Chapter Two

I remain outside for another minute or so, waiting in the dark, desperately hoping to sense more of Billy's presence. But it's gone. Not a hint of him—or anyone else—remains.

Rather than go back to bed when I return inside, I roam the dark and silent house that both does and does not feel like home. I can't remember the last time I slept a full eight hours. For most of my life, sleep has come in fits and starts. I fall asleep quickly. An immediate plummet into sweet slumber. The problem always comes later, when I wake after only an hour or two, suddenly alert, restless, and filled with an undefinable sense of dread. This can last for several more hours before I'm able to fall back asleep. Sometimes that falling-back-to-sleep part never happens.

Chronic insomnia, my doctor calls it. I've officially had it since my twenties, although it started long before then. Over the years, I've done the sleep studies and kept a sleep journal and tried every suggested remedy. Removing the TV from my bedroom. Reading an hour before bed. Hot showers and chamomile tea and sleep stories droning on in the darkness. Nothing works. Not even sleeping pills strong enough to sedate an elephant.

Now I just accept that I'll always be awake between one and four a.m. I've grown accustomed to those dark, quiet hours in the middle of the night, when it feels like I'm the only man in the world not asleep.

Rather than waste them, I try to put those wakeful hours to good use, keeping an eye on things while everyone else sleeps. In college, I roamed dormitory halls and circled the quad, making sure all was well. When Claudia and I shared a bed, I'd watch her sleep, unnerving her every time she woke to find me staring at her. Now that it's just me, I spend that long, lonesome stretch of night looking out the window. A one-man neighborhood watch.

Dr. Manning, the last in a long line of therapists stretching back to my teens, said it stems from a combination of guilt and anxiety.

"You can't sleep," she told me, "because you think you might miss another chance to stop something terrible from happening. And that whoever took Billy will eventually come back to take you."

She said it with the utmost sincerity, as if I hadn't already been told that a dozen times before. As if that all-too-obvious assessment would somehow allow me to sleep through the night. I pretended it was some major breakthrough, thanked her profusely, left her office, and never returned.

That was seven years ago and, contrary to what I let Dr. Manning believe, I still can't sleep.

Right now, my insomnia is manageable. I catch up on rest with midday naps, snoozing on the couch as the evening news murmurs in the background, sleeping in on Sundays until noon. That'll change when the school year starts in September. Then I'll have to be up by six, whether I've slept or not.

Tonight, though, is still mid-July, allowing me to roam from room to room. I've done nothing to the house in the week since I moved in while my parents moved out, and the place now has a disjointed, temporary feel. As if all of us—my parents, the movers, me—gave up halfway through. Most of my possessions, including half my clothes, remain in boxes stacked in corners of empty rooms, waiting to be unpacked. They're joined by everything my parents left behind—furniture that was either too big to fit into their downsized Florida condo or too unloved to make the trip.

In the dining room, chairs surround an empty space where a table should be. In the kitchen, the cabinets have been raided of most plates, utensils, and glasses, leaving only mismatched stragglers behind. In the living room, the sofa remains, but the matching armchair in which my father falls asleep every evening is gone. As is the TV. And the grandfather clock. And at least one end table, although the crystal bowl that once sat atop it now rests on the beige carpet.

Each time I notice it reminds me that I need to do something with the place. I can't let it stay like this for much longer. But I also have no desire to settle in for real, which would make this feel less like a temporary situation and more like the sad, permanent move I fear it is.

Until last week, it had been almost thirty years since I lived here full-time. I didn't go back to school the fall after Billy vanished. Rather, not the school I'd been attending. The one with familiar halls and teachers I knew and friends I never saw during the summer even though we lived only a mile or so apart. Instead, my parents sent me to a private school in upstate New York where no one knew who I was. Or what had happened in my yard. Or how I'd rarely slept a full night since.

It was a relief living in a creaky dormitory, surrounded by boys who were blissfully incurious about me. I used that to my advantage, blending in with the crowd until I graduated. No one noticed me, and I made every attempt to keep it that way. The few close friends I did have were still kept at arm's length when it came to Billy. Even though I told no one about him, they couldn't help but notice how gloomy I got right before the holidays or summer breaks—and how happy I was to be back at school when they ended.

