Since I had no idea if they still lived there, the next step was to call New Jersey information and ask if Anwen and Gregory Meier still lived in Somerset. They did. G.o.dd.a.m.nit, they did. In that strange and spooky house that was supposed to be a replacement for their lost child.

I sat and thought, then hopefully called a couple of different charter airlines listed in the phone book to ask how much they charged to rent a private plane and pilot to fly East. The prices were insane, but I was willing to do it until they said they'd need at least three hours, minimum, to arrange it. I called the airports in Burbank, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Nothing worked. There were flights to New York from these places but not the right connections to get me to them in time.

Seconds after I put the phone down after the last futile call, it rang again. Praying it would be Lincoln so I could tell him the one essential thing he didn't know, I s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. Only to hear Mary Poe's voice.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Max, it's Mary. I'm calling from the car phone, so it'll be a bad connection. Lincoln's gun is definitely real, and it's stolen. The serial numbers say it's part of a shipment of guns from a truck that was hijacked in Florida six months ago. It's also a major league weapon, very highpowered s.h.i.t. Terrorists love Glock guns because they're made mostly out of plastic and can be snuck by airport metal detectors.

It's no Sat.u.r.day night special, Max. It's the kind of piece that gives you the w.i.l.l.i.e.s even when you carry a gun yourself. But you say it's still there? Then it's all right. Just take it down and hold it in your lap, or stick it in a safe till boyo gets home."

I got off as quickly as I could, after asking her to be sure not to tell Lily about the gun. Having no idea how long I would be in the East, I went into our bedroom and packed a small bag with jeans, a couple of shirts, underwear... enough for three or four days. I knew I had to write Lily a note explaining some of this so she wouldn't go mad with worry when she returned and found both of us gone. But what could I say? "I am running after our son, who has discovered he was kidnapped..." What could be said? There was no time to think about it. I wrote that he had run away, possibly with Elvis and Little White. I was going to try to find him before anything bad happened. That was why I'd run out of the restaurant earlierbecause he told me he'd had enough of us and was going to go and live life on his own.

It was the kind of lie that left out enough to be almost true. She would go for it and that was all I could hope for at that moment. Lily was stubborn about Lincoln, but not stupid. She knew how angry he was and how unpleasant he could be. Hearing he'd flown the coop would not surprise her. I wrote I would call her the minute I knew anything.

I ran out of the house, locked the door, and unthinkingly looked through the livingroom window and saw that I'd left on a number of lights. One memory flicked through my mind of changing a bulb in one of those lamps, calling to Greer to please go to the kitchen and get me a new bulb. "Yes, Daddy."

The soft sound of her slippered feet racing down the carpeted floor and in a far part of the house asking her mother for a light for Daddy. What would our lives be like the next time I changed a light bulb in our home? How long would it be before that happened?

In contrast to all the frightening possibilities, the Los Angeles evening was lovely and fragrant. It would have been pleasant to sit out on the back patio, drink a gla.s.s of brandy, and talk quietly late into the night. We did that often. Greer would fall asleep in one of our laps as Lincoln had years before. We wouldn't disturb them. It was too nice being there together. When he was still alive, the greyhound would lie on his side near our chairs, his long legs stretched out straight. He was still around when Greer wasvery young. More than once we'd enter a room and see this tiny girl standing close but never actually touching him.

"Cobb! Oh my G.o.d." I remembered something intriguing when I thought of our dog. Lincoln was the only human being the old eccentric let touch him. Until one day the boy ran into the house in tears, wailing that Cobb had just snapped at him. Neither of us could believe it, knowing their special relationship. We rea.s.sured him, saying the dog had probably been sleeping and was in the middle of a bad dream or whatever. The three of us went out to find him and see what was up. He was in his favorite placelying in the sun on the warm stones of the patio. We told Lincoln to go try petting him again. When he bent down to touch the gray giant, Cobb either grumbled or growled. The sound was not friendly.

