The Deepest Secret

by Carla Buckley

  “There’s no way my son had anything to do with that.”

  “We all think we know our kids.”

  What the hell does that mean? “It’s not a matter of knowing what our kids are capable of. It’s a physical fact that my son was here when Amy went missing.”

  “We’d do anything to protect them. I know I would.”

  “Are you insinuating I’m hiding anything? I was flying home from DC last night. If you check …”

  “We already have, sir.” She closes her notebook. “Keep an eye on your daughter.”

  She turns and walks to her waiting car. The bright sun strikes the chrome of her car and makes him see spots.

  Tyler’s sitting on his bed, his photographs scattered across his navy blue comforter. He looks up as David enters the room, and David can see the confusion and fear in his child’s eyes.

  “I don’t get it, Dad. What’s wrong with taking pictures?”

  “Nothing, Ty. Nothing at all. They’ll find her.” David sits beside his son and looks at the images of smiling faces arranged there, photographs of everyone in Tyler’s small world, everyone Tyler knows. The only one missing is David.

  EVE

  Eve suggests taking Charlotte’s SUV. I’ll drive, she says. Charlotte doesn’t reply. She’s focused on the tasks at hand—printing and distributing flyers. They will paper this town with Amy’s smiling image. Everywhere, there will be reminders to the public to keep an eye out for this little girl. Everywhere Eve turns, she’ll be branded anew, her evil heart punished and punished and punished again.

  Charlotte’s car is filled with reminders of Amy—the hardened drips of milk staining the cup holder, the silver CD sticking out from the CD player. I could marry Harry Styles! The rainbow sticker pressed to the dashboard, and the faint scent of chlorine that rises from the pink-and-purple beach towel lying on the floor behind their seats. Eve cracks a window, but it doesn’t help. Charlotte gazes out the window, leaning forward, as if she was willing Eve to go faster.

  They reach the school parking lot, and Charlotte climbs out. Eve takes the box of flyers from the backseat. They will tape some here, on the front door that Amy had walked in and out of for six years. An American flag snaps in the hot wind. In the field beyond, children dash around kicking a soccer ball.

  “She loves this place,” Charlotte says. “I don’t understand it. It’s so dumpy. The hallways reek of food.”

  Minivans line the curb, parents waiting impatiently behind their steering wheels, focused on errands they have to run, chores they need to do. They don’t know how wonderful their lives are.

  “She knows I’m looking for her, right?” Charlotte asks. “No matter what, she knows how much I love her.”

  “Yes she does. She knows that.”

  If Eve could, she’d climb into one of those minivans and drive away. She’d let the babble of children’s voices rise and fall around her. She’d drive past the park and the library and the grocery store, and pretend she was someone else, anyone else. For a while, surely that would work.

  “Who would do something like this? Who would take a little girl away from her family?”

  “I don’t know.” I do. I do know.

  “Those sick women who cut babies out of pregnant women. What if someone like that has Amy? What if it’s a predator? Oh my God. She won’t understand.”

  “Stop, Charlotte. You have to stop.” For Charlotte’s sake. And yes—a whisper—for her sake, too.

  “I can’t. I can’t. How can I? What if I never know what happened to her? How can I live, not knowing? But I know they’ll find her. She’s okay. I know she is.”

  Eve keeps a calendar, not the monthly ones of sunrises and sunsets that she tacks up by every door, but a secret one, in her heart. On it she tracks the time she has left with her son. It’s a rough guess, one that gains days every time he has a good medical checkup and loses weeks when he has a bad one. The ending point floats in the air, and for the first dozen years, she couldn’t see it. But now that dark dot is coming into view, and if she squints, she can almost see it. And beyond it, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing.

  Why haven’t they found Amy? A small voice inside Eve pipes up hopefully. Maybe they never will.

  This isn’t her quiet cul-de-sac. It can’t be.

  Vehicles are parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. There are news vans from other cities—Cleveland, Chicago. People throng the street, reporters, neighbors, strangers, all of them taking up space as if they have every right to be there. They don’t. They have to leave, go and take their hateful curiosity somewhere else.

