“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”
“Should I tell her, Bree?” Crolley asked. His eyes still studied the carpet. “Should I?”
Bree knew that telling wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t bring the kids back—it wouldn’t solve the case—and Miranda would only lash out at Crolley and nothing good would come of it. Not a thing. Even if there was a lesson in all of it—for Miranda, for Byron, for Crolley—they wouldn’t learn it, because there was too much of a mess to swim through to get to it. And the boys would still be gone.
“Never,” Bree said. “Don’t ever tell her.”
They sat in silence for a long time, until Byron’s heavy footsteps clomped on the porch. Crolley stood. He looked Bree in the eye then for the first time, and she took his hand quickly and squeezed it, letting it go as Byron walked through the front door.
“He’s leaving, Byron,” Bree said. “Don’t say a word.”
She led Crolley to the door and he left without looking back, walking into the night toward his house.
“What was he doing here?” Byron asked her. He yanked off his Subway hat and flung it to the couch.
Bree had never lied to her brother before. “He came to tell me that he was in love with me,” she said.
Byron laughed and laughed. A tide of anger washed over Bree, because she wasn’t sure if he was laughing at the idea of a man like Crolley loving her, or at the idea that anyone could love her. Byron, she thought, had no reason to laugh at anybody.
“I’m leaving as soon as I get another U-Haul.” It was another lie that just spilled out, except it wasn’t a lie at all, she realized, because she really would start packing again and she’d leave for real this time.
Byron’s face froze. “Why?” His voice shook.
“You don’t need me here,” Bree said.
“I do,” Byron whispered. “These are hard times, B. What about Miranda? What about the boys? We need you.”
Bree felt the tide of anger slip away, but she was left confident, calm. “Nobody needs me here to find those boys, Byron,” she said. “Me staying or leaving won’t make a difference, and it won’t bring them back. Nobody needs me here.”
“But I do,” Byron repeated.
“You can call me.” Bree patted his shoulder. “Good night, Big Brother,” she said and went to her room.
Two days later, Bree Wilson left when the sky was the color of a plum. It was a Saturday morning. Kelley Street was quiet and her brother stood alone on the front porch. He’d told the neighbors about her leaving, hoping they’d convince her to stay. But they only came by with hugs, kisses, and tears—like they had the first time she tried to go—because why waste energy trying to convince somebody to stay someplace they didn’t want to be? As she drove away from her Mama and Daddy’s house, boys and girls rushed from their houses, yelling, Bree! Miss Bree! in their Looney Tunes pajamas, in their Popsicle-stained basketball shorts and plastic flip-flops. They ran after her U-Haul, waving and blowing her kisses, but by then she had turned left off Kelley Street on her way to the interstate and she didn’t see them.
Crolley left Kelley Street next, just days later, returning to help his aging parents on their farm in Rockingham County. The police thought his move suspicious, but they still had no evidence against him, and since he’d stayed on the street for more than two weeks after the disappearances, it didn’t seem like he was really running away from anything. They searched his empty house for the second time, hunted his backyard for recently disturbed dirt, but found nothing. Miranda watched the search from her front stoop, a sweatshirt wrapped around her shoulders. September was fading into autumn. She remembered that soon the Halloween dolls—curly-haired girls in pumpkin costumes—would be on display at the shop. She thought she might try to go to work tomorrow and maybe afterward go shopping for Halloween costumes, just in case. Josh had wanted to be Wolverine, Dusty, a snowman.
Next door, the Yates boy finally mowed the yard for his father. The teenager’s head bobbed to music, and the overgrown grass and early fallen leaves spat from the mower’s chute onto Miranda’s yard in large, moist clumps. The sight of the boy struggling to mow the ankle-high grass burst something inside of Miranda and sent her to bed for another four days. When she did come outside again, somebody had mowed for her, and whether it had been the Yates boy, or Don Crolley, or Byron Wilson, or somebody else entirely, she’d never know.