Around 6 p.m., three hours after the Shifflett boys were discovered missing, the police named a second major suspect behind Kelley Street’s Vanished Boys—as the local media would dub them in the days that followed. Frederick Shanks, a red-headed man in his thirties, was the former manager of the nearby Subway restaurant. When the folks on Kelley Street heard about Shanks, they sighed in relief: so far, the suspects were white men.
All afternoon Byron had been working up the courage to tell the police and Miranda about his ex-boss. Frederick Shanks, he said, traded Subway sandwiches for rocks of crack. Byron had discovered this, and at his sister’s urging, told the owner of the franchise about it. The owner fired Shanks, but didn’t press charges or turn him in, which Byron thought was stupid, but it wasn’t up to him. And besides, the owner had promoted him to manager. A week prior to the boys’ disappearance, Shanks drove down Kelley Street, saw Byron with the boys in Miranda’s yard, and shouted threats. He called him a job-stealer, a narc, and a no-account nigger, and said he’d kill him and the boys, too. Byron didn’t tell Miranda about the incident, he said, because he didn’t want her to worry.
Hearing this, Miranda froze, her jaw muscles working through the thick skin of her cheeks. “Somebody threatened my kids, and you didn’t tell me?” she said. She shoved him from the couch. “Get out. I can’t even look at you.”
Byron protested to no avail, and a detective took him to the station to question him, since Miranda didn’t even want him in another room of her house. He was there until ten that night, and when an officer dropped him off at Miranda’s, she wouldn’t answer the door. Byron crossed Kelley Street to his sister’s house. Bree was making a pitcher of iced tea when the front door squealed open but didn’t slam shut. She knew it was her brother. He was the only person she had to remind to close windows and doors so they wouldn’t waste the air conditioning and so Antonio wouldn’t get out.
“Yo, B,” he called.
Bree didn’t answer. Her name had already been chopped from Sabrina to Brina to Bree. If she accepted B, what next? Would she be nameless, would her name be a silent release of air from the lips? She imagined people opening and closing their mouths noiselessly like goldfish and expecting her to answer.
“B?” Byron was a big man—his heavy footsteps rattled the dishes in the china cabinet as he crossed through the dining room. Bree closed her eyes and answered him. Her brother had had his heart broken that day by the loss of the boys, and she wouldn’t be cold. He appeared in the kitchen doorway and told her about Miranda kicking him out, and why. Bree stirred scoops of sugar into the pitcher of iced tea.
“It was stupid,” he said, “but I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
Bree arched her eyebrows. “When it comes to a woman’s children, nothing like that can be brushed off,” she said. “Think about Mama—she would’ve tracked Shanks down and wrung his neck if he’d threatened one of us, no matter how old we were.”
Byron began to shake. “Shit, Bree,” he said. “I fucked up.”
Bree stood on her toes and hugged his neck. She hadn’t seen her brother cry in a long time, but this act of comforting was familiar. Even though he was one year her senior, she felt as if she had raised him, was raising him even now. Their parents had died eight years ago, only three months apart from one another. (“Now that’s love,” their neighbors and family had said.) Bree had been nineteen, Byron twenty, and somehow, she’d stepped into their mother’s role of humoring and catering to Byron. She fed him, co-signed car loans (something her father told her never to do), made payments, and then sold the cars when he couldn’t make the payments. She’d had to pick him up after his failed business schemes: selling discounted adult magazines, peddling vacuum cleaners, Amway. For ten years, Bree had worked in the business office at James Madison University. She stood at a counter and explained to students that they couldn’t register for classes because they owed somebody money. Bree told herself it was her brother—nobody or nothing else—that had kept her on Kelley Street, in her parents’ house, had kept her from going to college, except for a few classes at Blue Ridge Community.