Sophie Last Seen

by Marlene Adelstein

  Sophie Last Seen

  Marlene Adelstein

  Sophie Last Seen

  Red Adept Publishing, LLC

  104 Bugenfield Court

  Garner, NC 27529

  http://RedAdeptPublishing.com/

  Copyright © 2018 by Marlene Adelstein. All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: November 2018

  Cover Art by Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Sophie Last Seen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dear Reader,

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  For my parents, Bernard and Connie, with love.

  In memory of Carol Drechsler,

  inspired writer, voracious reader, and quick-witted raconteur,

  but, most of all, dear friend.

  Rather the flight of the bird passing and leaving no trace.

  Than creatures passing, leaving tracks on the ground.

  The bird goes by and forgets, which is as it should be.

  The creature, no longer there, and so, perfectly useless,

  Shows it was there – also perfectly useless.

  Remembering betrays Nature,

  Because yesterday’s nature is not nature.

  What’s past is nothing and remembering is not seeing.

  Fly, bird, fly away; teach me to disappear.

  from “The Keeper of Flocks” (1911-1912)

  Alberto Caeiro, Portugal

  Chapter One

  The feel of the smooth glass stone between her index finger and thumb could always calm Jesse Albright, especially when she felt the start of a panic attack. Like now. Setting the stone down on the dashboard, she turned to the passenger seat and said to her daughter, “We’re here, Soph.” She pulled into the entrance of the Countryside Mall, parked the truck, and got out.

  “You know the drill, sweetie.” Jesse gazed around the parking lot, her head cocked to the side like a dog listening intently. Not hearing anything in particular, she strode into the mall, heading straight for the trendy clothing store, Zone, as if she owned the place then went directly to the KidsZone section.

  “May I help you?”

  Jesse recognized Monica’s loud, nasally voice. The dark-haired high school student took her sales job way too seriously.

  “Oh, great,” Jesse muttered to Sophie. “You-know-who is working today.”

  Monica gave her a questioning look.

  “I’m just browsing,” Jesse said.

  “You do like to browse here, don’t you?” Monica said sarcastically.

  “Yes, I do.”

  The girl turned toward the checkout counter and grunted.

  “Blue jay, right?” Jesse said to Sophie. “That’s what you’d call her. Pushy, show-offy. A bully. Right, hon?”

  Monica spun around to face Jesse. “Just who are you talking to?”

  Taken aback, Jesse straightened her shoulders. “No one. No one at all.”

  Shaking her head, the girl mumbled, “Weirdo.” Then she twirled back around and walked over to the front desk, where she conferred with her young colleagues, rudely pointing and nodding toward Jesse.

  No, her daughter wasn’t there. She hadn’t been in years. But Jesse often spoke to her and was fairly certain Sophie heard her, somehow. She didn’t care if people thought she was crazy. For Jesse, who spoke to few people anymore, it was a comfort even if Sophie never actually answered back. She moved on to the circular clothes rack where she had last seen Sophie six years ago. She’d always told her daughter that if they ever got separated, she should go back to the last place they had been together. “If you were with me in the cookie aisle, wait for me back in cookies,” she would say, as if it were all a game. So Jesse kept coming back to the Zone, week after week. Just in case.

  Fall V-neck sweaters in autumn shades hung where colorful cotton T-shirts had been displayed That Day. Jesse stood at the very spot, her own ground zero, still looking for Sophie or any kind of clue.

  “I love this, Mommy. Can I have it?” Sophie fingered a pink top with the image of one small red bird with a black wing. Her bird obsession had begun when she was five, after her dad bought her a simple backyard feeder. After that, she’d devoured any book on the subject and began keeping a bird-watching journal. And later, she’d started her life list, an inventory of every bird she’d ever seen.

  “Not today, honey.”

  “But, Maaah–aaahhhm, it’s so cute.”

  “Don’t whine, Sophie. You’re not a baby.” Jesse was in a foul mood. She’d been working on a commissioned painting that wasn’t going well—a large oil of the Buckley Barn over in Deerfield. The perspective was off, and Jesse wanted to trash it. And she had argued with Cooper that morning over something stupid. Two hours later, she couldn’t even remember what had precipitated it—running out of milk? Cooper having to work late again?—but it turned into their typical fight. They’d both left mad, their unspoken issues hanging in the air, heavy and unresolved. Things had been strained between them for months—little sex, no real communication, but plenty of pent-up anger.

  “But, Mom, it’s the tanager from this morning. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Jesse looked over at her daughter. She had smallish hazel eyes and dark eyebrows that made her look serious and worried. Her black binoculars hung around her neck. She never went anywhere without them and often fell asleep with them clutched in her hand at night. Jesse sometimes imagined Sophie as a young woman walking down the aisle in her wedding gown, wearing those damn things round her neck.

  The pink top Sophie held had the word tweet below the bird in a lowercase typeface. She would have looked cute in it.

