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He chose the Lacey family at first because of the sailboats. For as long as he could remember, he'd dreamed of sailing. He imagined it would feel like flying, the wind rushing past his face and the waves scudding like clouds beneath him. And he thought he would feel safe-no people around, just him and the boat, and the open water.
He knew about the sailboats because he'd seen them in the newspaper photographs. He had read everything about the boys, all the clipped articles on yellowing newsprint, all the magazine features on slick paper so limp it had lost its gloss. Reading about someone else was almost as good as dreaming about sailing.
He couldn't remember exactly when he had discovered the file cabinet in the corner of the small cellar storage room. Pop always locked him in the cellar while it happened. He used to hate the cellar - he hated the blows and the cries from upstairs, muffled only slightly by the locked door and the flooring, and he hated the smell. Pop kept spreading quicklime and fresh earth over the dirt floor, but the smell never went away completely. You could hardly smell anything upstairs, but when he was shut down in the cellar the thick, sickly-sweet odor got inside his nose and he couldn't get rid of it. If he breathed through his mouth, he tasted it-a heavy taste like a rabbit a dog had torn apart and left half buried in rotting leaves.
He remembered that he had been trying to blot out the smell when he stumbled onto the file cabinet. If he closed himself in that little side room, the odor wasn't as bad. He had shut the door and pulled a dangling chain, and a single light bulb flicked on overhead. There were cardboard boxes piled in the room, sodden from the damp, and he had seen the gleam of metal half-hidden behind them. The file cabinet was up on two-by-fours, and if he slipped around the shadowy side of the boxes he could open the drawers easily. The clippings were inside.
He wasn't the greatest reader. He couldn't remember much about starting school, but he knew he'd been kept back. One of the boys had tried to help him with his reading once, and he'd gotten better, but he didn't like to think about that. The boy was in the cellar now, with the others, and he didn't have to think about him anymore. He could think about sailing instead.In school his classmates were always younger, and the teachers never bothered about him. He stayed quiet and kept to himself and didn't learn much, but Pop said that didn't matter. What mattered was not getting noticed. Other kids were problems and took all the teacher's attention every year. Grown-ups didn't waste any efforts on a kid who kept his mouth shut and stayed out of trouble and passed, even with C's. So when he first looked through the files he had trouble reading the articles. He recognized some of the pictures, though, from the boys he remembered, and he started with the articles in those files, sounding out the letters until the words made sense.
His reading improved, and over the years he had read every article in the file cabinet. Some he had read over and over. He knew each boy's family as if they were his own, and he chose the Laceys because of the sailboats. He also chose them because the boy's looks and age were close to his own, and because they had only moved to their house six months before their son disappeared. That would help explain his not knowing his way around.
And he also chose the Laceys, in the end, because of their money.
Copyright ©2000 by Elaine Marie Alphin
