The chair at the table in the shade was empty. Aunt Yolie's lemonade glass was still on the table, half full, with a bee walking around the rim.
For a moment nobody moved. Then everybody did.
Teri ran for the bench, and Ossie ran after her, pushing through the crowd at the Front Street end of the festival, past the beer tent and the dunk tank and a man selling helium balloons shaped like Garfield. The bench was there, at the corner where it always was, but the festival had swallowed it. There was a sawhorse barricade in front of it with a sign that said STREET CLOSED, and a family from out of town sitting on it eating funnel cake, and the bus sign had a paper bag taped over it and a hand-lettered note: FRONT ST BUS DETOURED — USE MAIN ST STOP SUNDAY.
Aunt Yolie was not on the bench.
"Have you seen an old lady," Teri said to the family with the funnel cake. "In a navy dress. A hat. A little hat with a net." They shook their heads. One of the kids had powdered sugar all over his face and he looked at her with his mouth open. Teri turned around in a circle in the middle of the street, in the middle of all those people, and Ossie saw her face come apart.
"She couldn't find it," Teri said. "She came to the bench and there was a barricade and the sign was covered up. She couldn't find the bus. Oh, God. Oh, God, Ossie, where would she go?"
Ossie didn't know. His mind went white. He stood there in the noise and the music with the smell of fried dough and bacon smoke all around him and couldn't think of a single thing, and then he felt somebody grab his arm, hard, and it was Zoli, out of breath, with flour on his T-shirt.
"Mrs. Sipos told my mom," Zoli said. "Where'd she go? Not here?"
"Not here."
"Okay." Zoli looked up Front Street and down it. His face had gone very still and focused, the way it looked on the route at five in the morning. "Okay. Okay. Where's your notebook?"