“He said he’ll explain when we get there,” my mom says, sitting straight and gripping the wheel like it might fly off at any moment.
Captain Moeller is waiting for us at the front desk.
“Thanks for coming back,” he says as the three of us rush to his office. I wonder what the hurry is.
Once we’re settled, he explains.
“I did a quick search on Beacon, London, and it turns out it’s a street in the city,” Captain Moeller begins. “A squad there has been keeping an eye on a building on that street… suspicious activity, I guess. A friend down there was still at his desk: he told me that a man and wife recently rented the space—it’s an office downtown in that older area—and anyway, there have been odd complaints, so they’ve been watching it.”
“What type of complaints?” Mom asks, and I notice that she is clutching her purse like a life vest.
“Crying children late at night… in a business registered as a pawnshop,” he says quietly. “The squad has done routine checks twice now and there’s no sign of wrongdoing. But like I said, they’re keeping an eye out.”
Captain Moeller stops talking a moment and clears his throat.
I’m confused. My mom might be, too. I can’t be sure.
“What does all this mean, Jim?” she says aloud. “Why did you want us to come back down here?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s touchy, and maybe I’m wrong, but this new information piqued my interest,” the captain says, leaning back in his chair and running a hand through what hair he has left. He checks the clock and continues.
“You never did an autopsy on Jonas’s body, did you, Bridgette?”
The question slugs my mom in the gut, and she looks visibly hurt for a split second. Then she recovers.
“No, you know that, Jim,” she says. “There were his clothes—definitely his clothes—and with the decomposition, we decided it was enough.”
My mouth is ajar now. Hasn’t my mom seen a single crime drama? Maybe she just wanted it to be over. Maybe she just needed to believe, to bury him and move on.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Mom asks, seeming agitated now.
“I don’t know. Kids late at night… at a pawnshop that the locals say isn’t open in the daytime. It’s just suspicious.”
“Say what you mean, Jim,” my mom barks, and suddenly Captain Moeller sits straight in his chair.
>“It’s so huge, I don’t know if we can,” I murmur.
“We can,” my mom says, in a voice so strong I almost believe her.
She leaves me standing alone in the center of the living room for a moment and then zips back into the room, keys in hand.
Before I have time to think about it anymore, my mom is pulling me toward the car.
“Let’s go.”
One good thing about living in a small town is that it’s possible that, way back in high school, your mother was friends with the man who is now police captain. It means that he might listen to you when others might not.
“So you just remembered all this?” Captain Moeller asks, looking back and forth between me and my mom.
Captain Moeller may have a potbelly and a bald head, but he’s got a kind face and, frankly, he’s our only hope.
“Yes,” I say sweetly. “I remember the day of the kidnapping now very clearly. I could help a sketch artist. Or look in a book?”
“They’d be a lot older now,” the captain says softly.
He doesn’t know what I see.
“We’d like to try,” my mom says warmly. After exhaling loudly, Captain Moeller gets up. He grabs a binder from the shelf and tosses it on the small table in the corner. Then he retrieves two more, each filled with photos, from the outer office.