The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother) Read online

  28

  We weren’t in the kitchen this time; we were in the den. Officer Ross wasn’t there with Officer Pinkus; there was another officer, who introduced himself as Sergeant Jones. Mom and Dad seemed to know him already, but I hadn’t seen him in the house during Aidan’s disappearance. And obviously Aidan hadn’t seen him, since he’d been…away.

  “First off,” Officer Pinkus said, “we want to apologize to you, Aidan, and to your whole family for the leak that came from our department. The person who told your story has been reprimanded—and I want to assure you that it was not someone who is working on your case anymore.”

  “We can accept your apology,” Mom said, “as long as you can tell us how we get this back in its box. I cannot tell you how many calls I’ve gotten today. Wendy McGillis, in particular, has called me on my cell phone, at my office, and here at the house, asking for ‘official comment.’ That scares me. And the posts on the local message boards scare me even more.”

  “What posts in particular?” Office Pinkus asked.

  “Please tell me you read the message boards,” Mom answered. “If you want to know anything about this town, you go to the mommy message boards. And, frankly, they’ve turned against Aidan. They are angry that they were so inconvenienced when they had to search for his body last week. Back then, a whole week ago, they offered prayers and help. Now they only seem to have criticism and snark to offer.”

  Sergeant Jones scribbled something down on his pad. “We’ll definitely check that out,” he said.

  “That’s not enough,” Mom insisted. “Not nearly enough. I want you to tell me how you’re going to ensure my son’s safety and prevent him from becoming the object of scorn and ridicule because one of your officers couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

  I couldn’t believe Mom was talking to the police in the same voice she used to send me and Aidan to our room for misbehaving.

  Officer Pinkus looked like she understood why she was in trouble, and accepted the punishment. “Look,” she said, “there’s no question mistakes were made. And I know you talked to Julia about how to deal with Ms. McGillis and any other members of the press. We didn’t stop looking out for your family after Aidan returned. We are still looking out for you, and will help in any way we can. I suggest we discuss this more after Sergeant Jones and I ask Aidan our questions. As everyone in this room knows, this was meant to be a follow-up visit from last Thursday. I know a lot has happened since then, but we still have questions about Aidan’s whereabouts last week. Aidan, do you mind if we ask you a few more questions?”

  It wasn’t like Aidan could say no, he’d rather not answer anything else about his disappearance ever again.

  “Sure,” he told the police.

  “Okay,” said Officer Pinkus, checking her notes. “Now that you’ve had more time to think about what happened, and hopefully you don’t feel as on the spot as you might have on Thursday…is there anything you told us that you’d like to change? Or anything you’d like to add?”

  Aidan had to have known the police would ask him this, but still he acted like he needed some time to think. Finally, he looked at Officer Pinkus and asked, “Do you want me to lie to you?”

  “Aidan!” Mom said. But Officer Pinkus didn’t seem to mind the question.

  “Why are you asking me that?” she asked back.

  “Because,” Aidan said, “I’ve been lying to people all day. I told them that I was completely out of it when I talked to you on Thursday, and that I didn’t know what I was saying. I told them my story was all made up, like I was really drunk on exhaustion and talking like a drunk person. I told them it was make-believe because there was no way to make them believe it. So if you want me to tell you the same things, I will. I’ll tell you exactly what I said to them. But I also want you to know that I’ll be lying to you. Because everything I said to you on Thursday was the actual truth.”

  When Aidan was done, I didn’t watch him or the police officers. I watched our parents. Mom looked like she wanted to pull down the ceiling and scream. Dad looked like he wanted to fold himself into the couch and cry.

  As for me—I was just trying to understand why Aidan hadn’t decided to lie to them too.

  Officer Pinkus didn’t write anything down in her pad. She didn’t break her eye contact with Aidan.

  “I appreciate you sticking to the actual truth,” she said. There was no judgment in her voice, no doubt. “That is, at the end of the day, the only thing I can ask of you is to give me the truth as you see it.”

  Sergeant Jones, I noticed, stayed silent.

  “I have to tell you, Aidan,” Officer Pinkus continued gently, “I spent the whole weekend checking our databases for something similar, some other mention of Aveinieu or another world described in the same way. It appears your case is unique. That isn’t to say that it’s wrong—it’s only to say that it’s singular.”

  “Probably because everyone else who’s gone there has stayed,” Aidan offered.

  Officer Pinkus nodded. “That is absolutely a valid explanation. Which leads to my next question: Can you remember the names of the other people from our world who were there? Names and any details—the towns they came from, the dates they left. If you give me their names, I can put them into our database and see if they match any open missing persons cases.”

  It was hard to tell who was more surprised by this question: Mom and Dad, because it took what Aidan was saying so seriously, or Aidan, because it took what he was saying so seriously.

