Vanished by Joseph Finder

course.”
    “I’ll do what I can, Nick.”
    “Good. You don’t mind me poking around in Roger’s study for a bit, do you?”
    “Of course not. Actually . . . would you like to spend the night in one of the guest rooms?”
    “No need. Thanks anyway.”
    “No, I mean . . . would you mind spending the night here? I’m just feeling really spooked. That terrifying e-mail from Roger, then the way it vanished? That just scared the hell out of me, Nick. I’m scared about whatever’s going on with Roger, and I’m scared for Gabe, and . . . Jesus, Nick, I’m too scared to even think clearly about anything anymore. Would you, please?”
    “Of course. Though I’ll have to get out of here early so I can stop at my place and change.”
    “I’ll probably be gone by the time you leave. I get to work early.”
    “What about Gabe?”
    “He gets picked up by his car pool. Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He’s used to being alone here in the morning.”
    “Roger always left early, too?”
    She nodded. “Sometimes we drive in together, unless he wants to get in to work before me.”
    I noticed that I’d referred to Roger in the past tense—as if he was dead—and she didn’t catch it.
    “Poor Gabe,” I said. “Latch-key child.”
    “Yeah, right,” she said, getting up and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. She picked up a couple of remote controls, and switched off the TV and the cable box.
    On her way out of the living room, she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think you know me well enough to know that I’m not, you know, a scaredy-cat. I don’t panic, you know that. But after the last couple of days, when I think of Gabe, and I think—”
    “You don’t have to explain.”
    “I’m scared out of my mind. Okay? I’m just flat-out terrified.”
    She turned around quickly, as if she was embarrassed she’d been so open, and she walked toward the door.
    “Lauren,” I called out.
    She stopped, turned her head.
    “I’m not going to let anything happen to you guys,” I said.
    Lauren whirled around, half walked, half ran toward me, and threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she whispered.
    Then just as quickly she let go. “I’ll get your room ready.”

18.

    I never thought I’d see a home office more grandiose than my father’s. Until I saw my brother’s.
    Dad’s library made a certain pompous kind of sense, since it was located in a thirty-room mansion built in 1919 on a ninety-acre estate in Bedford, New York. That’s horse country, of course, where women do their shopping in jodhpurs or jeans with holes at the knees and men walk around in flip-flops and everyone gets Lyme disease.
    Roger, though, had carved his library out of a far more modest, suburban house. He’d knocked out a couple of rooms on the second floor to create a two-story stage set, complete with a catwalk, and lined with leather-bound books he’d never even opened, probably sold by the yard. Here, my brother got to feel as important, as baronial, as I was sure he didn’t at work, where he no doubt just pissed people off.
    I found his laptop right where it belonged, on his ornately carved mahogany desk. It was next to an open copy of a book called Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America. Roger was a “birder”: a bird-watcher.
    That was a hobby I didn’t get, like most aspects of my older brother. I have no hobbies, but I basically understand why a guy might want to restore vintage muscle cars or brew his own beer or collect sports memorabilia. I know accountants who wield nothing more dangerous than a sharpened number two pencil at work but have workshops in their basements with table saws that could slice off your thumb in half a second. I know mild-mannered pediatric pulmonologists who race remote-control monster trucks or rock out on their Fender Stratocasters by themselves when they get home at night.
    But getting up at three in the morning to get pooped on by a