Mr. Martin hadn’t seen my face. In theory, he had no idea who I was.
Unless he’d forced Todd to tell him.
My parents forbade me to leave the yard by myself, but I wouldn’t have gone out even with their permission. I barely went outside at all. It seemed unlikely that he’d drive up to me in broad daylight, drag me into his car, and stab me to death, but I couldn’t rule that out.
A month passed. The search continued, though everybody pretty much knew that it was a lost cause by now. I turned fourteen but didn’t feel like having a birthday party. My mom still made me a chocolate cake, and I ate a couple of bites and blew out the candles so she wouldn’t feel that her efforts to make me feel better were a waste. But it seemed truly horrible to be celebrating getting one year older when I didn’t know what kind of nightmarish end Todd might have met. If he was dead, and he almost certainly was, I hoped it had at least been quick. If Mr. Martin was in a hurry to get back to his house, he might have killed him in a fast, painless way rather than taking his sadistic time.
So what I’m saying is that it was a truly miserable summer.
And then, in the middle of August, another boy went missing. A fifth grader this time. He disappeared in North Pole, by which I do not mean the earth’s actual north pole, but rather North Pole, Alaska, a very small town less than a twenty-minute drive from Fairbanks. It’s where you’ll find the Santa Claus House, which has been sending out letters from Santa with a North Pole postmark since 1952. If a child sends a letter to Santa Claus addressed only to the North Pole, that’s where they go.
I did not have a speck of evidence that Mr. Martin was responsible. The circumstances weren’t the same; right after lunch, the boy had walked to a nearby park to meet some friends and never arrived there. The friends had assumed that he got grounded or something and didn’t think much of it, and in the age before cell phones, his parents had no idea that anything was wrong until he didn’t come home for dinner. Nobody saw a man with his description in the area. Nobody reported a silver car driving slowly alongside young children. None of Mr. Martin’s neighbors had noticed any unusual behavior.
But I knew for a goddamn fact that Mr. Martin had taken Todd. And it was really weird to have three boys go missing like that in a single summer. I assure you, I didn’t want to confront him. Yet I also didn’t want a fourth kid to go missing. Or a fifth. Or a sixth.
I needed to get him to confess. And if that didn’t work, or I felt like I was in danger, I’d shoot him. A scenario where I killed Mr. Martin would be better than one where I did nothing and he continued to abduct kids. Perhaps he was innocent in the two other disappearances, but unless he had a twin brother that he hadn’t bothered to tell anybody about, he was not innocent in Todd’s. I had the right guy.
And so I bought the untraceable gun.
When I got home, I took it out of my backpack and hid it under my bed. It probably won’t surprise you to discover that my bedroom was not an antiseptic environment in which every object was in its proper place. After many years of going to war over this issue, my parents finally said that they didn’t care what my room looked like as long as I didn’t leave food in there to rot. I had no reason to believe that anybody searched my room on a regular basis, so I was comfortable with the idea of just keeping the gun under my bed for one night.
I slept horribly. I never remember my dreams, but I kept waking up thinking that the gun was going to go off, shooting right through my mattress into the back of my head. Or into my spine, paralyzing me, so I’d have to lie there helplessly until my mom or dad came in to check on me.
I got up when I heard my parents moving around downstairs. They seemed surprised to see me, since I was normally a lazy piece of crap who didn’t get up until after they’d gone to work. For the past couple of summers I’d demonstrated my responsibility by mowing lawns, but I hadn’t been doing much of that since Todd went missing.
My mom worked as a bank teller. And if you’re thinking, “Wait, didn’t he say earlier that his dad was distrustful of banks?” yes, I sure did. Very awkward. My dad was the manager at a furniture store, so we got great deals on furniture, which obviously should have made me the most popular kid at school, yet somehow didn’t.
We ate oatmeal together, then they left for work. As soon as the door closed, my stomach began to hurt from the task that awaited me.
I didn’t actually know that Mr. Martin was home. I hadn’t spent weeks stalking him, learning his schedule and habits like a professional assassin. I just figured that as a construction worker, he might not stick to a standard nine-to-five Monday-through-Friday workweek. If he wasn’t home, I’d come back another time.
I wrote a note to my parents, explaining where I’d gone, and left it on the dining room table. I had no intention of them ever seeing this note. When I got home, I’d throw it away. The note was only there in case I didn’t come home.
Then I tried to figure out where to put the gun. I hadn’t anticipated that this would be a difficult task—I’d just stick the gun in the waistband of my pants, right? The problem was that I wasn’t acquiring new clothes at the same rate that I was putting on weight, and even with a sweater (and why would I be wearing a sweater in August?) you could see the bulge. I could’ve worn a jacket, which would pose the same “Why is he wearing that?” question as a sweater, and if Mr. Martin offered to take my jacket and I refused, he’d know I was hiding something.
Not to mention that a few tests made it clear that I couldn’t yank it out of my tight pants at lightning speed. If I actually needed to use it, he would not stand there politely waiting for me to fumble with my firearm. And having the gun wedged in there filled me with the intense fear that it would go off, even though I quadruple checked that the safety was on.
So I’d have to keep the gun in my backpack. This wasn’t ideal, but I’d keep my backpack with me the entire time, mostly unzipped, and I’d make sure I knew exactly where the gun was.
I tested it a few times. Reached in and grabbed the gun as quickly as I could. Nobody would ever come up with a catchy nickname honoring my fast-draw abilities, but I was confident that, if necessary, I could pull the gun on him in time.
The confession presented another problem.
Microcassette recorders might have been around in 1979, but I sure didn’t have one, nor did anybody I knew. We had big, clunky tape recorders. Though technically it would fit in my backpack, I couldn’t shove it under some other stuff like I did the gun or it would be too muffled to record anything. And if I was there longer than half an hour, it would shut off with a loud snap, which would be extremely inconvenient.
Thus, I couldn’t present a recorded confession to the authorities. I just had to get something I could use against him. A confession obtained at gunpoint wouldn’t be admissible in court, but my goal was to force him to give me proof about what he’d done.
And if I couldn’t make that happen, I’d kill him.
I rode my bicycle over to his house, hoping he wouldn’t be home.
A car was in the driveway. The same car that had been there when I brought the state trooper over.
I stared at the house for a long time, trying to work up my courage.
I finally accepted that there was not going to be a moment where I wanted to do this. I just had to walk up there and knock on the door.