“I don’t know.” Myron thought about it some more. “It’s odd; that’s all. Maybe, I don’t know, do you think they’re romantically involved?”

Mickey rolled his eyes as only a teenager could. “No.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Old dudes,” Ema said to Mickey with a shake of the head. “No gaydar.”

“Clark is gay?”

“Yes. And what difference would it make if they were romantically involved? Weren’t they, like, ten, when this all went down?”

Something was niggling at the back of Myron’s brain, but he couldn’t figure out what yet. He moved back to the topic at hand.

“So after Francesca left, you tried to broach the subject of the kidnapping again?”

“Yes, but Patrick got real quiet.”

“Completely clammed up.”

“We left not long after that.”

Myron sat back for a moment. “How did he sound?”

“Sound?”

“We found him in London,” Myron said. “We have no idea how long he’s been there. Did you detect anything in his accent?”

“That’s a good question,” Ema said. “His accent was American overall, but . . .” She turned to Mickey. He nodded.

“It did have something else in it,” Mickey said. “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. He didn’t sound like he’d grown up here. But he didn’t sound like he’d grown up in England either.”

Myron tried to process that but came up with nothing. He tried something else. “So what did you do the whole time?”

“We ate pizza,” Ema said.

“We watched a movie,” Mickey added.

“We played video games.”

“We talked.”

“Oh, Patrick said he had a girlfriend,” Ema said. “But not from around here.”

“A girlfriend?” Myron said.

“Yeah, but he backed right off. He said it, I don’t know, like a kid bragging a little.”

“You know,” Mickey said. “Like when the new kid comes to town and says he has a girlfriend in Canada or something.”

“Don’t get us wrong,” Ema said. “He was nice enough. All kids talk about those kinds of things. It was just . . . I don’t know. It felt so normal.”

Mickey nodded.

“Thanks, guys. This was really helpful.”

“Oh, we’re not done,” Ema said.

Myron looked at them.

“I put a keylogger on his computer,” Mickey said.

“As in . . . ?”

“As in we can see whatever he types on it. Emails, social media, whatever.”

“Whoa,” Myron said. “Who’s monitoring him?”

“Spoon.”

Spoon was Mickey’s other close friend—if you still counted Ema as only a “friend”—and what they used to call (or heck, maybe still do) a lovable nerd or geek or dork. Spoon was also ridiculously brave.

“How is he doing?”

Mickey smiled. “He’s walking again.”

“And annoying everyone again,” Ema added. “Anyway, he’ll let us know if anything important comes up.”

Myron wasn’t sure what to say here. He didn’t like these teenagers crossing this particular ethical line, but he wasn’t in the mood to lecture them about privacy or, more important, give up a chance of possibly finding out the truth. It was a close call. Patrick might not be Patrick. Patrick might hold the key to finding another missing boy. Then again, was spying on a teenager justified? Was it even legal?