said Shadow.
"Is it?" asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away.
In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up.
Have you seen me?
Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.
Wednesday was driving. He said, "Read me anything interesting you find in the paper."
Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn't find anything.
Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it.
Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. "March twenty-third," said Shadow, encouragingly. "Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it."
"Not a chance," said a woman's voice. "April third. Six P.M. That way the day warms up the ice." Shadow smiled.
Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder.
"I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike."
"Exciting, huh?"
"Well, educational, maybe."
"I thought you weren't coming back to us," she said. "You were gone for a while, huh?"
"My uncle n
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