“Are we worried he’s been abducted?” Carlos asked.

“Right now, he’s just missing,” the officer said. “He left of his own will. But he’s a nine-year-old on the streets at night. Anything could have happened since then. We have to consider every possibility, and we need to move fast, so be thorough but stay focused.” His tone changed, as he added, “Bad things happen to kids at night.”

The entire briefing took two minutes, and somewhere during it, Duncan left, but I barely noticed. By the time the officer was done briefing us, I was staving off panic, and as soon as we got the green light, we were on the move. The school had a stash of heavy-duty flashlights we’d used for camping that they were handing out at the door. We each grabbed one, and as soon as we were out the gates, we started running toward the seawall.

* * *

Most of the search grids were square city blocks, but ours was just that narrow strip of beach. Alice and I decided to split up. She walked up high—at the top of the wall—and I took the steps down to the beach level, working along the water’s edge. I kept my flashlight trained on the waves—looking for Clay out in them.

Or a backpack. Or a book. Or—God forbid—a shoe.

Alice shined her light down and examined everything on the beach and near the wall—bushes and plants, driftwood logs, litter—looking for the same stuff.

We called for him, too. “Clay!” we shouted over and over. “We’re here!”

The hope, of course, was to find him safe and sound—maybe sitting pleasantly on a bench, reading a book and eating a bag of chips. Carlos and Coach Gordo had been assigned a fishing pier. Maybe he’d snuck out onto one and gotten trapped behind the gate when they hadn’t noticed him at closing time. It was possible, I kept telling myself, that there was some reasonable, not-at-all-tragic explanation for what was going on.

He’d be fine, I told myself. He’d be fine. He’d be absolutely fine.

But the longer we walked with no sign of anything, the harder it felt to believe that. The officer’s words, Bad things happen to kids at night, kept echoing through my head, and every now and then, I’d feel a swell of panicked tears squeezing my throat, threatening to rise up and take over.

But I’d shake it off. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—fall apart.

Clay was counting on us to find him and help him. He always seemed like such a little grown-up, but, of course … he was a kid. Despite his vocabulary, and his serious vibe, and his encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything, he had just as much right to make crazy mistakes as any other kid in the world. And just as much right to be totally overwhelmed by their consequences.

I tried not to think about how terrified he must be right now, wherever he was.

He was a kid. He was a kid who had lost his grandfather—probably the best person in his life—just weeks before the trip they’d planned together, one he’d been waiting for, looking forward to, reading up on, and planning for months. He’d read every shipwreck book in the library. He’d been keeping notes in a Moleskine of important questions to ask the museum staff.

I don’t know who pressured Kent Buckley into agreeing to take Clay on that trip, but I swear even a casual observer could have warned you that it wouldn’t end well.

That said, nobody could have imagined this.

The police weren’t totally sure if he’d run away—or been abducted.

My hunch was that he’d run away. My hunch was that he’d finally had enough of that father of his. A father who’d forgotten all about him—on his birthday. Any kid could make some bad decisions in the wake of a moment like that.

It was high tide now, and dark down by the water.

“Clay!” I kept calling. “Clay!” But the roar of the surf seemed to swallow the sound.

We were supposed to turn around at Murdochs—a gift shop built off the seawall on stilts over the water. That was the end of our ten-block range, and our plan was to switch positions on the walk back.

But when I reached the pilings underneath Murdochs and started sweeping the area with my flashlight, I saw something odd. It looked like a capsized motorboat that had washed up near the shore. Oh, God. Had Clay tried to take out a boat somehow? Had he tried to head out to sea? Where would he have even found a boat? Most boats were on the bay side, or in the ship channel. The Gulf side of the island was too shallow for boating.

I called for Alice to come down, and I walked closer—out into the waves. I looked harder.

And then I realized, it wasn’t a boat.

It was slick, and gray.

And it was … a fish of some kind.

A really, really big fish. A fish the size of a sedan.

And that’s when I saw, standing beside the fish, up to his rib cage in the waves: Clay Buckley.

It was a hell of a sight.

For half a second, I couldn’t speak, or move, or respond in any way. All I could do was take it in—until Alice arrived behind me.

“Clay!” I shouted, as Alice hooked her arm around me and propelled me forward.

“Holy shit,” Alice said, as we made our way closer. “Is that…?”

It sounded too crazy to say out loud. But we both could see what we saw.

“It’s a whale, right?” I said.

“Sure looks like one.”

“A baby one, maybe.”

I’m shaking my head in disbelief even now at the memory of it.

It was impossible.

But it was also unmistakable. It couldn’t really be anything else.

Not only was a whale washed up under the pilings of Murdochs gift shop, but it looked like Clay—our nine-year-old Clay—was talking to it.

We got closer and then paused for a second, just … flabbergasted by the sight—and then I trained my flashlight beam on Clay. He looked up and squinted at it, clearly aware that he was the subject of somebody’s scrutiny, and then, I swear, he lifted a finger in front of his mouth, and he shushed me.

Then he turned his attention back to the enormous creature beside him in the water.

Alice fell back to call and report that we’d found him, as I continued sloshing my way closer to Clay in the water.

As I closed the distance, I could see what was going on—though I could hardly believe my eyes. The massive animal beside Clay, which was half-submerged in the waves, was tangled in a fishing net. And Clay was standing right beside it with his pocketknife open, sawing at the rope of the netting.

“Clay, you need to step back!” I said, though he had clearly been there for a good while—and the idea that he would step back now just because some grown-up came along and told him to was pretty laughable.

I mean, this mammal was taller than he was. And there was skinny little Clay, right there, in the waves, risking getting crushed with each shift of the tide—and he absolutely didn’t care. Also, he seemed to be singing.

“Are you humming a Christmas carol?”

Clay didn’t look away from the net, but he nodded. “‘Silent Night.’ It’s the softest song I know,” Clay said.

And that’s when I knew. Clay wasn’t scared, and he wasn’t traumatized. He was helping. This kid knew exactly what he was doing right now in the middle of this crazy situation. He was trying like hell to make things better.

What would Max do?

“Do you have a knife?” Clay called. “Do you have anything sharp? Scissors even?”

But all I wanted to do was get Clay out of there.

I started walking toward him, thinking I was going to rescue him somehow—pull him back to the sand where it was safe. “Clay, it’s not safe for you to be here.”

Clay didn’t even look up. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “The tide brought him up this far, but it’s going back out now. It’ll be gone by morning.”

I shone my light over toward Alice and she gave me a thumbs-up.

“The police are on their way now,” I said. “They’re bringing your mom, and Babette—”

But Clay was suddenly staring straight at me, looking stricken. “Tell them to keep their sirens off!” he said. It was the first moment I’d seen him stop sawing at the net.

I gave a little shrug. “I’m not sure if we can—”

“Please!” Clay shouted. “Don’t let them run their sirens.” He looked over at Alice.

Alice blinked at him.

“His whole head,” Clay explained urgently, “is a supersonic hearing device. He’s already in distress. A sound like that could kill him.”

Alice nodded, and got back on the phone.

Clay went back to work.

For the first time, I really saw the animal. Its otherworldly gray skin, its deep, black eyes. The blocky shape of its head.

“Wait—Clay, is this a sperm whale?”

“I think so,” Clay said.

“There are sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico?”

Clay sighed. “We’ve already been over this.”

“Is it … a baby?”

“It could be a baby. Or it could be a pygmy sperm whale.”

Wow. “Don’t worry,” I said. “The police will get him fixed up.”