“Well, of course it was a crime. It was a crime the cops took five whole days to file a missing persons report, and even then they didn’t spend more than ten minutes looking for him. They came back two days later with the nonsense that he ran off. Case closed. But I know my Bobby. He wouldn’t have just up and left. Not without telling me. Not without something real scary chasing him out of town.” She reaches down and twists a knob at the top of the tank, and air hisses through the tubes. “Or somebody.”

“Why do you think they waited so long?”

Jamie is quiet for a minute, all but a high-pitched wheezing coming from her lungs. “I know you know Bobby’s business.”

I nod. That’s one part all the gossips got right. Drugs. Bobby dealt all kinds of drugs.

“And I know you know where we lived at the time.”

Another nod. In a pimped-out trailer on the ugly side of the lake, smack in the middle of what’s now the parking lot for a frozen yogurt shop. That’s how I know Miss Jamie, because she moved into Bobby’s trailer shortly after he disappeared. Chet and I lived four doors down.

“Then you know why the cops didn’t much care when he disappeared. What’s one less piece of trailer-park trash to them? Especially one who wasn’t exactly operating on the right side of the law. Those ghost shows always make him out to be an idiot, but that ain’t right. My Bobby had brains. He had street smarts.” She taps a finger to her temple. “A genius IQ. Whatever charges the cops flung at him never stuck.”

“What about the rumor Bobby was chased out of town by another drug dealer? That had to have come from somewhere.”

“Yeah, from mean ole Chief Hunt, though he was Officer Hunt at the time. That man always had it out for Bobby. Whooping his siren at him in town. Doing drive-bys during peak business hours. Showing up here, hauling him out of bed just to rattle his cage. Chief’s the one who planted that story in people’s ears, you know, so he didn’t have to explain why he wasn’t actually doing anything to find Bobby. For a while there, I suspected Chief of doing it himself. I thought he was the one who made Bobby disappear.”