The Disappeared

by David B. Silva

  “He just woke up; looks a little restless.”

  “Have one of the nurses bring something down for him to eat.”

  “Sure thing.”

  D.C. took a quick glance at the monitors, his face expressionless. When he wasn't looking straight at you, you wanted to keep an eye on him, to watch for the dangerous undercurrent that always seemed to be on the verge of breaking out. He nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever he had seen, and started to pop back out of the room. Before the door closed, he stopped and added this: “Oh, and put the fucking cards away, will you?”

  [69]

  Michael's paranoia had not receded much. In fact, as he gradually made his way down the street where he used to live when he and Teri and Gabe had still been a family, the paranoia began to rise in his throat again like the bile from a stubborn case of the flu.

  The house came into view on the right, and he could see almost immediately that there were no lights on inside. Even if someone had been in the back bedroom, there would have been a soft glow detectable through the entryway window. Not this time, though.

  He pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine and sat there a moment, debating if he should even bother getting out and knocking on the door. When he rolled down the window, the car filled with crisp night air. A chill snaked down his spine, and Michael opened the door and climbed out. He closed the door softly and made his way up the walk.

  Teri had done a nice job of keeping things up. The lawn was beginning to look in need of a mowing, maybe, but that was the nature of a healthy lawn. In the corner, he noted how the junipers had overgrown the sedum, and in the shadowy night casts it appeared that Teri had replaced the ivy bed with white rock. Less maintenance, he supposed. It was strange being back.

  On the porch, he cupped his hands and tried to peer into the entryway through the window next to the door. The other side was a jigsaw puzzle of light and shadow, indecipherable except for the fact that everything inside seemed still and quiet.

  “Come on, Teri. Be home. Make this easy.”

  That was still the hope, of course – that Teri would open the door and invite him in and sitting on the couch, he would find some ten-year-old neighborhood kid who had been drawn into Teri's fantasy without even knowing it. Then Michael would send the poor kid on his way and help Teri to see how she had turned her pain into a happy ending, only it had all been in her mind. And then he would help her to get some counseling. And that would be that. It would be over. Gabe's memory would be preserved, as it rightfully should, and that... would be... that.

  Michael stepped back and gave the door a rap.

  It wasn't going to be that easy, he knew that.

  Nothing ever was.

  He knocked again, then turned and glanced across the street, where a dog had begun to bark somewhere in the distance. When he had parked in the driveway, the neighborhood had seemed almost preternaturally quiet, and because of that he had only absently noted the black Olds parked at the curb across the street. But now, with the streetlight at a different angle, Michael realized he was not alone. There were two silhouettes in the front seat of that car. Men, he thought at a glance.

  The house was being watched.

  He was being watched.

  Michael turned back to the door and knocked a third time. Mostly for show this time, but also for the opportunity to take control of the sudden rush of adrenaline that was coursing through his body. Teri's fantasy had not been a fantasy after all. In an instant, that realization came to nestle in his thoughts as if it had always been there, never questioned. He might have been able to rationalize Teri's phone call, might even have been able to rationalize the van in Tennessee, but there was no rationalizing these two guys. Not here. Not at this time of night. Coincidence, overwhelming coincidence, was the nourishment of fools.

  He didn't bother to knock a fourth time. Instead, Michael found the needed strength to make his way back down the walk to his car. He rolled the new Taurus, the only car they had available at Budget, down the driveway and swung the rear end in the direction of the black Olds, stopping maybe six or seven feet short. Then he shifted out of reverse and into drive, and he watched in the rearview mirror as the Olds was gradually reduced to a mere dot in the distance.

  As he rounded the corner, Michael became aware of the pounding in his chest. Maybe a little paranoia had its place.

  [70]

  It was nearly two full days before Teri was able to return to the here and now. She had slept most of that time, curled into a fetal position, tossing and turning and fighting with her dreams.

  Walt drew the drapes in the bedroom to keep the daylight out, and he did his best to tiptoe around the apartment so he wouldn't disturb her. The one time she emerged from the bedroom, hungry, he sat her down at the counter in the kitchen and made her a plate of bacon and eggs and toast. She wasn't really hungry, though. She picked at the food with her fork, until she started to cry. Then Walt held her in his arms and tried his best to comfort her.

  “I let him get away again,” she said, her eyes red and swollen.

  Walt still didn't have the whole picture, but he knew enough to know she had done everything she could have done. “It wasn't your fault, Teri.”

  “I should have known better. Why would the FBI be involved?”

  “Hey, we're taught to trust a badge.”

  “But I'm not a little girl. I should have questioned them. I should have insisted they wait for you.”

  “It's over,” he said, doing his best to soothe her. He felt completely incompetent, a man trying to shine a bright light over the mouth of a deep, dark hole. What he didn't understand until much later was that sometimes you have to let the hole completely engulf you before you can find your way out again. “It's in the past. You can't change that.”

  Teri went over and over how she had let the boy slip out of her grasp and how much she hated herself for allowing that to happen. She would cry, then sniffle awhile, then talk awhile longer, then cry again. And Walt learned to listen without saying anything. That's all she seemed to need. Just someone to listen.

