Agnes heard the hall door close and padded out of the kitchen. She blinked at the door and then tilted her head to one side, listening. “Josh?” she called.
The house was silent.
“Josh?” she called again, her voice cracking with the effort. “Where is that boy?” she muttered. “Josh Newman, you come down here right this minute!” she shouted.
There was no response.
Shaking her head, the old woman prepared to climb the stairs again when something crunched under her slippers. She bent painfully to lift it off the carpet. It was a chunk of dried and hardened mud. Agnes squinted at the stairs. They’d been spotless when she’d walked down them only a few moments earlier, but now, all the way up to the second floor, they were covered in fragments of mud. Someone had followed her down, wearing old muddy boots. Turning her head sharply, she spotted the telltale traces of mud on the floor leading straight to the door.
“Josh Newman,” she whispered, very softly, “what have you done?”
Moving as quickly as her arthritic hips would allow, she hurried upstairs and pushed open the door to Josh’s room without knocking. She immediately spotted the dirty clothes tossed in the basket and the filthy sneakers shoved under the bed. She opened the wardrobe and found the space where the walking boots had been.
Standing in the center of the room, she turned slowly, conscious that there was something odd in the atmosphere. Her senses were no longer as sharp as they had once been; age had robbed her sight and hearing of their acuity… but her sense of smell remained strong. The still, dry air of the room was touched with the sweet odor of oranges.
The old woman sighed and fished her cell phone out of her pocket. She wasn’t looking forward to telling Richard and Sara Newman that their children had vanished. Again.
Some guardian she’d turned out to be!