The wife frowned in thought. “You know, I think I did,” she said. “It was about half an hour ago, maybe? I remember thinking she was too little to be out alone. She was running, and I thought maybe she was playing tag with someone, but no one else seemed to come after her.”
“Which way did she go?”
The woman pointed farther down the street. “She might have been heading for the park. That’s down that way.”
“Of course!” I said. “Thanks!”
I started jogging in that direction, but then came to my senses and pulled out my phone.
“Todd?” I said when he answered. “I found a lady who saw a little girl about half an hour ago. She was headed in the direction of the park. I’m going to go there now, but I thought I should tell you.”
“Great!” said Todd. “I’ll meet you there.”
I did run then and had every reason to regret not being in better shape. I arrived at the park’s playground panting, sweating, and with a sharp pain in my side. I even felt slightly dizzy and was reminded that I had promised the doctor not to exercise for a couple months. There hadn’t been the slightest chance I was going to exercise on purpose, but I couldn’t have foreseen an emergency like this. There were lots of kids on the swings and slide, but none of them seemed to be Mia.
I was feeling more and more shaky, and when I saw the bench Kim and I had sat on a couple weeks ago I was able to get to it. I sat down, closed my eyes, and made myself concentrate on breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. After a minute I felt better and opened my eyes. There were two kids standing in front of me staring at Molly. The big dog had flopped down at my feet, having probably never been led on such a forced march in her life. I couldn’t imagine the trouble I would have getting her to walk home again.
“Can we pet your dog?” asked one of the boys. “Sure,” I said. “Hey, have you seen a little girl with dark hair around here?”
The boys looked back at the playground and immediately I saw the absurdity of my question. There were a dozen little girls there, most with dark hair.
“Wait!” I said. There was a picture of Mia on my phone. I pulled it out and found it. “Here,” I said. “Do you remember seeing this girl?”
One boy shook his head, but the other said, “I think so. She was over there.” He pointed to a large bush.
“Thanks,” I said, and suddenly remembered Mia crawling under a bush to hide. I looped Molly’s leash around the arm of the bench and walked as quickly as I could manage over to the bush.
“Mia?” I called. I thought I heard movement inside the bush. I crouched down as best I could to peer between the branches. I saw a shoe. Mia’s shoe. “Mia!” I said. “Are you ok?”
“Shhhhhh,” came the reply. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”
Abandoning any dignity I might have had, I got onto my belly and crawled under the bush. It was part of a row of bushes, and there was actually space inside for me to sit up if I hunched over and avoided a big branch by leaning slightly to the right. Mia was lying down with her feet closest to me, but she sat up a bit when I got in there.
“Oh, Mia,” I said, giving her as much of a hug as I could from my awkward position. “I was so worried about you! We couldn’t find you!”
“I’m hiding,” whispered Mia.
“From who?”
“From the policeman. He’s going to take me back to my mom.” Now that my eyes were adjusted to the shade, I could see streak marks of tears running down her face.
“No one’s going to do that,” I said.
“I heard her,” Mia said. “I heard her say I was going to go back with her. And Mommy and Daddy got a new baby last night, and then today a police car came up and I knew he was going to bring me to my mom. There was a police car that came and got me when they brought me to Mommy and Daddy, so I knew that’s what he was there for, to bring me back to my mom.” Her face contorted. “I don’t want to go!”
“Oh, Sweetie, Sweetie!” I said, hugging her tighter as she began to cry. “The policeman wasn’t there for you. He just came to talk to me about something else.” She continued to cry. “Listen, Mia. When your daddy couldn’t find you, he told the policeman about it, and do you know what the policeman is doing right now? He’s getting people together to help look for you to take you back to Mommy and Daddy. He knows your mom isn’t allowed to have you right now, and he is making sure that she doesn’t come and get you, ok?”
Mia nodded, but her emotions were still too strong to allow her to stop sobbing. I just held her and stroked her hair as best I could. When I thought she was a bit calmer, I said, “Hey, let’s get out of here and go find your Mommy and Daddy, ok?”
She and I crawled out together and then we started walking back toward the bench where Molly still lay, mildly interested in the group of admiring children standing in a circle around her.
“Mia!” said Ed’s voice behind us and we turned around to see him and Todd coming our way from the parking lot.
“Daddy!” she screamed and ran toward him. He caught her up in his arms and hugged her for a long, long time.
Todd came up to me. “What happened?”
“She was hiding under a bush. She thought you had come to take her back to her birthmother. After the baby came last night she must have thought she was being replaced. And of course, her birthmother telling her she was coming to live with her again terrified her.”
“Poor kid! Now I’m really sorry I didn’t park the car elsewhere. Are you ok?”
“A little woozy,” I said. I glanced down at my clothes and saw that they had been soiled by my contact with the ground. “And I’m dirty, too. I had to crawl under the bush to get to her. She wouldn’t come out.”
Todd smiled and reached up to my hair. At first I thought it was a tender gesture and I almost melted right there on the spot, but his hand came away again with a dried leaf that had been clinging to my hair.
