The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle

All the adults go out looking for Calvin. Every house has a picture of him, and everyone is searching with flashlights. Mason is on the porch looking into the dark. The searchers sent him home. Shayleen opens the window to ask Mason about Calvin. She is crying. Mason knows it is genuine. He thinks, “You just cannot stand it. It is too much like another time. When another friend did not go home for supper. The worry is the most giant kind.” (211). Mason searches the root cellar again but finds nothing. He goes back out and starts to walk into the orchard to look, but Uncle Drum calls him home. He is standing on the porch with Lt. Baird. 

Lt. Baird is impatient and angry. He insists Mason knows something about the “second missing boy” (215). Mason takes Lt. Baird along his map of the afternoon, from the time he got off the bus to where Calvin and he split up. Lt. Baird becomes fixated on the pond, asking if they went swimming, assuming Mason is hiding something. Mason tries to retrace some of Calvin’s path, up a hill around toward the crumbledown.