  “But, Mom, I need it.”

  “You need it? I don’t think so. You have lots of tops.”

  And those were her last words to her daughter. Jesse bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, then she shook herself out of her memory.

  She turned away from the KidsZone section and caught a whiff of something. Watermelon? Sour Patch watermelon gum. Sophie’s favorite. It seemed to come from a petite teenager exiting the dressing room, carrying an armful of clothes. Her short brown hair was chopped and shaggy, as if she
’d given herself a bad haircut without a mirror.

  “Any luck?” Monica asked the girl.

  “I’ll take this one,” the girl said in a high-pitched Minnie Mouse voice that made her sound about six years old. There was something about the girl, something familiar, and it wasn’t just the watermelon gum.

  Jesse turned back and cruised through the store, making her usual rounds. She touched the clothes, scanned the floor, the shelves, and the racks, sliding hangers over, looking for that missing piece of the puzzle. A secret hatch in the floor where a ten-year-old girl could have fallen and disappeared. An article of clothing. A shoe. But there was nothing. As usual. It was just a store like any other.

  Not bothering to check for size, Jesse grabbed a long-sleeved white top and headed for the dressing rooms. Over the years, she methodically checked each dressing room over and over. She walked past the numerous vacant ones, bending down to look under the closed door of each cubicle in case Sophie was hiding there.

  She entered the last one, locked the door, and sat on the small bench. She tried to avoid looking in the full-length mirror, not wanting to see what she’d become. At forty-eight, her face was drawn and pale, her body thinner than it had ever been. But her startling white mane was the first thing people noticed and still something she couldn’t get used to. Sprinkled with black, the mass of wispy strands hovered about her head like a prairie warbler’s nest. Even though she had stopped painting after That Day, she still dressed like an artist in paint-splattered, patched jeans and men’s oversized thrift store shirts. She hadn’t cared about her appearance, put on any makeup, or had a haircut in years.

  No one would be able to tell that she’d once had a happy life. A husband. A child. Work she loved. She exhaled, whispering her mantra, “Mommy, Daddy, Sophie,” her eyes glistening. Memories of her old life were always seeping into her brain. Trying to keep them at bay was exhausting.

  A shiny reflection bounced off the mirror, something on the floor catching the light just so. She got down on her knees and reached under the bench, and as sometimes happened two, three, and four times a day, Jesse found a lost item. It was an old Nokia flip phone. “2 Voice Messages,” the screen said. It wasn’t password-protected, and she played back the messages. Both were hang-ups. The numbers were from an area code she didn't recognize. She snooped around, looking for photos and texts. She found only one blurry photo of someone’s feet wearing purple flip-flops. It was hard to tell if it had been taken on purpose. If the phone had received any texts, they must have been deleted. She tossed the phone into her purse to examine it later.

  Exiting the dressing room, she saw that teenager again, walking out of the store with a Zone bag. The girl wore purple flip-flops. So it was her phone. The girl could have been sixteen. The age Sophie would be now.

  Sophie had long brown hair, but that was years ago. It could be short now, like the girl’s. And Jesse realized the girl had Sophie’s habit of biting her lower lip, giving her the same worried expression. But the high-pitched voice wasn’t Sophie’s. The girl wasn’t Jesse’s daughter, yet something pushed her on. Jesse followed her and the sugary scent of watermelon gum into the food court, where she often observed teen girls. Over the years, she’d followed some as they texted and gabbed into their cell phones, oblivious to everything but their addictive plastic screens. Jesse often saw teens who resembled the grown-up Sophie in Jesse’s imagination. But when Jesse got close, the similarities always faded away.

  The girl with the choppy hair and purple flip-flops glanced behind her. Her eyes met Jesse’s, then she sped up and ducked into the entrance of the Cineplex without buying a ticket.

  Jesse followed the girl until she felt a firm hand on her arm, accompanied by a deep male voice. “You’ll have to come with me.” He was a linebacker-sized man in a navy-blue blazer with Security embroidered on the pocket.

  “Oh, I’m not going to the movies. I left something in there. I’m not crashing or anything.”

  “I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen you loitering around here before, stalking teen girls. They got names for people like you.”

  “What? No, no. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

  He tugged Jesse along by the arm. “Explain it to my boss.”

  AN HOUR LATER, SHE was still sitting alone in an airless basement office in an uncomfortable hard-backed chair. She was dying for a cigarette, but a large No Smoking sign loomed down at her from the wall. She’d had enough, gotten up, and reached for the doorknob, only to realize she was locked in.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” She pounded her fist on the door. “Hey! Somebody open up!”

  She sat back down, extracted a cigarette from her jacket pocket, and nervously lit up. She touched her purse on her lap, feeling the book inside it, and her shoulders dropped with relief.

  A couple of minutes later, she heard the sound of a key in the lock. She quickly tossed the cigarette on the floor, ground it out with her heel, and waved the air in front of her face.

