stay focused.” His tone changed, as he added, “Bad things happen to kids at night.”
The entire briefing took two minutes, and somewhere during it, Duncan left, but I barely noticed. By the time the officer was done briefing us, I was staving off panic, and as soon as we got the green light, we were on the move. The school had a stash of heavy-duty flashlights we’d used for camping that they were handing out at the door. We each grabbed one, and as soon as we were out the gates, we started running toward the seawall.
* * *
Most of the search grids were square city blocks, but ours was just that narrow strip of beach. Alice and I decided to split up. She walked up high—at the top of the wall—and I took the steps down to the beach level, working along the water’s edge. I kept my flashlight trained on the waves—looking for Clay out in them.
Or a backpack. Or a book. Or—God forbid—a shoe.
Alice shined her light down and examined everything on the beach and near the wall—bushes and plants, driftwood logs, litter—looking for the same stuff.
We called for him, too. “Clay!” we shouted over and over. “We’re here!”
The hope, of course, was to find him safe and sound—maybe sitting pleasantly on a bench, reading a book and eating a bag of chips. Carlos and Coach Gordo had been assigned a fishing pier. Maybe he’d snuck out onto one and gotten trapped behind the gate when they hadn’t noticed him at closing time. It was possible, I kept telling myself, that there was some reasonable, not-at-all-tragic explanation for what was going on.
He’d be fine, I told myself. He’d be fine. He’d be absolutely fine.
But the longer we walked with no sign of anything, the harder it felt to believe that. The officer’s words, Bad things happen to kids at night, kept echoing through my head, and every now and then, I’d feel a swell of panicked tears squeezing my throat, threatening to rise up and take over.
But I’d shake it off. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—fall apart.
Clay was counting on us to find him and help him. He always seemed like such a little grown-up, but, of course … he was a kid. Despite his vocabulary, and his serious vibe, and his encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything, he had just as much right to make crazy mistakes as any other kid in the world. And just as much right to be totally overwhelmed by their consequences.
I tried not to think about how terrified he must be right now, wherever he was.
He was a kid. He was a kid who had lost his grandfather—probably the best person in his life—just weeks before the trip they’d planned together, one he’d been waiting for, looking forward to, reading up on, and planning for months. He’d read every shipwreck book in the library. He’d been keeping notes in a Moleskine of important questions to ask the museum staff.
I don’t know who pressured Kent Buckley into agreeing to take Clay on that trip, but I swear even a casual observer could have warned you that it wouldn’t end well.
That said, nobody could have imagined this.
The police weren’t totally sure if he’d run away—or been abducted.
My hunch was that he’d run away. My hunch was that he’d finally had enough of that father of his. A father who’d forgotten all about him—on his birthday. Any kid could make some bad decisions in the wake of a moment like that.
It was high tide now, and dark down by the water.
“Clay!” I kept calling. “Clay!” But the roar of the surf seemed to swallow the sound.
We were supposed to turn around at Murdochs—a gift shop built off the seawall on stilts over the water. That was the end of our ten-block range, and our plan was to switch positions on the walk back.
But when I reached the pilings underneath Murdochs and started sweeping the area with my flashlight, I saw something odd. It looked like a capsized motorboat that had washed up near the shore. Oh, God. Had Clay tried to take out a boat somehow? Had he tried to head out to sea? Where would he have even found a boat? Most boats were on the bay side, or in the ship channel. The Gulf side of the island was too shallow for boating.
I called for Alice to come down, and I walked closer—out into the waves. I looked harder.