Is This Tomorrow: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt Page B

crew to interview Dot, who had wept and begged people to come forward. Dot had offered to sell the house for reward money. “Is Dot here?” Ava asked.
    “Doesn’t Dot have enough to think about?” Dick said. “We’re doing this for her.”
    The flyer floated in Ava’s hands. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? the flyers said, and there was Jimmy’s grainy picture, reprinted from the Waltham Tribune . Ava touched his face. Below the picture was a hand-drawn set of eyes, the pupils dark so the eyes seemed to follow you. WE ARE WATCHING YOU, the signs said.
    Frank Fitzgerald, the locksmith, stood up. “I want to put deadbolts on everyone’s doors, free of charge,” he said. Ted, who owned a toy store, handled out silver whistles on silver chains to all the kids, stopping to hand one to Ava. “Any car or person comes near you or your kid,” he said, “you blow this like a hurricane.” Someone blew the whistle so it sounded like a scream and then Ted clapped his hands to his ears. “I’d like to keep what’s left of my hearing, if you don’t mind,” he said.
    “Kids, if you ever need to, you bite,” he said. “Kick them where it counts.” He gestured to his groin and Ava turned away, her face hot with embarrassment. “Go for the throat, the eyes, anywhere tender,” he insisted. The kids shuffled their feet and socked one another in the arm. “I’m carrying my Daisy rifle with me all the time,” Stanley said.
    “We could have seen him without even knowing it,” one of the neighbors said. “We could have brushed right past him.”
    “How do we know it’s a him?” Debbie asked, and Ava sipped her watery lime punch, and then set it down again.
    “We don’t. We don’t know anything,” said one of the mothers, but Dick snorted. “Women don’t do things like that. They wouldn’t know how.”
    “Things like this just don’t happen,” Ted said. Not in Belmont, not in Waltham, and certainly not in this new development where they lived, with rows of ranch houses and driveways and leafy backyards, an enclave where everyone knew everyone else, where every summer there were barbecues, the fathers in plaid shorts, the mothers in starchy cotton dresses, and the kids all got to stay up late and drink Shirley Temples in paper cups.
    “How the hell could this have happened?” Ted said angrily. “A twelve-year-old boy.”
    “The cops swarmed over my place like bees,” Bob Gallagher said. “I’m surprised they didn’t want to look down my throat. Especially that Maroni guy.”
    “I told him we were doing this neighborhood patrol and you might have thought I told him we had an atom bomb in here,” Ted said. “He told me it was a poor choice of time and resources, that speed was of the essence, but I don’t see them having any success. Why shouldn’t we look? Why shouldn’t we do what we can?”
    One of the other men handed out a list he had made of all the fathers who would scan the neighborhood every night, along with what things to watch out for. Unfamiliar cars. Strange people. “Stay in groups,” one of the men advised. “Be on the lookout.”
    Other groups were going to go into the woods behind the Northeast Elementary School to see what they could find. “Didn’t the cops look there already?” Debbie said. “We don’t want to waste time here.”
    “They sure as hell did,” someone said.
    “Not very deep,” Ava said and everyone turned and looked at her.
    “Well, we’ll go deeper then,” Bob Gallagher said.
    Debbie stood up, waving her hands as people began to get up. “Tomorrow night,” she said. “We meet here at seven and we scout the area. We see what we can find.”
    “What exactly are we looking for?” Ava asked and Ted frowned.
    “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said.
    W HEN A VA GOT home, it was nearly ten and the house was quiet. Lewis’s door was shut, but she cracked it open to check on him. He was sleeping. Then she walked back to the living room and stood at