Touch of Evil by Colleen Thompson

bus.”
    “I guess it’s possible,” Justine said. On Thursdays, Gwen met the bus at the house.
    “I’m calling the school right now,” she said, but she’d barely turned toward the house when a realization bumped against her chest wall. “Wait a minute. I just heard the bus pass by here a few minutes before you came.”
    Ed Truitt came outside to join them, looking around eagerly. “Where’s that handsome grandson of mine?”
    “We aren’t sure, Dad,” Justine told him.
    His face froze as he looked from Justine to Gwen. “Aren’t sure? What the hell do you mean, you aren’t sure?”
    Flinching at his tone, Gwen explained what she’d been told at the school and her theory that Noah might have ridden the bus home. “Maybe he did get off the bus, but he didn’t come straight in for some reason.”
    They looked around, gazes touching on the stable, shed,and detached garage, then sweeping an empty pasture, save for old Moonshadow grazing solo in the distance. There were a million places where an undersized nine-year-old could hide. But to Justine, that made no sense. Noah always ran directly inside for milk, string cheese (warmed in the microwave for exactly eight seconds), and some grapes or half an apple, the same after-school snack to which he’d clung religiously for three years.
    He wasn’t a boy who varied his routine. Not willingly, anyway. Anxiety curdled in her stomach and reawakened the sick throb in her head.
    Justine turned to her father. “Did you say anything to him this morning?”
    “What? No. He went off with Mrs. Crane—Say…”
    Justine finished his thought. “Maybe Marianne thought she was supposed to bring him by, and she’s heading this way with him now. Let me run inside and try to reach her.”
    Her father nodded. “You do that, and we’ll check the outbuildings. ”
    Hurrying back inside, Justine fought back the crush of memories, the calls she’d made as a deputy and during her short time as sheriff. The horror-stricken faces of desperate mothers, frantic fathers, reporting missing children. The splintering of hope, of love, of the life the family took for granted in those cases when the missing were found dead. Drowned in a neighbor’s weedy pond or filthy pool. At the bottom of a rooftop. And in those worst, most heartbreaking of occasions, at the hands of some adult.
    Stop it. Stop now. Think about all those times when you found the kid safe. Think like a professional and get your act together.
    But as Justine dialed the school’s number, her mind spun like a roulette wheel, an ivory ball bouncing from one black question to the next. What if last night’s assault had been something more than a crime of opportunity, a general lashingout against local law enforcement? What if, instead, something personal was playing out, some grudge that could translate into an attack against her son?
    “Lakeview Elementary,” a harried-sounding woman answered. But then, the school’s secretary always sounded stressed and put-upon.
    Justine stayed on the line long enough to learn that Marianne Crane had left early for a doctor’s appointment, definitely without Noah. And that Noah’s teacher, who’d been supervising student pickup after school, could have possibly been distracted by a fight that broke out between two boys while she was ushering various children to the vehicles that pulled up.
    “This happens every couple weeks or so.” A scintilla of compassion competed with the know-it-all in the secretary’s voice. “The parents always find their kids safe and sound. Every one of them in the sixteen years I’ve worked here.”
    “My child’s disabled,” Justine shot back. “He’s barely verbal. He rarely makes eye contact, ignores the other kids, and can’t handle meeting strangers. Does that sound like the kind of boy who suddenly makes a new friend and decides to play at his house?”
    “Justine—Mrs. Wofford. Hurry,” Gwen shouted from outdoors.
    Unable to