Free Sympathy between humans by Jodi Compton

 
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Last year, after his accident in Blue Earth, my husband had been missing for seven days. I’d exhausted my professional knowledge of missing-persons work in looking for him. I’d traveled and spoken to his family. Furthermore, as his wife, I’d had full access to Shiloh’s accounts, his papers, his home. None of it had made any difference. It was as if he’d simply been erased.
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With Aidan Hennessy, I was in the opposite situation. He should have been easy as hell to find. Aidan was an underage runaway, not a fugitive. The longer he spent on the road, the more likely it should have been that he’d be arrested for vagrancy or petty theft. He simply shouldn’t have been this hard to find.
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Yet I’d spent three days working the various law-enforcement databases I had access to, and none of it was helping. Deputy Fredericks had e-mailed me Aidan’s last school-yearbook photo, but that didn’t count as an advance. Unless Aidan Hennessy fell into a drainage canal someplace near where I just happened to be, I didn’t think I was going to find him.
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It was that frustration that drove me backward, on my next day off, to the elementary school where all the Hennessy children had received their early education, and which Donal still attended.
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Marlinchen had mentioned her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hansen, in a brief phone conversation we’d had earlier that morning. Hansen had taught both Marlinchen and Aidan, although not in the same year, because Aidan had been held back to repeat the fourth grade. By my calculations, that made her the last teacher in Minnesota to be familiar with Aidan Hennessy, and the one most likely to remember him.
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The school didn’t look impressive, given the relative wealth of the neighborhood it was in. It was an assortment of one-story redbrick buildings. Children swarmed around the play structures in the yard; it was their lunch recess.
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On her lunch break, Mrs. Hansen was grading papers in her classroom. I stepped inside and immediately felt like a giantess as I walked up through the low desks toward the larger one where Mrs. Hansen sat. She was full-breasted for a woman otherwise slightly built— I gauged her at about five-one— and wore glasses on a gold chain over her off-white shell sweater. Her blond hair was shoulder-length, cut in a flattering way close around the face. Only by looking closely could you see she was nearing 50.
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“Can I help you?â€

 
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Marlinchen was the last person I should have come off second best to in an interview situation; she was just a kid. But she outclassed me; that was the problem. For all that I wore the authority of a county detective, I was still keenly aware of my rough edges when the job took me into the graceful homes and worlds of middle- and upper-class citizens, especially those like Marlinchen, who wore the intellect she’d inherited from her father as comfortably as she might have worn family jewels. She was the princess, in her shabby-elegant old castle on a shining lake, and I, a civil servant, was the commoner, feeling obligated to help her for reasons I didn’t fully understand.
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A lot of cops profess a special concern and protectiveness for the young. Asked to explain, they’ll tell you, “Cops are moms and dads, too.â€

 
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An hour later I was standing on the roof of Cicero’s building, looking up at the light-bleached sky over Minneapolis; only a few constellations were distinguishable. The real astronomy lay twenty-six stories below: the industrial-tangerine grid of city streets, the ascension and declination of the world most of us knew.
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Behind me, Cicero lay on his back on a blanket we’d brought up, arms crossed behind his head in the traditional stargazer’s position, wine in a chipped