It was one of the reasons his father, whatever their disagreements, didn’t worry too much about his son &rsqd nð…uo;s future prospects: Bobby was too conscientious to leave the beaten track for long. He liked order, and always had. He’d never been one of those messy teenagers, either in appearance or in approach. It just wasn’t in his nature.

But he hadn’t come home the night before, and he hadn’t called to tell his parents where he might be, and that in itself was unusual. Then he didn’t make it to work the following morning, which was so out of character that Ron Nevill, who owned the gas station, called the Faraday house to check on the boy and make sure that he wasn’t ailing. His mother expressed surprise that her son wasn’t already at work. She’d simply assumed that he’d come home late and left early. She checked his bedroom, which lay just off the basement den. His bed had not been slept in, and there was no indication that he’d spent the night on the couch instead.

When there was no word by 3 P.M., she called her husband at work. Together they checked with Bobby’s friends, casual acquaintances, and his ex-girlfriend, Emily Kindler. That last call had been delicate, as she and Bobby had broken up only a couple of weeks before. His father suspected that this was the reason his son was drinking more than he should have, but he wouldn’t have been the first man who tried to drown love’s sorrows in a batch of alcohol. The trouble was that frustrated love was buoyant in booze: the more you tried to force it to the bottom, the more it insisted on bobbing right back up to the top.

Nobody had heard from Bobby, or had seen him, since the previous day.