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“All right,” Theo said. “If you think of anything else, please let us know. And in the meantime, if you think there’s someone we should talk to, or you believe someone knows something about where Shaniyah or Leon might be, please tell one of us.”
“Call Mr. Hazard,” Auggie said.
“Do not,” Emery said.
“Anytime. Day or night.”
“Go on,” Theo said. “Get out of here.”
The kids shuffled out, each one offering a muffled goodbye to Emery as they passed him. Then they were gone. Emery wore a bemused look, but when he noticed Theo looking at him, it snapped off.
“Well?”
“I don’t know,” Theo said. “We learned a few interesting things.”
Emery grunted and pushed off from the wall. “So, what’s this all about? That class ring we found last week? You believe this has some kind of connection to the Cottonmouth Club?”
“Hard to say,” Auggie said.
“Right now,” Theo said, “we’re looking for a couple of missing students. That’s all.”
For some reason, that made Emery smile—an icy, knowing glitter of teeth, as though he’d been the only one to hear a joke.
As they let themselves out of the hallway, Auggie said, “I’m kind of surprised you let that happen. The kidnapping thing, I mean, with your little ducklings.”
Emery’s eyebrows stitched together, and he said, “By the time they called me and told me what they’d done, it was too late to stop them, and it seemed like an opportunity you might not get again.” He must have heard the unasked question because he said, “John takes a narrower view of this sort of thing.”
Angry voices rose at the end of the hall, moving toward them.
“That boy Keelan is a regular piece of shit,” Emery added as they started back toward the rink. “Colt never came out and said anything, but I watched that boy at a baseball game last spring. He kept trying to get Colt alone—any chance he got when Ashley wasn’t around, he shot toward Colt like an arrow. I think I’ve got an idea why now.” He turned his head, as though shaking off the thought, and then glanced at them. “What are you going to do now—”
John-Henry Somerset, in his uniform as chief of police, came around the corner. His features were locked in professional neutrality, but Theo had known him long enough and well enough to recognize the tamped-down anger. Close at his heels was a miserable-looking Colt, and then, trailing farther back, Keelan, accompanied by a man and a woman.
The woman was clearly Keelan’s mother: the same olive skin, the same dark hair—hers, clearly, had been curled and styled sometime before dawn. She wasn’t wearing a cheerleader uniform or tennis whites, but you could practically see them ghosting along behind her. She was holding Keelan’s arm and staring straight ahead.
Theo took the man for Keelan’s father, and it was clear where Keelan had learned how to carry himself. He had to be in his late thirties, but he wore a ball cap backwards and diamond—presumably, fake diamond—stud earrings. His mustache and stubble looked like they had to be trimmed hourly. He looked good, in a sleeveless workout shirt and shorts. He also looked like he was having a midlife crisis.
“You don’t have to hold his arm,” he was saying to the woman. “He’s not a kid.”
Keelan’s eyes were hooded and fixed on the middle distance.
“Jesus Christ, he’s practically an adult,” the dad said again. “Are you going to put him in a stroller?”
“He is not an adult,” the mom said.
“It’s my night with Kee,” the dad said. “Why don’t you take off, and I’ll handle this?”
“Handle this? Handle this? You let him get kidnapped!”
“Falsely imprisoned,” Auggie murmured.
“If you’d done what you were supposed to once, Ray, just once, you’d have been waiting for him when he came out of the locker room instead of staring down the shirt of a girl who’s still in high school.”
Keelan, for his part, just moved in a straight line: walking when his mom pushed, stopping when his mom pulled.
Then John-Henry reached them and said, “Really?”
Emery opened his mouth.
