Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [2]
“All right then, bye-bye,” Connie said, but Will didn’t respond, his head downcast. The babysitter touched his arm. “I love you, Will.”
Ellen felt a twinge of jealousy, however unreasonable. “Thanks again,” she said, and Connie left, letting in an icy blast of air. Then she closed and locked the door.
“I DREW IT!” Will dissolved into tears, and the drawing fluttered to the hardwood floor.
“Aw, baby. Let’s have some dinner.”
“All by myself!”
“Come here, sweetie.” Ellen reached for him but her hand hit the bag of Chinese food, knocking it to the floor and scattering the mail. She righted it before the food spilled, and her gaze fell on the white card with the photo of the missing boy.
Uncanny.
She picked up the bag of Chinese food and left the mail on the floor.
For the time being.
Chapter Two
Ellen put Will to bed, did a load of laundry, then grabbed a fork, napkin, and a cardboard container of leftover Chinese. She took a seat at the dining-room table, and the cat sat at the other end, his amber eyes trained on her food and his tail tucked around his chubby body. He was all black except for a white stripe down the center of his face and white paws like cartoon gloves, and Will had picked him because he looked so much like Figaro from the Pinocchio DVD. They couldn’t decide whether to name him Figaro or Oreo, so they’d gone with Oreo Figaro.
Ellen opened the container, forked chicken curry onto her plate, then dumped out the leftover rice, which came out in a solid rectangle, like sand packed in a toy pail. She broke it up with her fork and caught sight of the Coffmans, her neighbors across the shared driveway, doing their homework at their dining-room table. The Coffman boys were tall and strong, both lacrosse players at Lower Merion, and Ellen wondered if Will would play a sport in high school. There had been a time when she couldn’t imagine him healthy, much less wielding a lacrosse stick.
She ate a piece of chicken, gooey with bright yellow curry, which was still warmish. It hit the spot, and she pulled over the mail, sorted out the bills, and set them aside. It wasn’t the end of the month, so she didn’t have to deal with them yet. She ate another bite and was about to daydream her way through the Tiffany catalog when her gaze fell on the white card. She paused in midbite and picked it up. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? At the bottom it read, American Center for Missing and Abducted Children (ACMAC).
Ellen set her fork down and eyed the photo of the missing boy again. There was no blaming the lighting this time. Her dining room had a colonial brass candelabra that hung from the ceiling, and in its bright light, the boy in the photo looked even more like Will. It was a black-and-white photo, so she couldn’t tell if they had the same eye color. She read the caption under the photo:
Name:
Timothy Braverman
Resides:
Miami, Florida
DOB:
1/19/05
Eyes:
Blue
Hair:
Blond
Stranger Abduction:
1/24/06 *
She blinked. They both had blue eyes and blond hair. They were even about the same age, three years old. Will had just turned three on January 30. She examined the photo, parsing the features of the missing boy. The similarity started with his eyes, which were a generous distance apart, and the shape, which was roundish. They both had small noses and shared a grin that was identically lopsided, turning down on the right side. Most of all, there was a likeness in their aspect, the steady, level way that they looked at the world.
Very weird, Ellen thought.
She reread the caption, noticed the asterisk, and checked the bottom of the card. It read “Timothy Braverman, Shown Age-Progressed to Three Years Old.” She stumbled over the meaning of “age-progressed,” then it registered. The picture of Timothy Braverman wasn’t a current photo, though it looked like one. It was an approximation of how the boy would look right now, a projection done by computer or artist. The thought eased her, unaccountably, and she remembered the