The Mysterious Case of the Missing James
Anna woke up to the sound of police sirens piercing through the night. The blinking red numbers of the clock on her bedside table told her it was 3:27pm, which was wildly incorrect, considering the fact that it was still pitch black outside. The time didn’t really matter anyway. Loud noises should still be illegal before sunrise. Expecting the disturbances to fade, Anna turned over to go back to sleep. Instead, she listened to the sirens grow louder and closer to where she was trying to get some goddamn sleep! How hard was that, seriously? Deciding that, at this rate, she might as well not go back to bed, Anna grabbed her phone and was immediately blinded. She forgot to turn down the brightness again. Fumbling her way out of her room, down the stairs, and over the dog snoring in the hallway, Anna found herself in front of the pantry and reached a hand out from the depths of the hoodie she stole from James to inspect the contents. That’s about as far as she got before her phone started blasting the Hamster Dance. Guess she forgot to turn off the volume too. Yikes.
“Dude what the hell!?” Anna whispered into her phone with enough force to practically blow away James on the other end. Except the voice she hears in response is much more feminine than would be expected from her 17 year old best friend.
“Anna? It’s Sarah.” James’s mom sounded exhausted like she hadn’t slept in days. “I need you to come down here right away. Please?” She practically choked out the last word. Anna could tell that something was seriously wrong.
“Yeah sure.” Anna replied groggily, her voice hoarse from not being used all night. “Is everything alright?”
“Just get down here, okay?” Sarah’s voice softened slightly. “Please?”
“Yeah, yeah okay I’m coming,” Anna replied hurriedly before hanging up the phone and shoving it in the gaping pocket of her hoodie. Climbing back over the dog, Anna tiptoed out the front door, down the porch steps and grabbed her bike from the front lawn. The metal frame was cold to the touch; Anna shivered as her leg grazed the bike through the thin cotton of her pajamas. She rocketed down her eerily quiet street and sped onto James’s eerily loud one. Her heart dropped as she saw that the source of the sirens was directly in front of her best friend’s house. Anna jumped off her bike, bolted across James’s front lawn, and through his open front door.
“Hey kid!” the police officer in the living room barked at her, “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“What’s going on? Where’s James?” Anna fired back. She didn’t wait for an answer before tripping up the stairs to find Sarah sitting at the top, her head in her hands.
“James is gone. Bed made, backpack missing, it’s like he just got up and walked out.”Anna’s heart hurt listening to Sarah talk. Her best friend. Gone. Anna sat up and put her arm around Sarah, who was now shaking quite badly. She had to do something.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispered to James’s mother, who could now be classified as distraught.
“Go find him.” Sarah’s teary eyes gained a new intensity that Anna had never seen before. “If anyone can do it, it’s you.” Anna only nodded before she raced back out of the house.
Anna’s mind raced faster than her bike on the cold pavement. She remembered the summers they had spent playing together in the woods across from the old elementary school as she sped past the decrepit building, thinking fondly of the forts they protected and the dragons they defeated. She tried to think back to last Friday. Was James any weirder than usual? Sure he trailed off in the middle of his sentences and was extremely preoccupied with the supernatural, but those were normal James habits. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except… nah that didn’t mean anything. Anna shoved the last conversation she had had with him out of her head and pedaled on past the old school building and past the creaky playground. She only slowed down to inspect the tree they planted in front of the high school last week. The poor thing had been through a lot; been shoved in a hole, fallen on by none other than the lovely and coordinated James, been tied up, and then almost drowned when someone spilled and entire bucket of water on it by accident. Anna lightly brushed her fingers over the green needles of the pine tree, remembering how James insisted that they plant a pine tree. He explained that this tree was going to be his legacy, and that it was something people were going to remember him by. It was awfully depressing at the time, but the wheels in Anna’s brain started turning. Pine tree…legacy…forts… bingo. She raced back up the hill, past the ice cream shop, past the creaky playground, and into the woods across from the old school building. Anna threw her bike haphazardly across the start of the path she knew so well from her childhood and raced through the trees, turned black by the night. She screeched to a halt in front of an enormous pine tree covered in carvings and scratches from their games as kids. No sign of James. Anna slumped against the tree, the lump of adrenaline in her stomach fading away to exhaustion. She wasn’t going to cry here and ruin the happy memories of this place. She forced herself to get up and circle around the tree once more just to linger in the happy memories from when she and James used to play together as kids. Anna paused, surprised, because around the back of the tree, there was a small piece of white paper taped to the spot where she and James had carved their initials into the soft bark. “ANNA” was written on the front in James’s messy handwriting. It was all she could do to stop her hands from shaking as she tore the note from the tree and opened it.