That was the end of an era. From that moment until he died, he didn't want any of us touching him, not even his young pal. He still stuck his tongue out in those long, slow swipes Lily insisted were kisses, but he wouldn't be touched. When was that? Walking to the car, I tried to figure out exactly when the change happened in him. It seemed to have been after Lincoln and I became blood brothers. Or it could very well not have. My mind was racing so fast and trying to tie so many different strings together that it was unhelpful and dangerous. I made up a line that has become a kind of allpurpose prayer for me: "I want calm and not control." As I backed out of the driveway, window down for the cool air needed across my face, a part of me still couldn't believe I was about to fly across country chasing a son who'd found out too much too soon and was doing exactly what he shouldn't.

Turning the steering wheel, I started repeating over and over, "I want calm and not control." Down Wilshire, weaving through the red and yellow taillight traffic, I said it. Down La Cienega Boulevard out to the airport: "I want calm and not control."

The car was almost out of gas. I drove into a station and stopped by a selfservice pump. The man in the cashier's booth looked at me through a pair of binoculars. No more than thirty feet away, he used binoculars to see if I was going to rob him. It was a great idea for "Paper Clip," but the life where I did that job now seemed as far away as the Ivory Coast. I went to the booth and slid a twentydollar bill beneath a bulletproofgla.s.s window thick enough to stop a Cruise missile. The man held the bill up to the light to see if it was fake. His face was all suspicion. How many times had he been robbed, or simply scared to the bottom of his bones?

"We get a lot of counterfeit twenties."

"I can imagine."

My mother used to say, "You feel black, you see black." The drive to LAX that night was one scene after another of worry or angst or h.e.l.l, beginning with the man with his binoculars. Was it coincidence that I saw a drunken man standing in the middle of the street screaming, or two police cars screech up in front of a house and the officers jump out going for their guns? Further on, a gang of black kids stood in front of a Fatburger all wearing the same blackandwhite Oakland Raiders baseball caps and windbreakers. There must have been fifteen of them in this uniform and they all looked ready for murder. The road widened out and began to rise toward the oilwellcovered hills. Streetlamps dumped their fake orange glare over us. I looked to the side and saw ugly, sinister faces in the cars pa.s.sing mine.

Drivers with narroweddown heads like weasels, bald rats, and lipless ferrets pointed forward, so eager to get somewhere that even their heads were squeezed down by the G force of antic.i.p.ation. A young child in the back seat of a Hyundai had its hands and open mouth pressed to the window. A beautiful pa.s.senger with long blond hair looked at me with such burntout, nothinginterestsme eyes. Was she dead?

Was the world I knew suddenly so macabre and threatening because of what had happened tonight with my son? Or had it always been this way and only now was I able to see it with understanding eyes?

I sped up. It was a long time before my plane left but I needed to be at the airport. Needed those clean long boring halls and plastic chairs where you sat looking at nothing, waiting for the time to pa.s.s until you could get on a plane and continue looking at nothing for a few more hours.

Before you see L.A. Airport, you see the planes gliding in over the highway to land. They are enormous there, eighty feet above the ground and sinking. Larger even than when they are parked at the terminal. They dwarf everything as they drop slowly in toward earth; you love their size and the fact they're tame, that you can ride in one anytime you want.I left the car in longterm parking and walked quickly to the terminal. It was an evening in the middle of the week and traffic was light.

So much emotion at the doors of an airport. Hugs and tears, the joy on the faces of those who've just landed and are coming out into the real air after so many hours on the plane. Cars pull up, pull away.

Above all else, everything is rushed. A rush to get there, to get out of here. The world on fast forward.

