Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,16
said with what seemed to Simon like intentional slowness, “if you think the food’s so bad?”
“I suppose you could say we were invited.”
“Invited by who?”
“We don’t know by whom. I received a postcard last week from someone saying he wanted to repay me for something I did.”
“Can I see this postcard?”
Simon gestured to Amy. She rooted through her pocketbook, her hand plunging in and out of the various pockets. “Just dump everything out,” he said.
“It’s not here. We must have left it on the table at the restaurant.”
“You left it at the restaurant?”
“We left it.”
“But that’s our only connection to—wait a minute, I kept the other ones.”
Simon hurried to the kitchen. The yellow fish magnet was gone from the side of the refrigerator. So were the postcards. He came back to the living room empty-handed. “They aren’t there.”
Reade nodded as if that confirmed some theory of his. “How were you and your son getting along, Mr. Howe?”
“Why are you asking that?”
The policeman shrugged as if the reason was obvious. “You said he was grounded. Did he get into trouble recently?”
“Is that important?”
“It might figure into where he is, if we knew what was bothering him.”
“Okay, what he did was swing his fist at a classmate.”
“Your son hit him?”
“It was more of a shove,” Simon said, “but he shouldn’t be touching anybody like that. That’s why we grounded him for a week.”
“Did you do anything else—corporal punishment of any sort?”
“I don’t think the best way to teach our son that hitting someone’s bad is by hitting him ourselves.”
Reade shrugged. “There’s a lot of that happening these days, more than you’d think. My parents hit us big time.”
Simon imagined the page-one story—Spanking Makes a Comeback in Red Paint. Another scarier headline popped into his mind—Search on for Editor’s Son.
“I’m a therapist,” Amy said with her fingers touching at the tips, her way of keeping composed, “and I would never spank a child. So before I explode would you get on your radio and broadcast that our son is missing?”
Reade nodded amiably, as if he was agreeing with her. But then, “The thing is, we don’t really know he’s missing, Mrs. Howe. All we know is that he isn’t where you expected him to be. Happens all the time with kids.” The officer walked to the front door and crouched down to inspect the knob. “No sign of forced entry here or at any of the windows. It appears your son let himself out. Maybe a friend rang the bell and he answered it.”
“He knows not to open the door when we’re not here,” Simon said.
“Your boy always do what you tell him?”
“No, but—”
“I’ll alert night patrol to check around town, the usual places kids hang out. You have a recent picture of …”
“Davey,” Amy said, “our son’s name is Davey.” She pointed to the mantel, and Simon understood that he was to retrieve the photo of their son in his baseball uniform.
“Cute kid,” the policeman said as he tucked the picture inside his jacket.
Simon nodded. Davey was a very cute kid.
Amy slammed the door shut behind the officer. “We wasted an hour with that idiot,” she said. “You know how far someone can drive in an hour?”
“Drive?”
“Yes, drive. If that lunatic of yours knocked on the door and Davey answered …”
Simon took her hands. “I’m sure that didn’t happen, Amy.”
She broke away from him. “How can you say that? You don’t know.”
“I just think we should stay positive. We don’t need both of us going to pieces.”
She whirled around, her hand swiping over the hall table, sending a pile of envelopes to the floor. “Maybe that’s exactly what we need, both of us feeling the same thing. Because right now I have no idea what you’re feeling. It’s like you know something about this.”
Simon bent down to pick up the mail and set it back on the table. It took him a moment to realize what she was suggesting. “You think I’d hide information when Davey’s missing?”
“I’m checking his room again,” she said and then swept up the stairs faster than he had ever seen. He had to take the steps by two to keep up. She stopped just outside the doorway to Davey’s room, as if not to disturb a crime scene. “Nothing’s out of place,” she said, which was easy to tell. Davey kept an unusually tidy room. Casper raised her head, stretched, then jumped off the bed and trotted to them. Amy picked her up and sniffed, as if