  “I’m trying to think,” he said. “Cordelia is the one I knew the most, but she never told me her last name. Just the initial, R. There weren’t enough of us there to need last names. Ming was from China. There was a young woman named Heidi who spoke English. She said she was from Canada, and had been in Aveinieu for twenty years. But I don’t know how that translates to our time. And I never asked her where in Canada. We never really talked about home. I was too busy trying to figure out Aveinieu.”

  “I just need one full name,” Officer Pinkus said. “Preferably from the US, since I have more access here.”

  Aidan thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t know. We were isolated on the farm. Cordelia had a friend from New York named Joel. But I never met him. He’d left a few years before me. Joel P. Cordelia said he’d wanted to explore more of the world—but he never came back to tell her what he’d found.”

  “And Cordelia was from here? Did she tell you when she left?”

  “A long time ago. That’s all I know.”

  “You stayed with her the whole time?”

  Aidan nodded.

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had this long red hair, with some gray in it. Her skin was tan—she liked to joke that she was lucky that she wasn’t fair like her sister because she would have burned under the Aveinieu sun. It’s not like there’s sunscreen there.”

  “Did she make the joke about sunscreen?” Officer Pinkus asked.

  “I don’t think so. I did. Why?”

  “It was a long shot. If she’d mentioned a particular kind of sunscreen, or sunscreen in general, we might have been able to pinpoint her age better.”

  It was the first time I’d realized there hadn’t always been such a thing as sunscreen.

  Officer Pinkus is pretty smart, I thought.

  And then I thought, But if she’s so smart, why is she acting like she believes Aidan?

  It must be to make him talk, I concluded.

  But Aidan only had so much to say. She asked him a few more times about other people, but he said he couldn’t remember anything else. Then she asked him why he’d come back, and he explained to her why he’d been banished. That was the word he used: banished.

  “It makes sense that there might be viruses or illnesses that we have in this world that they wouldn’t necessa
rily have the immunity to in another world,” Officer Pinkus said. “Isn’t that right, Raymond?”

  Sergeant Jones nodded. “Of course.”

  Officer Pinkus closed her notebook. “I think that’s all I need right now,” she said. Then, as if it was an afterthought, she added, “Oh—one more thing. Why the dresser?”

  I could see Aidan waver slightly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was surprised, and they never told me how it works. I asked, and Cordelia said she had no idea either. ‘Our brains aren’t big enough to comprehend the connections between worlds,’ she said. She said my guess was as good as hers, and odds were strong that both guesses would be totally wrong.”

  Officer Pinkus smiled. “Cordelia sounds like my kind of person. It’s lucky she was the first person you met, and not someone a lot less friendly.”

  “I know, right?” Aidan said. “I thought that a lot.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, like Cordelia was a neighbor they needed to go have a talk with.

  “Okay, boys,” Officer Pinkus said. “Time for me to chat with your parents. I’m going to trust you to not listen on the other side of the door, okay? I’ll be back tomorrow to check in—and, Aidan, if you think of anything else, or anyone else who was there, be sure to write it down. And if it’s something you feel is urgent to tell me, your parents have my number and you can call anytime, day or night.”

  “Thanks,” Aidan said. And even if our parents didn’t get the message, I did:

  The way to get Aidan to appreciate you was to listen to what he had to say.

  29

  Officer Pinkus had asked us not to listen at the door. She hadn’t said anything about listening from the staircase.

  I pointed out this loophole to Aidan as we walked upstairs.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. He went into our room, grabbed his laptop, and headed for the attic.

  I definitely got the sense that I was not welcome to follow him.

  So I stayed on the top stair and listened. I figured he’d be grateful later, if I found out something interesting to tell him.

  I couldn’t hear every word, but I could hear enough.

  Cordelia’s name came up a lot. Mom and Dad were asking if the police thought there was a “real Cordelia,” as if the Cordelia from Aveinieu had a counterpart in our world.

  At one point, Dad said, “Aidan was always the stable one,” which made me wonder if I was the unstable one. That didn’t sound right.

  Mom brought up Wendy McGillis again. The moment she did, the phone rang. I was going to pick it up, but Dad yelled, “Don’t pick up the phone!” I stayed put.

  Then I heard a door opening. I worried that my parents had heard me breathing or something. So I backed off, toward my room.

  “Don’t pick up the phone if it rings!” Dad yelled again.

  Soon I could hear the officers leaving. I decided I should tell Aidan it was okay to come down, so I went up to the attic.

  I expected Aidan to be in front of the open dresser, studying it again. But instead he was on the old rocking chair our mom had used when we were babies and she wanted to rock us to sleep. He was working on his laptop and didn’t tell me to go away when he saw me.

  “I think it’s over,” I told him. “The police are heading home. Or back to the station. Or wherever it is they go after talking to us.”

  I was babbling, which Aidan would have never said was my best state. I then followed up with one of his least-favorite questions for me to ask: “What’re you doing?”

  “Just searching,” he said.

  I went and looked over his shoulder. He had Aveinieu typed into Google. There weren’t any helpful results.

  “How do you know how to spell it?” I asked.