  Charlotte and Owen stand outside their house, microphones bunched in front of them. Their children are off to one side. Nikki wears a bright yellow sundress, defiant. Scott has his hands in his pockets and his chin lowered. He is aware of every camera pointed his way. He’s terrified and angry, both.

  “Amy’s allergic to peanuts,” Charlotte says. “Even touching one can cause her to break out in hives. If you have her … if she’s with you, you need to know.”

  Remember to focus on your daughter, Detective Watkins had told Charlotte and Owen. Talk about what she’s like, what her special interests are. Use her name frequently. We want to humanize her. We don’t want to talk about repercussions or punishment.

  “Amy’s eleven years old, four feet ten inches tall. She has brown eyes and long blond hair. I wouldn’t let her get her ears pierced so she drew on her earlobes with a blue Sharpie. She … Amy … saw pictures on TV of the children without clean water and she decided to start saving her allowance to help build a well.”

  A woman nods, taking notes.

  “Amy loves the color pink.” Owen speaks clearly into the microphone. “She’d eat Brussels sprouts if they were pink.”

  Amy’s bedroom is painted a throbbing bubblegum color, her bedspread and curtains deeper shades of rose. There’s a fat fuchsia beanbag chair, and neon pink shades on the lamps. She’d begged for a bright pink carpet, but Charlotte had drawn the line.

  Eve stands with Albert in his driveway. Next door, Joan and Larry Farnham stand in their own driveway, holding hands, the way they always do. Nearby, a man says to his cameraman, “Make sure you’re focusing on the mother, get it if she breaks down. People love that.”

  He glances at Eve, through her, and then back to Charlotte and Owen.

  “A terrible business.” Albert’s white hair stands in tufts all over his head, and despite the warmth of the day, he’s wearing a long-sleeved button-down shirt and corduroys. He’s gotten so small since Rosemary’s death three months before, shrunken inside his clothes. He used to figure so large in Eve’s life, a reassuring ballast. He had helped David nail boards over Tyler’s bedroom windows. Rosemary had searched for cotton gloves in Tyler’s size; she had glued tiny pictures of salamanders and creepy-crawly bugs onto sunglass frames so that he begged to wear them. And now Rosemary’s gone, and it’s just Albert, shambling alone through the rooms of his house.

  Neil Cipriano walks over. “Any news?” he asks, and Eve shakes her head.

  Sophie Wu pushes her way through the crowd, young and slim, her long black hair gleaming, every strand in place. When Sophie moved in, Eve had gone over with her basket of light bulbs and an offer to replace any that burned out. Sophie had shaken her head. No, no, she’d said with sympathy. Don’t even worry about it.

  “This is crazy,” Sophie says. “I had to park at the top of the street.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” Albert says, and Eve looks at him. Does he know something? But no, he means the press conference.

  Charlotte and Owen have stopped talking and now the FBI agent is saying something in response to a reporter’s questions.

  “We’d have noticed a stranger hanging around,” Sophie says. “Wouldn’t we? I mean, this is a dead-end street. It’s not like people can just drive through. But I’m not home much. You’re home, Eve. Did you see anyone?”

  “I’d have to think about it.”
How can she be intentionally dangling the thread of suspicion? Keeping silent was one thing, but when did she decide to start lying? She doesn’t want to be this person. She wants this person to stop talking.

  “You ask me, it had to be someone who knew Amy’s comings and goings.” Neil’s got his hands shoved into the pockets of his pressed khakis, his blue button-down shirt open at the collar and the cuffs neatly rolled up. His cheeks gleam, closely shaven.

  He can’t mean it. He can’t know what he’s saying.

  “The police warned me to be alert for people who’ve suddenly changed their appearance or their routine,” Albert says. “Maybe gone missing for a period of time.”

  “Like who?” Sophie wants to know.

  “Like one of us,” Neil replies baldly.

  Eve had driven right past their houses at four in the morning, a time she never left her home. She’d been intent on getting to the carwash, and she’d been paralyzed with fear driving past the police cars parked in front of Charlotte’s house. She hadn’t looked to see if any of her neighbors was watching. Had one of them seen her return an hour later, tires splashing through the puddles, her bumper hanging low as rain clouds roiled overhead?

