Then he casually began sifting through the stack of mail on the table. When he got to the electric bill he stared at it almost as intently as Joel had stared at the Vargas poster the first time he saw it. “Holy cow.”

Joel and I looked over at him.

“Our electric bill went up nearly ten dollars. You boys need to start turning the lights off. You think money grows on trees?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Joel?”

“No, sir.” Joel turned and glared at me.

My father pushed aside the mail and started reading the paper. After a few minutes he looked up. “Here’s something for you, Eric. Do you know a girl named Madeline Webb?”

I looked up at him. “No, sir.”

“Hmm,” he said. “It says here she goes to Granite Junior. You’re in ninth grade, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure you don’t know her? She’s in your grade.”

I shrugged.

Joel furtively glanced at me, then put more strawberry jam in his Malt-O-Meal.

“Look, here’s a picture of the girl.” He turned the paper around to show me. It must have been an old picture of Grace. Her hair was shorter now and she’d gained some weight.

“Oh, her.”

“Then you do know her?”

“She’s in one of my classes.”

He turned the paper back around. “This article says her parents think she’s been kidnapped.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because she’s been missing for days,” he said sardonically.

“I mean, maybe she ran away or something.”

He looked up at me. “If she ran away she would have left a note or packed a bag.”

I took a couple more bites of my cereal while my dad moved on to the sports section. “Tex Clevenger retired from the Yankees. Might as well go out on top. Joel, don’t you have his card?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess eight years is long enough to throw a ball around.”

When I finished my cereal, I asked, “Could I take that page?”

Without looking up, my father asked, “Which page?”

“The one with the article about the girl at my school.”

He handed me the local section.

“Excuse me,” I said. I carried my bowl and the newspaper over to the sink. As I rinsed out my bowl Joel joined me.

“Thanks for getting us in trouble,” he said.

“You don’t know it’s the heater. Besides, she’d freeze to death without it.”

“Yeah, and now she’s in the paper. Someone’s going to find her and we’ll be dead.”

“No one’s going to find her and I’m the one who’s dead, not you.” I rolled up the paper. “I’m going to show her the article.”