The Wonder Test Page 3

  I make a mental note to ask Officer Kyle what the real story is behind Gray Stafford. Sounds like a runaway or perhaps a secret stint at drug rehab.

  When we get home, the kids dump their backpacks in the entryway and head for the stairs. Rory stops midway up. “Mom, can we have grilled cheese?”

  Of course, Rory is old enough to feed himself, but at his age, there’s so little I can do for him, this small task feels like a gift—not to him but to me.

  From the kitchen window, I can see the kids crossing the breezeway. My father’s house is set on a hillside and shaped like a barbell, with the bedrooms, living room, and movie room on one side, the kitchen, dining room, office, and more rooms on the other. The breezeway connecting the two ends of the barbell is made of concrete and glass. If the house weren’t so secluded, surrounded by trees and shielded by an imposing front gate, the glass breezeway would be uncomfortably exposed. It bothered me when we first moved in, the same way that having my back to a room bothers me.

  But this is Northern California, not New York City. I’ve left my work behind. I should do the same with the paranoia.

  When I bring the grilled cheese sandwiches to the movie room, Rory and Caroline are sitting on opposite sides of the sectional. It’s the episode of Seinfeld in which George introduces himself as the architect Art Vandelay. When Fred and I first met, we watched Seinfeld every night on the only channel his television could pick up in his tiny cabin in the Hudson Valley. Before Fred died, he and Rory had been watching reruns together. Every night, I’d hear them laughing, pausing the TV to get snacks or to talk. They’d made it halfway through the fifth season when Fred died. Rory hasn’t watched it since.

  The night of the funeral, I heard Rory swearing and slamming his fists against the coffee table. I found him on the couch in front of the broken table, tears pouring down his face, his eyes wide open in shock and disbelief. When I tried to comfort him, he pulled away. “Who am I going to watch my show with?” he wailed. I felt helpless, so ill equipped to meet the fact of Fred’s profound and inescapable absence.

  I’m surprised to see Rory watching it now. It feels like forward momentum.

  At five past seven, Rory and Caroline come downstairs. “Stay for dinner?” I offer.

  “Thank you, but I have to study.”

  “Need a ride home?”

  “No, thank you. Our driver is on his way.”

  Rory waits outside with his new friend. Gray clouds have moved in, and from the kitchen I can see the kids standing in the rain, their backs to me, their body language already so much more familiar than it was a few hours ago. Headlights appear, casting the two of them in a halo of light. Another black Peugeot, diplomatic plates, bigger than the one I saw at the Royal Donut Shop, rolls into the driveway. Rory steps toward the car, reaching out to open the door for Caroline. She kisses Rory quickly on both cheeks before disappearing into the vehicle.

  Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I’m happy that Rory has befriended Caroline, impressed that he made such quick work of my request, but worried that, given time, she just might break his heart.

  6

  Explain the relationship between retrieval practice and increased performance using Gates’s theories of recitation. Identify and diagram a cohesive structure in your own learning that has been formed as a result of focused testing.

  I’m in my father’s library, boxing up books to donate, when I hear the doorbell ring. Through the window, I see Officer Kyle’s cruiser.

  I motion him inside. “We can talk out back.” I lead him through the house to the covered patio, where my dad installed a minibar, grill, and coffee station. I put coffee on to brew. Kyle doesn’t relax until he’s sitting at the table under the heat lamp, gazing out at the expansive green canyon.

  “This place is amazing. If you don’t mind my asking, how did a mechanic afford it?”

  “My dad had a way with British cars, and he had a way with people. His clients were loyal. Eighteen years ago, one of his best clients, a retired stockbroker, decided to return home to Long Island. He knew my dad loved his house and had been wanting to move ‘up the hill’ for years, so when it came time to sell, he quoted him an absurdly low price. The place was in bad shape, but the bones were good. My dad welcomed the project.”

  “Everybody needs a project,” Kyle says.

  The coffeemaker beeps. I pour coffee into two mugs and join Kyle at the table. “Tell me about your case.”

  “Actually, it’s my first.”

  “Is it this thing with the cat, Mister Fancy?” I joke but regret it when I realize how condescending it sounds.

  “No.” Kyle doesn’t sound the least bit offended. “Jeeves turned up this morning. This is more complicated.”

  “I like complicated.”

  He sips his coffee. “Has your son by any chance mentioned the business at school? The kid who went missing—”

  “Gray Stafford.”

  Kyle nods. “Right. He vanished on the way home from baseball practice.”

  “When?”

  “Last February, sophomore year. He used to cut through the woods and follow the canyon back to his house. His coach and one of his teammates saw him jump the fence after practice ended at four thirty p.m. At a quarter past seven, his mother called the station in a panic.”

  “She waited more than two and a half hours to call?”

  “She wasn’t worried at first. If he walked straight home, it took him twenty minutes—”

  “But he didn’t always walk straight home.”