Where was Lincoln now? Rushing across the country toward two people "Call them! Just call them up!" Whatever is most obvious hides when you're stressed. Two steps into the building, the idea to call and give them some kind of warning came to me. I looked around wildly for a telephone. Over there! I'd taken a load of change when I left the house, which was good because this was going to be one expensive call. I dialed New Jersey information and for the second time that night asked for Gregory Meier's number. Those blessed pushb.u.t.ton telephones. How long it took when you were in a hurry but had to twist and twist the wheel of the old machines. Now stab stab stab... and you're through. It was ridiculous feeling so pressed for time when Lincoln was still four hours away from landing, but I did. The connection was made and their phone began to ring thirtyfive hundred miles away.

"Hi. You've reached the Meiers, but no one's home now. Please leave your name and message and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks for calling."

There was a peep and the demanding silence that expects you to talk. I couldn't think of what to say. In one minute? If I had told them, "Be careful of a boy who's coming. He thinks you're his parents and could be dangerous," they might have called the police or gotten scared enough to make things even more confusing and difficult. What if someone I didn't know called and told me that? I'd think either that it was a bizarre prank or that the speaker was a s.a.d.i.s.t. I tried calling four more times before taking off, but their machine always answered. What did that mean in terms of Lincoln? Would they be home by the time he reached them? If not, if they were out of town and not due back for days, how would that affect him? What would he do? Wait? Take his anger and frustration, get back on a plane with it, and fly somewhere else? Knowing our son, he'd wait a short time and then return home. I didn't know which was worse.

Although the plane was half empty, I got stuck next to a woman who began talking the instant I sat down and didn't stop until I got up again, told her I had a great deal of work to do, and changed seats. I wasn't in the mood to be civil. There were only so many hours before New York and I wanted to try to figure out as much as I could. After we landed, there wouldn't be time for thought.

Once we were airborne, the stewardess came round asking for drink orders. I would have killed for a double anything, but bit my tongue and asked for a ginger ale instead. I was exhausted and a drink would put me right to sleep. Sitting by a window, I watched as the plane tipped and banked, then found its way and leveled out over the black and yellow twinkling below. I remembered driving over tonight and seeing planes coming in. How romantic and heartlifting the sight. Yet how lonesome and small I felt now, climbing up into that same sky.

We pa.s.sed over a baseball stadium with all its lights still on after a night game. Seeing the field reminded me of an unsettling discussion Lily and I had had a few weeks before.

Like Lincoln, I had always loved baseball. Until I was fifteen or so, the nucleus of every summer was the game, whether that meant watching it on television, playing catch with my friends, talking about it with the barber when I went in for a ballplayer's crew cut, trading Topps baseball cards with others...

The minute I was old enough to play in Little League, I begged my parents to sign me up. They did, and one of the proudest memories of my young life was walking into the living room after dinner one night wearing for the first time my robin'seggblue baseball cap and Tshirt that said the name of our sponsor, "Nick's Sh.e.l.l Station," on the front. My team was named the Yankees, thank G.o.d, which made life even better because this was in one of the periodic heydays of the New York Yankees and all of the men who played on that great team were my heroes. Mom put down her crossword puzzle and said I looked "very nice." But Dad paid me the supreme compliment. Giving me a careful onceover, he said I looked just like Moose Skowron, Yankee first baseman and my favorite player.

Our first game was also opening day of the season that year and many people came out to watch. I was a.s.signed to right field, the equivalent of Siberia in Little League because no child ever hits a ballthere. However, our coach thought it was a good place for me because I couldn't catch for beans and would do the least damage there. Which didn't bother me a bit because hitting was my dream, not fielding. Nothing felt better than whipping that Louisville Slugger bat around and once in a spectacular while feeling the great "clunk" of wood connecting with the ball. That's what I lived for, not putting a huge leather glove up in the air to stop a ball from sailing by. Batting was heroic, fielding was only necessary.

Our opponents that first game were the Dodgers, a good team, but fearsome too because their star pitcher was none other than Jeffrey Alan Sapsford. His fastball, even then, would have struck out Moose Skowron.

By the fifth inning we were losing nine to nothing. I'd batted twice and struck out both times.

