The Necklace

by Matt Witten

  But just as she did, some jerk in a big SUV came roaring up behind her, doing eighty at least and coming within ten feet of her car. He hit the horn hard and swerved around her.

  What an asshole. Suddenly Susan decided not to take this guy’s shit. She slammed her foot on the gas. It took a while, but the car made it up to sixty-five, seventy-five, eighty … Now it was up to eighty-five. The old car probably hadn’t gone this fast since the 1990s, and maybe not even then. But now she was right behind him. She could feel him wondering what the hell this middle-aged lady was up to.

  She swerved into the passing lane and pulled up alongside him. He looked over at her, confusion and fear growing on his face.

  She rolled down her window. “Go fuck yourself!” she yelled, and gave him the finger.

  Now he was definitely terrified. She roared in front of him as he dropped back.

  She laughed to herself, victorious. Ahead of her the dark gray clouds began to lighten. There was even a broad band of blue, which seemed to get bigger as she watched.

  This was going to be an adventure.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FRIDAY, APRIL 12, TWENTY YEARS AGO

  SUSAN GOT OFF the phone with Danny and told Molly she needed to go home. But she was so distraught, she walked straight into the closed front door of the diner.

  Molly took Susan’s car keys and said she’d drive her. From the door, she told the customers, “I gotta run. Just leave your money on the counter or pay next time you’re here.”

  On the ride home, Susan repeated “Please, God” over and over, desperately hoping Amy would be home by the time she and Molly got there. When they arrived, three police cars were on the street out front. It made everything even more devastatingly real. She jumped out of the Dodge Dart before it came to a stop. The weather had turned cold again but she didn’t feel it. Two cops, men in their forties, sat in one of the cars. The front window was open and Susan could hear police radio sounds.

  “Did you find her?” she said breathlessly.

  The cops looked up, and she knew their answer even before they spoke. “Not yet,” the cop closer to her said.

  She ran inside with Molly following. She heard Danny in the kitchen saying to someone, “Maybe she fell somewhere and cracked her head or something.” Susan dashed in there and saw two men sitting at the table while Danny paced the floor, eyes wild with fear. He and Susan looked at each other, unsure whether to hug or what. It was as if their pain was so huge they couldn’t afford to touch each other, because that might make things even worse somehow, magnify their terror.

  The two men at the table were cops: a crew-cut man in his fifties and a short man in his thirties with a sour expression. Susan recognized the crew-cut man, Michael Lynch. His wife worked at the drugstore. He was sitting ramrod straight, like he was still in the military.

  Both cops stood up when Susan entered. Lynch started right in, saying crisply, “Ms. Lentigo, we’re sending people out to look for your daughter. We’re also contacting the teachers and crossing guard to see if they saw anything when Amy left school.”

  Susan said, “She probably decided to walk home by herself. We should check the woods between here and the school.”

  Lynch nodded. “We’re doing that. We have people out there.”

  “It’s freezing tonight! We have to find her!”

  “We’re doing everything we can, Ms. Lentigo. Now if you’re okay to talk, we have some questions for you that may help us.”

  Susan sat on a chair and said, “Okay,” nodding her head up and down. She found herself staring at a stray hair on Lynch’s nose. She couldn’t take her eyes off it for some reason.

  Danny sat back down and grabbed at his head. Lynch sat too, and said, “I understand there was a miscommunication with your mom. You thought she was taking care of your daughter.”

  Finally Susan’s eyes snapped away from the hair. “Yeah, that’s what she said.”

  “But then she called to say she couldn’t do it.”

  Susan frowned, confused, and looked around at everybody: the cops, Danny, and Molly, standing by the door. She felt a rushing in her ears. Was this cop accusing her of something? Of being a bad mother? Did Danny think that?

  She protested, “I didn’t know. Not ’til tonight.”

  “Let me play you the message,” Lynch said. Susan sensed he wasn’t a man who spent a lot of time trying to make people feel better.

