Will had a dream that he was on the deck of a ship that was lurching unpredictably as storm waves tossed it about. It was one of those half-awake dreams where you know you are dreaming but can’t quite wake up. A voice was hissing at him, “Will, wake up! WAKE UP!” Will opened his eyes groggily. It was light out—had he actually slept through to morning? Rose was shaking him back and forth and whispering as loud as she could and still call it a whisper, “Will, would you please WAKE UP! Blue is missing! Would you wake up?”
Will sat up, not sure if he heard right, but shocked enough that he was wide awake. He couldn’t have heard right. He matched Rose’s loud whisper, “Did you just say Blue is missing?”
“Yessss!” she said emphatically, “And you are impossible to wake up! Mom and Dad got a phone call just a few minutes ago from the O’Days. They were asking if Blue was here. Is she here Will?”
Why would she be here? “No, of course not!”
“If she isn’t here and she’s not at the O’Days . . .” she trailed off.
Will’s heart sank. This was exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen! Things were always better in the morning, it was almost a rule. Instead, it seemed things had gone horribly wrong. There must be some explanation. Things had to be okay. Blue had to be somewhere safe, he reasoned. There was no other possibility he even wanted to consider.
“Will,” said Rose, “Where could she be? She has to be somewhere, right?” It was a pleading kind of nonsense question, not wanting to ask the real question that was nagging at Will’s mind, too. She has to be somewhere safe and not . . . the other thing which was “not safe” and just not possible. There had to be an explanation.
Will jumped up and started pulling on his clothes. “Rosie, I’ll be right back. There’s one place she might be, but don’t tell anyone yet, okay? I have to check first! I don’t want her to get in trouble!”
“I wanna go with you!” voxed Rose.
“Hey, little Meerkat, you can’t. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Will knelt down and held Rose by the shoulders and looked her in the face. He knew she’d like being called meerkat, but she wasn’t grinning this time. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she replied, “But where are you going?”
“I’ll tell you when I get back, but promise not to say anything. Just tell Mom and Dad I was already up and gone, okay?” And with that, Will slipped out his window.
Rose whispered after him, “Okay, but I can’t lie if they ask me!”
Will just gave her the thumbs up as he went around the back of the garage, slipped in the side door, grabbed his bike, and shot off down the hill to the park. He didn’t know what he was expecting to find, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. If she wasn’t at the O’Days and she wasn’t at his house, then she had to be there—asleep on a bench, or in a bush, or in that tree or something!
He headed straight for the parking lot by the restrooms. It looked entirely different during the day. He studied the tree they had climbed. It looked like it couldn’t possibly hide anything. He wondered how they could have convinced themselves that it was a good hiding place. They had checked it carefully at night, but seeing it during the day, it just didn’t seem possible.
He checked all around, in the bushes and in both restrooms, hoping that he would find her asleep somewhere. Nothing. He scanned the ground around the restrooms and tree but didn’t know what he was looking for. A discarded piece of clothing, a lock of hair, a shoe, blood? There was nothing but grass, dirt, a few bits of trash and a lot of cigarette butts.
Will pedaled despondently back up the hill, thinking hard. This was not good, not good at all. There was nothing, absolutely nothing at the park to tell him whether she had been there or not. He was trying to think of alternative places. He looked left and right as he rode, checking the spots they had hidden in or spied from. He was desperate to see her sleeping in the bushes, or hiding somewhere, just to jump him when he passed by. He kept up a steady, “click, click, click. . .” ever hopeful that he would hear that reassuring “cht, cht, cht . . . got you!”
He was almost to his house and his hope was draining out and being replaced with a slowly forming ominous possibility. Before he could ponder that possibility, though, Rose spotted him and came running out in the yard. “Mom’s been looking for you. I didn’t tell, and I didn’t lie! You should hurry inside, though.”
“Thanks, Rosie. You’re the best sister,” voxed Will.
“I’m your only sister,” she voxed but without the usual smile at the old joke.
Will parked his bike and walked into the house. His mom was sitting at the table and had just hung up the phone. She had a list of names in front of her and about half of them were crossed off.
Her lips were pressed tight and her face full of concern. “Will, I’m glad you’re home. We got a call this morning and . . .”
“Blue’s missing. I know Rose told me. What’s going on Mom?” Will asked. He decided to play dumb, so he could get the full story from his mom.
“Ma Beth said that they had breakfast around nine this morning and Blue didn’t come down, which wasn’t that unusual to them, I guess. But when it got to be ten, and Blue still hadn’t come down Ma Beth decided to check on her. When she went to her bedroom, Blue wasn’t there. Her bed was made as if she’d gotten up already. Ma Beth said they checked everywhere in the house and didn’t find her. None of the boys knew where she was or where she might be, so she started calling other places Blue could be.” Will’s Mom paused and then looked intently at Will. “Do you know where she could be? Did she visit here last night?”
Will voxed back, “She wasn’t here last night! Why would she be here?” He wondered why she would have asked that. He looked sideways at Rose but Rose looked back at him and shrugged.
His mom said, “Okay, but do you know where she could be?”
Will hesitated. He could tell her that she might have gone to the park last night. She would’ve been back by now, unless something went wrong, but he still wanted to believe that it couldn’t have, that something else was going on. “I don’t know, really Mom,” and then he decided to add, “She does like to be out at night, but she never stays out!”
“Okay,” she said. “Then maybe we can at least start looking for her outside. She might have fallen asleep somewhere. It is still early. They say 90% of runaways are usually found somewhere right around home.”
Will realized that his mom did not want to consider the bad possibilities either. She was calling Blue a runaway, and Will was trying to believe that, too.
“I’ll start looking around the neighborhood for places we hung out. I bet she’ll be asleep in a bush somewhere,” said Will.
Rose said, “I’ll come, too!”
But their Mom said, “No honey. You need to stay here.”
Rose looked crushed, but Mom just said, “No pouty faces!”
Rose voxed to Will, “I hope YOU find her, and soon!”
“Yeah, me too, little Rose,” and he smiled. “No problem.” But inside, a hot pressure was starting to develop, an inkling of dread that he was not going to find Blue or that he would find something he did not want to find. He tried to brush it off, but just like last night, he was feeling like his body was being more truthful to him than his mind was. What his body was telling him was that something bad had happened and there wasn’t much time.