Besides that, I'd dropped an easy fly ball and been yelled at by half my team. I knew I deserved their hatred. I was a b.u.m, we were losing, the world was doom. Worse, my parents were there witnessing the debacle. I knew my father had skipped meeting the seven o'clock train (his biggest haul of tired customers) so he could be on hand for my debut. Some debut. I'd failed him, my team, the name Yankees.

The last time I got up to hit, Jeffrey Alan Sapsford looked at me with gleeful disdain.

Unforgettably, his second baseman yelled, "Easy out!" and he was talking about me. The whole world had heard. I, the heir to Moose Skowron's throne, was fixed in everyone's mind as an "easy out." Try erasing that kind of mark from your record when you're that age.

Sapsford threw his first pitch and, without thinking, I swung and knocked the ball five hundred and forty miles into deep center field. I hit it so hard and far that the other team froze as one watching the ball soar off into that deep green infinity. The people in the grandstand got up and started applauding before I had even rounded first base. When I came in to home plate, my team stood there waiting for me and cheering as if this were the last game of the World Series and I had saved the day. Pure glory.

We still lost ten to one, but in the car riding home afterward, I was a hundred percent hero and no one could take that away from me, ever.

My parents chattered on about how great it had been, while I sat in the back seat basking in fresh memories and their praise. As we turned the corner of Main Street and Broadway, my father said with a loving chuckle, "And did you know your fly was open the whole way round?"

"What?"

"Your fly was down."

"Oh, Stan, you said you weren't going to tell him that." Mom shook her head and smiled sympathetically at me over her shoulder.

In poleaxed, stunnedstill shock, I looked down at my blue jeans. I'd hit a home run in these pants.

They were part of the legend's uniform! But there it wasthe accusing white slip of my underpants beaming out through my fly. Not much. Not enough to really be seen unless you looked hard or someone drew your attention to it, but there nevertheless. The apex of my lifeand my zipper was open!

I honestly don't remember if I got over it quickly or if that moment's brainblasting embarra.s.sment lasted a long time. Until I told the story to Lily, it had been a fond smile from way in my past, the kind of childhood memory you like to tell your partner so they can share a piece of your past few others know. I finished telling her the story with a smile and a shrug. "Max hits a homer."

"That's despicable. Your father is a real a.s.shole sometimes."

"Why?"

"Why ? Why'd he tell you that? What was the point? You had your home run. It was yours, nothing could take it away from you. But he didhe spoiled it forever by telling you about your zipper.

Listen to the way you tell it nowlike it's only a funny little amusing story. Right? 'Max hits a homer.' You should have heard your voice. It wasn't only that, it was one of the supreme moments of your childhood.

A home run! So what if your stupid zipper was down? So what if the whole world knew, so long as you didn't? He's an insensitive jerk."

Call me blind. Or only in love with my father, whatever, I never thought of it like that. I knew the man loved me and wasn't trying to ruin my moment. But like a hammer thrown across four decades, the wrongness of what he did hit me square in the head for the first time.Looking down from the airplane at the empty, lit baseball stadium, I remembered my wife's indignant voice as she spoke of him.

How many times had we done exactly the same thing with Lincoln? Was that what caused him to turn out so disastrously? Were there hundreds or thousands of things we'd done out of pure love that were nonetheless so flatout wrong an enemy couldn't have devised a more effective means of destroying our boy?

This is what I thought about while crossing America that night. Pity the man who is not sure of his sins. Beware of the child who is his responsibility.

Halfway through the trip, I thought if only I could stay up here in the air for the rest of my life. As in a children's story, it would have made things so much simpler: Once upon a time there was a man who had made so many mistakes in his life that he decided to leave the earth and never return.

It was raining in New York when we landed. Water rolled down the windows in strange patterns as we taxied to the gate. Since it was such a late flight, there wasn't the usual rush of pa.s.sengers to leave their seats and then the plane itself. People rose slowly and shuffled forward to the exits like tired zombies.

