Page 69 of The Man Made of Smoke

The obvious answer.

It was what I’d been told as a teenager, but I’d never been able to accept it then. I had always felt deep down that there must have been something—that thereshouldhave been. Now there was the sickening possibility that my failure was worse than I had ever realized, and that perhaps everything happeningnowwas my fault too.

“Seriously,” Sarah said. “Whyareyou asking?”

I took a long, slow breath.

Everything inside me told me to keep this to myself. To keep it all locked down. To remain detached and calm. But it also felt like I needed to unburden myself. That—just for once—it might help to let someone in and share the story, even if it was just so I could hear that it was ridiculous. And Sarah was my friend. Even if she hadn’t seen the boy at the rest area that day, she had at least been there.

“Dan?” she prompted.

So I made my decision. I pushed my plate to one side.

“Do you have a laptop?” I said.

Half an hour later, I had told her everything.

Sarah’s computer was on the kitchen table between us now, the screen open on the website about the Pied Piper. She kept scrolling up and down the page, as though there was something there that would help her make sense of what I had said but she couldn’t see it yet.

“Let’s start with this woman,” she said. “Rose Saunders. She has a history of mental illness, and she has gone off on her own before. So it’s possible she’s done that again for some reason?”

“Yes.”

“And from what you’ve told me, her partner doesn’t sound like themost reliable of witnesses. So his whole story could just be a load of bullshit?”

“Yes,” I said. “But then there’s the wallet I found.”

“Darren Field, right. Do you know where I’d guess he is right now? Balls deep in some other woman. I mean, I’m sorry to be blunt, but I know the type.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s possible.”

Sarah waited.

Then she sighed.

“But if not,” she said. “Then what exactly are you thinking? Darren Field can’t be the man Rose Saunders watched being murdered.”

“No.” I shook my head. “The timings of the disappearances are wrong for that. Rose saw someone else die. And then, because she went to the police, the killer took her again, and that time she was the victim. Darren Field was forced to watch her being killed. And now he’s vanished too.”

“Because he went to the police?”

“I don’t think he did,” I said. “All I know is that he spoke to my father, and maybe that counted. Perhaps in the killer’s mind, that was enough.”

“And so this might be why your father did what he did?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you think the killer might be… the boy you saw that day?”

“I don’t know.”

Sarah stared at me for a moment. I could tell that she was thinking things over, and there was something about the expression on her face that made me feel uneasy. It reminded me a little too closely of the one I’d learned to hide whenever I was guiding a vulnerable client toward an obvious conclusion they were trying to avoid.

“Ormaybe,” she said, “if Field reallyhasbeen murdered, that would mean someone else was abducted and made to watch him die. And if that person was your father, he might still be alive. You might be able to save him.”

“I don’t know.”

“And if the kid you sawwasn’tRobbie then maybe you can—”

---