Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

laces was gone. I looked around inside the sneaker and under it, but I couldn’t find the lace. Was this some trick the kids were playing on me? But I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I had only fifteen minutes until afternoon snack.

    I STAYED IN the city after work that day and saw a movie, a comedy. I was glad to get some laughs, but my good mood didn’t last. Soon I was standing on the sweltering subway platform, my anger starting to resurface. Then I noticed a familiar figure at the edge of the platform. Britta.
    “How’s the nanny business?” I asked.
    She smiled when she saw me, and my bad mood disappeared again in an instant. “Pretty good.”
    “Seems like a tough job. Dealing with Dylan, I mean.”
    She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. After a moment, she said, “He’s . . . how do you say it? Hands full?”
    “Hands full is right,” I said, and we both laughed. “How long have you worked for his family?”
    “Three months. My friend worked there before me. She told me not to take the job, but . . .” She shrugged. “I need the money.”
    “Tell me about it.” I looked down at the end of the platform, then back at her. I wanted to find out more about Britta, who she was and where she came from, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dylan. I was still haunted by that image of him holding Amber’s head underwater. “Have you ever wondered if he might be . . . dangerous?”
    I thought about a case we’d studied in criminal justice during spring semester, involving two seven-year-old boys who had murdered a toddler. We discussed whether they should be punished as severely as teenagers, or even as adults, despite their age. Their attorney had argued they were too young to know what they had done and should be released, but the court disagreed. The boys were sentenced to juvenile detention until the age of twenty-one, which some of my classmates thought was extreme.
    Not me. I believed they were stone-cold killers. They wouldn’t stop. As soon as they got out, they’d just do it again.
    “Dangerous? No, not little Dylan.” Britta shook her head emphatically, but there was uncertainty in her eyes.
    A train rumbled at the edge of the tunnel, its headlights blasting through the dark. I turned to Britta.
    “So I was thinking . . . do you want to get together sometime? For coffee? We could even talk about something besides Dylan.”
    She smiled, beaming at me. “Yes. I would certainly like that.”

    A FTER THE POOL episode, Dylan was on his best behavior for the next two days, and I started to think that maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad kid, and I had just overreacted.
    And then there was the incident with the Star Wars figures.
    Kids weren’t supposed to bring their own toys to camp, but I didn’t see it as any big deal. He’d brought them out of his cubby during afternoon playtime, and since Rebecca hadn’t noticed, I didn’t say anything.
    “This is me,” he said, holding out an Anakin Skywalker figure. “And this is you.”
    Apparently I was Darth Vader.
    When I reached for the figure, Dylan pulled it away. “Huh-uh,” he said with a fake babyish voice. “It’s mine.”
    He sat at one of the tables and moved the figures across an imaginary starscape. Ignoring him, I let myself get drawn into the kitchen area by Amber, who served me an imaginary breakfast of pancakes and ice cream. “Delicious,” I said, spooning it up.
    And then I heard Dylan call my name. “Eddie! Eddie!”
    I looked over but all I saw was Royce jabbing his paintbrush furiously at the easel, creating a splotchy mess, and Michael painting a picture of a dog the exact same shade of green as his socks.
    “Eddie!” I heard for the third time, and when I finally saw him, I was shocked.
    Dylan had built his favorite shape, the tall tower with a single long block on top, only this time he had added something else to it. My missing shoelace. Dylan had tied one end of it along that top block and the other end of the lace hung down, forming a makeshift noose around the Darth Vader action figure.
    “You’re on my galley,” he said, smiling.
    And I thought:
gallows. He’s been saying
gallows. He must have learned about them on his family vacation to England, during a visit to some medieval castle or other. Now instead of a fort or a spaceship or anything a normal kid would create, the little son of a bitch was making a gallows, just so he could threaten me.
    I charged across