Because I had only a carryon bag, I walked straight to a telephone and called the Meiers again. It was seventhirty in the morning. No luck. Next stop was a car rental desk. Within minutes I was behind the wheel of a newsmelling yellow Ford. I figured it would take about two hours to drive from Kennedy Airport to Somerset, New Jersey, but once on the road, morning traffic was beginning. It would take more time.

In the years since we'd met, I had thought very little about the Meiers. The only time I put life aside and concentrated on them was in a dentist's office one morning. Sitting there waiting my turn, I picked up an architecture magazine and started giving it the quick shufflethrough. I pa.s.sed something, ignored it, and only seconds later did it register. Leafing back fast, I found the large twopage spread on the house I had visited one depressing afternoon in the middle of that first crisis. There it was! Anwen and Gregory Meier's remarkable home. A c.o.c.keyed cupola and what looked like a kind of giant bat wing had been added on to the original building, but it was such a memorable place that no matter what, it couldn't be disguised. The text said Anwen Meier's Brendan House, one of the most famous examples of the Corvallis School of architecture, had received yet another prestigious award, this time from a European architectural organization. It spoke of the house as if everyone knew about it and wouldn't be surprised by this latest tribute. I tore the article out and showed it to Lily. Shaking her head, she began to cry. The memory of her face reddening and the glistening tears on her cheeks stayed with me many miles.

Somewhere along those miles was the rest stop where Lincoln bought his supplies. It was the only place he could have gotten them in the middle of the night on the New Jersey Turnpike. He bought big bottles of CocaCola. I would guess four of them. Four would do the trick if he was clever and careful about it. Gasoline was no problem. Pull into a station, fill 'er up, and ask the attendant if they sold those jerry cans you keep a couple of gallons of extra gas in for the lawn mower. Gallons of gasoline make quite a fire. What did he use for a wick? Probably underpants or a Tshirt. Maybe he took off his "f.u.c.k DancingLet's f.u.c.k!" shirt, tore it to pieces, and stuck them into the tops of the bottles. That would have been appropriate: c.o.ke bottles full of golden gasoline and "f.u.c.k" shirt sc.r.a.ps. That's all you need.

Anyone who watches television knows how to make a Molotov c.o.c.ktail, the poor man's hand grenade.

I knew he was bad, capable of things I had never wanted to think about. But even later, after retracing his steps and grasping his motives, I was appalled by what he did that night. If only he had stopped a few minutes to listen, to ask questions and hear the truth, terrible as it was. None of it would have happened. Other things would have, certainly, but not that and not to them.

He was a fast driver and had his threehour head start on me. He also had a great sense of direction and would have no trouble finding the house. When he was young one of his hobbies had been studying maps, particularly exotic onesCambodia, Mali, Bhutanand finding the shortest routes from one heroic or otherworldlysounding point to another. Timbuktu to Nouakchott. Bu Phlok to Snuol. One birthday we gave him a beautiful bra.s.s calipers to measure his distances exactly. He still had those calipers in a deskdrawer, along with the bullet and the picture of Little White.

I envisioned him driving eighty miles an hour down the New Jersey Turnpike, stopping only to get gas and the supplies he needed for the job. What went through his head in those hours? At home he always drove with the radio on loud, impatiently turning the dial whenever a song came on he didn't like.

Add that to the picture. Add clicking on the overhead light while steering with one hand, looking quickly from his map to road signs approaching, then to the map again to make sure he was going the right way.

Lily had made this same drive sixteen years before, fleeing New York in a car she'd bought with money stolen from a drug dealer/pimp. She was only five years older than Lincoln was now. All three of us had made this same drive south, all for such different desperate reasons.

I got off at the New Brunswick exit and remembered certain landmarks from my last trip, although the town itself had been cleaned up since then in the typical waysh.o.m.ogenized, mallified. Morning traffic was heavy. Stuck in a long line at a red light, I felt weariness creep up the back of my head and spread.

