Brandy stared at him, as if trying to assess his sincerity. “Near here,” she finally said. “The yellow house on Vista, up behind the Shakespeare Theater.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Since I was Emily’s age. She’s like a mother to me.”
“Was she here today?”
Brandy stood. “What are you getting at? She’s my friend. She lived in our house for years. She made me believe in myself.” Brandy touched her left cheek. “Made me believe I could be an actress even with…” She paused, started over. “When I was little, she sewed a trunk full of costumes so I could play make-believe. Kathleen would never scare me like that.”
“Is she here now?”
Brandy shook her head. “It’s Saturday. She was going to coach Stone and me around noon, but I had to babysit Emily.”
So, the kid had other plans. Maybe she’d grown tired of babysitting for her sister. But given how upset Brandy was, he couldn’t believe she’d deliberately done anything to lose Emily. “Does Kathleen work?”
“She coaches acting at the Little Theater in Talent. And teaches it part time at the university.”
He saw the pride on her face when she talked, and realized that Brandy loved Kathleen.
“She was in Talent this afternoon,” Brandy said.
Radhauser jotted the name Kathleen Sizemore, Vista, and Little Theater in his notebook.
Brandy told him what he’d already learned from Stone, that the two of them had the leads in their senior class play, how she wanted to be an actress more than anything, and that Kathleen was a great coach. “She’s the one who convinced my dad I should take acting lessons.”
He needed to interview Kathleen. Maybe the former nanny had a problem with Christine. Maybe she’d had a dream of being more than just a nanny to Brandy.
“Why would you agree to babysit Emily when you had plans with Kathleen and Stone?”
She told him about Christine’s babysitting dilemma—her mother’s birthday.
“So, you didn’t really want to be with Emily today?”
Brandy’s eyes filled with tears. She quickly looked away, as though ashamed for him to see them. “No, I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I was careless with her.”
“I want you to think hard now. Anything, anything at all might be significant. Has Emily done or said something unusual lately? Mentioned someone you didn’t know? A new friend?”
She shook her head. “It isn’t fair. Playgrounds are for kids. They’re supposed to be safe.”
He asked the question again.
“She’s two-and-a-half. She’ll turn three in July. Sometimes she invents things, like imaginary friends.”
“Did you ask her about these friends?”
“She told me she met them in the park, a yady and a man.” Brandy gave him a sad smile and told him Emily couldn’t pronounce the letter L. “She said that they loved her.” Brandy’s gaze darted around, found her stepmother, then returned to Radhauser.
The kid looked physically ill, as if a pile of rocks had tumbled to the bottom of her stomach.
She leapt to her feet. “The necklace. Oh my God. If that necklace had anything to do with Emily’s disappearance—”
“What necklace?”
She hesitated. “It’s probably nothing.” Her voice sounded choked, as though something had gotten caught in her windpipe.
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s the funny thing about leads. They often seem like nothing at first.”
Brandy paced in front of the bench as she told him about the garnet necklace, how she’d gone to Emily’s preschool to talk with Jodie about it.
“Jodie at Rainbow’s End Nursery School?” he asked.
She nodded. “Emily claimed Jodie had helped her put it on.”
A slow, familiar fear rose inside him. What if the kidnapper had been stalking the school playground? “My daughter, Lizzie, goes there three days a week.” He swallowed, looked away, his words falling on the ground like rocks.
“She must be four. Emily is in the Tuesday/Thursday class,” Brandy said. “The younger kids.”
He bit his lip as he wrote the words, diamond and garnet heart necklace, Jodie and Rainbow’s End.
Brandy told him how she’d talked with Ms. Frazier, Emily’s preschool teacher, gotten a list of parents from Emily’s class, and called every one of them to see if anyone owned the necklace. No one did. “I even went to the parks and recreation lost and found to see if anyone reported it missing.” She related the conversation she’d had with Emily that led her to believe her sister had imagined her big friend.
“You ever see Emily talking to anyone, besides other little children, in the park?”
“She’s pretty friendly. And she plays with this bigger boy sometimes,” Brandy said. “He has Down syndrome,” she added softly, as if reluctant to say anything that might get the boy in trouble.
“What can you tell me about him?”
She told him the boy was ten or maybe eleven. That he wore white cotton gloves that seemed a little strange. “But Emily loves him. She wanted me to get her some gloves, too.” Brandy paused and looked toward the sand pile beside the merry-go-round, as if searching for the boy. “He was always so nice to Emily,” she added, her gaze returning to Radhauser.
He studied her. “Did Emily say the boy gave her the necklace?”
“No.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Kent. But I don’t know his last name. He’s here a lot with his babysitter. I saw him when I took Emily into the restroom. But when I came out, he… Oh my God,” she said. “He was gone. Maybe that’s what happened. Emily wanted to play with him. Maybe she climbed out of her stroller and—”
“What’s the boy look like?”
She gave him a description.
He wrote everything down, straight black hair—cut in bangs—dark brown eyes, green baseball cap, khaki-colored shorts, high-top red sneakers with tan socks, and the white gloves.
