Page 55 of Middle of the Night

“Can’t we just stay in the yard?” he says.

“Do you see any places to explore in this yard?”

Ethan checks both sides of the lawn, for reasons unknown even to him. Obviously, there aren’t. “No,” he says.

“Exactly,” Billy replies.

Next to Ethan, Russ pipes up. “I’ll go exploring!”

“Me, too,” says Andy, abandoning his Matchbox car in the grass.

Billy kneels before his brother and puts a hand on his shoulder. Although he complains about Andy’s annoyingness all the time, Ethan’s never once seen Billy treat him with anything but affection. Being an only child, Ethan suspects he wouldn’t be the same way. He can’t imagine having a sibling. Sharing space. Sharing toys. Sharing parents. He gets the luxury of always being the center of attention.

“Only big kids can go,” Billy says, as if they’re teenagers and not a mere three years older than Andy.

“But I can act like a big kid.”

“I’ll play with you when I get back.” Billy then invokes the phrase he’s been using constantly since he and Ethan went to seeThe Lion Kingthree weeks earlier. “Hakuna matata, dude?”

Andy nods, dejected. “Okay.”

Then the three of them begin the march across the yard. First Billy, then Russ, then a reluctant Ethan. There’s something off about Billy today that he can’t quite pinpoint. He’s normally less determined, less self-assured. If Russ weren’t with them, he’d ask Billy what’s going on. But Russiswith them, a fact Billy no longer seems to mind as they pause at the tree line.

“You ready?” he asks.

“Totally,” Russ says with an enthusiasm that makes Ethan roll his eyes.

“Ethan?”

Billy looks his way, the curious glint in his eyes worrying Ethan. Something is definitely up.

“I guess,” Ethan says, resigned to endure whatever it is Billy clearly has planned. “Let’s go exploring.”

FIFTEEN

After groggily going through the motions of normal life—coffee, breakfast, shower—I’m back at the laptop by nine a.m., this time examining Hemlock Circle as it looks on Google Maps. From above, it appears as a series of circles within circles, like a target.

The bull’s-eye, if you will, is a small circular island of plants in the dead center of the cul-de-sac. There’s a Japanese maple, some stubby evergreens, swaths of ivy. Surrounding it is the street itself, which juts into the circle between the Wallaces’ and the Patels’. The outer circle is made up of the property lots—a thick band of green lawn on which sit six homes.

Surrounding all of it is the forest, which thins out a quarter mile behind the Wallace house, where it’s replaced by a state road with another, less-wooded residential area on the other side. I move the map in the opposite direction, nudging it northward until the screen is filled with the green of the woods behind my house.

I don’t stop until a brown rectangle breaks through the green.

The Hawthorne Institute.

At least I think it is. The land surrounding it is more overgrownthan I remember it being, with swaths of pixelated green obscuring what resides there. Even when I zoom in, it’s hard to make out individual buildings or other details. Almost as if it’s forbidden to see them from any angle.

Or maybe I’m just so exhausted I can’t see straight.

I barely slept a wink during the night, too occupied by thoughts of Billy, of ghosts, ofBilly’sghost. Now I’m running only on fumes and caffeine as I stare at the satellite view of the area, trying in vain to bring it into focus.

One of the things that kept me awake all night was this idea that Billy needs me to help him move on. That he’s spent the past thirty years in a ghostly limbo, waiting for my return. Since his remains were found there—and because it’s where we went to explore the day he vanished—the falls and the Hawthorne Institute seem like the most logical place to start.

I return to my old friend Google, beginning my search with Ezra Hawthorne. For someone worth a billion dollars when he died, his digital footprint is shockingly small. The search yields just a few archival photos showing a man whose looks barely changed over the years. A picture of him taken in the sixties bears a striking resemblance to one snapped in the nineties. In all of them, his overriding feature is paleness. White hair, white skin, white teeth. When that’s combined with the fact that he seemed only to have been photographed while wearing a black suit, a person couldn’t be faulted for thinking Ezra was actually a walking corpse.

Yet he lived for almost a hundred years, according to his meager Wikipedia page. Born in 1900, died in 1998. And that’s about it for pertinent information contained in his listing, which mostly details his status as the only child of Elsa Hawthorne, who was the only child of steel magnate L. B. Hawthorne. The institute is mentioned once, in a sentence so vague it could mean literally anything.

Hawthorne founded the Hawthorne Institute in 1937, and remained its head and primary benefactor until his death. It closed shortly thereafter.

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