After spending the night at Charlie's, he and I spent the morning playing tag and stick ball in the back yard. For the latter, we obviously didn't have enough people to make a team, so we resorted to merely throwing the ball to each other and seeing how far we could bat it. We had to go fetch it every time. After Charlie hit three home runs into the neighbor's yard, we called it quits. Instead we used the sticks to sword fight. I won after stabbing Charlie in the chest. I felt accomplished. Usually, he ended up chopping off my head.
After some time, we strolled down to the library to see what if we could find any news paper articles about recent child abductions. At first, we didn't find much. Then, after we starting digging a little more, we found what we were looking for in a two-week-old issue. There was this little boy named Ricky Van Sutton, who mysteriously disappeared from his home about three weeks back. Apparently, his mother saw him watching TV one minute, then, when she turned her back to gather laundry for the washing machine, he was gone. She also said that, about a day before his disappearance, Ricky had mentioned seeing a "scary, tall man" on the other side of the street. When the mother walked out there to see what he was talking about, there was no one there. She then punished her son for lying.
Unfortunately, Ricky's photo in the paper did not match the appearance of the boy in the bushes. This disappointed us. However, about four days farther back, there was mention of a similar vanishing of a girl named Molly. The article made no mention of a tall man. Then, from a two-month old paper, we discovered reports of two boys who disappeared less than 48 hours apart. In both stories, there were accounts of the children seeing a thin, tall man. One of them even detailed that he was wearing a business suit.
We were excited. For us, the most exciting thing that ever happened was some kid getting sent to the principal's office for drawing crude pictures of the teacher. This, although morbid, was amazing to us. We needed to find more.
We then started going through older records from the '50s. We only found one mention of a kidnapping, but it was intriguing. In the article in question, a father lost his four-year-old son at an amusement park while he was occupied with buying cotton candy. Minutes before, the son mentioned something about "a really skinny man who stared at [him] without a face." The dad had gone to question the guy about why he was staring at his child, and making him cry, but he supposedly left before he could even say anything. When the father brought this up to the cops, they called him crazy.
We couldn't get much more information before the librarian kicked us out for being in there without parental accompaniment. We didn't care, though. We had what we needed.
After that, we walked back to my to Charlie's house with smiles on our faces. We ate lunch with his parents and then went back up to his room to watch TV. When we got there, Charlie turned to me. "I wanna ask you something." He said, "How do you know so much about crime scenes?"
"My uncle's a cop." I answered. Charlie nodded.
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