TWO

THE FEAR HAD MOSTLY SWEATED OUT OF ME, but as I walked from the cafeteria to history class, I couldn’t stop myself from taking out my phone and rereading the horror story that is the “Human Microbiota” Wikipedia article. I was reading and walking when I heard my mother shout at me through her open classroom door. She was seated behind her metal desk, leaning over a book. Mom was a math teacher, but reading was her great love.

“No phones in the hallway, Aza!” I put my phone away and went into her classroom. There were four minutes remaining in my lunch period, which was the perfect length for a Mom conversation. She looked up and must’ve seen something in my eyes. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re not anxious?” she asked. At some point, Dr. Singh had told Mom not to ask if I was feeling anxious, so she’d stopped phrasing it as a direct question.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been taking your meds,” she said. Again, not a direct question.

“Yeah,” I said, which was broadly true. I’d had a bit of a crack-up my freshman year, after which I was prescribed a circular white pill to be taken once daily. I took it, on average, maybe thrice weekly.

“You look . . .” Sweaty, is what I knew she meant.

“Who decides when the bells ring?” I asked. “Like, the school bells?”

“You know what, I have no idea. I suppose that’s decided by someone on the superintendent’s staff.”

“Like, why are lunch periods thirty-seven minutes long instead of fifty? Or twenty-two? Or whatever?”

“Your brain seems like a very intense place,” Mom answered.

“It’s just weird, how this is decided by someone I don’t know and then I have to live by it. Like, I live on someone else’s schedule. And I’ve never even met them.”

“Yes, well, in that respect and many others, American high schools do rather resemble prisons.”

My eyes widened. “Oh my God, Mom, you’re so right. The metal detectors. The cinder-block walls.”

“They’re both overcrowded and underfunded,” Mom said. “And both have bells that ring to tell you when to move.”

“And you don’t get to choose when you eat lunch,” I said. “And prisons have power-thirsty, corrupt guards, just like schools have teachers.”

She shot me a look, but then started laughing. “You headed straight home after school?”

“Yeah, then I gotta take Daisy to work.”

Mom nodded. “Sometimes I miss you being a little kid, but then I remember Chuck E. Cheese.”

“She’s just trying to save money for college.”

My mom glanced back down at her book. “You know, if we lived in Europe, college wouldn’t cost much.” I braced myself for Mom’s cost-of-college rant. “There are free universities in Brazil. Most of Europe. China. But here they want to charge you twenty-five thousand dollars a year, for in-state tuition. I just finished paying off my loans a few years ago, and soon we’ll have to take out ones for you.”

“I’m only a junior. I’ve got plenty of time to win the lottery. And if that doesn’t work out, I’ll just pay for school by selling meth.”

She smiled wanly. Mom really worried about paying for me to go to school. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

I nodded as the bell sounded from on high, sending me to history.

—

By the time I made it to my car after school, Daisy was already in the passenger seat. She’d changed out of the stained shirt she’d been wearing into her red Chuck E. Cheese polo, and was sitting with her backpack in her lap, drinking a container of school milk. Daisy was the only person I’d trusted with a key to Harold. Mom didn’t even have her own Harold key, but Daisy did.

“Please do not drink non-clear liquids in Harold,” I told her.

“Milk is a clear liquid,” she said.

“Lies,” I answered, and before we set off, I drove Harold over to the front entrance and waited while Daisy threw away her milk.

—

Maybe you’ve been in love. I mean real love, the kind my grandmother used to describe by quoting the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the love that is kind and patient, that does not envy or boast, that beareth all things and believeth all things and endureth all things. I don’t like to throw the L-word around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse. You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold.

He was a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corolla with a paint color called Mystic Teal Mica and an engine that clanked in a steady rhythm like the beating of his immaculate metallic heart. Harold had been my dad’s car—in fact, Dad had named him Harold. Mom never sold him, so he stayed in the garage for eight years, until my sixteenth birthday.

Getting Harold’s engine running after so long took all of the four hundred dollars I’d saved over the course of my life—allowances, change ferreted away when Mom sent me down the street to buy something at the Circle K, summer work at Subway, Christmas gifts from my grandparents—so, in a way, Harold was the culmination of my whole being, at least financially speaking. And I loved him. I dreamed about him quite a lot. He had an exceptionally spacious trunk, a custom-installed, huge white steering wheel, and a backseat bench clad in pebble-beige leather. He accelerated with the gentle serenity of the Buddhist Zen master who knows nothing really needs to be done quickly, and his brakes whined like metal machine music, and I loved him.

However, Harold did not have Bluetooth connectivity, or for that matter a CD player, meaning that while in Harold’s company, one had three choices: 1. Drive in silence; 2. Listen to the radio; or 3. Listen to Side B of my dad’s cassette of Missy Elliott’s excellent album So Addictive, which—because it would not eject from the cassette player—I’d already heard hundreds of times in my life.

And in the end, Harold’s imperfect audio system happened to be the last note in the melody of coincidences that changed my life.

