Laura
I stepped on the gas. A thousand thoughts ran through my mind at once but I managed to cut through them with only a little difficulty.
“What happened?”
“I was at school,” I heard myself saying. I tried my best to make my voice sound hard, which helped a little bit to eliminate the awkward squeaking, but I still sounded completely unsteady. “I had to talk to Charlie’s teacher, so I left him outside. I locked the car, I’m certain of that.”
“Can you open the doors from the inside?”
“Not the back seats. And not without unlocking the doors, in any case.”
“So someone had to have unlocked the doors?”
“I had the only key, so…”
“Okay, so we have some pretty specific ideas about who opened the door from the word go, is that right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I had thought through all of this myself, but somehow hearing him say it made the whole thing feel more concrete, more manageable. More real, somehow. I sucked air and tried to make sure that I was as calm as humanly possible.
“So he must have left of his own free will. Voluntarily.”
“I guess you could put it that way, yes.”
“How would you put it?”
“He might have been getting bullied at school.”
“Bullied?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t talk to me about it, obviously. That was what his teacher wanted to talk to me about. She was concerned that there was something going on with him and his friends. Something that I might be concerned enough to want to follow-up on.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you want to follow up on it?”
“Of course I did,” I said, sourly. “What do you think I am, some kind of witch? I didn’t get the chance.”
“I didn’t mean to imply… look, I’m just asking if it felt possible, or if the teacher seemed like she was overreacting.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I’d have closed my eyes if I could. But I was driving, and in a moment we would be near the school again.
“I don’t know. He seems okay, but I mean… you saw him. He’s not exactly keen on opening up all the time.”
“I guess,” Dave said. He was looking out the windows. “Hey, let me out here.”
“What?”
“Just trust me. You go search near the school. I’m going to do my own exploration.”
He looked like he knew what he was thinking about. He’d been running around this town making a wreck for as long as I knew him. Before he left, he probably knew every single solitary inch of public land, and any private land that wasn’t locked up tight.
“Okay,” I said. I slammed on the brakes and the car jerked as it slowed. “Keep your phone on you, alright? And Dave?”
He leaned back into the car. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. He sounded more confident than I was feeling, that was for sure.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Dave.”
“Doing something stupid is exactly what I’m good at,” he said with a smile. Then he turned and pulled a chain-link fence apart a hundred feet back the way we’d come, to reveal an opening that was plenty for a child. For a full-grown man it was a tight fit. I didn’t watch him disappear into it.
I pursed my lips. It was all logical, when I thought about it clearly. I didn’t want to think very clearly. I wanted to panic and lose my mind and continue to freak out as long as possible. I wanted to have someone else solve my problems for me. I drove slower and kept my eyes open for something I didn’t expect to find.
Woodbridge was never a large town. It’s far from a ‘city.’ But if you want to hide in it, then there’s more than enough options. For someone who is still small enough to hide behind a trash can, the options are near infinite.
There was only one person who could have let Charlie out of the car: Charlie himself. Which means that he left because he wanted to, or because he thought that he had to.
What could possibly scare him as much as he’d been scared? I pressed my lips together and drove on in silence, scanning the sides of the road. I had the radio on when I’d gotten to the school; now it was off. It hurt my ears to listen to it. Hurt my head. I wanted silence, and by God I got it.
I started with a lap around the school. Slow enough that someone could keep up with a light jog, but it provided me plenty of time to look around. If I’d been on point, he couldn’t have gotten much further than the edge of the property by the time that I realized he was gone.
Which means that I didn’t find him when I looked the first time because I was farting around, or because he was moving fast and I looked in the wrong places. The third option was the least pleasant one: something could have removed him from the school grounds.
Of course, he had to have let himself out of the car. That was always the sticking point. Maybe there was something that I was overlooking. Or maybe there wasn’t.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I hoped that it was a call from Dave, telling me that I could stop worrying. That his efforts had turned Charlie up, no problem.
I looked at the screen. The caller ID only provided a number, and not one that I’d ever seen before. I frowned. I still had to answer, though. I knew that, deep down in my gut.
I squeezed my stomach tight and flicked the green circle. The screen changed to the phone menu.
“Hello?”
“Is this Laura Small?” The voice was a man’s voice, grown and adult, but aside from that it wasn’t familiar.
“Who is this?”
“Charlie’s mom, right?”
I repeated the question. “Who is this?”
“Your son came by with my little brother. He’s hanging out now, but I didn’t want you to worry.”
“You should have waited to ask.”
“I realize,” he said evenly. “I just realized that he hadn’t cleared it with you first. You should come by and pick him up.”
“Okay. You have an address?”
He gave me an address. It was on the south side of town. I wrote it down on a receipt and made sure to read it back to him.
“See you in a minute,” he said. I took a breath, tried to slow my pulse down a little, and started going through my contacts to look for Dave.