I went out to Vance on the Thursday at half past five in the morning, which is two hours before my shift.
I want to be honest about the reasoning, because there was some and it was thin.
The honest version is that I could not sleep. I had been not sleeping since Karen said the thing about the awning, and I had lain there working out what a child would need in order to be at a bus stop in north county at six-ten in the morning and also at Vance at eight-twenty, and every arrangement I could construct had a hole in it, and the hole was where an adult should have been.
The version I told myself in the car was that I would check the stop, see nothing, and stop thinking about it.
Vance is not really a trailer park. It is about forty lots on a gravel loop with a laundry and a mail kiosk, and roughly two-thirds of it is occupied at any time. There are people there who have lived on that lot for twenty years and there are people who are there for a season.
The laundry is a cinder block building with four machines, three dryers, and an awning over the front that somebody built in the nineties out of corrugated plastic. It is the only structure on the lot that is not somebody’s home.
The door does not lock. It has not locked in the nine years I have been driving that route, and I know that because children wait in there when it rains and have done the whole time.
I parked at the top of the loop with the engine off and I did not get out.
At about ten to six the light came on inside the laundry, and a boy came out of it with a backpack.
He did not look furtive. That is the detail that changed the shape of the whole thing for me.
I had been imagining somebody hiding. What I actually watched was a kid come out of a building at ten to six, stop, put his bag down, retie a shoe, pick the bag back up, and walk down the loop towards the road with his hands in his sleeves because it was thirty-five degrees.
He walked like a person going to work.
At the road he turned right, away from my stop, away from Vance, and started walking up the shoulder of County Road 4 in the dark.
I sat in the car for perhaps ninety seconds and then I did the thing I had agreed with Marcus that I would not do, which is that I followed him.
I followed him at about fifteen miles an hour with my lights on, forty yards back, which is not covert and was not meant to be. He knew I was there within about a minute. He looked over his shoulder twice and kept walking.
He walked one and three-quarter miles up County Road 4 in the dark on a road with no shoulder and no lights, and I drove behind him the whole way with my hazards on, and at the junction with Milner he turned left and walked another half mile to a stop that is not on my route.
It is on Marcus’s route. It is Marcus’s first stop, six-ten.
He stood at it. I stopped forty yards back. Neither of us did anything for about eleven minutes.
At six-oh-nine Marcus’s bus came over the rise, and the boy got on, and Marcus saw my car — I know he did, because he lifted a hand off the wheel about an inch — and the bus pulled away.
I want to lay out what I actually understood at that point, because it was less than you might think.
I knew: he had spent the night in the laundry at Vance, or at least had been in it before six.
I knew: he walked two and a quarter miles in the dark to reach a bus stop on a route that goes to the school an hour earlier than mine does.
I did not know: whether he had a home, and where. Whether anybody knew where he was. Whether the laundry was a one-off, a sometimes, or the arrangement. Whether he had walked two miles away from something or towards something. Whether he was eleven or thirteen. His name.
And that gap between what I knew and what I would need to know to do anything sensible is the entire reason the next four days happened the way they did.
Marcus called me at eight from the high school, and he had walked his aisle, and the boy was not on the bus.
He had got on at six-ten and got off somewhere in the forty minutes between there and the high school, at one of nine stops, and Marcus had not seen him do it.
I said, “He’s getting off before the school.”
And Marcus said, “Yeah.”
Then he said: “He’s not going to school at all, is he.”
And I said no, I don’t think he is, and then I sat in my car outside a laundry in Vance and understood that I had been comforting myself for two weeks with the one part of this I had never actually checked.
Whatever else is happening, this boy is going to school.
He wasn’t. He had never been. He was riding buses.