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PART ONE

INDIAN SUMMER, 1997

1

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported

Of those, a large portion are abducted by one parent estranged from the other, and over fifty percent of the time the child’s whereabouts are never in question The majority of these children are returned within a week

Another portion of those twenty-three hundred children are runaways Again, the , and usually their whereabouts are either known immediately or easily ascertained—a friend’s house is the most common destination

Another category ofchildren is the throay—those who are cast out of their hoive chase These are often the children who fill shelters and bus terht districts, and, ultimately, prisons

Of thenationally every year, only thirty-five hundred to four thousand fall into what the Departorizes as Non-Family Abductions, or cases in which the police soon rule out fa away, parental ejection, or the child beco lost or injured

Of these cases, three hundred children disappear every year and never return

No one—not parents, friends, law enforce people—knohere these children go Into graves, possibly; into cellars or the homes of pedophiles; into voids, perhaps, holes in the fabric of the universe where they will never be heard froain

Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone For a ers who’ve heard of their cases, haunt their loved ones for far longer

Without a body to leave behind, proof of their passing, they don’t die They keep us aware of the void

And they stay gone

“My sister,” Lionel McCready said, as he paced our belfry office, “has had a very difficult life” Lionel was a bigto his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard fro we couldn’t see sat atop therip in a callused hand He wore a brown UPS delivery brown baseball cap in his beefy hands “Our mom was a—well, a boozer, frankly And our dad left ere both little kids When you grow up that way, you—I guess you—et your head straight, figure out your way in life It’s not just Helene I mean, I had some serious probleel”

“Lionel,” his wife said

He held up a hand to her, as if he had to spit it out now or he’d never spit it out at all “I was lucky I , Mr Kenzie, Miss Gennaro, is that if you’re given tirow up You shake that crap My sister, she’s still growing up, what I’ Maybe Because her life was hard and—”

“Lionel,” his wife said, “stopexcuses for Helene” Beatrice McCready ran a hand through her short strawberry hair and said, “Honey, sit down Please”

Lionel said, “I’ to explain that Helene hasn’t had an easy life”