“Oh!” I said.
“I’d better call off the search,” said Todd. Ed was already calling Kim to tell her that he was with Mia, and Todd was soon on the phone with some other official person saying that the child had been found and reunited with her parents. I went back to Molly and sat on the bench while the men finished their calls. I was incredibly eager to continue my conversation with Todd. I replayed in my mind as much of his speech as I could remember, and probably had a silly smile on my face while I was doing it. I realized that I hadn’t had much of a chance to say anything in return. In fact, I thought I’d only said something about God working on my heart before Ed had interrupted us.
I imagined us walking slowly back to the Coles’ house together where I could tell him that I was deliriously happy to hear him say he wanted me to be with him, and that I had no intention of moving across the ocean or of dating Jason. It would be, after all, like the walk that Captain Wentworth and Anne took after he had opened his heart to her in that amazing letter.
I saw the men coming toward me and I stood up to meet them. Immediately I sat back down again. The adrenaline that had been keeping me going had evidently ebbed away after Mia had been found, and I felt much too weak to stand up, let alone walk back. I glanced at Molly and knew that she wasn’t going to want to walk home, either.
“Let’s go,” said Ed. “We’ll all go in the Suburban.”
“Can you make it to the car?” asked Todd.
“I think so,” I said.
“Well, take my arm,” he said, and we walked like that across grass to the parking lot. It would have been much more romantic if I hadn’t spent the whole time trying to stay upright instead of fainting, but I will say there have been very few strolls that I enjoyed more.
Ed and Kim insisted on my staying over that night. They said it was to keep an eye on me after all my exertions, but I knew it was mostly because Kim wanted to know what Todd and I had said to each other on our walk. When we’d gotten back to the house from the park, To
d had told us he needed to get back to the station. But while the Cole family were gathered around Mia, hugging her and each other, Todd had pulled me aside and asked if he could see me on Monday night.
“And you told him…?” said Kim later as we sat on Deirdre’s bed like two teenagers discussing their first crushes. Deirdre had volunteered to give me her room while she slept on an air mattress in Mia’s room.
“I said yes,” I said. “He’s picking me up at seven.”
Kim squealed and hugged a pillow. “Where are you going? What are you doing? What are you going to wear?”
“No idea. About any of those things.”
Kim twirled her hair as she thought. “Dressy casual. That will work for just about any activity.”
I sat up straight suddenly. “Kim! I’ve just remembered! What will I do if Jason calls again?”
“He won’t,” she said calmly.
“How do you know?”
“I told him not to. A couple weeks ago. He asked if you were well enough to go out and I told him that something was developing with someone else—someone you already knew. I told him he should wait and see what happened with that relationship before trying again.”
“Thanks. I hope that didn’t hurt his feelings.”
“I don’t think so. I think he’d been testing a possibility but he hadn’t made up his mind that you were the one for him or anything.”
“Good.”
“Now, you need to get to sleep.” She picked up the empty mugs we’d drunk hot chocolate out of, along with the wrapper of the chocolate chip cookies we’d snuck into the room.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
“Sweet dreams.” Kim giggled like a fourth grader and I threw a pillow at her as she left the room.
Chapter 17
On Monday I spent way too much time picking out an outfit to wear that evening. It worried me a bit. I couldn’t recall being flustered over a date to this extent since my early twenties. As the time approached, I made myself stop fiddling with my appearance. I looked at the clock. Six o’clock; I had an hour left. I thought I ought to read something to calm my nerves. I sat down on the sofa just as my phone dinged to tell me that I’d just gotten an email, so I read that first.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: re: Sorry
Dear Dr. Peters,
I asked a lot of people in my family if they knew the name of the man who had spent time looking at my great-grandfather’s library. The only person who remembered him was my great-grandpa’s old housekeeper. She wasn’t positive, but she thought his name was Willoughby or something like that. At first she said it was Wuthering, but I think she was mixing it up with a novel. Anyway, that’s all I could find out. I hope it helps.
Matt
Well, there was confirmation. I was glad my own little bit of detective work had paid off. I could hardly wait to tell Todd and see his reaction.
I reached over to the coffee table for my big, fancy edition of Our Mutual Friend. A student had once heard that it was my favorite of Dickens’ novels and had given me this large-print leather-bound copy as a gift. It’s somewhat impractical, as it’s too much to carry around—at a thousand pages it looks more like a photo album—but it does look nice on a coffee table. I’ve read it so many times that I usually just skip to my favorite parts, so I read about John and Bella’s long talk after Betty Higden’s funeral, sympathising in a new way with their walk to the train station.
The doorbell rang just as John and Bella were getting onto the train, and I looked up at the clock. It was only six-thirty. Todd must be early, I thought. Either he’d gotten the time wrong or he just couldn’t wait to see me. I stuck my finger in my place in the book and carried it with me to the front door. For a moment I entertained the idea of making some kind of joke about the book, like that I thought reading it aloud would make the perfect date, or that we couldn’t leave until I had finished the whole thing. I hadn’t decided which of these mild witticisms to use by the time I got to the door.
