Page 131 of I Will Find You

But her hands are up and her eyes are growing wider.

“We just need to see the photos,” I say to her. I lower the gun and take out the photograph in my pocket. “Do you see that boy? The one in the background.”

She is too terrified to take her eyes off me.

“Look,” I say a little too loudly. “Please?”

Rachel says, “Let’s move this inside, okay?”

We do. Irene only has eyes for the gun. I feel bad about this. No matter how this turns out, she will never be the same. She will know fear. She will lose sleep. She lost something today, and I took it from her the moment I took out the gun. That’s what any kind of threat or violence does to a person. It stays with them. For good.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say, but I’m babbling now. “I’ve spent the last five years in jail for killing my son. I didn’t do it. That’s him in the picture. That’s why I escaped. That’s why Rachel and I are here. We are trying to find my boy. Please help us.”

She doesn’t believe me. Or maybe she doesn’t care. Instinct is working here for her too. The most primal instinct—survival.

“He’s telling the truth,” Rachel adds.

Again I don’t think it matters.

“What do you want from me?” Irene asks in a panicked voice.

“Just the pictures,” I say. “That’s all.”

Three minutes later, we are in Irene’s kitchen. There are dozens of photos stuck to the refrigerator of Irene and Tom and the two boys. She sits at the kitchen block and with a shaking hand, she opens her laptop. I notice the way she keeps glancing at the refrigerator. I don’t know if she’s finding strength in her family or reminding me that she has one.

“It’s going to be fine,” I tell Irene. “I promise.”

That doesn’t seem like much of a comfort to her. I feel the pang again, not for myself, but for what I’m doing to her. She’s an innocent in all this. I try to find some consolation in the fact that when I’m vindicated, whatever hint of PTSD that I’m leaving her with today may vanish.

“What do you want me to do?” Irene asks.

Rachel tries to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Irene shrugs it off.

“Just bring up the photographs from that day, please,” I say.

Irene mistypes, probably due to nerves. I have tucked the gun away so that she can’t see it anymore, but it remains the proverbial elephant in the room. Eventually she clicks on a folder and a bunch of thumbnails start crisscrossing the screen.

She stands up from the stool and gestures for one of us to take over. Rachel sits and clicks on the first photograph. It’s of one of the boys grinning and pointing at a huge green roller coaster behind him.

“Can I go now?” Irene asks. Her voice is shaky.

“I’m sorry,” I say as gently as I can. “You’ll call the police.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Just stay with us another minute, okay?”

What choice does she have? I’m the guy with the gun. We start clicking through the photographs. There are more shots involving roller coasters mixed in with shots of costumed characters and some kind of water-dolphin show, that kind of thing. We scour through the background of every photograph.

Eventually we land on the photograph that launched all this. I point to it and ask Irene, “The boy in the background. Do you remember him at all?”

She looks at me as though my face will hold the correct answer.

“I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“He has a port-stain birthmark on his face. Does that help?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t…he’s just in the background. I don’t remember him. I’m sorry.”

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