—

Daisy and I were scanning stations in search of a song by a particular brilliant and underappreciated boy band when we landed upon a news story. “—Indianapolis-based Pickett Engineering, a construction firm employing more than ten thousand people worldwide, today—” I moved my hand toward the scan button, but Daisy pushed it away.

“This is what I was telling you about!” she said as the radio continued, “—one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the whereabouts of company CEO Russell Pickett. Pickett, who disappeared the night before a police raid on his home related to a fraud and bribery investigation, was last seen at his riverside compound on September eighth. Anyone with information regarding his whereabouts is encouraged to call the Indianapolis Police Department.”

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Daisy said. “And you know his kid.”

“Knew,” I said. For two summers, after fifth and sixth grades, Davis and I had gone to Sad Camp together, which is what we’d called Camp Spero, this place down in Brown County for kids with dead parents.

Aside from hanging out together at Sad Camp, Davis and I would also sometimes see each other during the school year, because he lived just down the river from me, but on the opposite bank. Mom and I lived on the side that sometimes flooded. The Picketts lived on the side with the stone-gabled walls that forced the rising water in our direction.

“He probably wouldn’t even remember me.”

“Everyone remembers you, Holmesy,” she said.

“That’s not—”

“It’s not a value judgment. I’m not saying you’re good or generous or kind or whatever. I’m just saying you’re memorable.”

“I haven’t seen him in years,” I said. But of course you don’t forget playdates at a mansion that contains a golf course, a pool with an island, and five waterslides. Davis was the closest thing to a proper celebrity I’d ever encountered.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Daisy said again. We pulled onto I-465, the beltway that circumscribes Indianapolis. “I’m fixing Skee-Ball machines for eight forty an hour and there’s a hundred grand waiting for us.”

“I wouldn’t say waiting for us. Anyway, I have to read about the effects of smallpox on indigenous populations tonight, so I can’t really solve The Case of the Fugitive Billionaire.” I eased Harold up to highway speed. I never drove him faster than the speed limit. I loved him too much.

“Well, you know him better than I do, so to quote the infallible boys in the world’s greatest pop group, ‘You’re the One,’” which was this super-cheesy song I was way too old to love, but loved nonetheless.

“I want to disagree with you, but that is such a great song.”

“You’re. The. One. ‘You’re the one that I choose. The one I’ll never lose. You’re my forever. My stars. My sky. My air. It’s you.’”

We laughed, and I changed the radio station and thought it was over, but then Daisy started reading me an Indianapolis Star story from her phone. “‘Russell Pickett, the controversial CEO and founder of Pickett Engineering, wasn’t home when a search warrant was served by the Indianapolis police Friday morning, and he hasn’t been home since. Pickett’s lawyer, Simon Morris, says he has no information about Pickett’s whereabouts, and in a press conference today, Detective Dwight Allen said that no activity on Pickett’s credit cards or bank accounts has been noted since the evening before the raid.’ Blah-blah-blah . . . ‘Allen also asserted that aside from a camera at the front gate, there were no surveillance cameras on the property. A copy of a police report obtained by the Star says that Pickett was last seen Thursday evening by his sons, Davis and Noah.’ Blah-blah-blah . . . ‘estate just north of Thirty-Eighth Street, lots of lawsuits, supports the zoo,’ blah-blah-blah . . . ‘call the police if you know anything,’ blah-blah-blah. Wait, how are there no security cameras? What kind of billionaire doesn’t have security cameras?”

“The kind who doesn’t want his shady business recorded,” I said. As we drove, I kept turning the story over in my head. I knew some edge of it was jagged, but I couldn’t figure out which one, until I snagged a memory of eerie green coyotes with white eyes. “Wait, there was a camera. Not a security one, but Davis and his brother had a motion-capture camera in the woods by the river. It had, like, night vision, and it would snap a picture whenever something walked past—deer or coyotes or whatever.”

“Holmesy,” she said. “We have a lead.”

“And because of the camera at the front gate, he couldn’t have just driven off,” I said. “So either he climbs over his own wall, or else he walks through the woods down to the river and leaves from there, right?”

“Yes . . .”

“So he could’ve tripped that camera. I mean, it’s been a few years since I was there; maybe it’s gone.”

“And maybe it’s not!” Daisy said.

“Yeah. Maybe it’s not.”

“Exit here,” she said suddenly, and I did. I knew it was the wrong exit, but I took it anyway, and without Daisy even telling me to, I got in the right lane to drive back into the city, toward my house. Toward Davis’s house.

Daisy took out her phone and raised it to her ear. “Hey, Eric. It’s Daisy. Listen, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got the stomach flu. Could be norovirus.”

“. . .”

“Yeah, no problem. Sorry again.” She hung up, put her phone in her bag, and said, “If you even imply diarrhea, they tell you to stay home because they’re so scared of outbreaks. Right, okay, we’re doing this. You still got that canoe?”