  “Really,” Sophie says, but she’s not looking at Eve. She’s eyeing the Farnhams, standing just a few yards away. She lowers her voice. “Don’t you think it’s strange that no one’s ever seen inside their house? They never leave even their garage door open.”

  It was true. Larry and Joan parked their cars in their driveway, and Larry wheeled his lawn mower out the side entrance. They kept their drapes closed and slipped in and out of their front door, barely opening it wide enough to let themselves inside. Eve couldn’t wait for the sun to go down so she could pull open the drapes. She kept the windows opened at night, whenever the weather allowed. She chafed at being closed up indoors, but the Farnhams seemed to welcome it. Sophie’s right: it is strange.

  “The police searched their place,” Albert says mildly, and Sophie testily replies, “Not until today. They weren’t home last night. The police asked if I knew where Larry and Joan were, and I told them I didn’t know.”

  “Well, it is the weekend,” Neil volunteers. “People do go out.”

  “Not them,” Sophie says. “I don’t think they have any friends. It’s just the two of them.”

  Albert looks thoughtful. “Amy was over there a lot.”

  Not Albert, too. “Only because Larry was building a goldfish pond,” Eve says.

  “Wow, Eve,” Sophie says. “I never imagined you’d be sticking up for him.”

  “I’m not,” Eve protests, but no one’s listening. Charlotte’s talking into the microphones and cameras again, and everyone has turned to watch her. Eve risks a glance down the street toward her garage. The door’s closed, hiding her car. She’d pulled the car in so far that the fender had bumped the wall. She imagines she can hear it ticking.

  HOLLY

  “My mom’s freaking out,” Zach says. “She says there’s a predator loose. I can’t even bike to work. She has to drive me.”

  Tyler leans back in his desk chair. He’s been going through his photographs, the ones he keeps in his bottom drawer—Sophie tipping a bottle over a glass; Charlotte sitting in her armchair with her zebra-print reading glasses perched on her nose; Amy crouched by her old dollhouse, reaching in; Dr. Cipriano holding up a measuring tape to his basement wall. Tyler taps them together and slides them back into their hiding place behind the box of printer paper. “Sucks,” he says with feeling. He can’t remember the last time Zach called him on the phone. They usually text or message each other on Facebook.

  “She’s calling people to form a watch group. She call your mom yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She will.”

  Zach’s mom and Tyler’s mom weren’t friends, though. They pretended to get along, but Tyler and Zach both know it’s not real. Their moms smile and say polite things, but they don’t hang out, not like Tyler’s mom and Charlotte always do. But when Zach’s family moved to a bigger house a few miles away, Tyler’s mom had seemed sad.

  “You see anything?” Zach says. “You were right there, man. Like CSI.”

  But Tyler hadn’t been looking out the windows the whole time. He’d been gaming; he’d gone into the kitchen for a snack. If only he’d been paying attention. He could have saved Amy. “Want to come over?”

  “No way my mom will let me. You come over here.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  They hang up. In sixteen minutes, Tyler can leave his room. Though it won’t really be sixteen minutes. It’ll be seventeen minutes, maybe even eighteen, before his mom knocks. She always makes him wait an extra minute or two, just to be sure. Clocks have a way of slowing down or speeding up, she says. He used to fight with her about it when he was little. It wasn’t just about that minute; it was everything else, too. He wanted to go to McDonald’s, ride a roller coaster, visit the ocean. He blamed his mom for making him stay inside, but she never budged. She only shook her head and looked sadly at him. I’m sorry, she’d say, and he’d retorted, If you were really sorry, you’d say yes.

  Then one night Melissa came into his room and stood there, arms crossed, glaring at him as he lay sprawled in his bed. You don’t remember what it was like, she’d said. But I do. So cut it out.

  He puts his head back against the wall. The poster across from him reads Play the Lottery. Win.