  The security guard who had hauled her in entered, followed by a burly guy with an air of authority and a crew cut. Burly, obviously the boss, sat at his desk, and his underling bent down and whispered in his ear, “Bird Mom,” as if Jesse weren’t sitting just two feet from him and couldn’t hear. That was how Jesse had been referred to in the newspapers and online after That Day. The boss glanced up at Jesse, steely eyed. She knew people gossiped about her and “Bird Girl,” as Sophie had come to be known.

  “Listen,” she said, clutching her purse to her chest, “there’s been a big mistake. I did nothing wrong.” She turned to the guard who had grabbed her. “What did I do? Nothing!”

  His boss proceeded to lecture her, claiming to have numerous videos from the mall’s security cameras, showing her following young girls. “You’re lucky, Mrs. Albright. I’m going to let you off today, but I don’t want to ever see you here in the Countryside Mall again.” He spoke to her as if she were an insolent child, wagging his finger. “Not at the Cineplex or the food court. And definitely not the Zone. And if you do, charges will be pressed. I’m sorry for your tragedy, but I got my job to do. This is no joke. We’ll be watching.”

  She stood, fists clenched. “What’s the idea, locking me in here? I’m not some criminal, for God’s sake. I’m a mother. I have rights. And I have a lawyer, who you’ll be hearing from.”

  She raced out of there, relieved to finally be out of that hellhole. She would need to lie low for a while, and of course, they would never hear from any lawyer.

  Jesse sat in the parking lot in her twilight-blue Ford Ranger, which she’d gotten when she’d traded in the Volvo wagon, her one attempt to remove any remnants of family life. She let her head rest on the steering wheel while she took deep calming breaths. She rubbed her glass stone. Lately, her thoughts and actions had felt out of control, as if some evil puppet master were pulling her strings. She took out the tattered paperback copy of Bixby’s Birder’s Bible from her purse. The book fell open to page five, where Jesse had repeatedly opened the book to reread a particular passage.

  She read aloud from the first chapter. “Birding is fun because you never know what to expect, what birds you will find, or how long they will stay before flying off. Each time out is a new adventure. Some birds”—Jesse lifted her eyes from the page and recited from memory—“are elusive and particularly difficult to find.”

  Sophie was her elusive bird, reluctant to show herself. Jesse’s own ivory-billed woodpecker. She gazed out the window and scanned the parking lot slowly, then she went in reverse. She continued to recite, “To find birds, you must pay close attention and be patient. Stop. Wait. Watch. And most of all... listen.”

  She closed the book and held it to her chest. She had to keep the faith. She took one more look out the windshield, then kept her head still while she listened. Tires on pavement. Cars honking. Kids shouting and laughing. She wasn’t sure what she was listening for but figured she would know it when she heard it. She slid the
book back into her purse and started up the truck. She headed onto Interstate 91 then picked up Route 9 in Northampton. The drive from the mall in South Holyoke back to her home in Canaan was a good forty minutes, but it gave her time to think.

  Today had not been a good day. Being called out by that snotty salesgirl. Hauled in by that guard. Humiliated by his boss. Years ago, a policeman had given her a pamphlet: When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide. Jesse had read and reread it a thousand times, and for her, life had become all about survival. “Force yourself to eat and sleep. Find time for physical exercise.” Those made sense. But she took one command most seriously of all: “Never stop looking.”

  She was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. The years of not knowing had taken their toll. And the recent disastrous call from Cooper about selling the house weighed heavily on her. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold on. She glanced in her rearview mirror as if she might see Sophie. “C’mon, Soph. Drop me a clue. A tiny nugget. Please, sweetie. Please.”

  She made her way back through Canaan with its classic New England farmhouses and stately white churches. But what had drawn her to the tiny western Massachusetts hill town in the first place was the simplicity: no big box stores or strip malls and spotty cell service. It was a sleepy community east of the Berkshires, population 1,835, where dairy, sheep, and maple sugaring farmers mingled with city transplants, like she and Cooper had been, looking for a gentler life. It was a sweet, peaceful town, where they had good neighbors. And they’d loved living there.

  She drove down the extra-wide tree-lined main street and by the town lake where she and Sophie used to swim. Well, Jesse would swim while Sophie bird-watched. She passed the quaint clapboard-covered shops and two-pump Citgo, and she saw something large in the middle of the road. A fallen tree limb perhaps. She pulled the truck over, got out, and saw it was a downed road sign. Someone, maybe drunk, must have plowed into it the previous night. It was a banged-up yellow metal No Stopping sign. Jesse saw where it used to be posted in front of the Canaan church. She looked around stealthily and, when she didn’t see anyone, picked it up. It was heavier than she’d imagined, and she hauled it into the bed of her truck. Another clue from Sophie. “No stopping” meant “Keep looking.”