  He stepped over to the phone machine on the counter and hit play. They heard a robotic male voice say, “Eight fifty-six a.m.” Then Lenora’s voice came on: “Honey, I just remembered I have a date tonight. We’re going out for dinner, so I can’t get Amy from school. Sorry about that. Maybe tomorrow night.”

  There was a beep, then silence.

  “I never heard that,” Susan said, defensive. “I’ve been gone all day. If I knew, I would’ve picked Amy up myself!”

  “That’s what I told them,” Danny said, gesturing angrily at the cops. “I don’t know why they’re wasting time on this!”

  She was relieved Danny didn’t seem to be blaming her. Meanwhile Lynch ignored his outburst and said to Susan evenly, “Your husband says he didn’t hear it either.”

  Danny said, “Yeah, I had already left for work when your mom called.”

  “I don’t get it,” Susan said to Lynch. “Like Danny says, why are we even talking about this?”

  “Exactly!” Danny agreed.

  Lynch put up his hand to quiet them. “Please. Is there anyone else who had access to your home today and might’ve heard this message?”

  Susan jumped up. “This is stupid! We should all be out looking for Amy right now!”

  Lynch said firmly, “Ma’am, we need to know if somebody learned about this mix-up and decided to take advantage. Maybe they realized they’d have four hours before anyone realized Amy was missing and went searching for her.”

  Finally she understood what Lynch was going for. A rock of fear rose in her throat.

  Four hours.

  Four hours for some creep to do whatever he wanted to Amy.

  Apparently Danny understood now too, because his face went white.

  Lynch asked, “Who else has a key to your house?”

  “Just Susan’s mom,” Danny answered.

  “Are there any workmen who come in during the day?”

  “No, nobody like that.”

  Lynch asked Susan, “Is it possible your mother took Amy for some reason?”

  What was this cop accusing her mom of? “Took her?” Susan said, outraged. “No, of course not!”

  But then she had an alarming thought. Lynch must have caught traces of it on her face, because he asked, “What?”

  She looked down and shook her head. “What is it?” Lynch persisted.

  She looked back up. “My mom is going out with a guy Amy doesn’t like. She thinks he’s creepy. He called her ‘Pretty Baby.’”

  Danny stared at her. “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me?!”

  Susan tried to fight her growing shame. “I didn’t want to upset you. But I told Mom I didn’t want him around Amy anymore.”

  Danny was still staring, his mouth open. “You should’ve told me. I’d have kicked his fucking ass!”

  Before she could apologize, Lynch asked, “What’s his name?”

  “Frank something.”

  “You don’t know his last name?”

  She racked her brain but came up empty. “My mom never told me.”

  “Un-fucking-believable,” Danny said. Maybe he didn’t blame her before, but Susan knew he sure as hell blamed her now.

  But that didn’t matter. She needed to focus, remember everything she could.

  Lynch said, “This guy Frank, is that who your mom had dinner with tonight?”

  She desperately searched her memory—did Mom tell me anything about any upcoming dates? —but then shook her head in defeat. “I don’t know if it was him or somebody else. She’s going out with a couple diffe
rent guys.”

  “So you don’t know where Frank was this evening?”

  “No.” Oh God, oh God …

  Lynch and the sour-faced cop exchanged a look. She could tell they considered Frank a serious suspect. Lynch asked, “Where does he work?”

  Susan squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember if her mom had ever told her. But once again she had to say, “I don’t know.”

  Lynch’s partner spoke for the first time. “What did she tell you about him?”

  “I think he’s from Glens Falls. Amy said he had a beard and a tiny nose. She thought he looked weird.”

  Danny exploded. “Jesus, Susan, and you never told me?!”

  “You and Mom would’ve gotten in a fight,” she said, but knew right away how lame that sounded.

  Danny’s eyes burst with fury. “This guy may have kidnapped our daughter!”

  Susan felt so horrible. But Lynch put up his hand again. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Let’s just locate this individual as fast as possible.”

  She tried to pull herself together. “We should call everybody we know and get a search party going.”

