Telly went down the hall and out through the front door. He started searching around and calling out. I went behind him to see what he was doing. He got down on his knees. He stuck a stick under the porch and banged it back and forth. Then he went to the side deck and yelled for Rowan. He shone a flashlight under there and shook his head. He went around to the other side and opened the shed like Gloria did. He moved some boxes. Next he went to the potato patch and he looked at the dirt. Nothing was growing so there was nowhere to hide. He walked back and forth over the grass real slow. And then he went into the woods. I couldn’t see him no more. Every few minutes I’d hear him hollering or branches breaking or rocks banging. Sometimes he sounded scared. Sometimes he sounded angry.

“Please, Rowan!”

“Goddammit, boy! Show yourself!”

It was a long, long time before Telly came back. He looked like he rolled around in a buttered-up frying pan. His neck and arms were covered with scrapes, and there were lots of red spots from black fly bites. Some of them were scabs of blood.

“Not a single sign,” he said. He took the cup towel and wiped his face. “If there was a trace, rain got it washed clear.”

“Where’d you go?” Gloria asked.

“All over. Far out as the farms. Behind the school. The playground.”

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the piece of metal Carl gave me. The more I squeezed at it, the smaller and smaller it got. “Did you, um, go out to the bridge, Telly?”

“The stone one? Where the old tracks cross over the creek?”

I nodded. Gloria looked at me hard. “Rowan caught tadpoles there once. With Darrell.”

“I didn’t go in that far.” Telly put his hand on top of my head. “Besides, he’s not a little boy, Bids. No thirteen-year-old is catching tadpoles.”

“Oh,” I said.

He went out of the kitchen and was going upstairs. “I’m taking a shower.”

“Your soap’s still there, Telly.”

When he came down again, he was even more red. He drank a big glass of water. We waited and waited. The clock on the wall kept ticking and Rowan still didn’t come home. Telly and Gloria walked in circles around the kitchen. Gloria cried more and Telly gave her another hug. He said, “It’s going to be okay, Glow. We’re in this together.” Then when the sky turned orange and crickets started chirping, he picked up the phone and he called the police.

ROWAN

I stretched and yawned. “Get up now,” Carl said again. “Before the sun gets too high.”