Page 13 of At Midnight Comes the Cry
He realized he had been on the road to this house since Hadley Knox had asked him where he thought Flynn might be. Clare had continued her own pointed comments, and while he figured he didn’t owe her anything—not after setting up an adult play date with Adolf and Eva—she knew people better than anyone else. When she said the least he could do was see how the Flynns were doing, he knew she was right.
He was glad he had listened to her. It turned out Kevin’s parents were so worried about their middle son’s disappearance that Sean Flynn volunteered on the spot to drive the three hours to Kevin’s rented house. Russ preferred to make the trip in his own truck, but Sean had come along. Now Russ grabbed his jacket from the backseat and got out. “Nice little place.”
“It’s small, but the back garden runs straight down to the river, with stairs and a wee dock. I told him if he wanted to buy, we could expand toward the road here or raise the roof to put in a second floor…” Sean’s voice died away.
Russ looked around. “Is that his mailbox? Across the street?”
“He got a PO box when he moved. Said it was more secure.”
“He’s right.” It also meant they weren’t going to get a look at anything that might have been sent to him. Ah, well. Kevin was a millennial, and none of them seemed to use actual, physical mail anyway.
Sean pulled the key from his pocket and unlocked the front door. They walked into a mudroom space at the end of a galley-stylekitchen. Everything was clean and neat. No clothing waiting in the stacked washer and dryer. He opened the fridge. Condiments, bottled water, a six-pack, but no food left to spoil. The freezer was stuffed with frozen meals and ice cream that had crystallized over.
“Does Kevin like to cook? Would he have milk and eggs and that sort of stuff?”
“He isn’t much to make his own dinner, but he likes cereal and his sandwiches.” Sean paused beside Russ. “That looks cleaned out to me.”
“Me, too.”
“Is that a good sign?”
“Well, it means he probably left of his own accord, and he had enough time to plan his departure and get rid of everything that might spoil.” He shut the refrigerator door. The kitchen opened into a great room beneath a peaked roof, with a TV-watching spot on one side and a desk and bookcases on the other. He could see the promised view of the river through a glass-fronted door framed with two wide picture windows. “Why don’t you check his bedroom and see what clothes or personal items might be missing. I’ll take a look at his desk.”
Sean vanished down a short hallway.
Kevin’s desk was neat, with pencils and pens corralled in a New York State Fair mug and pads of paper squared atop what looked like an old-fashioned desk diary. Russ opened that first, to discover it was a book journal. “Oh, kid.” He leafed through to make sure there weren’t any significant letters or memos hidden inside, but it was all jottings on novels and nonfiction. “You’re even more of a nerd than I thought.”
There was no landline, which didn’t surprise him. The only reason he and Clare still had one was because their jobs required they be reachable 24/7. Or rather, her job did. The only person who needed to reach him by phone these days was his mother. He opened the desk drawers—one was full of junk, a second had warranties and instruction manuals for the various appliances in the house, and a third held a loose stack of unopened mail. His eyebrows went up. Maybe Kevin didn’t live his life entirely online.
It took him a second to realize what he wasn’t seeing. “Hey, Sean. Did Kevin have a laptop?”
“Sure,” Sean called from the bedroom.
“Well, it’s gone now.”
Sean came back down the hallway. “So he carried it with him.”
“Looks like.” Unless someone else had been in here and taken it. “Anything from the bedroom? Clothes?” He stopped himself from asking,Condoms?
“It’s hard to say—it’s been a long time since I knew everything the boy put on. But there’s definitely some missing. Nothing nice-like. Work clothes, I think. He has a good down parka his mother got for him last Christmas that’s gone.” He glanced out the windows overlooking the river. “He keeps his camping gear in the shed. I’ll take a look.” He unlatched the door and headed toward a small structure near the property line.
Russ scooped the bills onto the surface of the desk and sat down to sort through them. There wasn’t as much variety as he had thought originally. Monthly statements for his auto loan, requests for donations to various charities, some letters in a crabbed hand—opened, good boy, Kevin—from an S. Flynn in Kilkenny, Leinster. Granny from the old country, no doubt.
He checked the postmarks on envelopes that had them. Nothing after the first week of October. Two months ago, when Kevin had asked for personal time off from the Syracuse PD.
Russ put most of the mail back into the drawer, with the exception of two possibly useful stacks. Kevin’s credit card sent him a monthly bill that listed every place he’d made a purchase. And he got a paper quarterly statement from E-ZPass, laying out the tolls he’d gone through. Russ set them aside to examine later.
He tried the bathroom next. The medicine chest was stocked with the sort of generic stuff everyone had—rubbing alcohol, Band-Aids, floss. A half-empty bag of disposable razors and a brand-new-looking toothbrush made it impossible to tell if Kevin had taken any necessities with him or had left them behind.
He heard the sound of the back door opening. “Russ?”
“In the bathroom.”
“Check and see if there’s a first aid kit in there, will ya?”
Russ opened the cupboard beneath the sink. Nothing there but TP and cleaning supplies. Outside in the hallway there was a linen closet between the bath and the bedroom, but the only things it held were sheets, pillowcases, and a short stack of mismatched towels. “I don’t see one.” He returned to the great room. “Maybe in the kitchen?”
Sean shook his head. “We always kept ours in the bathroom, and I expect the boy’d be the same. I think he took it with him.” He looked up at Russ. “His camping gear’s gone.”
