“I’m going to check the playground,” I said, even though the teenagers were not paying much attention to me. I ran toward the swings, my mother’s request to return to her and Lucy forgotten.

I began my search for clues in a methodical fashion, using my foot to mark off areas in the sand to examine. I found a man’s watch almost immediately. It lay in the sand near one of the swings and had probably come off when a father had been pushing his child. I found a playing card—the two of clubs—along with numerous Popsicle sticks. And then I found a clue that sent a chill up my spine: a small piece of blue cloth!

I ran back to the lifeguard stand just as Ned was climbing down the ladder.

“Ned!” I called as I neared him. “Look what I found near the swings.” I held the piece of cloth out to him and he took it from my hand but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. His face looked grim, his mouth a straight, tight line.

“It might be from the boy’s trunks,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “No. His trunks are plaid, not solid.”He looked distracted as he handed the cloth back to me. “But thanks for trying and for keeping your eyes open.” He started toward the parking lot at a run, and Isabel walked up to me, frowning.

“Don’t bug him, Jules,” she said. Lifting her hair off her neck, she slipped a rubber band around it to form a sloppy ponytail. “This is an emergency. There’s no time to fool around.”

“I know it’s an emergency,” I said, and I walked away from her, annoyed.

“Come on, Julie,” my mother called again. She was folding the blanket and I walked over to help her.

“I want to stay, Mom,” I said, taking the hem of the blanket in my hands.

“You’ll only get in the way.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

My mother took the folded blanket into her arms and looked around us. People were still huddled together in small groups, talking. Some of the adults were racing this way and that, searching for the boy, I guessed, although the beach was so small you could nearly see all of it from where we were standing. The only areas hidden from view were the patches of tall beach grass at either end of the sandy crescent, and I watched a couple of women disappear into them, calling, “Donnnnneeeee! Donnnnneeeee!”

I heard sirens in the distance and looked toward the road. Ned and Isabel and a few other people stood in the parking lot, and Ned waved at the ambulance and the police car as they came into view.

“Please, Mommy.” Lucy grabbed our mother’s arm. “I want to go home.”

Lucy hated the sound of sirens. They must have reminded her of riding in the ambulance after the long-ago accident she’d been in with our mother.

“All right,” Mom said. “Pick up the thermos and we’ll leave. Julie, you can stay, but be sure you let the police do their job.”

“I will.”

“And be home by three. Not a second later, all right?”

A couple of men walked past us, one of them saying to the other that the bay might need to be dragged.

“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.

“Never mind,” my mother said. She picked up her beach bag and I saw tears in her eyes. She probably thought the boy was dead.

My mother and Lucy headed for the parking lot and I looked around me, trying to figure out what to do. My gaze lit on the pier. No one was out there, and I wondered if I could get a better look at the water from the end of it. I started running in that direction as a second police car pulled into the parking lot.

By the time I reached the end of the pier, there were no children at all in the water. Adults waded in the shallow section, eyes downcast as they looked for the little boy’s body. I studied the water below the pier, thinking that if the boy had made it onto the pier and then fallen in, I might see him under the water’s surface. But the water was too dark and, after a while, my eyes hurt from trying to pierce it.

I walked back down the pier toward the beach, and when I reached the area where the wood of the pier met the sand, I saw small footprints. They headed away from the beach toward the parking lot and they were the only set of footprints going in that direction. I followed them to where they disappeared into the crushed shells of the parking lot. Even when I got down on my knees and looked very closely, I could see how the bleached white bits of shell had been disturbed by tiny feet. I followed the footprints across the entire width of the parking lot, heading toward the clubhouse which was a nice, woody-smelling building where the kids in the area could play bingo and other games on rainy days. I picked the footprints up again in the sand at the other end of the parking lot. It was almost too easy. The footprints led directly to the rear of the clubhouse and stopped short at the lattice that enclosed the building’s crawl space. I tugged at one of the seams in the lattice and it pulled away easily. Kneeling down, I crawled inside, and there I found little Donnie Jakes, sound asleep on the cool, shaded sand.

