When I turned back, he was not there.

For the first two minutes, I believed he had simply stepped behind me. For the next five, I believed he had wandered to the next booth and would appear any moment. For the rest of that afternoon and evening and all the days that followed, I understood that something had happened that I might never fully understand.

He was seven years old. He had brown hair and a gap between his front teeth that made him whistle slightly when he said words with s in them. He loved the pool. He loved Orbeez.

He loved Orbeez with the specific and serious devotion that seven-year-olds bring to their obsessions. He had a color system for them, which he had explained to me in great detail over several summers and which I had listened to with the patient half-attention of a mother managing seventeen other things at once. Blue ones were for people who felt lonely. Yellow ones were for birthdays. Red ones were for emergencies. Green ones were private, and when I asked what that meant he would look at me with the dignified expression of a child who knows an adult will not understand.

Three unopened boxes of Orbeez still sat on a shelf in our garage.

I had never thrown them away. I couldn’t explain why, exactly, except that throwing them away would have required me to make a decision about what they were, and I wasn’t ready to decide.

Carmelo understood this without being told. He glanced at me across the pool the way he had learned to glance at me over three years, carefully, gauging how close I was to the edge.

“Abby.”

“I know,” I said. Before he could say it.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“I know.”

I said it too fast. We both knew I didn’t know anything at all.

---

He walked to the pool net and reached for it.

“Don’t touch the sides,” I said, thinking of fingerprints, thinking of all the procedural things I had learned by accident over three years of cooperating with searches and investigations and periodic case reviews that always ended with some version of the same careful language: no new developments at this time.

Carmelo nodded and angled the net into the surface.

The Orbeez slid away in clusters and then rolled back into place like water filling a hole. He tried again, deeper this time, and came up with a net full of wet, shining beads that he emptied into a plastic storage bin near the fence. We worked without talking. I found flowerpots, a bucket from under the patio sink, an old cooler we hadn’t used in years. We filled them all and lined them up along the fence and went back for more.

The shape at the bottom grew slowly clearer.

Acrylic, I thought, when Carmelo had cleared enough for us to make out one corner. Thick and sealed, the kind of container designed to be watertight. Larger than a coffee table, weighted at the base, perfectly horizontal on the pool floor.

Then Carmelo stopped moving.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

He didn’t answer. He was leaning over the edge, looking through the layers of water and shifting beads at something I couldn’t see from where I was standing.

“Carmelo.”

He reached into his pocket and took out his phone.

I moved around the pool until I was beside him.

He pointed.

At first I saw only pale shapes, indistinct through the water and the remaining beads. Then the Orbeez drifted in the current we’d created, and a gap opened up, and through it I saw a flash of yellow.

Small. Bright. A familiar, specific yellow.

A handle.

My fingers found the pool railing.

Mason’s sand shovel had been yellow. He had carried it to the beach, to the park, to the festival. He carried it the way some children carry stuffed animals, as a talisman, as a comfort object, as the one familiar thing in an unfamiliar world. The police had included it in the list of items missing with him. Tiny yellow plastic shovel, approximately nine inches, crack near the grip.

Carmelo was already dialing.