Seconds Away

CHAPTER 43

When I got off the phone with Rachel, I called Ema and filled her in on the plan. I wanted to get an update on Spoon, but, one, I didn’t know who to call, and, two, I didn’t want to be distracted. Spoon had made it clear: There was nothing I could do for him. I had to concentrate on finding the truth.

I had eight hours before we enacted Rachel’s idea-serious downtime that I desperately needed. My body was torn between sleep and food, and as usual, food won. As I headed up to the kitchen, Uncle Myron was watching the news on TV.

“Can I make you a sandwich or something?” he asked.

“No, I got it.”

I opened the fridge. Uncle Myron had recently purchased turkey, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, and submarine rolls. Awesome. I made the sandwich in maybe forty seconds. I grabbed an ice water and started heading back to the basement when something on the television made me freeze in midstep.

Myron saw it. “Mickey?”

I ignored him, keeping my eyes on the screen. Myron fell quiet.

The anchorman with the too-green tie was using his best “gravely serious” voice: “A sad anniversary coming up. Tomorrow morning, there will be a memorial service for Dylan Shaykes, marking twenty-five years since little Dylan, then age nine, was kidnapped from his school playground and never seen again.”

I looked at the picture on the screen. Oh no, I thought. It can’t be…

“The story of little Dylan made huge international headlines. His photograph was plastered on milk cartons. There were sightings everywhere from coast to coast and even in Europe. The police seriously questioned his father at the time, but William Shaykes was never arrested for the crime. Young Dylan’s blood was found in a nearby patch of woods, but all these years later, a body has never been found. So the mystery remains.”

The television screen continued to show the photograph of nine-year-old Dylan Shaykes. Little Dylan had curly hair and sad eyes. I had seen his picture-this exact snapshot, as a matter of fact-in the Bat Lady’s upstairs hallway. There had been another picture of Dylan, taken sometime later, sometime after his disappearance, on the Bat Lady’s nightstand.

On the screen, the female coanchor shook her head and said, “Sad story, Ken.”

“Sure is, Diane. And with no new clues after all these years, we will probably never know what happened to little Dylan Shaykes.”

But he was wrong. Because now, looking at the photograph again, I knew.