The first man down my basement stairs was a state crime scene technician in white coveralls and blue gloves, and I stood at the top of the steps with Officer Benton and watched him disappear into the dark, my hand pressed flat against my chest. Three patrol cars blocked my street. Neighbors in bathrobes stood on their lawns with coffee mugs. I had lived in that house for forty one years and had never once been afraid of my own basement. Now my knees trembled. Officer Benton took my elbow gently. “Mrs. Petrie,” he said, “whatever is down there, you did not put it there.”
The technician was gone for eleven minutes. When he came back up, he was not carrying what I had braced myself to see. He held a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, as thick as a hymnal, tied with fishing line. He set it carefully on the kitchen table, as if it might wake. Beside it he laid a small cloth bag, drawstring closed, and a handful of baseball cards from 1989, soft and bent. There was no horror in the room. There was only an old smell of dust and cedar and the faint ghost of the work shirts of Glen.
Officer Benton opened the bag with a pen. Inside lay a shoelace, a Joplin Miners pin, and a worn leather wallet that held a student card. Thomas Benton, it said. Age nine. He sat down in a kitchen chair. His face had gone gray, and for a moment I thought he might be sick. “That is the wallet of my brother,” he said in a whisper. “It was in his back pocket the day he disappeared. The police never found it.” I put a hand on his shoulder. I could not think of a thing to say.
The oilcloth bundle was a stack of letters. At least forty of them, all in envelopes with the same neat blue handwriting, all addressed to the same woman, Mrs. Evelyn Benton, 2214 South Connor Avenue, Joplin, Missouri. They were stamped but never mailed. Each one had a date written on the corner in the hand of my husband. The first was June 1990. The last was May of two years ago, three weeks before Glen died. On top lay a single sheet of lined paper, folded once, and across it Glen had printed, in capital letters, TO BE OPENED BY THE POLICE IF I AM GONE.
A good man can carry the truth for thirty years, not because he fears it, but because he gave his word to a frightened child.
Officer Benton read it aloud, slowly, in the kitchen where I had cooked ten thousand dinners. My name is Glen Petrie, it began. In July 1989, I was working late at Schifferdecker Park when a boy ran up to me at the third base line, crying. He had a split lip and a black eye. He said his stepfather had beaten him and would kill him if he went home. I had been a groundskeeper for eleven years, and I had never been a brave man. But I could not send that child back. I hid him in the equipment shed for three days.
I put my fist to my mouth. Forty one years of marriage, and Glen had never said a word. The letter went on. He had telephoned a cousin of his in Oregon, a retired teacher named Walt, who agreed to take the boy. Glen had driven him there himself, in the cab of his old truck, across four states, and had given him a new last name. The boy had made him promise on his grandmother grave never to tell, because the stepfather was a man with a gun and a temper and friends on the police force. He said, You must wait until it is safe.
“He is alive,” Officer Benton whispered. He was weeping openly now, the tears running down his lined, tired face. “Tommy is alive.” He read the last paragraph twice. I have written to Evelyn forty times, Glen had written, and I have never had the courage to send one. I told myself that I was protecting the boy. I think I was also protecting myself. When the stepfather died, I should have spoken. I was afraid they would call me a kidnapper. Forgive me. The boy is named Thomas Walter Rowe now. He lives in Bend. He is a high school coach.
I do not remember the next hour. I remember Officer Benton on the telephone, shouting and laughing and crying, the troopers gathering in my front yard, and a woman neighbor running across the street with a pot of coffee. I remember the way the morning light came through the kitchen window and fell across the oilcloth, bright as a window in heaven. And I remember thinking, with a kind of wonder, that the glove I found under the bleachers had not been put there by a stranger.
It had been put there by Tommy. Thomas Rowe arrived in Joplin on Friday, on a red eye flight, in a gray jacket and a Bend Bulldogs cap, a tall, graying man of forty six with the eyes of his mother. He told us that his stepfather had died in the spring, that he had read the obituary online, and that he had flown to Joplin the week before to leave the old glove under the bleachers where his mother walked every Tuesday. He did not have the courage to knock on the door. He wanted her to come to him, in her own time.
Evelyn was waiting on the front porch of the little white bungalow on Connor Avenue, with a walker and a church hat on her head, though it was not Sunday. He came up the ramp slowly. For a long moment neither of them moved. Then she dropped the walker, and he caught her in both arms before she could fall, and I turned my face away to give them privacy. I heard her say his name, only once, in a voice like a bird. Tommy. And he said, “Mama. I kept the glove.”
Officer Benton and his brother sat on that porch until after dark, side by side, while Evelyn went through the letters of Glen one by one. I left them alone. I walked home through the warm evening, past the ballfield, past the park, where the lights were coming on. At the third base line, under the new bleachers, I stopped and looked down. A single dandelion had pushed up through the gravel. I picked it, gently, and carried it home, and set it in a glass of water beside the picture of my husband on the mantel.