A female police officer, wearing the uniform of the Josephine County Sheriff’s office, stood a few feet from the bench, as if waiting to be assigned a job. “Excuse me,” he said to Brandy, wanting to ask the female officer to follow up on Kent.
Maxine McBride stood about five feet three inches tall—her frosted hair cut short as a boy’s beneath her cap. And she wore a pair of gold rattlesnake earrings that curled around her lobes. He saw it as a message. Despite her size, she was tough enough to keep up with the good old boys on the force.
Radhauser filled her in on what they knew so far and asked her to interview park regulars, check the rosters for kids in Special Education classes at the local elementary and middle school levels. See if she could locate a full name and address for a boy named Kent. Radhauser gave her his card. “Get back with me as soon as you have something.”
When he looked around for Brandy, he found her walking the path in front of the restroom. “What if I made a mistake about Kent?” She told him how Kathleen had warned her to be careful. “Kent saw us go into the restroom. What if he followed me inside and took Emily somewhere?”
Radhauser had serious doubts that a ten-year-old boy would kidnap Emily, but they could have wandered out of the park. “If she’s with him, we’ll find her.”
She stopped pacing and a look of relief spread over her face that quickly turned to panic. “He won’t talk to you. For months, he only talked to his babysitter and Emily. It took me forever to get him to even look at me.”
“Does he talk to you now?”
Brandy nodded. “Do you think this is my fault?”
“I’m sure Kent is a nice boy.” Radhauser tried to help her feel less responsible. She was only a kid. And judging from the glares her stepmother shot in Brandy’s direction, she would be shouldering enough blame. “I’ll need your help in interviewing Kent. If Emily is with him, they’re probably safe and playing somewhere.”
Brandy gave him a closed-mouthed smile. “They played with P
ooh and Tigger a lot, and Emily always giggled.”
“It’s possible the necklace did have something to do with her disappearance,” he said, coaxing her back toward the park bench. “Someone may have given it to Emily to gain her trust. Exactly when did she come home with it?”
She grimaced, then looked off into space. “About a week ago.”
“Do you still have it?”
She shook her head and shrugged. “Emily’s two-and-a-half. She loses everything. Do you think the necklace might help us find her?”
“It’s a clue. Has she ever brought home any other gifts, ever mention her big friends before last week?”
Brandy looked at him. Her eyes pooled with tears again. “One day a couple weeks ago, she ran over to me with her cheeks stuffed with candy. I pried a wad of tootsie roll out of her mouth and yelled at her for picking it up off the playground. She started crying and told me she didn’t pick it up. Maybe someone gave it to her.” Brandy kept shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe how irresponsible she’d been. “I missed all the signs, didn’t I?”
It was a scene Radhauser had participated in a hundred times in his career. As a rookie, he thought his inexperience accounted for it being so damn difficult. But now, more than two decades later, he knew the truth. He hadn’t become tougher or hardened to the pain. Every time he witnessed another person’s grief, it cut out a piece of him.
“What exactly did Emily say about the friends who allegedly gave her the necklace?”
“That big people couldn’t see them. That they didn’t hurt her. Emily has a great imagination. I read in this magazine that you should encourage that in children.” Blinking rapidly, Brandy looked away.
He gave her a moment, then spoke her name to call her back. “You said there was a lady and a man, right?” He made a note in his book.
“I think she included Kent,” Brandy said. “And I really thought she found the necklace and that the lady friend must be imaginary.”
“What did your parents say?”
She sat, twisted her hands in her lap. “I’m not sure my father knows anything about it. But Christine saw the necklace.”
“Didn’t she wonder where Emily got it?” He tried to keep the suspicion and judgment out of his voice.
“I…I told her I gave the necklace to Emily.”
Radhauser stopped writing and looked at her, trying to understand how a smart kid, who seemed to care about her little sister, would lie about something like that. “Why?”
Brandy explained what happened that night.
“Does your stepmother spank Emily a lot?” Radhauser made a note to talk with the neighbors.
“Christine gets frustrated,” Brandy said. “She’s trying to go to college and be a wife. She wasn’t ready to be a mother.”
“Do you know where your stepmother was when Emily disappeared?” Again, he thought about Christine’s bedroom slippers, the strange prints he’d found on the restroom floor.
“What are you trying to say? Christine didn’t have anything to do with this. I shouldn’t have lied to her about the necklace. She was home, packing a picnic for Stone and me. She wouldn’t hurt—”
“Has she hurt Emily in the past?” He heard the sound of heavy breathing, like someone who’d been running. The faint smells of aftershave and sweat. And then a man’s long shadow appeared on the ground beside him.
The man wore a dark suit and a maroon tie that he’d pulled loose at the knot. It hung crooked around his open collar. He was clean-shaven, tall and slender, with dark brown hair, slightly wavy on top. A man who looked as if he were in control, until Radhauser saw the terror in his eyes.
Brandy inched toward the opposite edge of the bench, her fear palpable. She glanced quickly toward Stone, then at the man Radhauser assumed was her father.
“What necklace?” the man asked. “And who hurt Emily in the past?”
Radhauser rose from the bench and stuck out his hand. “You must be Emily’s father.”
