A Son's Tale. Tara Quinn Taylor

you left class, I just wanted to make certain you were okay.”

      She shook her head. “My son’s missing.”

      “I know.”

      Of course he did. The whole class knew. Maybe the whole town did. She hoped to God the whole town knew.

      “Dr. Whittier? Are you Sammie’s doctor?” Morgan heard her mother’s voice as if from a distance greater than the couch across the room.

      Morgan looked back outside.

      Surely someone would have seen a ten-year-old boy wearing cutoff shorts, a Phoenix Suns T-shirt and black sneakers with a hole in the toe. Sammie was small, like her, but he wasn’t invisible. That blond hair, and those big brown eyes of his…

      “…her English professor…” Cal Whittier’s voice infiltrated briefly.

      Sammie had wanted her to practice catch with him the night before. She’d been too busy cutting decorations for Saturday’s picnic. She’d started at the day care when she’d been pregnant with Sammie. The job had offered free child care, which saved her enough money that she’d been able to get them the duplex in the nicer neighborhood rather than settling for an apartment in a less safe part of town.

      She’d worried, at first, that she wouldn’t qualify for the job, but Tennessee law allowed you to teach in a day care with only a high school diploma. She’d started out as an assistant teacher and then was offered the job of executive assistant to the director. She liked teaching, though, and she substituted for the full-time teachers whenever she could. She’d lucked out. She got to spend the first five years of Sammie’s life with him and earn money, too. And once Sammie had started school, Morgan’s boss had allowed Sammie to come to the day care after class to play and help with the little kids until Morgan was off work.

      As a bonus, she’d loved working with the preschoolers—she’d been a natural—and had found a career.

      “Morgan was in my class when she got the call about her son… .” She assumed Dr. Whittier was still addressing her mother and she turned back around.

      The three of them—Morgan, Whittier and Julie—were standing in the middle of her tiny living room, while her mother perched on the edge of the couch, her thumbs rubbing back and forth across opposite palms.

      “I’d just seen Sammie half an hour before he went missing,” Julie was telling Whittier. “I’d gone into his classroom to take a message to his teacher and he’d called out to me, flashing that big grin of his.”

      He’d just run away. Sammie was doing this to prove he could. To prove that he was old enough to be on his own. To prove…

      “They’re going over her computer now…” Julie continued, filling in the newcomer, just as they’d all done every time someone new arrived on the scene.

      Morgan had caught Sammie on the internet again the night before.

      She’d yelled at him. He knew that he wasn’t allowed to be on the internet without her. It wasn’t safe for kids.

      “I have parental controls in place but he knows how to hack through them.” Her voice sounded far away—a disconnect from the cottony haze of unreality that had her in its grip.

      “You think he might have met someone there?” Whittier’s piercing gaze confirmed that she was in the conversation.

      Morgan held on to that look. To him. And touched ground for a second. “No.” She shook her head again. “I caught him before he could clear history and cache. He was looking at basketball shoes.” She repeated what she’d told Detective Martin an hour before. And her mother and father when they’d arrived at the police station.

      “Does he clear history and cache regularly?”

      “He used to, before I caught on to the fact that he was sneaking on to the computer behind my back. Then he figured out that if I saw everything cleared, I’d know he’d been on.”

      “Do you have any idea what he was looking at?” His tone held the same deep concern he’d expressed the previous spring when she’d first told him about the son she was raising alone and struggling to let go of enough to give him some independence, but hold on to enough to keep him safe.

      “Basketball,” Morgan said, breathing normally for a moment. “Stats, schedules, shoes, basketball video games, autographed balls…”

      Whittier frowned. “If that’s all he was into, why delete the history?”

      “So I wouldn’t know he’d been on the computer without supervision.”

      “Because he thinks you baby him too much.”

      She’d appreciated Whittier’s conversation regarding her son these past months. Appreciated his male perspective.

      “I know you agreed with him when it came to showering. I have to trust him to get himself clean enough and to give him his space to grow into a young man. But there are just too many dangers on the internet. I still won’t let him go on unless I’m sitting there with him.”

      “And he probably sees that as more proof that you don’t trust him.”

      “Right. I can’t budge on this one. But I make sure that I put aside time to let him surf to his heart’s content. I want him to learn the internet, to know how to get around and to be privy to the wealth of good information out there. Seems like we’ve been to every basketball site ever uploaded. We look at all the baseball sites, too, but basketball is his first love. Did you know that in the history of the NBA only eight players were born on May 3? And that the most recent was in 1977? That was Tyronn Lue. He was drafted by the Denver Nuggets and played for ten years. Sammie’s birthday is May 3… .”

      “Morgan, Detective Martin needs to speak with you.” The booming—and openly reproving—voice rent through her like a shard of lightning. She should have been more focused on the moment, should have known the second the detective had reentered her residence, seeking her attention.

      She’d been rambling. Her father thought she talked too much. That she took a hundred words to say what could be said with ten.

      The detective was waiting for her in the foyer. “No one in the neighborhood has seen your son since the two of you left this morning.” Elaine Martin’s tone was all business now. “But we found one eyewitness, a seventy-year-old woman who says she saw Sammie on the corner of Bohemian and First.”

      Heart pumping, Morgan took a step back until she was almost leaning against the man who’d sired her. Bohemian was four blocks from school.

      “He was speaking with a man.”

      “What man?” She couldn’t stop the shaking that had control of her body.

      “We don’t know. We’re hoping you can help us.” Detective Martin pulled an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch copy of a hand sketch from the portfolio under her arm. “Do you recognize this man?”

      Morgan stared at the chiseled features. The longish hair. And the tattoo on the muscled shoulder. Some kind of spiked something.

      “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

      “Look closely, Morgan. Take your time,” Elaine Martin said. “Our witness says the man was in his mid-thirties and was well over six feet tall.”

      She wanted to know the man, wanted to find her son, and choked back tears as she shook her head.

      “Look again, Morgan.” Her father’s voice jarred her further. “You must have seen him someplace.”

      She stared at the photo, studying the tight cheeks, the shoulders. The tattoo. Eyes that were…human. Trying to place them all. Running the image through her mental memory bank. A coach? A relative at the day care? Someone at the grocery store? The mall? Or the pizza place?

      “I don’t know him… .” Her voice was only a thread—a