showing the world something that says, Don't push.
Old Mrs. Hayley watches the boy when Rachel's at work, and she tells Dalton Voy once that you couldn't ask for a better behaved boy, or one who so openly loves his mama. She says that boy is going to be something special. President or something. War hero. You mark my words, Dalton. You mark 'em.
One sunset at Boynton's Cove, Dalton takes his daily walk and comes upon mother and son. Rachel is waist-deep in the warm Gulf, holding the boy under his arms, dipping him up and down in the water. The water is gold, silky in the dying sun, and it seems to Dalton that Rachel purifies her son in gold, performs some ancient rite that will coat his flesh so it can't be pierced or torn.
The two of them laugh in the amber sea, and the sun dips red behind them. Rachel kisses her son's neck and props his calves over her hips. He leans back in her hands. And they look into each other's eyes.
Dalton thinks maybe he's never seen anything as beautiful as that look.
Rachel doesn't see him, and Dalton, he doesn't even wave. Feels like an intruder, actually. He keeps his head down, walks back up the way he came.
Something happens to you when you stumble on love that pure. It makes you feel small. Makes you feel ugly and ashamed and unworthy.
Dalton Voy, watching that mother and son playing in the amber water, has realized a cold, simple truth: He's never, not for one second, been loved like that in his life.
Love like that? Hell. It seems so pure, it's damn near criminal.
Chapter 1
PART ONE.INDIAN SUMMER, 1997
Chapter 1
Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.
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 majority of them are not gone long, and usually their whereabouts are either known immediately or easily ascertained-a friend's house is the most common destination.
Another category of missing children is the throwaway-those who are cast out of their homes or who run away, and the parents decide not to give chase. These are often the children who fill shelters and bus terminals, street corners in the red-light districts, and, ultimately, prisons.
Of the more than eight hundred thousand children reported missing nationally every year, only thirty-five hundred to four thousand fall into what the Department of Justice categorizes as Non-Family Abductions, or cases in which the police soon rule out family abductions, running away, parental ejection, or the child becoming lost or injured.
Of these cases, three hundred children disappear every year and never return.
No one-not parents, friends, law enforcement, childcare organizations, or centers for missing people-knows where 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 from again.
Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone. For a moment or two they haunt strangers 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 big man with a slightly houndish sag to his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard from his collarbone, as if something we couldn't see sat atop them. He had a shaggy, shy smile and a firm grip in a callused hand. He wore a brown UPS deliveryman's uniform and kneaded the brim of the matching brown baseball cap in his beefy hands. "Our mom was a-well, a boozer, frankly. And our dad left when we were both little kids. When you grow up that way, you-I guess you-maybe you got a lot of anger. It takes some time to get your head straight, figure out your way in life. It's not just Helene. I mean, I had some serious problems, took a hard bust in my twenties. I was no angel."
"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 met Beatrice, straightened