  Amy was always crawling into places she didn’t belong: in Tyler’s fort, up that tall tree in the Farnhams’ backyard. Once, she’d climbed into the backseat of Dr. Cipriano’s sweet Chevy Impala and lain down where she’d been completely hidden. Tyler had searched everywhere and had been about to give up when Dr. Cipriano came out and found her there. Tyler had been humiliated being caught playing hide-and-seek with a little kid. Amy had begged and begged after that, but that was the last time they ever played together.

  He hadn’t told Detective Watkins any of that. He didn’t like the way she’d looked at him, as if she didn’t want him to see how curious she was about him. Sometimes people had a hard time being around him. Melissa’s friends were usually nervous the first time they met him. Tyler’s teachers could be extra smiley on Skype or have faces as flat as stone. Not all the kids Tyler hung out with could deal with it. Once, when he was five, a kid in his Cub Scout den jerked away when Tyler accidentally bumped into him. His mom had invited him to Tyler’s birthday party that year. But of all the kids, he was the only one who didn’t come.

  Pizza’s a welcome treat, but Tyler’s the only one eating. His dad hasn’t touched his food, and his mom’s just pleating a paper napkin between her fingers. Even Melissa isn’t fighting him for the last slice. She’s picking off circles of pepperoni to stand in a greasy stack on the side of her plate.

  “I saw Owen today, out with the search teams.” His dad’s red across his forehead and nose and down his arms. Normally, this is the kind of thing his mom would be all over, but she hasn’t said a word about it. It’s Amy. Her disappearance has shocked the normal right out of his mom. She just sits there, looking at him, looking at all of them, but not like she’s really seeing them. “I would’ve expected Scott to be there, too, but I must have missed him.”

  Melissa looks up at the mention of Scott’s name. She used to have a major thing for Amy’s brother, back when everyone called him Scotty. Melissa used to sit on the front porch and watch Amy’s house, waiting for a Scotty sighting.

  “The police went all over the area,” his dad tells them. “Searching yards, knocking on doors. They’re going to bring out sniffer dogs and search helicopters.”

  Wait until he tells Zach. “What kind?”

  “AW139s.”

  Monster aircraft, the newest breed. They don’t bring those out for nothing. If they couldn’t find Amy, nothing could. “Can anybody help search? Can I?” He’d like that. He’d look places no one else would think of.

  “Oh, honey,” his mom says, and
he knows there’s no point in asking again.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Melissa says.

  Why shouldn’t they talk about it? Doesn’t Melissa want to know where Amy is? Then he gets it: the way Melissa’s picking at her food, her face so white. She’s hungover. Her Facebook status has changed. She’s no longer in a relationship. Tyler’s never really liked Adrian, who always stared when he didn’t think Tyler would notice. Melissa’s called him on it more than once. Dude, she’d said. Cut that out. He remembers how worried Melissa had been about getting a boyfriend, about how she asked their mom why boys didn’t like her. He’d have thought that finally having a boyfriend would make Melissa happier and less worried, but in fact, the exact opposite has happened.

  “Can I go to Zach’s?” Tyler asks.

  “Why don’t you see if he can come over here?” his mom answers.

  “He always comes over here. Why can’t I go over there for once?”

  “Are you sure Mrs. McHugh doesn’t mind?”

  “No.” Zach’s mom never makes a big deal about having to turn off certain lamps, but his mom always insists on coming in and making sure before she lets him go inside. People change light bulbs when they burn out, she told him when he protested, embarrassed at the big production she was making. They don’t think about it, so we have to.

  “Let’s give it a break, buddy,” his dad says, reaching for his beer. “This is a bad time for everybody. You boys can hang out later this weekend, okay?”

  Later, his parents come and sit with him in the living room as he watches TV. His mom’s got a package wrapped in striped paper. Her face is puffy like she’s been crying. “Your dad tell you about your birthday present?” she asks, and when he nods, she hands him the package. “This was supposed to go with it.”

  It’s flexible, and light. He shakes it, just to make her smile. His dad says, “What do you think it is?” and he answers, “A football.” This is from when he was little and thought every present was a football. His mom’s smile deepens to her eyes, and now it looks a little more real.