Chapter 12: Nobody's Boy

Jesse made a sound.

He pulled the boy up off the floor and held him so hard the boy's sneakers came off the boards.

"Ow," the boy said into his shoulder. "Jesse, you're crushing me. Why do you have a beard?"

"Because I'm thirty-three," Jesse said, and started laughing and crying at the same time.

The chief stood by the cabinet with his hand still on his holster.

He was staring at the boy.

"Who in the hell is that?" he said.

Jesse looked at him over his brother's head.

"You put me in the hospital over him," he said. "That's who."

The chief didn't know what he meant.

I could see it in his face that he really didn't.

The boy looked around the tower room, at the camera on its tripod and the velvet chair.

"I was just sitting down," he said. "She said hold still and count to eight."

"That was twelve years ago, Bud," Jesse said.

The boy stared at him.

"We have to go," I said. "Right now."

The chief moved to block the door, and then he looked at the broken holder on the floor, still glowing faintly at the cracks.

He stepped back and let us pass.

We went down the back stairs with Jesse's arm around his brother's shoulders.

The back stairs came out in the kitchen, and the kitchen opened onto the parlor.

Forty women in sundresses turned to look at us.

They looked at Jesse in his lawn service shirt and at me with my hair coming down.

Mostly they looked at the skinny boy in the Braves shirt.

Not one of them knew who he was.

Jesse's mother had played piano at First Methodist for thirty years, and half of these women had sung while she played.

They'd brought her casseroles when her husband died.

They looked at her younger son.

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