“Turn left at the end of the road,” Chick said.

Left started them back down the mountain. The area was slightly less affluent, but you were just talking about varying degrees of high rent. Chick told him where to make the right and the next left. The journey was a short one. The two houses were less than a mile apart.

When they made the final turn onto the Moores’ street, Chick looked up ahead and muttered, “Crap.”

News vans, lots of them, lined both sides of the road. That made sense, of course. After a ten-year absence, Patrick Moore was home. The press wanted pictures and video of the missing boy and the happy parents and the big reunion. So far, only one image of the recently rescued Patrick had surfaced in the media. An orderly at the hospital in London had taken a somewhat blurry picture of the sleeping teen from a distance and sold it to a British tabloid.

There was an obvious hunger for more.

The media began to swarm the car, but Myron kept moving so that no one could get in front of them. There was a town cop at the foot of the driveway. He waved Myron in and stopped anyone from following. The media obeyed, choosing instead to rely on their zoom lenses. Myron noticed a FOR SALE sign in the yard. In front of him, the garage door slid open. He pulled inside, the electric door beginning to close behind him. Myron turned off the engine. They waited for the door to close completely, cutting off those probing lenses, before all three of them opened their car doors and stepped out.

The garage fit two cars. The car parked next to them was a Lexus sedan. There was no clutter in the garage, not so much because the owners appeared to be orderly but because there simply wasn’t anything here. Nothing about this place felt “suburban family,” but then again why would it? Patrick too had an older sibling, a sister, Francesca, who’d be about Clark’s age if Myron recalled correctly, and no younger siblings. Hunter and Nancy were divorced, so up until a few days ago, that was it—single mom, one college-age daughter. Nancy had probably been ready to move out and start the next chapter of her life.

The door between the house and garage opened. Hunter Moore leaned his head out. He seemed surprised to see Myron with them, but he shook it off. “Hey, guys, come this way.”

They took the two steps off the concrete and onto the tile. The kitchen was quasi-homey, done up to look rustic with stone veneers and wood-paneled cabinetry. Nancy stood by the kitchen table with a man Myron didn’t recognize.

The man smiled at them. The smile made Myron cringe a bit. He was balding, wiry, probably in his early fifties, with the kind of glasses you call spectacles. He wore a denim shirt tucked into faded jeans. His whole persona had an emcee-at-an-outdoor-folk-festival vibe.