I think my friends assumed I hated my parents. The truth was that I hated this house. I hated being reminded of what happened here. I hated waking up in the middle of the night, looking out my bedroom window, and seeing the same patch of grass where Billy vanished. Most of all, I hated the guilty feeling that overcame me every time it happened.

Billy was gone.

I was still here.

Somehow, that didn't seem right.

When it came time to choose a college, I picked one even farther away from home. Northwestern. There, it was even easier to blend in with the crowds of students tramping through golden summers and brutal winters. I fell in with a group of misfits. The same kind of video game geeks and comic book nerds who are popular now but definitely weren't back then. Even among them, I was bit of an outcast, preferring books to Game Boys, quiet gatherings to parties.

It was at one of those small gatherings that I met Claudia, who'd tagged along with a friend of a friend. We found ourselves standing next to each other in a corner, pretending to enjoy our lukewarm beer.

"The upside to huge parties," she said, unprompted, "is that their sheer size provides good cover for introverts like us. Here, we just stand out."

I eyed her over the rim of my plastic cup. She was pretty, in a bookish way. Brown hair. Willowy frame. Shy smile.

"What makes you think I'm an introvert?" I said.

"Your expression," she replied. "Your demeanor. Your body language. The fact that you're standing here with me, president of Introverts Anonymous."

I grinned, surprised and delighted to be so easily pegged. "Yet you talked first."

"Only because I have a weakness for guys in glasses."

That single sentence gave me enough courage to ask her out on a date. We went for deep-dish pizza and beer, that most clichéd of Chicago first dates. Not a cliché was what I told her as we walked back to campus—that the summer I was ten, my best friend was taken from a tent in my backyard and never seen or heard from again.

"Jesus," she said, appropriately shocked. "Who was your friend?"

"Billy Barringer."

Claudia recognized the name, of course. Everyone had heard of Billy.

The Lost Boy.

That's what the press started calling him in the weeks following his abduction, when you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about it. And it's what he continues to be called in those shadowy, conspiracy-laden corners of the internet that still talk about him. To them, Billy has entered the realm of urban legend, even though what happened isn't as mysterious as those girls who vanished from that summer camp or as terrifying as that group of teenagers killed in a cabin in the Poconos.

Billy's case still resonates because it happened in a quiet suburban backyard, which is generally recognized as one of the safest places in America. And if it could happen here, it could happen anywhere.

That night, fueled by nerves, too much beer, and Claudia's lovely, searing gaze, I told her all of it.

About how, in the middle of the night, someone crept into my backyard, sliced open the tent in which we slept, and snatched Billy out of his sleeping bag.

About how I'd slept right through it, unaware of what had happened until I woke the next morning and glimpsed the sun through a slash in the tent that definitely hadn't been there the night before.

About how weird those first few morning hours were, when none of us quite knew the gravity of the situation, our confusion outweighing our fear.

About how the police were just as lost, unable to find even the smallest clue about who might have taken Billy. Or why. Or what happened to him after that.

About how no one knows anything after all these years. And how we'll likely never know. And how it all feels like my fault because I was right there when it happened. And how sometimes the guilt is so strong that I find myself wishing it had been me who was taken.

"But you weren't," Claudia said. "You're here, now, with me."

She kissed me then, my heart exploding into a thousand butterflies. In that moment, I swore that I would remain there, with her, for as long as possible.

That turned out to be seventeen years, during which both of us graduated. Me first, then Claudia two years later. We stayed in the Chicago area, where she got a job with the parks service and I found a teaching gig at a private school not unlike the one I'd attended. I was never the most popular teacher. A far cry from the cool ones you see in movies, whose passion is so infectious that students end up standing on desks reciting poetry. I showed up, gave my lessons, guided bored teenagers through Great Expectations and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Our life together might not have been exciting, but it was good.

Until it wasn't.

