Silas Pemberton's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Silas Pemberton had six faces on his corkboard and no thread to tie them together. He stood in his garage before dawn, a mug of cold coffee in one hand and a red marker in the other. Six school photos. Six kids gone from the houses along the meadow in the last eleven weeks. He had tried ages. He had tried streets, teachers, church, dentists, the color of their front doors. Nothing lined up. The sheriff had stopped returning his calls a month ago, when Silas quit the department to work the case alone. His daughter Nell was the second face on the board. He had promised her mother he would bring her home, and every morning he woke to a house that still answered no one. He was about to draw another useless line when something struck the window above the workbench. A pale butterfly clung to the glass, wings ragged, dark smudges along the edges like burn marks. Silas had seen one before. Pinned inside a shoebox under Nell's bed, labeled in her handwriting: found by the fence, Tuesday. He set the mug down and pulled the shoebox from the shelf where he had kept it. The wings inside matched the one at the window. He walked to the board and checked the dates he had written under each child's photo. Then he went to his truck for the case files he had copied before leaving the department. He read through the parent interviews again, this time looking only for one word. Four families had mentioned it without being asked. A butterfly on a screen door. A butterfly in a lunchbox. A butterfly the child had chased into the meadow the day before she vanished. Silas circled the four names in red and stared at the two that were left. He picked up the phone and called the mother of the fifth child. She answered on the second ring. He asked if her son had brought home any insects in the week before he disappeared. She was quiet a long moment. Then she said her son had kept one in a jar on the sill, and she had thrown it out the morning after his bed stayed empty.