As I left, I thought about Lexie’s plan to traumatize him for his own good, and took a twisted kind of pleasure knowing that some sort of suffering was in store for him. I had a suspicion, though, that Crawley would be a hard egg to crack.

I knew I wasn’t going to sleep much that night, so I didn’t even try. If the Schwa Effect was hereditary, then the key to everything was finding out what happened to his mom. The thing is, if the whole problem revolved around not being noticed, how could we find an eyewitness? If the Schwa Effect led to being universally forgotten, how could I hope that anyone would remember?

Our little dowsing session with Ed Neebly and our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you’ve ever been there, you know the signs don’t tell you the exit you’re coming up to, they only point out the exits you’ve just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods—and since you’re probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with. As for my own parents, I’m sure they would have blown a gasket if they knew what I was about to do.

I had never been the kind of kid to sneak out late at night. I was more the kind of guy who would come home ridiculously late and suffer the consequences, but once I was home for the night, sneaking out was never an option. I’ve got this screen saver that I don’t use very much, on account of how lame it is. It’s a cartoon of a computer wearing a nightcap and snoring. But if you darken the screen so no one can see the picture, and you set the volume just right, you’d swear there was a real person sleeping in the room. The pillows I had shoved under my blanket weren’t very convincing, but add the snoring from my computer and suddenly it was like I had a roommate. I quietly slipped out, to catch a bus toward Canarsie.

The butcher had looked away.