The pager on my belt squeals with familiar tones. Tom, the 911 dispatcher, sounds stressed while declaring there’s a boy missing at the Fox Hall development. The mother can be heard in the background screaming, “I want him found now! You find him now!” It is an unusual blistering July afternoon on San Juan Island.
She steals from her parents’ house. Twelve porcelain plates with cobalt trim, a dozen wine glasses wrapped in her polar fleece jacket, and two gold lamps with painted roses on their bases. Her hands sweat holding these things, as she rushes from the house worrying that the front door will slam shut before she comes back for the second load.
Pendarvis was an unlikely hero. To begin, there was his name: Arthur Pendarvis, Jr. Why didn’t adults realize it’s dumb for two people to have the same name in one family? One of them always gets called something else, and it’s never the adult. Why not give the child his own name in the first place?
Tranderpost was a trader of animals, only one among a whole tribe of traders whose flags went all adroop the day that Tranderpost let the tiger go. He shouldn’t have done it, Lord knows, opened that cage and set the killer free. He risked his own neck doing it, thrusting that the tiger would disappear into the bush
It was hot outside the little California schoolhouse and summer vacation was just around the corner. Through the open windows the smell of fresh cut grass blew in on a gust of wind. Hidden behind Ted Gordon’s geography book was a magazine. It was dog-eared and the cover was off. It was stapled open to one page, a big picture of a broad, blue western river and the caption beneath it read: “The Madison.”