Now I'm here, moving through a dark house half filled with boxes containing remnants of that once-good life. I retrieve my phone from the charging station in the kitchen (another tip for insomniacs: sleep with your phone in another room) and tap out a text.

can't sleep. of course

I pause, then type what I'm really feeling.

i miss you, Claude

I send the texts before I can change my mind, even though I know they make me sound completely pathetic. Not at all how I envisioned myself at age forty. Especially the part about living in my childhood home. This was my parents' idea, sprung on me when they announced they were finally taking the plunge and moving to Florida.

"You'll be doing us a favor," my mother said when I initially resisted. "Selling a house like this is such a headache."

What she meant but couldn't bring herself to say is that she knew I was going through a rough patch, both emotionally and financially, and that they were happy to help, even though I'm far past the age of needing help from my parents. At least, I should be.

I relented and moved into the house after getting them settled into their new condo outside Orlando. I've been here ever since, caught between adulthood and adolescence. Some days it feels like my parents will be home at any minute, carrying in groceries, my mother announcing that she bought that flavor of Ben Jerry's I like so much. Other times it feels like I've been hurtled into the future, to a time in which both are long gone and I've inherited everything.

At the end of the hallway, past the mudroom and the laundry room, is what used to be my father's study and now serves as my makeshift office. The boxes in here are opened—a half-hearted feint at unpacking. My father left the bookcases but took the desk, forcing me to use my laptop propped on a battered coffee table I found in the basement.

I flick on a lamp, sit at the coffee table, and open my laptop. I tell myself that I have no idea what I'm looking for. That this is just mindless web surfing until I get tired or the sun comes up, whichever arrives first.

But I know full well where I'm going, typing in the address with the unthinking ease of someone slipping back into a bad habit.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

NamUs, for short.

An online database of people who've gone missing, been taken, vanished into thin air.

I know the statistics well. Each year in America, more than half a million people are reported missing. Although the vast majority are quickly located, alive and well, some aren't so lucky and end up on NamUs. Those who remain missing after a year or two or more eventually become cold cases.

Then there's someone like Billy. A case so cold it's now a block of ice.

As I type in Billy's name, I can't help but think about the presence I detected in the driveway. Feeling it was like being an amnesiac hit with a thousand memories at once. A sudden awakening, as surprising as it was comforting. A sense of long-forgotten familiarity.

And enough to make me think, for a slice of a second, that it was indeed Billy.

That he was alive.

That he had returned.

But Billy is still unaccounted for, a fact confirmed for me when his page appears on the NamUs website. At the top is his case number, his name, and his photograph, under which sits a red bar and white letters spelling out that most horrible of words.

Missing.

The picture had been taken in the school gymnasium the previous October. Somewhere in my parents' condo is a framed portrait of me in front of that same smudged blue backdrop. In my photo, I'm grinning wildly, exposing teeth too big for my mouth, my polo shirt rumpled and my hair gelled into submission.

Billy's school photo is the opposite. In it, he appears uncharacteristically subdued and formal. His mouth teeters on the cusp of a frown, like he wanted to be anywhere but there. I'm certain his mother, and not Billy, picked out his dark blue shirt and green necktie. She probably even tried to tame his unruly hair, to no avail. The cowlick poking up from the back of his head is the photo's most disarming feature.

Near the picture is the date Billy disappeared and what he was last seen wearing. Black T-shirt, blue shorts, white sneakers.

Accurate, yes, but only scratching the surface. I know, for instance, that the black T-shirt had a small white stain on the chest, the shorts were made by Umbro, and the sneakers had come off an hour before we went to sleep and were still in the tent when I woke up. The last thing he ate were two s'mores my mother had made in the oven because she thought having a campfire in the backyard was too dangerous. I even remember Billy's last words.

Hakuna matata, dude.

Lower down on Billy's page, a series of age-progression photos shows how he might have looked over the years. At fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five. Using his school photo as a starting point, they all disconcertingly picture him in that same blue shirt and green necktie, as if they're the only clothes he's ever worn, magically expanding with the rest of his body as he grew taller, wider, older.

