No one-not parents, friends, law enforcement, childcare organizations, or centers for missing people-knows where these children go. Into graves, possibly; into cellars or the homes of pedophiles; into voids, perhaps, holes in the fabric of the universe where they will never be heard from again.

Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone. For a moment or two they haunt strangers who’ve heard of their cases, haunt their loved ones for far longer.

Without a body to leave behind, proof of their passing, they don’t die. They keep us aware of the void.

And they stay gone.

“My sister,” Lionel McCready said, as he paced our belfry office, “has had a very difficult life.” Lionel was a big man with a slightly houndish sag to his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard from his collarbone, as if something we couldn’t see sat atop them. He had a shaggy, shy smile and a firm grip in a callused hand. He wore a brown UPS deliveryman’s uniform and kneaded the brim of the matching brown baseball cap in his beefy hands. “Our mom was a-well, a boozer, frankly. And our dad left when we were both little kids. When you grow up that way, you-I guess you-maybe you got a lot of anger. It takes some time to get your head straight, figure out your way in life. It’s not just Helene. I mean, I had some serious problems, took a hard bust in my twenties. I was no angel.”

“Lionel,” his wife said.

He held up a hand to her, as if he had to spit it out now or he’d never spit it out at all. “I was lucky. I met Beatrice, straightened my life out. What I’m saying, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro, is that if you’re given time, a few breaks, you grow up. You shake that crap. My sister, she’s still growing up, what I’m saying. Maybe. Because her life was hard and-”

“Lionel,” his wife said, “stop making excuses for Helene.” Beatrice McCready ran a hand through her short strawberry hair and said, “Honey, sit down. Please.”

Lionel said, “I’m just trying to explain that Helene hasn’t had an easy life.”

“Neither have you,” Beatrice said, “and you’re a good father.”

“How many kids do you have?” Angie asked.

Beatrice smiled. “One. Matt. He’s five. He’s staying with my brother and his wife until we find Amanda.”

Lionel seemed to perk up a bit at the mention of his son. “He’s a great kid,” he said, and seemed almost embarrassed by his pride.

“And Amanda?” I said.

“She’s a terrific kid, too,” Beatrice said. “And she’s way too young to be out there on her own.”

Amanda McCready had disappeared from this neighborhood three days ago. Since then, the entire city of Boston, it seemed, had become obsessed with her whereabouts. The police had put more men on the search than they had on the manhunt for John Salvi after the abortion clinic shootings four years ago. The mayor held a press conference in which he pledged no city business would take precedence over her disappearance until she was found. The press coverage was saturating: front page of both papers each morning, lead story in all three major telecasts at night, hourly updates inserted between the soaps and talk shows.

And in three days-nothing. Not a hint of her.

Amanda McCready had been on this earth four years and seven months when she vanished. Her mother had put her to bed on Sunday night, checked in on her once around eight-thirty, and the next morning, shortly after nine, had looked in at Amanda’s bed and seen nothing but sheets dented with the wrinkled impression of her daughter’s body.

The clothes Helene McCready had laid out for her daughter-a pink T-shirt, denim shorts, pink socks, and white sneakers-were gone, as was Amanda’s favorite doll, a blond-haired replica of a three-year-old that bore an eerie resemblance to its owner, and whom Amanda had named Pea. The room showed no signs of struggle.

Helene and Amanda lived on the second floor of a three-decker, and while it was possible Amanda had been abducted by someone who’d placed a ladder under her bedroom window and pushed the screen open to gain entry, it was also unlikely. The screen and windowsills had shown no signs of disturbance, and the ground at the foundation of the house bore no ladder marks.

What was far more likely, if one assumed a four-year-old didn’t suddenly decide to leave home on her own in the middle of the night, was that the abductor entered the apartment through the front door, without picking the lock or prying the hinges loose from the jamb, because such actions were unnecessary on a door that had been left unlocked.

Helene McCready had taken a hell of a beating in the press when that information came out. Twenty-four hours after her daughter’s disappearance, the News, Boston ’s tabloid answer to the New York Post, ran as its front-page headline:

COME ON IN:

Little Amanda’s Mom Left Door Unlocked

Beneath the headline were two photographs, one of Amanda, the other of the front door to the apartment. The door was propped wide open, which, police stated, was not how it was discovered the morning of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Unlocked, yes; wide open, no.

Most of the city didn’t care much about the distinction, though. Helene McCready had left her four-year-old daughter alone in an unlocked apartment while she went next door to her friend Dottie Mahew’s house. There she and Dottie watched TV-two sitcoms and a movie of the week entitled Her Father’s Sins starring Suzanne Somers and Tony Curtis. After the news, they watched half of Entertainment Tonight Weekend Edition and then Helene returned home.

For roughly three hours and forty-five minutes, Amanda McCready had been left alone in an unlocked apartment. At some point during that time, the assumption went, she had either slipped out on her own or been abducted.

Angie and I had followed the case as closely as the rest of the city, and it baffled us as much as it seemed to baffle everyone else. Helene McCready, we knew, had submitted to a polygraph regarding her daughter’s disappearance and passed. Police were unable to find a single lead to follow; rumor had it they were consulting psychics. Neighbors on the street that night, a warm Indian summer night when most windows were open and pedestrians strolled at random, reported seeing nothing suspicious, hearing nothing that sounded like a child’s screams. No one remembered seeing a four-year-old wandering around alone or a suspicious person or persons carrying either a child or an odd-looking bundle.

Amanda McCready, as far as anyone could tell, had vanished so completely it was as if she’d never been born.

Beatrice McCready, her aunt, had called us this afternoon. I told her I didn’t think there was much we could do that a hundred cops, half the Boston press corps, and thousands of everyday people weren’t already doing on her niece’s behalf.

“Mrs. McCready,” I said, “save your money.”

“I’d rather save my niece,” she said.

Now, as the Wednesday evening rush-hour traffic dwindled to some distant beeps and engine revs on the avenue below, Angie and I sat in our office in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Dorchester and listened to Amanda’s aunt and uncle plead her case.

“Who’s Amanda’s father?” Angie said.

The weight seemed to resettle onto Lionel’s shoulders. “We don’t know. We think it’s a guy named Todd Morgan. He left the city right after Helene got pregnant. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

“The list of possible fathers is long, though,” Beatrice said.

Lionel looked down at the floor.

“Mr. McCready,” I said.

He looked at me. “Lionel.”

“Please, Lionel,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He fitted himself into the small chair on the other side of the desk after a bit of a struggle.

“This Todd Morgan,” Angie said, as she finished writing the name on a pad of paper. “Do police know his whereabouts?”