Page 38 of Come Find Me
“It’s for the best,” he says softly.
“It’s bullshit, Joe. And you know it.” I storm down the hall, and I slam the door. He didn’t even notice that I brought him the world’s best pizza.
I take out the folded-up sheet of paper with the readout, the signal.
And then I send Nolan a text.
What are you doing tomorrow? We need answers, and we’re running out of time.
There’s not even a place to park in front of my house. My parents’ cars are in the driveway, and there are several dark cars parked along the curb, so I end up at the corner of the street, walking the rest of the way home.
“Where were you?” my dad asks as soon as I open the door. There’s a group of them gathered in the dining room—my parents, men and women in suits, Agent Lowell. But no one waits for me to answer. They make a space for me and beckon me forward.
Agent Lowell has a hand on the back of a chair at the table. “Here, take this,” he says.
My mom paces behind me. My dad, in contrast, is completely still. Once I’m seated, Agent Lowell places a photo directly in front of me, on top of the wooden table.
The picture is of my brother. They don’t really need me to confirm this; it’s obvious. In the image, he’s walking sort of diagonally away, but his head is thrown over his shoulder so he’s almost looking straight at the camera. Like someone called his name and he’s looking for the source.
Still, it’s a punch to the gut, seeing this. Something new. A moment, an image I’ve never seen before. I’d just about given up on seeing any such moments ever again.
I lean closer to the image. At the edge of the frame is the solid brown tail and a hind leg—Colby, beside him.
I can’t figure out where he is, though. Only that the dog is with him, and it looks like he’s in the woods.Colby would never leave him,my dad told the investigators, and he’s right. We lost my brother and our dog that day, but I’m really only allowed to admit to missing the one. But here they both are, and something tightens in my throat, seeing them again.
Agent Lowell places a second photo in front of me, this one zoomed in on Liam’s face. “In your best estimation, is this an accurate picture of Liam the day he went missing?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.” I can feel my heart racing.
“His clothes, the details?” he asks, and then I understand my role. I’m confirming the clothes he wore, the dog, the way he’s looking over his shoulder. His dark blond hair is a little longer than it usually was, because he was due for a haircut, so it sort of falls over his forehead from the weight of it, instead of staying up and to the side, like he styles it. Styled it.
The jeans, the long-sleeved maroon shirt, the blue sneakers. All of it is Liam, all of it the details we gave over and over about that day; remembering, pulling things from his closet so we were sure. These details are now ingrained in our memory.
But, I see, there are some things we had forgotten, that I only remember now, by looking at him: the way his left arm bends slightly, held at his hip, from an old injury that never healed right. A broken bone brought to the doctor too late, already starting to ossify around the crack on its own. And a cut against the underside of his jawbone, from shaving. I’d forgotten that, completely, until they show me the photo of his face, zoomed in.
I remembered hearing him hiss in the bathroom that morning, the razor dropping, clattering against the sink. A bead of blood on the porcelain, left behind.
Why did I never mention that, in the days that followed? It’s like that detail completely slipped my mind—like I was too focused, instead, on the feeling in the dream, the knowledge that, somehow, his disappearance was inevitable.
“It’s him. It’s that day,” I say. More definitive now. There’s nobest estimationhere. It’s him. In that moment. The small, chaotic details leading to only that day, and no other day.
My mother whispers, “Oh my God.” The room has otherwise gone silent.
“Thank you, Nolan,” Agent Lowell says, a hand on my shoulder.
“What does this mean?” my dad asks. I’d leave, but the hand is still heavy on my shoulder, as if holding me in place.
“There’s a time stamp in the image file. The date and time lead us to believe it was taken around four in the afternoon the day of his disappearance,” Agent Lowell responds. “Though we know these things can be fudged with.”
Nothing is definite. Still, it was taken that day.
“Do any of you recognize the location?” he asks.
I don’t. None of us do. It’s just trees, and Colby’s tail, and my brother. “Couldn’t this still be the park?” I ask.
“That would be highly unlikely,” he responds after a pause. “This is almost four hours after he disappeared, and we had plenty of officers patrolling the park. It seems unlikely he would’ve been there all along without giving himself away. Especially with the dog.”
Everything changes. I slip from his grasp, from the table, from that room. Their voices rise, and I continue up the steps, trying to make sense of things.