  “No. Sometimes he’d horse around in the canyon, playing on his phone, whatever, or stop by a friend’s house. So it wasn’t unusual for him to arrive home an hour or two after practice. That evening, Mrs. Stafford took Gray’s sister to dance class. The mom and the sister didn’t return home until seven, which is when they realized Gray wasn’t there. The mother called a few of his friends, the coach. No one had seen him. She went down to the canyon and found his backpack sitting on a rock by the stream. That’s when she panicked.”

  “But he came back, Caroline said.”

  Kyle raises his eyebrows. “Who’s Caroline?”

  “My son’s friend from school. She said the school wasn’t too concerned about the whole thing.”

  “Well, that’s a different ball of wax, but he did come back, eventually. My predecessor, Crandall, thought the kid had run away, but it never made much sense to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, the backpack. If you were planning on running away, wouldn’t you pack a few supplies and take your backpack?”

  “What if he wasn’t planning it? Spur of the moment thing. Teenage boys are impulsive. What about money?”

  “According to Gray’s mom, he always carried a hundred dollars in his wallet.”

  “What’s a tenth grader doing with a hundred bucks? Was Gray using?”

  “Unlikely. He was a star athlete. And a hundred bucks is pocket change here. You ever try to buy a green juice on Burlingame Avenue? Anyway, the wallet and the money were still in his backpack.”

  “What about his phone?”

  “Gone.”

  “So if he had his phone, he could use mobile payments.”

  “Possibly, but there was the thing with Uber. Gray’s phone had been used to summon an Uber to the Crystal Springs Shopping Center at five nineteen p.m.”

  I picture the shopping center in my mind. “That’s what, two and a half miles from the canyon? Tenth-grade kid, athletic, he could have easily gotten from the canyon to the shopping center in just under fifty minutes.” I think for a second. “But you didn’t say he called the Uber, did you? You said an Uber was summoned.”

  “Yep.”

  “You think somebody else did it to mislead everyone. You talked to the Uber driver?”

  He nods. “Thirty-six-year-
old divorced mom from Foster City. She never saw Stafford. When she arrived at the location, she couldn’t find a passenger, which checks out. She entered him as a no-show. Crandall guessed Stafford was staying with a friend in San Francisco, tried to convince the parents as much, but they weren’t buying it. They called SFPD, put up flyers, the works. Nothing panned out.”

  “How long exactly was the kid gone?”

  “Eleven days.”

  “Who found him?”

  “That’s the thing. Nobody found him. He just reappeared from out of nowhere, wandering along the beach in Half Moon Bay.”

  “Half Moon Bay? That’s a weird place for a kid from Greenfield to pop up. Did he have any connection to it?”

  “None. His parents said they only went to Half Moon Bay once a year for the pumpkin festival.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “Gaunt, scratched up, traumatized for sure, but other than that, he seemed . . . not fine, exactly, but mostly unharmed.”

  “Traumatized how?”

  Kyle frowns. “You’ll have to read the file.”

  “How did he get home?”

  “Seriously, I think you need to read the file. I don’t want to contaminate your thoughts with my version of the story.”

  “Well, what did Gray say after he reappeared?”

  “Nothing. He came back mute, didn’t utter a word for months.”

  I’m stunned. “A kid goes missing, reappears under mysterious circumstances, skeletal and mute, then returns to school this semester, and it doesn’t even come up at the parent meetings?”

  Kyle glances down at his immaculately manicured nails. “This town likes to keep things quiet. There are sensitivities. Decisions, you know, above my pay grade.”

  “When did you finish the academy, Kyle?”

  He scratches his chin, a little embarrassed. “Twelve weeks ago, give or take.”

  “And the first case that lands on your desk is a missing child. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they didn’t push this one a little higher up the food chain?”

  “Technically a ‘found’ child, but, yes, I thought so too.”

  “Do kids disappear here very often?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  I’m not sure I heard him right. “Hardly ever?”

  Kyle takes a long drink. “The year before Gray Stafford. Two other kids, twins.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Same school?”

  He nods. “There are only five schools in this town. Three elementary schools that all feed into one middle school, which feeds into the high school.”

  “Who was on that case?”

  “Crandall.”

  “Is Crandall helping you with the Stafford case?”

  “No. He got a job in Montana, on the border somewhere, left in a hurry. I hear he got an offer too good to refuse.”

  “Surely you’re not handling this case alone?”

  He shrugs. “I’m told that’s how we do things here. We’re a small department.”

  In my office in New York City, if a stranger abducted a child, it prompted an instant, frantic buzz of activity, all hands on deck. Dozens of agents immediately stepping into their roles, a machine moving together in concert, a freight train rolling. And that was in a city of two million kids. How can a town this small afford to drop the ball when three of its own go missing?

  Kyle seems so young and so lost. “Can you help me?”

  “Of course. Do you have the file?”

  He nods.

  “With you?” I prod.

  His face lights up in understanding. “Oh, you mean now. It’s in the car. I’ll go grab it.” He races out to his cruiser and runs back carrying a banker’s box. He isn’t even breathing heavily.

  Kyle has the slim lower body and oversized arm and chest muscles of someone who recently spent time at a police academy. There’s something different about him, though. In my class at Quantico, when we went around the room on the first day of training, forty-seven of the fifty candidates said that being an FBI agent was a lifelong dream. And then there were the other three—those of us who fell into it, who came to the organization sideways, not by any grand design but almost by accident.