The last photo suggests what he would have looked like five years ago, at age thirty-five. His face is fuller, though the almost-frown remains. His hair, finally tamed of its cowlick, is darker and thicker. I've seen this picture before. Too many times to count. Each time, I'm struck by how strange it is to see someone I think of as forever young looking thoroughly middle-aged. It's the same jarring feeling I sometimes get when I look in the mirror. Those fine lines on my face and the gray hair at my temples and in my patchy beard make me think, When the hell did I get so old?

Only, with Billy, the question is, did he get this old? Is it possible that he's still alive today, living in complete anonymity, blending in with all the other middle-aged men out there? I doubt it. If Billy was alive—if he truly still existed—wouldn't it be known by now? Wouldn't Billy himself reveal it to someone?

In case he does, there's a police contact at the bottom of the page. It's changed multiple times in all the years I've been coming to Billy's NamUs listing, including since my last visit. Currently, the contact is Detective Ragesh Patel, a member of the local police department and the only son of Mitesh and Deepika Patel, who live two doors away. A noticeable demotion. The contact used to be someone from the FBI, telling me that not even the authorities think Billy will ever be found.

In some ways, I get it. Everyone—including his own family—thinks Billy is dead. There was even a memorial service, held a year after his disappearance. I attended, sweaty and itchy in a suit bought just for the occasion, staring at a silver-framed photo of Billy that sat atop an empty coffin. Everyone else, meanwhile, stared at me, the kid who hadn't been taken. I felt the entire church quietly assessing me, wondering what made me different enough that a kidnapper would choose Billy over me. In that moment, I so badly wanted the roles to be reversed. For Billy to still be alive and for me to be anywhere but there, a feeling that grew more pronounced once Mrs. Barringer started screaming. Full-on, chest-heaving wails so loud inside the church that they rattled the stained glass windows.

I close the NamUs listing and do a Google search of Billy's name. The most recent link is to the website of an armchair detective who's gained quite a following discussing unsolved cases. I click it and am immediately confronted by two photos.

Thephotos.

The two images most associated with the strange case of Billy Barringer. They're famous in certain parts of the internet. Well-known enough that every true-crime blog, podcast, and website uses them. Understandable but still unnerving, seeing how both were taken in my backyard.

One shows an orange pup tent on a patch of lawn that's been fenced in by a perimeter of police tape. Snapped by a Star-Ledger photographer who snuck into the backyard without my parents' permission, the photo has become the defining image of the Billy Barringer case. The picture is angled in a way that highlights the vertical slit in the tent's side, the gash puckered open by the same breeze that causes the police tape to buzz like telephone wire. For thirty years, that slight gap—and the darkness beyond—has made people lean in and look closer, straining for a glimpse into a place where something horrible occurred.

Even me, who had been inside that tent mere hours before the photo was taken, yet who knows as little about what happened as everyone else.

The other picture is the last known photograph of Billy, snapped on the Fourth of July, 1994. It shows him eating a wedge of watermelon, pink juice dripping from his lips like he's a vampire. It's far more endearing than his dour school picture, which is why I think the media glommed on to it. In it, he looks like a regular kid, when in truth, Billy was anything but regular.

Someone stands next to him, completely cropped from the photo except for a sliver of bare arm nudging Billy's at the edge of the frame.

That's me.

My parents, immediately concerned about how I'd be affected by my friend's abduction, made sure to cut me out of the snapshot before it was released to the press. In doing so, they created an ironic reversal of the situation.

Billy, the Lost Boy, was seen literally everywhere, his image almost as prominent that summer as O. J. Simpson and the white Bronco. And I became invisible. Just a bit of skin belonging to another boy. Because I was a juvenile, that's how both the police and the media referred to me back then.

"Another boy."

As in "Ten-year-old Billy Barringer was camping in the backyard with another boy when he was taken in the middle of the night," which happens to be the first sentence on the website now open on my laptop. I keep reading, although it's nothing I haven't seen a thousand times before. There's a brief introduction about who Billy was, where he lived, what he was doing the night he went missing, and what happened after everyone realized he was gone. Scattered throughout are more references to me as "another boy," "a neighbor," "Billy's best friend." All the euphemisms strike me as silly, considering how the website names nearly everyone else, including my parents.

