The Game You Played by Anni Taylor

words. She’d tell you something that happened at school and then pick the whole thing apart, scene by scene.
    “I’ll do my best to convince your mum about the pup,” I assured her.
    Jessie cut a lonely figure as I said good-bye and headed away. But I couldn’t stop and chat. Not now.
    I rushed along the hard pavements to the end of my street, turning right at the Southern Sails Café and then jogging the two blocks to the police station.
    The station was big and busy and intimidating. It had become my second home in the months after Tommy vanished. The kind of home you wished you could run away from and never see again.
    I was shown into Detective Gilroy’s office. He looked up briefly from a phone conversation. “Please, take a seat. I’ll just be a moment.” His tone was neutral. I knew already that he didn’t hold out much hope for this letter to lead to anything.
    I sat and waited, impatience spinning through me. I wanted him to move on this. Get things happening.
    So many times in the past six months, I’d sat here like this, impatient like this. Those times had become less and less frequent. There’d been no leads to follow, nothing to discuss. Until this morning.
    The detective kept talking on the phone. From his end of the conversation, it sounded like it was about a domestic violence court order. A husband taking an order out on his wife, worried that she was going to hurt the kids.
    I studied Trent Gilroy’s face. He was the man who I’d once seen as holding the fate of Tommy in his hands. That was in the early days, when he all but promised me he’d find Tommy (before hope of finding Tommy had faded to nothing). He was in his early forties I guessed, his hair a mix of black and silver. He wasn’t bad looking. He had a single deep line running across his forehead that looked like a statistical line graph, with a blip to the right of it.
    I handed him the plastic bag as soon as he ended his call, before he had a chance to ask for it.
    Frowning hard, he turned the blip on his forehead into a statistical anomaly, tugging the letter from the envelope with his own special detective set of tweezers.
    “Hmmm. . . .” He sounded noncommittal as he read it. He looked up at me with a faint look of surprise. “This has been written with a typewriter.”
    “Are you sure?” I’d never seen something typewritten before. Typewriters were relics of an era before my time. I knew that you could get fonts on the internet that matched the old typewritten look.
    “Yeah.” He held it up to the light, examining it closely. “I’m sure.”
    “What do you think about the rhyme?”
    “Well, it’s hard to determine what the person wanted to achieve in sending this. It doesn’t say very much. I mean, we don’t know for certain that it’s not well intended.”
    “Well intended?” I raised my eyebrows incredulously.
    He scratched his temple. “Maybe. But if it is, it’s very misguided. We’ll run tests on it anyway. Just leave it with us. We already have your fingerprints and Luke’s on file, so we’ll be able to distinguish different prints on the letter and envelope.”
    The police had taken our fingerprints after Tommy had gone missing, so that if they found anything belonging to Tommy, they could quickly tell which prints were ours and which were those of a stranger. They had Tommy’s fingerprints, too, from the ornaments of Nan’s that he touched on the day he disappeared. They even had items of his clothing from my dirty laundry basket (for the sniffer dogs), including one of his T-shirts that had a tiny patch of blood from when he’d fallen and grazed his knee the day before.
    “Could it,” I began, “I mean, is it possible that the person who took Tommy wrote this? Maybe they’re feeling bad about what they did.”
    He exhaled a drawn-out sigh. “Unlikely. In the realm of possibilities, no.”
    “Why not?” I asked bluntly.
    He took a moment before answering. “Because people who take