Case Closed

"Mama."

Caroline woke to a little boy's whisper. Probably Toby with a nightmare again. Groggily, she turned over, rubbing the bleariness out of her eyes. When she moved her hand, however, there was no one there.

She turned back toward Duane's side of their king-size bed, and started at the boy who greeted her again, eyes wide in that way all children's eyes become when sharing secrets. "Mama, I was lost. Why didn't you come find me?" her first son asked with pleading green eyes darkened in the midnight blackness of the room.

"I'm so sorry, baby," Caroline answered. "We tried so hard, but no one could find you."

Neil had been kidnapped when he was six years old. The authorities searched for weeks, but there was no trace of him. She and Duane had been devastated, and for years kept hoping that their boy would be found. An old family friend, Odom Detwiler, had been a godsend, organizing the search and liaising with the police and other searchers. But after nearly two years, Caroline and Duane decided to end the search in the hopes that Neil would eventually find his way back to them on his own.

After a few more years, in which both of them came to accept the loss of Neil, Toby, now four, was born. Caroline never stopped hoping to find her eldest son, but somehow, seeing Neil now was not as joyful an occasion as it should have been, especially since, ten years to the day after his disappearance, here he was in her bed, looking not a day older than when he was taken, and wearing the exact same fire truck pajamas he'd been wearing to bed ten years ago, his cheeks--which had never been chubby in the first place--so hollow she could make out that little dip in his jaw where his teeth joined the mandible.

"He said it was a game," Neil explained in a chill whisper. "Uncle Odie made me dig a hole at the farm, and then made me lay down. And then I forgot."

"Forgot what, baby?"

"Everything."

She looked closer, and knew with awful certainty what had happened to her eldest--or at least acknowledged the awful truth that she'd never before dared to think aloud, but had somehow always subconsciously known: Odom Detwiler was no friend.

Caroline woke up screaming, and would never forget the bullet hole dead center, below the scrubby brown fringe on her little Neil's forehead.