  Kyle seems to have come to police work sideways too. It could be the hair, shorter than a civilian but probably twice the length of the next kid in his academy class. Or maybe it’s his easy smile. A lot of people in law enforcement think they have to be serious all the time in order to earn respect, so they adopt a rigid, humorless persona.

  He sets the box on the table. I remove the lid. “Out of curiosity, what made you want to be a cop?”

  “To protect and serve,” he says with a faint smile.

  “No, really.”

  Kyle glances down at the box, then back up at me. “Man, you’re good. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I can’t lie to you. You’ve got to teach me that.”

  “Seriously, why did you join?”

  “Would it make you think less of me if I said student loans?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What about you? Why’d you join the FBI?”

  “I’ll tell you another day.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I push my coffee aside and look into the box. Kyle and his predecessor have produced a lot of paper. A file, like an encyclopedia, consists of multiple volumes. Each volume is contained within two cardboard covers. The bottom cover has two metal prongs, and the first piece of paper in the case—usually the initial incident report—is the first to go in the volume. I always enjoy the moment when I begin a new file. There’s something satisfying about it: the frisson of possibility, the promise of the investigation.

  A case file builds historically, from the first document to the last, with the oldest documents at the bottom of the first volume. Once the metal prongs have reached capacity—about one ream of paper—you begin a new volume.

  This box contains three volumes, each one numbered and dated, with the words “Gray Stafford” printed in black Sharpie on the front.

  I pick up the latest file and flip to the middle, Kyle’s write-up of an interview with one of the Staffords’ neighbors. The write-up is surprisingly well written, descriptive in a way that belies his recent arrival on the force. A similar report from a veteran tends to be unilluminating, filled with jargon, clichés, and shorthand, mostly written in the officer’s head before the interview has even begun.

  “Nicely written. You read a lot?”

  “Everything I can get my hands on.”

  “College really messed you up. Left you with student loans and a bad reading habit.”

  He gives me a wry smile. “Ivy League education isn’t what it used to be.”

  Kyle is a strange bird. I like him. “Can I spend some time with the file?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here.”

  I sense that Kyle is racking his brain for the appropriate department regulation that governs the possession and location of files. “I don’t know.”

  “Who assigned the case to you?”

  “Don Jepson, chief of police.”

  “If you’re worried about chain of custody, tell Chief Jepson that you’ve formed an informal task force, enlisting the help of an FBI profiler?” I suggest.

  He frowns. “I’m not sure how that would work.”

  “Just run it by him.” Usually, small police departments with a complex investigation and a limited budget are happy to get help from the FBI, but maybe the GPD doesn’t have a limited budget. Maybe they’re eating caviar in the break room.

  “You on sabbatical, officially?” he asks.

  I can’t help letting out a little laugh. “I’m a midlevel federal government employee. We don’t get sabbatical. I’m on LWOP, leave without p
ay. Still a special agent, though, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  His face relaxes. “I don’t see why not. Can you read quickly, in case someone goes looking for it?”

  “Come by day after tomorrow, same time. You can grab the file, and we’ll discuss the case.”

  He stands to leave. “Awesome. Thanks a ton. I’ll let myself out.”

  Before the front door closes behind him, my attention has already drifted back to the box.

  I pick up the first volume, the one that was started by Kyle’s predecessor, Crandall. I thumb through it, skimming. In this line of work, files can be deceiving. Size rarely matters. I’ve seen files over fifty volumes containing almost no useful information, filled instead with administrative fluff—travel vouchers, irrelevant phone records, skeletal write-ups of poorly executed interviews.

  The early reports are like that, plentiful but sloppy, the information cursory at best. Volume two shows the same utter lack of finesse, not to mention a level of detachment that goes beyond the usual professional boredom. Either Crandall was a lousy investigator, or he knew he was leaving.

  7

  Orange, Yellow, Singing, and Velvet. Identify the four countries in which these revolutions took place and explain the origin and meaning of the names. Create a logical name for your own country’s next revolution, incorporating current sociopolitical trends.

  Although volume three of the Stafford file is half as thick as the other two, it’s packed with solid interviews, surveillance, focused records checks. The best work is from the last few weeks, since Kyle got the assignment. From the looks of it, he might turn out to be a natural investigator.

  I’m tempted to get lost in volume three, but the only way I’ll truly grasp the case is to work my way through the file systematically, bottom to top. While some people tackle a file from the most recent documents to the oldest, I prefer to start at the beginning to see the whole picture. I need to watch the story unfold in the same order it unfolded for the investigator.

  For me, each file is a narrative. Some constitute a short story, some a novel. In complex cases, a file is often disconnected, confusing, the real clues buried deep within. I was a graduate student in English literature before I was an FBI agent, and I tend to think of these files as a literary genre. To be honest, the files are probably the reason I stayed in this business for so long. When I was hired out of grad school, I only meant to stick with the FBI for three years, five at most. I wanted the experience, the novelty. I wanted to step behind the curtain, if only for a minute.