person but also a dog, it seems like a runaway. Mike knew this. He knew this, and he used it.
“Is it enough?” It’s the first time I’ve heard my mother ask Agent Lowell a question.
“It will be,” he says. “We know what questions to ask now about Mike’s work at the shelter. We’ve heard that he worked closely with the teen runaways. And now we think he must’ve operated by threatening to turn them in to authorities, or turn them in back home, unless they did what he asked—distributing for him, collecting the money. Problem was, there was so much turnover there anyway. Sometimes they came back to the shelter, sometimes they didn’t. I guess, if things didn’t go Mike’s way, he thought no one would look too closely when they didn’t turn up again.”
Until Liam.
There are witnesses this time. Me, and Kennedy, and now Hunter Long. Hopefully, with the support of the police, we will have more.
We don’t have proof, but we have enough.
Agent Lowell looks up at the ceiling, at the scratching I also hear, coming from my brother’s room. It’s becoming a habit. “Is that who I think it is?” he asks.
“We keep finding him in there,” my mom says, almost smiling.
Turned out, all the press was good for something. The phone call we received after the service—the woman on the other end who’d been trying to reach us for days. “I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said.
Then she described Colby—the brown-and-white coat, the tail that was a solid brown. “One day, two years back,” she explained, “I saw this scrawny thing digging in my garden. He looked too skinny, and he seemed frightened.”
My back straightened; even my parents noticed.
“Well, he had no collar, you see. I thought he was a stray. I put up signs, just in case. But, you know, it’s not really near you. And I think…”
“Nolan?” my dad said, stepping closer to the table. “What is it?”
I shook my head, dropping the phone to my side, barely able to believe it. “Colby,” I said. “Someone found Colby.”
And now he’s back, half ours, half belonging to someone else. And he keeps gravitating to that empty room. He spent the first day pawing at the door until I let him in, and then he sat in the middle of the room, staring at something no one else could see.
He’s in there again now.
Sometimes I think he can sense something we don’t.
And sometimes I think how things can still come back, even after we stop looking for them.