Fred and Joyce Marsh.

Much like our homes at the time, their names sit side by side with those of Billy's parents, Blake and Mary Ellen Barringer. After all, it was our yard Billy vanished from. And it was my parents' care into which he had been placed.

The only other notable name not mentioned—on the website or anywhere else I've seen—is Andy Barringer, Billy's younger brother. Seven at the time, he was also left alone by the press, meriting barely a mention.

Like most things I've seen about Billy's disappearance, there's an air of judgment to the piece. That's always been the case. In the weeks following the abduction, much was made about how a boy could have been taken from a suburban backyard without anyone seeing it happen. Everyone from the nightly news to the New York Times to Unsolved Mysteries, which aired a segment about it that fall, had the same questions. "How could this happen?" they asked. "How did no one notice?"

Unspoken but abundantly clear is that the neighborhood was to blame.

Especially my parents.

And especially me.

The small scraps of blame that weren't laid at our feet went instead to the authorities, who never figured out what happened to Billy. Every agency you can think of, from the local police to the FBI, got involved at some point. The only certainty these disparate authorities could agree on is that sometime between 11 p.m. on July 15 and 6:30 a.m. on July 16, someone created a thirty-eight-inch slice in the left side of the tent and pulled Billy through it.

What happened after that was—and still is—a mystery.

A close examination of the gash indicated it was made outside the tent. Because it was a clean cut, police assumed a new or recently sharpened knife was used. The narrow width of the slash made them conclude it was a kitchen knife and not a hunting knife, which has a thicker blade.

This intel was enough to prompt a search of every house on the cul-de-sac from top to bottom. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my parents and an FBI agent, listening to the clomp of footsteps overhead as investigators upstairs went from room to room. At the time, I didn't know what, exactly, they were looking for. All I knew was that my parents were scared, which made me scared as well.

The search yielded multiple knives from every home on Hemlock Circle. After they were tested, not a single one could conclusively be pinpointed as the same knife used to slash my tent.

With the searches came interviews. Everyone in the neighborhood had to endure more than one round of questioning. Local cops led to state police detectives, which became FBI agents.

No one reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious, largely because the backyards of Hemlock Circle are big blind spots. I've always thought of the cul-de-sac as like a circular Trivial Pursuit game piece, with each tract of land one of those colored wedges you insert when you give a correct answer. Every house, meanwhile, sits at a slight angle from the neighboring homes. All of that, coupled with privacy hedges bordering every yard, means no one in Hemlock Circle can easily see into a backyard that's not their own. The only people who could have witnessed something useful the night Billy vanished were me and my parents. But their bedroom sat at the front of the house, offering a view of the cul-de-sac and not the yard behind it.

As for me, well, the website I'm looking at sums it up like this: "The other boy in the tent claimed to have seen and heard nothing."

One word in that sentence gnaws at me.

Claimed.

As if I possibly could have lied to the police about that.

As if I don't care what happened to Billy, when in truth I would do anything to learn what fate befell him.

Yet there's nothing left to be done. Despite all the searches and interviews, the only trace of Billy's whereabouts came after a K-9 unit followed his scent for a mile through the vast forest that surrounds the cul-de-sac. The trail ended at an infrequently used access road that bisects the woods, connecting two bigger, busier roads, making police think Billy had been led from the tent to a waiting car.

What happened after that—or who did it—well, no one knows. There were no signs of a struggle, either inside the tent or out of it. No one reported hearing screams or cries for help. No blood was found in our yard. No fresh footprints, either, mostly because the grass had been mowed the afternoon of July 14 and was therefore too short for someone's shoes to make much of an indentation. Trace evidence belonging to more than a dozen people was found in the yard, thanks to the Fourth of July party my parents had thrown earlier that month.

It could have been any of us.

It could have been none of us.

Over the years, there've been plenty of suspects, none of which hold much water because all of them are improbable at best, impossible at worst.