  “Cordelia told me. And someone must have told her. So I think if anyone else came back here, that’s how they’d spell it. Though I’ll try other spellings later.”

  “What if you’re the only one?” I asked.

  Aidan sighed. “Then no one will ever really believe me, I guess. I know I have to get used to that. But it would definitely make it better if there was someone else. Then I’d know for sure.”

  “For sure that you’d been there?”

  “For sure that it really exists.”

  30

  Aunt Brandi texted me for an update. I didn’t know what to tell her.

  The day sucked like you said it would, I started.

  Then I added,

  Aidan is sticking to his story.

  She texted back, What he says is what matters. What everyone else says is much less important.

  I wanted that to be true, but I wasn’t sure. We had to live with everyone else. There was no way around that.

  * * *

  —

  Mom and Dad decided to order pizza for dinner. Dad called it in. Then they both forgot, and when the doorbell rang, they jumped and panicked.

  “Who could that be?” Mom asked. “It better not be Wendy McGillis.”

  “It’s the pizza,” I said. “Remember?”

  Dad laughed. Mom didn’t.

  But I noticed that when Dad opened the door to get the pizza, he didn’t open it all the way.

  It was like he was afraid to let anyone see inside.

  * * *

  —

  I was hoping to ask Aidan more questions—about maddoxes, about Cordelia, about anything he was willing to tell me. But when I got back to our room after brushing my teeth, he was already asleep. Or at least pretending to be.

  The phone was ringing, and kept ringing all night.

  I guess we got used to it enough to stay asleep.

  31

  “Boys. Wake up.”

  It was Mom’s voice and it wasn’t time to wake up yet. I looked at my clock. I was confused.

  “What’s going on?” Aidan asked, his voice still sleep-choked.

  I rubbed my eyes, tried to focus on Mom and Dad standing in the middle of our room.

  “Julia from the police department is downstairs with two officers,” Mom explained. “She’s going to help us. There’s a television van outside, and a reporter who’s setting up in the front yard. We are not answering the door or making any comment—Julia is going to handle all that for us. You two are going to have to stay home today, and you’re going to need to listen to us very carefully. Under no circumstances are you to open the door or answer the phone or even look out the window. The shades are drawn and the doors are locked, and they need to stay that way. Julia says it’s just the morning news, and the reporter should be gone within an hour. She also says we’re lucky there’s only one station here. That means the story isn’t being picked up too widely.”

  “How did they find out?” Aidan asked.

  Mom looked at Dad, as if he was the only one who had the answer.

  “There was a story in the News this morning,” he said. “Written by Wendy McGillis. I believe she’s a mom at your school.”

  Aidan was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.

  “Can I see it?” he asked.

  Dad hesitated, but Mom nodded and he took out his phone. I sat down next to Aidan on his bed so I could see too.

  It was from one of the city papers nearby, known for its big headlines and small amounts of truth.

  THE BOY WHO CRIED UNICORN

  Local town searched everywhere for missing boy.

  Now he says he was off in another world.

  They didn’t name Aidan, but anyone who’d been paying attention last week would have remembered who he was. We’d been all over the news…and now the news was all over us. Some of the details from the police report were in the article, as well as a big “shame on you for reporting rumors about a minor” from Sergeant Jones and a few quotes from “local parents” who were glad Aidan was home but “dist
ressed” that they had been “lied to” and “misled.”

  “We thought he might be dead,” one parent was quoted in the last line of the article. “But he was probably just taking a vacation.”

  Nobody, it seemed, believed the vacation had actually taken place in Aveinieu. They thought Aidan had pulled a prank, and was making fun of them with his story.

  “This isn’t good,” Aidan said when he was done reading.

  “No, it isn’t,” Dad said, taking back his phone.

  The doorbell rang. Once. Twice.

  None of us moved.

  It was only when there wasn’t a third ring that Mom said, “You guys should go back to bed. Dad and I will be with the police downstairs. I’ll call Denise and ask her to have Glenn pick up your homework.”

  Mom and Dad left, closing the door behind them.

  “What channel is it?” Aidan asked me. Then, when I gave him my best How am I supposed to know? look, he gestured to the window and said, “Peek out from the side and see what channel it says on the van.”

  It was useless to tell him that was exactly what Mom had just told us not to do. I went over to the window, pulled the shade out a little, and looked out.

  “Channel Seven,” I reported.

  Aidan opened his laptop. “Okay. Got it.”

  I put the shade back and sat back beside him.

  There was suddenly a buzzing in the room—both of our phones vibrating at once. Aidan reached for his and showed me it was a text from Brandi.

  Those jerks, she wrote. Don’t they remember the whole point of the boy who cried wolf is that in the end he was TELLING THE TRUTH?

  The message was just for me and Aidan. My parents weren’t on it.

  Aidan texted her back a wolf emoji.

  On his laptop, someone was doing the weather report in front of a map that made America look like it was tie-dyed. Then there were some commercials.