The people around me had had their good night's sleep, hot morning showers, breakfasts to get them up and out and going. Not me. As the light turned green and I was off again, I hated every one of them; resented them their stomachs full of savory coffee, the safe tedium of their jobs. They had children. Their children were not like mine.

New Jersey farm country, the sun only just up. Cows far off in fields, dogs running around free in backyards. Kids standing by the side of the road waiting for the school bus. The closer I got, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew. One last left turn and I was on their road. There's where I pulled over last time because I had to pee so badly. Some of the tickytacky houses had been torn down and replaced with attractive, much more expensivelooking places. The invasion of the middle cla.s.s.

The road dipped, rose, dipped again, and that's when I saw the first fire truck. It was a long hook and ladder coming slowly down toward me. On such a narrow road out in the middle of that nowhere, the red truck looked twice as large as it was. Wherever it was going, it was in no hurry to get there. Up in the open cabin, the driver and another man sat with their helmets off, smiling. The pa.s.senger was smoking a cigarette. We made eye contact and he lifted his cigarette hand in a small halfwave. Another two men stood on the ledge at the back of the truck holding on to silver handles. Both of them were in full uniform and one leaned his head against the truck, looking either exhausted or asleep standing up. I kept driving, only faster now. Why was that truck out here? Where had it been so early in the morning? I saw the smoke about a quarter of a mile further down the road. A police car pa.s.sed going in the other direction.

Smoke tells the whole story. When it's slow and spirally, aimless, you know a fire has lost its fury or its energy. Without seeing the flame itself, you can be sure its back is broken and will go out soon. If the smoke is hard and fast and billows straight up into the sky, the fire is a bad one, still very alive and dangerous.

A wispy brown pillow of smoke hung unmoving in the pale pink morning sky over the Meiers'

house. Some was still rising off the burned part of the building, but it was more an afterthought than anything else. Two fire trucks and a police car were parked on the road in front. Firemen were curling thick gray hoses back into form and generally wrapping up their work before leaving. Three policemen stood close together, comparing notes. People stood around on the street and the edges of the Meiers'

lawn watching the goingson. I parked my car back from the ma.s.s of other vehicles and got out slowly.

The house was unmistakable except for one thing. Standing there looking at it, I realized the bat wing was gone. The vaguely asymmetrical addition I'd seen pictured in the architecture magazine was no longer there. In its place was a black, scorched, collapsed mess of burnt pieces of things scattered across a wide area, standing, piled, smoking: the metal frame of a b.u.t.terfly chair, a wooden table that had oddly been burned on only one side, leaving it two legs to stand on, books strewn across the ground. Had the bat wing been their library?

"Tar." An old woman came walking toward me and slowed a few feet away. It was clear she wanted to tell someone what she had heard. "One of the firemen says he thinks it was the tar. They've been working on that kooky roof for weeks and he says the gasoline must've hit right on the tar for the whole thing to've gone up so fast. Who on G.o.d's green earth would want to burn their house down?"She thought her question over and suddenly stared at me with new, suspicious eyes. "You from around here, sir?"

Despite a hole as deep as h.e.l.l in my heart and growing, I thought fast and managed to come up with "I'm from the newspaper. They sent me out to see what's going on."

"You're from the Spectator ? Well, my name is Sandra Hagen, in case you want to use me as your source."

I could tell she loved being able to use that word. "Thank you, Mrs. Hagen. Listen, I just got here.

Could you tell me what happened?"

Clearing her throat, she threw back her head as if the television cameras were already rolling.

"Anwen wasn't around last night. She had to be up in New York for some thing or other. Brendan was here by himself and was the one who saw the guy who did it."

"Brendan ? Excuse me, did you say Brendan?"

"Yes, Brendan Meier, that's her son. Don't you know about him ? That's a story too! You ought to write that one up first. Do one of those twopart series on them. It's a family that's had more troubles than Job."

"Brendan was kidnapped as a child."

