“No, I guess.” Gloria walked them around the house. I heard their feet coming through the ceiling upstairs. Quiet steps and then Gloria’s stomp, stomp. With my ears I followed them moving around until they came back. “Do you have a downstairs?”

“Basement,” Gloria said. She pointed down the hallway.

He walked over and looked at the basement door. “Do you always keep it padlocked?”

“Yes, sir, I most surely do.” Gloria put her hands on her hips. “My husband still got some of his guns down there and it’s the responsible thing when there’s children in the house.”

“Good for you,” the policeman said. “I wish every parent was as conscientious. Accidents do happen. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

“I can tell you right now he’s not down there, but I can open it up.”

“Please,” he said. We need to be thorough.”

Gloria went upstairs again and stomped back down with a shiny key in her hand. She wiped her forehead. I think she was sweating. Then she unlocked the door and they went down the basement stairs. They were mumbling down there but I couldn’t hear. Outside Telly flicked his cigarette away, and then he started patting the yellow paint on the door. He was looking at it real close like he didn’t know what it was. Then he looked at the tops of his fingers, but it had to be dry by now.

Gloria and those men came back upstairs. The moon-tie man said, “We’ll just check around outside.” They both went out the front door and down over the steps. Telly followed. I sneaked behind them.

“Odd, isn’t it,” the man in the uniform said. “A kid going off in that weather? My guess, he was furious about something.”

“If he went off at all,” the tie man said.

They were doing the same thing Telly did. They looked under the front porch and the side deck with their flashlights. Telly was watching them and shaking his head. Then one went to the shiny car and talked into a thing on a cord. The other went to the shed, but he poked his head out and chopped the air with his hand. A little bit later a van came down our driveway. It wobbled side to side in the potholes. Then a real police car came with lights, but the lights were turned off. Our driveway was full, and there were lots of extra people outside. Some of them were our neighbors who lived around the circle. Telly was standing there talking to them. “It’s the boy,” he said. “We don’t know where he’s got to.”

When I sneaked inside again, the tie man was talking to Gloria.

“Mrs. Janes, do you have a recent photo?”

Gloria scritched at her neck. “Not really. My camera broke.”

“School photo?”