I got a ride home a little after three from a policeman named Officer Davis, to whom I’d turned over the boy after I found him. Officer Davis walked me to my front door and told my mother that I had found Donnie Jakes, alive and well. Mom burst into tears, and it took me a while to realize it was not my role in finding him that made her cry, but rather that the child, even though he was a stranger to her, was safe.

“We’d have found him eventually,” Officer Davis said to her, once she’d mopped the tears from her face with a tissue, “but Julie here saved us a lot of work.” He told her I was an excellent sleuth. He told her I was a hero.

The next day, the Ocean County Leader ran the following headline on its front page: Boy Found Unharmed. The first sentence of the article was something like, Twelve-year-old Julie Bauer, aka the Nancy Drew of Bay Head Shores, helped police locate three-year old Donald P. Jakes, who had wandered off from his parents’ blanket on the BHS beach.

Within twenty-four hours, everyone knew my name. The mayor called to thank me, telling me once again that I was a hero, and Daddy came to the bungalow a day early to take us all out to dinner to celebrate. I was full of pride and self-importance, and I started thinking of myself as charmed, as though I could do no wrong. If only that had been the case.

CHAPTER 25

Julie

“I told him.” Ethan’s voice was a soft monotone on my speaker phone.

I was sitting at my desk, once again attempting to work on Chapter Four, and I quickly picked up the receiver.

“What did he say?” I asked. “And how are you?” I’d been waiting for his call, knowing he planned to talk to his father this morning. I had not yet gotten up the courage to call my mother.

“I’m fine,” he said, “but I won’t pretend it was easy.”

“Did you go to his house?” I knew that had been his plan.

“Uh-huh. I told him I’d bring over some pastries for breakfast and I think he knew something was up. So, we sat in his kitchen, and first I told him about Ned’s letter. He looked…God, he looked awful, Julie. Shocked. His face was all…it just crumpled in on itself. I told him I didn’t think it meant that Ned had done it, and he started yelling…well not yelling, exactly, but he said how he knew Ned didn’t do it better than anyone, because he’d been with Ned that night, just like he told the police. And then he said, ‘I hope you didn’t do anything with that letter. We should burn it.’”

I winced. “Oh, Ethan,” I said.

“I told him that I took it to the police and that they spoke with you and me and that they’ve reopened the case and will probably want to talk with him.” The words came out in that monotone again. He sounded tired.

“What did he say?”

Ethan sighed. “He got up and walked around the kitchen for a while. He limps. Man, it just about breaks my heart to see how fast he’s aged since my mother died. He said it seems unfair that Ned’s not here to defend himself. He kept asking me why I took it. ‘Why did you feel the need to take it?’ he kept saying. I told him I had to take it, that it was the only decent thing to do.”

“Of course,” I murmured, reassuring myself that it had been the right thing, even with the authorities looking in my direction for their suspect.

“I knew he’d finally see it that way,” Ethan said. “He’s always had this strong sense of justice. Of right and wrong. And finally he sat down again and said he wished I hadn’t, but that he understood. He had tears in his eyes and I asked him why and he said he was thinking about George Lewis and his family. He looked like he was going to…I don’t know. Fall apart, or something. I felt like I was killing him, Julie.”

The way he said my name made me feel close to him. I wished he were sitting next to me so I could wrap my arms around him.

“He finally said I did the right thing and that he’ll be glad to talk to the police because he’s the only voice Ned has now. He’s afraid the finger’s going to end up pointing at Ned anyhow, no matter what he says.”

“I’m sorry it was so hard,” I said. “For both of you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I feel relieved that he knows now. That he heard it from me and not the police. When do you plan to tell your mother?”

“Today,” I said, knowing I couldn’t put it off any longer. “I’ve got to get it over with.”

“Do you want me to come up there?” he asked. “I could be with you when you tell her.”

I smiled at his offer. It was tempting; I wanted to see him again. But I knew this was something I had to do alone.

“I’ll be okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

I walked the two blocks to my mother’s house as soon as I got off the phone with Ethan. I found her in the backyard where she was clipping blue hydrangea blossoms to bring into the house, and she looked up in surprise when she spotted me. I didn’t often drop in unannounced.