the book she’d started the day she fell. She’d bent the spine, and she regretted that; she had a deep respect for books. That entire day was a bit hazy in her memory. She hadn’t fallen since, but she knew that all it would take was falling the wrong way and her bones would snap like peanut brittle. She settled herself more firmly in her seat. No! There would be none of that. Juno was sick, sick as hell, and if she were careful, she could finish out her days without breaking a hip, or a leg, or whatever old people broke when they fell. As if on cue, Juno’s hip began to ache.
She was trying not to think about what she’d heard the night before as she lay in her own bed. You misheard, she’d told herself a hundred times since that morning. But she hadn’t misheard, and now those words were repeating themselves in her head like a goddamn two-year-old whining in a toy store. She rubbed little circles at her temples and tried to read the words on the page. But she wasn’t thinking about the story; it wasn’t fiction in which she wanted to immerse herself. It was the truth.
Juno got up from the chair with some difficulty and walked over to the family computer. The screen was dark, but she knew that if she gave the mouse a little nudge it would spring to life, revealing the family vacation screen saver. She hadn’t touched a computer in years—well, except when she’d nudged Sam’s mouse much the same way the other day—but her life before had held all of those things: computers and jobs and credit cards. She didn’t miss it. She had very little and having very little yielded fewer complications. It had taken Juno time to adjust to a life without—stuff—but once she had, she found that she preferred it.
She sat down in the chair facing the computer, flexing her fingers. It was no big deal; Juno knew how to work a damn computer. She wasn’t one of those timed-out old people who poked at an iPhone screen with a shaking index finger. She just didn’t want to be part of that world anymore. She almost got up right then and there, but Nigel’s words played again in her head. Call it human curiosity.
There they are! Juno thought as the photo of the Crouches appeared on the beach. She tried not to look at them as she pulled up the internet browser, but she could see them out of the corner of her eye, staring at her with their sunburned faces. Her fingers found the keys easily. Slipping right back into it, she thought, sitting up a little straighter. Not bad for a sixty-seven-year-old, not bad at all. She typed missing children Seattle Washington, and then, as an afterthought, added the year into the search box. Sam was thirteen years old. That would have made him an infant in 2008.
The Center for Missing and Exploited Children was the first site to appear, and Juno clicked on it. She was given the option to search for a missing child by name, but since Juno didn’t know what Sam’s real name was, she scrolled past that and saw there was a section where she could search by the city and state from which a child had gone missing. She typed in Seattle Washington and entered the year 2008 into the missing date option. Then Juno hit the return key and waited.
There weren’t many. She scanned through the single page of results in less than five seconds. There were no infants reported missing in Washington in 2008, but that didn’t mean anything. If the Crouches had kidnapped Sam, they could have taken him from anywhere. And maybe he wasn’t an infant infant; Nigel could have used that word “infant” and meant it broadly. She widened the search to all fifty states, which yielded a considerable number of results.
She leaned back in the chair—think, Juno. She knew that of the nearly 800,000 children under age eighteen who went missing each year, more than 58,000 were nonfamily abductions and only about 115 were stranger kidnappings. That was almost two stranger-danger kidnappings to a state every year. That calmed Juno’s nerves. Her previous thoughts sounded kooky, even to herself. A kidnapper’s emotional motive was desperation, and Winnie and Nigel were hardly desperate—selfish, mostly, with a side of entitlement.
Just because she was already on the web page, she copied down a