Page 6 of Silence of the Missing

He wasn’t here.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark and, other than the far-off scurrying of some animal in the underbrush and the occasional hoot of an owl, it was silent. I’d gone in fairly deep and there was no one human here, I thought, other than myself.

I called out for him one more time, hoping against hope he’d answer, but my rational mind taunted me. I knew, with deep-down certainty, he was no longer here. The thought made me sick to my stomach.Where could he have gone?

I emerged out of the woods to find Mom waiting, holding Vanilla in her arms like a baby. She cocked her head, her eyebrows coming together in confusion when she saw I was alone. “Sammy? What’s going on? Is he okay?”

It took me a moment to find my voice. “He’s not there.”

“Wait. What? I don’t get it.” She took a few steps toward the entrance to the woods.

“Mom. I said he isn’t there.”

“He’s gotta be. Where could he go?” She handed me Vanilla, sighing with impatience. “You stay here.” She marched off into the woods with a determination that screamedLet Mom take care of things. Because, obviously, her boy wasn’t capable.

For once, I hoped she was right.

I listened as she made her way into the woods, the crunching of leaves underfoot, a small gasp when she must have run headlong into a tree trunk.

She emerged ten minutes or so later, her face a mask of worry and confusion. There were scratches on her forehead. There wasn’t much power behind her voice as she said, “You’re right. He’s not there. No one is.”

I felt a lump the size of a tangerine in my throat, the stinging burn of tears in my eyes. “What could have happened? Where could he be?”

Mom shook her head. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know. I wish I did.” She stared off for a moment into the shadows. Then she looked at me. “We need to get home.”

“We can’t just leave without him.”

“Sweetie, you looked.Isearched. We both know he isn’t there.” She glanced down at her watch. “It’s been, like, a half hour, maybe more, since he wandered off.”

“Maybe he’s lost?”

“Oh Sammy, I don’t think so. He said he was going to use the bathroom. Why wouldn’t he just do that and come back?”

I had no answer.

She took a step closer. “We need to get home so we can call his family and the cops.” She shook her head and my own fear and terror were reflected in her own eyes. “There’s probably going to be a rational explanation. We’ll laugh about this tomorrow.”

I didn’t think so. In fact, I wondered, in that moment, with the smell of fireworks still lingering in the close night air, if I’d ever laugh again.

V

We didn’t laugh about his disappearance the next day, nor the next, nor the one after that.

We never laughed, because Jeb never came back.

Over the course of July, the whole town united to do everything they could to find him. Our small local police force went above and beyond in their search, organizing volunteer groups to literally beat the bushes in the fields and woods surrounding our small town. Grids were set up; search dogs were deployed. Divers came in from Pittsburgh and dragged the Ohio and a couple of nearby lakes. A tip line was established. Flyers plastered the town—shop windows, telephone poles, and on any surface that could be used as a bulletin board.

For a while, it was all anyone talked about—how the Kleber boy vanished into thin air just after the bursting lights and booms of a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Jeb’s parents, distraught, went on three local network news stations to make tearful, impassioned pleas for the return of their son. I watched them on the little portable Mom kept on the kitchen counter, so she could view her soaps while she washed dishes or made supper. Jeb’s mom looked tired—dark bags under her eyes, her platinum-dyed hair greasy and plastered to her head. Her eyes shone with tears ready to fall. His dad was a scarecrow—emaciated in a faded red and black plaid flannel shirt too warm for summer—with about as much emotion. His eyes were dark and dead.

Callers deluged the tip lines in the early days with sightings.

Jeb was with an older man with a shaved head in a black Lincoln Continental.

Someone spotted him at the Orange Julius in the Beaver Valley Mall.

He was with a gang of young, presumably runaway, teenage boys in a bad neighborhood in Akron.

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