“Footprints. Finger bones. Clues.”

Edward puffed back to the bench and sat down, tears streaming down his face. “I’m so hungry,” he said.

Alan, crawling around the torn sod left when someone had dragged one of the picnic tables, contained his frustration. “If we can find Daniel, we can get Frederick and George back, okay?”

“All right,” Edward snuffled.

The next time Alan looked up, Edward had taken off his scuffed shoes and grimy-gray socks, rolled up the cuffs of his tent-sized pants, and was wading through the little pool, piggy eyes cast downward.

“Good idea,” Alan called, and turned to the sandbox.

A moment later, there was a booming yelp, almost lost in the roll of thunder, and when Alan turned about, Edward was gone.

Alan kicked off his Birks and splashed up to the hems of his shorts in the wading pool. In the pool’s center, the round fountainhead was a twisted wreck, the concrete crumbled and the dry steel and brass fixtures contorted and ruptured. They had long streaks of abraded skin, torn shirt, and blood on them, leading down into the guts of the fountain.

Cautiously, Alan leaned over, looking well down the dark tunnel that had been scraped out of the concrete centerpiece. The thin gray light showed him the rough walls, chipped out with some kind of sharp tool. “Edward?” he called. His voice did not echo or bounce back to him.

Tentatively, he reached down the tunnel, bending at the waist over the rough lip of the former fountain. Deep he reached and reached and reached, and as his fingertips hit loose dirt, he leaned farther in and groped blindly, digging his hands into the plug of soil that had been shoveled into the tunnel’s bend a few feet below the surface. He straightened up and climbed in, sinking to the waist, and tried to kick the dirt out of the way, but it wouldn’t give—the tunnel had caved in behind the plug of earth.

He clambered out, feeling the first fat drops of rain on his bare forearms and the crown of his head. A shovel. There was one in the little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna, sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.

“Lost another one, huh?” he said. He looked as if he’d been awake 

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