There’s no way that I’m going to leave this man alone in my home. “I think it’s best if you just go,” I tell him. “I’ll go and look for him myself. Thanks, though.”
“Let me drive you around, then,” Sam says, looking at me as if he really wants to help. “You can keep trying to reach him while I drive.”
He has a point. Though Pitch is just a speck on the map, I’m not so familiar with all the back roads.
My thoughts turn to a girl that Max doesn’t know I’m aware of. “There’s a girl,” I say. “I think she lives out near the fairgrounds.” I think her name is Nikki. She’s pretty in a too-much makeup, overplucked-eyebrow sort of way. She comes into the convenience store where I work several times a week—Pitch Fuel and Feed. Seriously, that’s its name. She nearly always buys the same things: a can of Red Bull, cinnamon-flavored gum and a pack of powdered-sugar donuts. Sometimes she comes in by herself and sometimes she comes in with a girl of about five who has Down syndrome. I assume she’s Nikki’s sister.
Nikki always waits patiently while the younger girl wanders the aisles with a dollar bill clutched in her hand. She doesn’t roll her eyes or heave big sighs when her sister chooses a pack of gummy worms, puts it back and then reaches for a bag of potato chips. The sister does this three or four times with different snacks and eventually always settles on the gummy worms. Nikki just waits, absentmindedly spinning the metal rack that holds everything from key chains to sunglasses. When her sister finally makes her decision, they lay their purchases on the counter and I ring them up.
I want so badly for Max to talk to me about Nikki but whenever I ask him about his friends he just says that everyone in Pitch is stupid. I try not to push it, afraid that if I do he will stop talking to me altogether.
Sam pulls open the front door for me and waits by my side as I debate whether or not to lock it. Max has a key but Violet didn’t bring hers to the overnight. “It will be fine,” Sam says. “You’ll probably only be gone for thirty minutes, tops. Your daughter’s got a phone, right?”
“Yeah, but I better leave a note,” I tell him and then dash back inside and scrawl a few words on the back of an envelope. Violet, went looking for Max. Lock the door behind you if you get home before we do. Mom.
Outside I find Sam sitting in his car, the engine idling. My car—not the one that we arrived with in Pitch, but one with fewer miles and fewer dents—is parked in the driveway just in front of Sam’s SUV. The night air is chilly and I wish I would have thought to grab a sweatshirt. I climb in next to Sam, who, seeing me shiver, cranks the heater to the highest setting.
“Where to?” he asks. Though I’m grateful for the ride, for his willingness to come along with me on this trek, a persistent voice in my head is telling me to get out of his car and into my own.
“Let’s check his friend Clint’s house first,” I say. “He lives out on Highway 162 about four miles.” Sam backs out of the gravel driveway before stopping in the middle of the street.
“Or,” Sam says, sliding his eyes toward me, “we can follow the sirens. Might put your mind at ease.”
His suggestion makes sense. We can drive all around the county and not come across Max, but if we go toward where we think the emergency vehicles went, then I’d know for sure that Max is safe. Or not.
“West, I think,” I say and Sam throws the car into gear and tears off toward the railroad tracks that split Pitch in half. No one can say that one side of Pitch is any better than the other. The north side has the Lutheran church, the library and the Fuel and Feed while the south side has the Catholic church, the middle school and the old opera house. Both ends of town have their share of foreclosed homes.
Sam turns onto Main Street and I tap my foot nervously as we pass the hardware store and an antique shop with a vintage soda machine sitting out front. He reaches for my hand and I pull it