"Did'ja ever find Davy, Mike?" Peter asked, looking up from the frying pan where he was sautéing some chicken for dinner.
"Yeah, he's upstairs in the spare room," Mike replied without looking up from the newspaper. "At least he was before," he added thoughtfully. "Mighta moved since then."
"I'll go find him," Micky volunteered.
"No, let me," Nicole interjected. "I want to talk to him for a bit."
"Okay babe, whatever," Micky replied. He headed to the cabinet instead to get some plates.
Nicole wasn't sure what she expected Davy to be doing when she reached the spare room, but she certainly hadn't expected him to be searching. That, however, was what he seemed to be doing.
Nicole had almost forgotten that Davy could search like that. She'd been distraught after discovering Thomas was missing, and hadn't thought of asking him. Now, three days later, she wondered how she could have forgotten.
Davy sat silently on a battered old folding chair in the center of the room. She recognized it immediately. It was a piece of dilapidated furniture, one of the garage sale items that she and Peter had furnished their house with soon after they'd moved in. She could remember sitting up with Thomas at night during two-am feedings and trying to get him to eat strained peas. They hadn't found a high chair at that point, and so Thomas was fed on her lap. Which resulted in a number of outfits being destroyed by spilled baby food, but she didn't mind.
Nicole knelt down near the box in front of Davy. It was filled with Thomas' old clothes. That must have been why he'd come up there, to look, and he must have thought that he'd find Thomas easier if he could look at these clothes.
She sighed a huge sigh, wondering whether to alert him and drag him out, but decided not to.
It turned out that Nicole didn't need to do that after all. Davy's eyes began to flutter, as though he were waking up from sleep, and shortly afterward, he opened his eyes and looked at her.
"Great news, love," he announced cheerfully, and gave her a hug. Nicole looked surprised for a moment.
"Great news?" she asked, pulling back and looking him in the eyes.
"'E's alive," Davy replied. Nicole smiled.
"I always knew that, Davy," she replied.
"You-you did?"
"Of course. Bob wouldn't kill Thomas. He'd beat him, starve him, whatever. He might even allow him to die. But he wouldn't kill him."
"Well, that's not the only good news," Davy said. "I've found 'im."
"You did?"
Davy grinned. "Would I lie about that?" he asked, an impishly happy look on his face. Nicole grinned and returned, joyously, the hug he'd given her.
"Davy, that's terrific!" she exclaimed. "Where is he?"
"As far as I can tell, e's in a 'ouse. A broken down old 'ouse about three miles from 'ere. "
"Great. Let's go."
"Wait. Shouldn't we tell the others? I mean, they'll want to know. And then we can come up with a plan. "
"Oh, yeah," she mumbled.