"Right. And they searched till they found him. Rumor has it the Meiers spent a couple hundred thousand dollars looking. Then her husband, Greg, died right after they found the boy."

"I don't believe it! They found him? I've never heard of that happening."

"It's amazing. But anyway, Brendan was home last night when this guy threw these bottles full of gas at their house. He heard something outside, which must have been the gla.s.s breaking, and ran out.

Whoever did it was still standing there on their lawn, watching the whole thing go up. Can you imagine?

Nedda Lintschinger, who lives in that house there, the blue one? She woke up at the sound and looked out the window too. Said she saw two men on the lawn and recognized Brendan in his pajamas 'cause he's such a tall boy, you know? Their house was on fire but the strangest thing was, these two guys were just standing there talking! Nedda said it looked like they were having a nice chat.

"Suddenly out of nowhere, the other guy starts screaming, 'What? What? What?' Just like that, then kicked Brendan youknowwhere. The poor boy fell down but the other wouldn't stop. Stood right there kicking and kicking him. Now that's what Nedda said. I can only tell you what I heard, but she swears it's what she told the police, so I guess it's true.

"Whatever, the crazy man kept on kicking poor Brendan. Then he lit up another bottle and threw it against the house. Finally Nedda ran for the phone to call for help and didn't see what else happened.

All we know is the nut was gone by the time she got back to look. Brendan's lying on the ground, not moving. She thought for sure he was dead. Thank G.o.d he wasn't. He's in the hospital with some broken ribs and a cutup face, but they say he'll be all right."

Thanking her for her help and listening while she spelled her name so I'd get it right in print, I left Mrs. Hagen and walked over to the policemen. Luckily I always carry one of those small pocket tape recorders in case an idea comes to me. Introducing myself as a reporter for the Spectator , I asked what had happened and held the recorder in front of them. Their story was basically the same. They'd gotten a call reporting the fire and a possible a.s.sault in progress. When they sent officers to investigate, they found a burning house and an unconscious teenage boy on the lawn. No sign of the perpetrator. Fire presumably caused by Molotov c.o.c.ktails igniting buckets of roofing tar which stood near the building.

The Meier boy was in satisfactory condition at the hospital and was going to be all right. No idea who the "perp" was. They kept repeating that word"perpetrator." "perp." Brendan said he'd never seen the other before. It was a boy, however, that much was sure. A teenager dressed like a punk, but the outfit might only have been camouflage, a costume to throw them off the track. Damage to the house was "expensive but not fatal." The cop who said it liked the line so much he repeated it for his friends. If I waited a day or two, I could interview Brendan at the hospital. But I didn't need to, because I already knew exactly what had happened.

Lincoln had read my file on the Meiers and in one dreadful implosive flash knew we weren't his parents, Lily had kidnapped him.How could he have remained sane? He did. But he came to the restaurant knowing. He flew East knowing the only thing he wanted to do now, in those first hours of his new life, was see his real parents and punish them. Yes, punish them for not finding him. For not looking hard enough; for not having spent all their time and energy and money to get their son back. Whatever they'd done over the years was not enough. Yes, he read the file and saw what tragic, wrecked lives they'd led since his disappearance, but he didn't care. Whatever they'd suffered, he was the one who'd been kidnapped, violated, forced to live a life away from his natural family.

Nor did it matter that we had given him everything we could; we were kidnappers, criminals, monsters. The same words that raged through my head a decade ago when I discovered Lily's secret.

And still did. And still did.

It was worse for Lincoln, though, because that secret had been kept and nurtured by people he believed were his parents. Worse, as far as he knew, his real parents had abandoned the search for him.

What he didn't know, what he hadn't given me time to tell him the night before, was the Meiers were not his parents. Lily had not stolen their child. The reason she had those newspaper clippings about them and their plight was because she'd once spent an afternoon in Garamond, Pennsylvania. The next day she kidnapped an infant from a car parked at a roadside rest on the turnpike a few hundred miles from Garamond.