Reunion at Red Paint Bay by George Harrar

checking his room again,” she said and then swept up the stairs faster than he had ever seen. He had to take the steps by two to keep up. She stopped just outside the doorway to Davey’s room, as if not to disturb a crime scene. “Nothing’s out of place,” she said, which was easy to tell. Davey kept an unusually tidy room. Casper raised her head, stretched, then jumped off the bed and trotted to them. Amy picked her up and sniffed, as if there might be some clue.
    Simon looked around the room for clues, anything not right, and spotted Davey’s blue bandanna hanging over the bureau mirror. “This better not be one of his magic tricks or I’m going to—”
    There was a sound downstairs, a door opening. The cellar door? Casper kicked out of Amy’s hands, claws bared, and darted under the bed, a blur of white. She wasn’t often spooked like this.
    “Davey?” Amy called. There was no answer. Simon took a step, and Amy grabbed his arm. “Take his bat.”
    He reached around the doorway into the bedroom and pulled out the Louisville Slugger. He moved quietly down the stairs, with Amy just behind him. Atthe bottom he turned and looked toward the kitchen. There was their son, earphones in, pulling apart an Oreo.
    “Davey!” Simon yelled and ran into the kitchen. He took the boy by the shoulders. “Are you okay?” The cookie fell to the floor.
    “God, Dad, what are you doing?” Davey bent down to retrieve the Oreo.
    “Where were you? We told you you were grounded.”
    The boy pulled out his earphones. “What?”
    Amy turned her son around, her hands on his shoulders, her face level to his. “Where were you?”
    “Up in the tree house. You didn’t say I had to stay
in
the house. Grounded means staying in your house
or
yard.”
    “I’m not interested in technicalities,” Simon said, turning the boy back to him. “When we leave you in the house we expect to find you in the house.”
    Davey started to lick the icing off the Oreo, but Amy took it from him and tossed it in the sink. “Listen to us,” she said. “We’ve been home an hour worried sick about where you were.”
    “Wow,” the boy said, “and you called the police?”
    “You mean you saw the police car and still didn’t come in?”
    “I just saw it leaving like a minute ago, Mom. I didn’t know it was about me.” Davey reached into the cookie jar and brought out another Oreo. “Can I havethis one?” Amy nodded. He twisted apart the cookie and handed the icingless side to her. “Did they catch him?”
    “Catch who?” Simon asked.
    “The man out front. That’s why I went up the tree house. You told me not to answer the door.”
    “Somebody rang the doorbell?”
    “He didn’t ring it, but he was standing there for like a long time.” Davey pointed down the hallway to the panel of fluted glass next to the front door. “So I sneaked out the back and climbed the tree and pulled up the ladder and listened to some tunes. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?”
    It was horrible to imagine, a man at the front door, not ringing the bell, just waiting, with their son inside alone. “Yes,” Simon said, “that was the right thing to do.”

The streets of Red Paint
feel familiar to him, a pattern indelibly implanted on his brain when it was a younger age. He remembers the shortcut from the inn to the Common, parks on the darker river side, then walks the winding bike path to the bandstand. He goes up the broad steps and stops for a moment, looking out on the green as if there is a crowd come just to hear him. What would he speak of, something topical, like divine intervention in the modern world? Miracles would surely be the talk of the town after the page-one headline in the
Register—Virgin Appears in Red Paint Backyard?
The question mark was necessary, of course, the proper journalistic skepticism. But if you believe in God, how could you not believe in miracles? Anall-powerful God could clearly do what would seem improbable