Take, for instance, Unlikely Suspect No. 1: Fred Marsh.

My father.

He was the first person the police considered because, why not? The crime took place on his property, after all, under his watch. What became very clear very early on is that he never, ever would have done such a thing. He's a decent man. A good man. Devoted husband, professor of sociology at Princeton, a man so careful about abiding by the law that he's never even had a speeding ticket. Plus, my mother—no slouch herself in the decency department—had sworn that he was asleep beside her the entire night. And why would a homemaker and longstanding member of the PTA lie about such a thing?

Suspicion fell away from my father almost instantly, moving on to Unlikely Suspect No. 2: Billy's father, Blake Barringer.

Because the slash was made on the side of the tent that faced the Barringer house, authorities assumed Billy's kidnapper came from that direction. This led to police wondering if Mr. Barringer was to blame. Just like with my father, that went nowhere.

Blake Barringer, a pharmaceutical sales rep, was away on business in Boston that night. Dozens of witnesses saw him at the hotel bar, nursing a Sam Adams until close to eleven p.m., and checking out the next morning after his wife called to tell him Billy was missing. It was impossible for him to drive home, kidnap his son, and then drive back to Boston.

Also, he had no known reason to hurt his son, and appeared just as distraught by Billy's disappearance as the rest of the family. Besides, most abductions by parents are the result of custody disputes, and the Barringers remained married until Blake's death in 2004.

Unlikely Suspects No. 3 through 16 were everyone else on Hemlock Circle. Not counting me and Billy, a total of fifteen other people were present on the cul-de-sac that night. All of us were investigated in one way or another. None of us had any reason to hurt Billy—or any idea of who did.

That void was filled by the dozens of people who, over the years, have said they know what happened. Sickos, attention-seekers, and, in some cases, literal psychopaths have said they kidnapped Billy. Or murdered Billy. Or saw Billy bagging groceries in their local ShopRite. To date, seven men have come forward claiming to be him. Every pronouncement and confession was investigated. None were true, leaving those of us who knew and loved Billy with nothing but dashed hopes and unanswered questions.

By now, most everyone agrees the likeliest suspect is an outsider. Someone who swept into Hemlock Circle, took Billy, and left just as quickly and quietly. The website open on my laptop is a big proponent of that theory. It details how someone—no one quite knows who—claimed to have seen a strange man in camouflage roaming the cul-de-sac closest to Hemlock Circle the day before Billy vanished. But authorities have never been able to tie Billy's abduction to similar crimes. It didn't match the patterns of any known serial killer twenty years before 1994 or in the thirty years since. In FBI interviews of people incarcerated for abducting and killing young boys, none admitted to having anything to do with it.

Thirty years later, that's where things stand. No culprit. No answers. Nothing but the sad, brutal fact that Billy is still gone.

I close the laptop and go back upstairs. In the bedroom, I reach for the pen and notebook again. The sole remedy for my insomnia that actually seems to do some good. Two therapists ago, I was told that if something's on my mind, churning through my thoughts into the wee hours of the morning, the best thing to do is write it down. In doing so, I allow my brain to put off thinking about it until later, like a mental snooze button. It doesn't always work, but it's better than nothing.

I open the page I wrote on earlier.

Had The Dream again.

Beneath it, I add, Billy is NOT out there.

I gingerly place the notebook and pen on the nightstand and check the clock. A little before four. Still a chance to get at least a few hours of sleep.

Yet when I close my eyes, my thoughts drift back to the true-crime website I'd been reading. While better written and researched than others I've seen, it still didn't tell the whole story. For one, it insinuated that Billy's abduction came out of nowhere. That the twenty-four hours before he vanished were like any other day that summer. That there were no storm clouds on the horizon, portending imminent doom, or events in the neighborhood that, in hindsight, foreshadowed tragedy.

Most of that is correct. It had been a typical New Jersey summer. Sunny. Lazy. A little muggy for my mother's taste, but pleasant.

Yet there's more to the story. There always is. In truth, the day Billy vanished had been anything but ordinary.

And I knew something was off the moment I woke up.