Addy Trombley is missing.
Somehow, eight hours have passed since the beginning of all this, or at least the beginning as Grandpa Hank and I know it. For the Trombleys, it’s been a harrowing thirteen or more. It’s the more that is full of mystery. Nobody seems sure exactly how long the nine-year-old has been gone. That’s the hook the media is hanging on to for now, and it’s playing out in living rooms up and down our street—throughout Chicagoland, really, thanks to the five o’clock news feed.
It’s playing out in ours.
“I can’t believe nobody saw anything.” My mom plops down on the opposite end of the couch and hands me a bowl of warmed-up leftover pasta. She’s still wearing her work shirt and her name badge that reads KARA. We’ve been consumed with the news for the last three hours. Mom came home from her shift early, the owners of the garage deciding to close up out of respect for the heartbreaking news. In reality, they wanted to sit glued to their televisions like the rest of us. Nobody will admit it out loud, but one of humanity’s greatest flaws is how excited we become when tragedies happen.
“Jonah didn’t even hear the party. Nose in those books of his,” Grandpa Hank says, prying the cap from his second beer as he settles into his worn blue easy chair. I shoot him a glare and he coughs out a short laugh.
The police came to interview us about two hours ago, and for all the times I’ve stared out that window watching the Trombleys with a certain dash of envy, I missed seeing the most important incident of all. I was useless. We all were.
“It’s weird watching your own front yard on the news,” Mom says, pressing the volume button on the remote to bring up the latest reports.
The glow of our living room window can be seen behind the live shot. I crane my neck and pull the flimsy curtain panel open an inch and squint when my eyes are hit with the harsh spot on the reporter.
“She went to my high school,” I mumble.
“That broad?” Grandpa says. I turn back in time to see him gesture toward the television, only to have my mom smack his wrist.
“What was that for?” He rubs his skin, then holds the chilled beer bottle against it as if her small slap actually hurt. She scowls at him, urging him to fess up to his misogyny.
“Fine. Lady,” he grumbles. Mom clicks her teeth together and mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah,” I cut in, ending their semi-playful spat. “She spoke at last year’s graduation. I guess she’s the most famous person to come out of Oak Forest, or something like that.”
“Horseshit,” Grandpa barks. Mom and I both flash our attention to him. He shrugs. “Your dad’s more famous than she is. He’s just famous among smart people, and this town is full of real idiots.”
My mom softens to him again, reaching over and squeezing the same spot on his arm that she smacked a moment ago. She misses Dad, and she shows it in these little moments of reverence. I only wish I could feel that same awe they do. Instead, I don’t really feel anything. Other than Grandpa living here and Mom being a lot more stressed, my life hasn’t changed much in the absence of my father. I didn’t really know him. That fact does make me sad, though, because now . . . I never will.
I take after my mom physically. She’s slender, whereas my dad was always on the stocky side. I get my height from both of them, reaching six feet by my sophomore year. The rest of me, though, is a carbon copy of my mom. Dirty blue eyes, as she calls them, and copper-brown hair that doesn’t fall straight or curl. It means when I wake up in the morning, I look like one of those pencil-toppers I used to buy at the book fair in elementary school, wild strands poking in all directions.
I did inherit my father’s mind, and that scares me a little now that he’s gone. School has always been easy, but I have caught myself more and more obsessing on the work. My dad turned into a man who studied life rather than lived it. As much as I don’t want the same fate, it sometimes feels inevitable. My path has been carved.
“ . . .When police showed up at the Trombley residence, they weren’t sure what to expect. They say it’s procedure to investigate missing person reports with a certain sense of skepticism. As an officer, they’re not sure what they’re walking into. Is this the case of a runaway? Abuse or domestic violence? A teen drug problem? But what law enforcement quickly learned was that none of those shoes fit the Trombley case. The problem is, they’ve never really seen anything like this before. Addy Trombley is just a little girl, last seen skating in her driveway yesterday afternoon. Seemingly, under everyone’s noses, she simply . . . vanished.”
“Stupid,” my mom mutters at the TV, knocking back the rest of her warm tea and bolting from the other end of the sofa where she’d been sitting near Grandpa. “These news people think they’re so clever with those little sayings. None of those shoes fit the Trombley case. I mean, my God, Rick and Patricia are living a nightmare and this, this broad, is playing around with nursery rhymes while her network exploits their tragedy. It all makes me sick.”
“Oh, so you can call her a broad,” my Grandpa says, earning an instant glare from Mom.
“I was using it for effect,” she shoots back.
“Well, what do you think I was using it for?”
“Chauvinism,” she retorts.
Grandpa and I don’t crack a smile in her presence, but the moment she leaves the room and is out of ear shot, he leans forward and cups his mouth toward me. “Don’t mess with your mother. She’s always right. And she has a mean left hook,” he jokes, rubbing his arm. I expected him to say something else at first, but he’s always quick to take up Mom’s side beyond their usual jokes and banter.
“Hey.” I meet Grandpa’s squinty stare and for a few seconds he gnashes his whiskered lips together in thought. It feels as though I’m about to get a lecture.
“I wanna give you your birthday present now.” He coughs through his effort to stand up from the chair, and moves toward the side table near the front door, pulling out the small drawer and removing a wrapped package the size of a Bible. I’d think maybe that’s what I’m being given if I didn’t know what a heathen my Grandpa is. Mom walks in as he’s about to hand the gift to me.
“Oh, I didn’t think we were doing this until next weekend,” she says, a smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. She taps her fingernails against her refilled tea mug and perches on the arm of the couch. I hold her stare for a second, seeing if I can get her to crack. She only shakes her head.
I expect a card with some cash inside and maybe a flat-pan cake with some sprinkles for my birthday, which is definitely at odds with the heavy package now resting in my hands. I can tell it’s a book, but it isn’t your normal hardback or the latest Brandon Sanderson. The shape is too odd for that.
“Well, go on.” Grandpa Hank nods at my hands.
The goofy grin of a child takes over my mouth and I laugh out nervously while I fumble with the paper. It doesn’t take long to unwrap the beat-up notebook with well-worn leather binding and an ink stain smudged across the spine. Turning it over in my hands I study it, and after noting his trademark handwriting engraved with pen on the cover, I realize it belonged to my father. He wrote like a typewriter, complete with the little hoods over his lowercase A’s and tails at the ends of his D’s and T’s. I used to look at his notes in his briefcase when he packed up in the morning and always wondered how he wrote so much in such a meticulous way.