It didn’t matter, because it wasn’t Todd at the door. It was Dr. Weatherill.
I just stood there gazing at him unbelievingly. I had spent all weekend thinking he was somewhere in Oregon, and now he was standing in front of my door.
“Miss Peters?” He was perfectly polite and deferent, just the same as I had seen him twenty-odd years ago, only more gray and thin than I remembered him.
“Yes?” I said, trying to appear calm.
“I wonder if I might have a word with you? You may not remember me, but you were in one of my classes at UCSC. Dr. Weatherill.”
“Oh, right!” I said and pasted on a smile. “What is it you need?”
“Well, I’d like to come in and ask you a question—about your bookstore, as it happens. I don’t know if you got a message I sent you by way of a third party.”
“Yes, you said you might be interested in buying some of my books. I was very happy to hear that. Maybe we can arrange to meet sometime and go over the books together.”
“I’d like to do that. But I still have a question. May I come in?”
If I’ve learned anything from mystery novels and TV shows, it’s that you don’t let murder suspects into your house when you’re alone.
“Now isn’t really a good time. I’m going to be leaving soon,” I said. “Maybe you could come back tomorrow?”
He sighed. I noticed now that his eyes were bloodshot and he looked unwell.
“I’m afraid I must insist,” he said and took his hand out of his coat pocket. It was holding a gun.
I froze, staring at it. He had killed Frank in daylight in his own store, and he would probably not hesitate to do the same to me. I wondered if I could keep him talking for half an hour, until Todd would show up.
I backed away from the door and let him enter. I still had Our Mutual Friend clutched to my chest. I’d remembered reading about a Bible carried in the shirt pocket of a soldier in World War I, was it? Or World War II? Anyway, it stopped a bullet from killing him. I kept the book in front of me as a kind of shield. Just in case.
“I was wondering,” Weatherill said, when he’d come in and shut the door, “where your safe is.”
“I don’t have a safe,” I said.
“I mean the safe for the bookstore.”
“But there isn’t one,” I said.
“Oh, yes there is. There’s a secret safe.” Weatherill’s voice had taken on an edge.
“Really, I don’t think there is.” Frantic escape plans flitted through my head. Perhaps I could tell him I would show him the safe but he’d have to come with me, and then on the way I would signal someone or something. Or I could tell him that the police knew everything and he’d better give himself up instead of adding to his crimes. Surely he’d be to see the sense in that.
“I know there is,” he said. “Frank Delaney told me in an email that there was a safe.”
“He did?” I wondered if there’d been an email we never saw, because the one the police had found didn’t mention anything about a safe. And Frank and I had had that discussion right before he died about the possibility of getting a safe. I didn’t see how Frank could have had one.
“Well, he didn’t tell me about it,” I said.
“I think he did,” said Weatherill. “I think he told you there was a book that needed to be kept secure. That’s why it wasn’t at his house or your apartment or the bookstore.”
I would have been completely at sea if I hadn’t already known what he was talking about. I decided to play very dumb.
“I don’t understand,” I said. I wondered if I could get to my phone, which was still lying on the sofa arm. I started moving slowly in that direction, walking backwards with the book still clutched in front of me.
“It’s very simple,” he said, speaking like I was five years old. “Frank Delaney had a secret safe, and he put a book I need into it.”
“How do you know i
t was secret?” I said.
“He told me in code,” said the professor. “He wrote, ‘everything is safe for now.’ You see? That was a message for me. It mentioned the word ‘safe’ but not in a way that most people would recognize it. It was a code language.”
The idea of Frank making up any kind of code was completely laughable. He’s crazy, I thought. That freaked me out more than anything else had done since I’d opened the door. There would be no reasoning with him if he was really out of his mind. All I could do would be to try to keep him calm. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was only six thirty-five; I wondered if I could keep him talking for twenty-five whole minutes. Lord, help me.
“Speaking of codes,” I said, “I’ve always wondered about the code William Byrd used for his journal. Was it the same as Pepys?”
“No. Pepys used Shelton’s system of shorthand, and Byrd used Mason’s. But that doesn’t answer my question about the safe.”
I was almost to the sofa now but couldn’t figure out how to pick up and use the phone without him knowing it.
“I really don’t know anything about a safe,” I said, “but it seems to me I read somewhere that Pepys used bits of other languages as well as shorthand in some of the more naughty diary entries. Is that true?”
“Of course it is.” Weatherill’s impatience seemed to be growing. “That’s common knowledge. If you don’t know that, then it’s no wonder you’re only an adjunct professor at a school like Wilkester!”
Amazing isn’t it, that at such a moment my pride was still hurt by his statement?
“You’re right,” I said, swallowing the insult in the interest of safety. “But you know so much about all of literature. I’m sure every fact seems like common knowledge to you.”
He appeared a little mollified. “Well, I have been immersed in the world of letters for a long time and have an extremely retentive memory.” He moved closer to me but lowered the gun a bit.
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