  Still standing by the door, Molly said, “I can start making calls right now.”

  “I’ll do it too,” Danny said, and reached for the phone on the counter.

  But Lynch stopped him. “Good idea, but call from a neighbor’s house so we can keep this phone free.” He turned to Susan. “I need you here with me in case I have more questions for you.”

  Molly gave Susan a hug and said, “Hang in there, sweetie.” Susan was grateful that Molly at least didn’t hate her, but it didn’t change anything. When Amy told her Frank was creepy, she should have done more than just call her mom. She should have called Frank and told him to stay the fuck away from her daughter.

  Molly hurried off to a neighbor’s trailer down the street. Then Susan turned to Danny, and they looked each other in the eye. But they still didn’t touch. If Frank had hurt Amy, Susan would never forgive herself and neither would Danny. They nodded to each other, then he took off.

  Susan turned to Lynch and asked, “What do you think happened to her?”

  Lynch took out a notepad. “I’d rather not speculate. We need to find your mom so she can help us locate this individual. Every second matters, ma’am.”

  Susan wrung her hands, then something came to her. Finally. The words poured out. “My mom said the next time someone took her to dinner, she’d make him go to Cooper’s Cave. She heard they have great lobster.”

  Lynch immediately got the number for Cooper’s Cave from Susan’s phone book and called them. He stayed on the line while the restaurant manager searched for a bearded man with a tiny nose or a woman fitting Lenora’s description: fifty-six, dyed blonde hair, five-seven with a good figure. Susan waited anxiously, hoping against hope Lenora would come on the phone and it would turn out Amy was right there at the restaurant with her.

  But when the manager came back on the line, he told Lynch, with Susan listening, that he hadn’t found Lenora. Several women more or less fitting her description had been there earlier tonight, but he didn’t know anything more about them.

  “Did anyone see a man with a beard and a tiny nose?” Lynch asked.

  “Nobody remembers a guy like that.”

  A chill ran through Susan. So Mom wasn’t with Frank tonight. He was somewhere else—maybe with Amy.

  They better find him—now.

  Lynch radioed the Glens Falls PD and asked them to send officers to question all the waitresses at Cooper’s Cave. Maybe one of them had heard Lenora and her date say something about where they were going after dinner. Then Lynch asked the Glens Falls cops to send cruisers to all the bars in the area. “And the ice cream places too,” Susan said into the radio. “My mom loves ice cream.”

  She told Lynch everything she could think of about Lenora’s colleagues and friends. Maybe somebody would know Frank’s last name. Then she told Lynch about all the other guys her mom had gone out with in the past year. Frank wasn’t the only questionable boyfriend of hers who’d had contact with Amy.

  Lynch radioed back and forth with cops from all the local towns, while Susan took the calls that came in on her phone. Every time it rang, her heart jumped, thinking it was Amy. But each time it was just a concerned friend or neighbor, and her heart broke all over again.

  Between calls, Lynch informed her about what was going on. Danny and Molly were out there calling people, who called other people, and within hours over two hundred searchers were hunting the woods in Lake Luzerne, calling Amy’s name. They were mainly unorganized, though some of them were given specific missions. They went down to the footpaths along the Hudson. They went up to the lake that gave the town its name and walked the empty campsites. They drove up and down 9N and the intersecting streets and looked into parked cars. They drove into the parking lots of the town hall, the bowling alley, and the video rental store.

  Lynch had the cops banging on the doors of known sex offenders. If you included all the different categories, there were a lot of them—almost thirty in the town itself, and a hundred if you included Corinth and Lake George.

  Susan set her highest hopes on the search party Danny was leading. He took his big flashlight with him and went to the elementary school, where he was joined by several neighbors and people from church. Together they walked the same shortcut Amy might have used to come home from school: the path above the old tannery. In spots it was treacherous, especially during mud season. Maybe Amy slipped and fell to the stream below and hit her head, and she was still lying there. They checked every bend of the stream, with Danny slipping more than once and cutting his arms badly on the rocks.