He shook Radhauser’s hand, but his gaze never left Brandy’s face. “I’m Daniel Michaelson,” he said, then turned his full attention back to Brandy. “You lied to Christine about a necklace?”
She looked at her boots.
Christine broke away from the other officer and flung herself into Daniel’s arms. She leaned into him as if her spine had turned to powder. He took the dead weight of his wife and held her while she cried.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll do whatever has to be done. I swear to you. Whatever it takes to bring Emily home.”
Christine grabbed the front of his shirt, balling the cotton material in her fists. “Just tell me she’s not dead.”
Radhauser watched Daniel’s throat muscles as he swallowed, then patted his wife’s back as if she were a fragile thing, something he might shatter with his touch. “No. She just wandered off. They’ll find her.”
Radhauser had another vision of Tyler’s small body crammed into the trunk of an old Studebaker. The boy had still been dressed in his baseball uniform—his team name, The Cactus Patch, printed in white, block letters across the front of his lime green shirt.
“Do either of you have a recent photo of Emily?” Radhauser asked.
Daniel let go of Christine, then opened his wallet, pulled out photographs of Emily from the plastic sleeves and spread them across the park bench.
Looking at the photos, Radhauser wanted to race home, pick up Lizzie, and hold her tight. “Can you tell me how tall Emily is and how much she weighs?”
Daniel shrugged and looked at Christine.
Christine said nothing.
“Emily weighs thirty-three pounds and she is thirty-five and a half inches tall,” Brandy said.
Radhauser wrote down the information she’d provided and then examined each photograph, finally choosing a close-up of Emily on the swing in their backyard. He understood the importance of the first photo released to the public. It needed to be a good likeness for identification, but it also should make the child appealing, a child everyone could love. A child other people would feel connected to and want to help bring safely home. He needed a photograph that ensured thousands of eyes were looking for Emily.
In the swing photo, Emily laughed with her mouth wide open—light captured in her blue eyes. And her hair, tied back in a pink ribbon, caught the afternoon sun and blazed a trail of curls behind her. One dark strand had fallen loose, leaving a coil in the shape of a question mark on her upturned cheek.
Chapter Eight
Brandy stuffed her hands into her pockets so Officer Corbin couldn’t see them shake.
“I know you’ve already answered these questions for Detective Radhauser,” he said. “But sometimes a different phrasing…” Corbin paused, shrugged. “Something new comes out.”
Brandy didn’t care if she had to answer the same questions a million times, if it would help bring Emily back. Brandy repeated the entire story.
Emily was officially listed as missing. Other officers searched Lithia Park. Interviews were conducted with vendors, hospital employees, the bear quartet, park employees, and some of the mothers and older children who’d stayed to help Brandy and Stone look for Emily.
Forensics scrutinized every inch of the park restroom and dusted the stalls, sinks and stroller for fingerprints.
Six cadets in hip boots waded in the lower duck pond. Christine watched from a nearby bench. Each time one of them bent to lift something from the bottom, Brandy stopped breathing and didn’t breathe again until she was sure it was a piece of debris and not Emily.
While Detective Radhauser questioned her father, Brandy ran through the park again, rechecking all the places Emily loved to play. When she found nothing, she started to cross the bridge into the Winburn parking lot. She would bang on the doors of every house facing Lithia Park. Someone must have seen something.
Her father caught up to her and grabbed her arm. “Don’t go wandering off. We need to talk about that necklace.”
&nbs
p; She curled up on another bench, wrapped her arms around her knees. It didn’t matter that she’d kept her eyes on the stroller wheels. It didn’t matter that she believed she’d protected her little sister from something that might frighten her. Emily had still disappeared.
* * *
The park search yielded nothing.
Emily had been missing for nearly two hours.
Brandy was stunned to realize how unchanged this day remained for so many people. Men and women milled around waiting for the afternoon plays to begin, waiting for King Lear in the Angus Bowmer Theater later that night.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, Stone stood in front of her. He gave her a sad smile. The sun made him squint. “The detective said I should go home now, but I want you to have this,” he said, handing her a slip of paper. “It’s a private line directly into my bedroom. Use it anytime you want.” His gaze shifted to Christine and Brandy’s dad. “You’re gonna need a friend.” His eyes went soft. “I want it to be me.” He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Just call me, even if it’s the middle of the night.” He looked her straight in the eyes. Warm energy passed between them. It was as if he could see through her, all the way to her soul—see how scared and responsible she felt.
She looked away, still feeling the pressure of his hand, the heat of his stare as he waited for a response. But she couldn’t look at him again for fear she’d burst into grateful tears. She tucked the paper into her shirt pocket, nodded to thank him, then watched as he stepped away so slowly it looked like he walked under water.
Once Stone was out of sight, Brandy stood and headed toward Detective Radhauser. “Make a list of everyone Emily trusts. Include phone numbers,” Radhauser said to her father. “Babysitters, teachers, neighbors, friends, relatives.”
Radhauser paused and turned to Brandy. “In case I need to talk to your boyfriend again, make sure his phone number is on the list, too.”
“What boyfriend?” her dad said. “Don’t tell me you were fooling around with some boy when you were supposed to be watching Emily.”
When Time Is a River Page 8