It took him one hour to find her.
When the police asked how he did it, this time he told them something more like the truth.
“I was lost once as a kid. I suppose I know where to look.”
He saved the girl, but the price was high. His face was all over the news. A reporter with The Times put two and two together. The headline read, Former Lost Boy Finds Lost Girl.
After that, Jeremy went into search-and-rescue full-time. The princess he was supposed to find didn’t want to be found, apparently. But maybe if he looked for enough girls, he’d find her by accident.
He didn’t charge much for finding missing girls unless the parent or partner hiring him was rich, and then he charged through the nose. By the time Jeremy was twenty-three, he’d already found nine missing women and girls and two bodies.
A wealthy couple in Short Hills, New Jersey, offered him ten grand to find their ballerina daughter who had “eloped” with her dance master. Standing in the foyer of their seven-bedroom house, Jeremy said he’d take ten up front and ten when he found her. They liked that he said “when” and not “if,” so they paid him in cash.
The ballerina daughter, age sixteen, and her kidnapper were a few hours outside of Vegas when Jeremy caught up with them at an IHOP.
He nursed a black coffee while waiting for the police to come and arrest the dance teacher. The girl looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes, long hair barely brushed, her eyes darting around the restaurant as if seeking someone to see her, to save her. He met her eyes and nodded, hoping she would understand he was there to help her. She looked away.
While waiting, he wrote a postcard to Rafe that read simply, 23 September 2015—Las Vegas.
As he dug the postcard stamps from his wallet, his phone buzzed.
Someone had posted something to his Facebook page. Jeremy hated social media as much as he needed it as a cover. Occasionally, he posted safety tips so he’d seem like any other outdoor influencer—hug a tree; wear wool socks, not cotton; always travel with matches—instead of a freak with magic powers on a quest to find a missing princess.
Reluctantly, he opened the app to read a new comment from someone calling themselves Johnny Cosmic. The comment was one word—Liar.
Jeremy deleted the comment immediately. As a rule, when someone tried to start something with him online, he’d ask himself three questions:
Do I know if this person is over the age of twenty-one?
Do I know if they’re mentally stable?
Do I know if they’re under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or a cult leader?
If the answer was no to any or all of these three questions, he’d delete the comment. These were also the three questions he’d ask himself before sleeping with someone.
Mr. Cosmic wasn’t done with him, unfortunately. He posted a photo. Jeremy squinted at it, not sure who he was seeing or what. Then he knew.
Rafe. A picture of Rafe’s naked back. Jeremy recognized those long pink scars that ran from his shoulder to his hip. In the photo, Rafe appeared to be sound asleep on white sheets.
The caption to the photo read, This is not what a bobcat attack looks like. What is Ralph Howell hiding? Admit it! You were never lost.
Jeremy took a screenshot seconds before Johnny Cosmic deleted the comment and picture himself. Even the account was gone.
He stared at the screen. Was this a recent picture? He couldn’t see much of Rafe’s face, only in profile a little, his straw-blond hair falling over his cheek. And who took it? Someone he was sleeping with, obviously. Call him sexist, but he had trouble believing a woman would take pictures of her lover’s scars while he was unconscious. A man then? Jeremy ignored the stab of jealousy, sharp as a sword point in his stomach. Well, it wasn’t like he’d been an angel all these years.
Then Jeremy saw what he hadn’t seen at first, distracted as he was by Rafe’s body, so vulnerable and exposed in sleep. A wristband. A white wristband. Plastic from the looks of it, with black type on it.
A hospital wristband. Brook Haven. A nurse or an orderly or another patient had recognized Rafe’s name. One of the West Virginia Lost Boys “truthers” who believed there was more to the story than two fifteen-year-old boys lost in the woods for six months.
Jeremy hated them for two reasons. One, because they pulled insane and evil shit like this on Rafe. And two, because they were almost right.
Finally, the police arrived. Two uniforms. Jeremy subtly pointed out the girl, and the cops nodded, walked up to the table, and, five minutes later, the dance master was in handcuffs. Jeremy tried not to think about what would happen next to the girl. Her family would want to celebrate, to pretend everything could and would go back to normal. But it wouldn’t. He would tell them that “normal” and “back to normal” were two very different things.
Then he sent the screenshots to the lawyer he kept on retainer just in case Johnny Cosmic was more than an internet troll. At least once a week, someone contacted him online, taunting him, Tell the truth. We know you were abducted by aliens. We know.
If only it were that simple.
You’ll be lonely. Just don’t let it make you stupid.
Ten years after they went missing, Jeremy gave in and went back to Morgantown to see Rafe. Although Jeremy had gone no-contact with Rafe, apart from the postcards, his mum filled him in every time they spoke, so he knew exactly where and how to find him. At the Hotel Morgan, painting a block of rooms like he did every summer.
Jeremy checked in to the hotel, and the next morning, he waited at the bar, where he had a good view of the elevators. Rafe arrived at eight. He wore old canvas trousers covered in splotches of white paint, a gray V-neck T-shirt, and work boots. He looked thin, tired, the older brother of his teenage self. The older brother who didn’t sleep last night or the night before or the night before that.
Often, Jeremy wondered if his memory had exaggerated the strange beauty of Rafe’s eyes, that weird ice blue almost like a husky’s. But no. His eyes were exactly like Jeremy remembered. Rafe glanced vaguely in his direction once without a flicker of recognition. Jeremy was in a new Tom Ford suit, wearing glasses he didn’t need and a beard he was still getting used to.
Rafe waited for the elevator, and it took everything within Jeremy not to stand up, go to him, grab him by the shoulders, and say, “Don’t you know who you are? You haunt the nightmares of monsters. Old men take off their caps when someone speaks your name. You painted the portrait of a queen, and it hangs in the Great Hall. Don’t you remember?”
But no, of course, he didn’t remember.
Then the elevator door opened, and Rafe got in, then the door shut. He was gone.
Jeremy took the stairs up to his room, stripped out of his clothes, and then laid naked on the cold tile floor. He didn’t vomit, but it was a close call.
They’d stayed at this hotel once, he and Rafe. His mother had been given a free night in one of the suites when she agreed to play piano for a friend’s daughter’s wedding. She gave the room to him and Rafe and slept at home in her own bed. They stayed up until four in the morning eating, talking, never even turning the TV on because, whether they would admit it or not, they were both hoping something would happen. It didn’t, because no one on earth was more chickenshit than a boy in love with another boy who doesn’t know he’s in love with him.
The only reason Jeremy knew Rafe was also hoping something would happen was because, eventually, they’d fessed up. One night, he, Rafe, and Queen Skya had played Shanandoah-rules croquet by lantern light in the courtyard behind the palace.
Every wicket they missed, Skya said, they had to tell her a secret. So Jeremy offered the embarrassing confession that he didn’t want to learn how to hunt. He just wanted an excuse to hang out with Rafe. Then Rafe missed and said he had purposely forgotten to pack a T-shirt that night they were staying at the Morgan, so maybe Jeremy would give him one of his. He slept in the shirt every night for a week.