  Susan was crushed when Danny called in and said they hadn’t found her.

  But at least he was nicer to her now. “Susan, I was talking to Parson Parsons,” he said, “and she told me I was wrong to blame you. So … sorry about that.”

  Susan felt her chest growing warm. Danny was not a guy who apologized or forgave easily. If anything, he tended to be on the rigid side, harboring resentments about screwups that seemed pretty minor in her eyes. So she realized he had worked at this.

  “I’m really sorry, honey,” she said, sniffling, her eyes getting wet. “I feel like it’s all my fault.”

  “Forget it. We’re gonna go search by the river now, so, goodbye.”

  “I love you!” she said into the phone.

  She couldn’t sit still anymore, so she went out to the backyard, leaving the door open, and called Amy’s name. She looked out at the darkness, toward the woods at the back of the yard and the wetlands beyond them. “Amy!” she called again. A dog barked in the distance and Susan heard what sounded like an owl, but nothing else.

  Then the phone rang. She rushed inside and picked it up. “Hello?” she gasped.

  “Susan, what the hell is going on?” she heard Lenora say. “I’m at some bar and I heard the police are looking for me. Amy is missing?”

  Susan could tell right away her mom didn’t know anything about Amy, and her spirits sank. But still, she asked breathlessly, “Yes, have you seen her?”

  Lynch stepped closer, listening, as Lenora said, “No. My God, Susan, do they think something happened to her?”

  “Were you with Frank tonight?”

  “Who?”

  Susan ignored the bewilderment in her mom’s voice and snapped, “Frank! Your boyfriend!”

  Now her mom got defensive. “He’s not exactly my boyfriend, and no, I wasn’t with him. Why?”

  Shit! “What’s his last name?”

  There was a pause, then her mom said, “Susan, get off this. Frank is not some perverted kidnapper, for chrissake.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “He’s married. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  Susan had never been so furious at her mom, or maybe anyone, in her whole life. “Tell me his fucking last name!”

  Lenora finally said, “Okay, fi
ne, but this is crazy. Frank Simmons.”

  Susan repeated the name for Lynch’s benefit, then asked her mom, “Where’s he live?”

  “I’ve never been there, but it’s somewhere in South Glens Falls.”

  Lynch got the phone book and searched for Frank Simmons’s address.

  Lenora said, “Look, it’s probably nothing. She’s probably just lost somewhere.”

  “I hope so, Mom,” Susan spit out, not bothering to keep the anger out of her voice.

  Thirty minutes later, Lynch was still using Susan’s kitchen as a command post when he got a radio call. She could hear the conversation.

  “I’m at Frank Simmons’s house,” the cop on the other end said. “We got him.”

  Lynch asked, “Is the girl with him?”

  Susan gripped the edge of the kitchen table.

  “No,” the cop said, and Susan moaned with pain.

  “How’s he acting?” Lynch said.

  “Freaked out. He’s denying everything.”

  “Does he have an alibi for this afternoon?”

  “We asked him. He said he won’t talk without a lawyer.”

  Susan’s eyes widened. He wouldn’t talk? This had to be the guy!

  What did he do to Amy? Is she still alive?

  Lynch asked, “Did he say why he won’t talk?”

  “No.”

  Susan yelled into the radio, “Make him talk! Beat the fucking shit out of him!”

  The cop said, “We’re doing everything we can, ma’am.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, PRESENT DAY

  SUSAN DROVE WEST on Route 29, leaving Lake Luzerne far behind. The band of blue grew and took over the sky. As the state highway rolled out in front of her, she thought, what a big world. She opened her window and breathed in the invigorating cold air.

  She turned on the radio, looking for pop or country, but all she could find were sports and political talk. The hell with that. She turned it off and, without thinking, began to sing, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride, nobody’s gonna slow me down, oh no …”

  She remembered when the song came out: the summer before she started dating Danny, when she was sixteen. Young, free, and filled with hope. She sang louder: “I’m running and I won’t touch ground, oh no, I got to keep on moving …”