  She never did eat more than a forkful or two of her breakfast. It turned cold after awhile, and the eggs turned runny. Gradually, the conversation—what there had been of it—died out and it seemed there was nothing left to be said.

  Teri stared emptily across the kitchen, her fingers working at the edges of her napkin. “I think I'll go back to bed.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can put some coffee on?”

  She smiled numbly. “No. But thank you for listening.”

  Walt returned her smile, a hesitant, awkward turn of the corner of his mouth, and he watched her climb out of her chair and shuffle back down the hall to the bedroom and close the door behind her.

  That had been yesterday morning.

  And now Teri was up again.

  She came down the hall, still looking a little on the tired side. Two days of tossing and turning, of nightmares and sweats, had not been good to her. Her hair was a rat's nest, twined and clumped and all out of sorts. Her eyes were still dull from sleep, though beneath them, the dark rings were gone now. She yawned, placing the back of her hand over her mouth, and leaned against the nearest wall.

  “How are you feeling?” Walt asked.

  “So-so.”

  He nodded. “Hungry?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “What would you like?”

  “Anything. It doesn't matter.” Teri yawned again, and ran a hand through her hair, flattening it against her scalp. “What time is it?”

  He had to check his watch. “A little after two.”

  “Another day wasted, huh?”

  “I wouldn't call it wasted.” He got up and went into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes from yesterday were still in the sink, where he had simply forgotten about them. He turned the water on and let it run, waiting for it to make the long trip from the heater through the pipes. So
many things hadn't gotten done the past couple of days. In a way, he had been sleeping as much as she had.

  Teri came up and stood in the kitchen doorway. “I'm ready now.”

  He glanced at her.

  “I've done my crying, and I'm done feeling sorry for myself. I want my son back.”

  He smiled. “That's all I wanted to hear.”

  [71]

  “Where do we go from here?” Teri asked. She brought a cup of coffee to the table and sat across from Walt.

  “After the bad guys, I guess.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “First off, we have to figure out who the hell they are.”

  She nodded. She was beginning to feel better now. After he had made lunch and she had showered and cleaned up, she had taken a few extra minutes to sit down and close her eyes, to try to gather up whatever strength she could find inside herself. Walt had been right about what had happened. It was in the past, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. The future, however, was still in the making, and that was something she wasn't going to let herself forget.

  “Have any guesses?” he asked.

  “I don't know who they are,” she said. She took a sip of coffee, which had been the last of a pot that Walt had made earlier. It was bitter and only lukewarm. “But they're tied to Gabe somehow. They're the ones who took him the first time; I know they are.”

  “You have any ideas why they might be interested in him?”

  “No, it doesn't make any sense.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking away. He picked up the pencil he had brought with him to the table and tapped an absent meter against the yellow legal pad underneath. “What do you know about Dr. Childs?”

  “You're kidding.”

  “No, I'm not. There's something about that man.”

  Teri had known the doctor for twenty, maybe twenty-five years, ever since she had first met him at a community health clinic, where he volunteered his time on weekends. That had been long before he had started his own private practice, and long before Gabe had even been born. “I don't know. I know he's a good doctor.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why him? I mean, why not this Mitch guy? He's the one who's showing up everywhere.”

  “Mitch is just a stooge. There's someone else behind this.”

  “I've known Childs a long time,” Teri said, feeling suddenly uneasy. She took another sip of coffee, trying not to let herself runaway with the idea that the doctor might actually be involved somehow. There weren't but a handful of people you could trust in your life, and you desperately wanted to make sure one of those was your doctor. If you couldn't trust your doctor...

  “I don't want to leave any avenues open,” Walt said.

  “I know. And I understand that. It's just that...” It was just that what? Suddenly it was hitting too close to home? In her mind, she had always imagined that the source of their trouble was someone or something out there, some external, faceless enemy that had picked them at random. This, though, wasn't like that at all.

  “He may not have anything to do with it at all,” Walt said. “But we've gotta make sure.”

  She nodded, knowing he was right.

  “So why don't you tell me what you know about him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how you first met,” he said evenly. He appeared only mildly interested, but that wasn't the case here at all. At least not in Teri's eyes. Walt had done this before. He knew how to keep an even tone in the conversation, how to listen without spooking the person who was doing all the talking. It had all been part of his job at one time.

  “It was the first time I ever thought I was pregnant,” she said. “Michael and I were going together, and I had missed my period. We were both in college then, and the chance that I might be pregnant... neither one of us was ready for that. We talked about it and talked about it, and it was like running into a mine field. You think you have everything under control and then suddenly there's this out of nowhere explosion and all your dreams start disappearing out from under you. It was...”

  She stopped and realized how long ago that had been and how fresh it still seemed in her mind. Some things become part of who you are whether you invite them in or not. “I ended up at a health clinic off campus.”

  “And Childs worked there?”

  “He volunteered there.”

  “Doing abortions?” Walt asked matter-of-factly.

  “No, of course not,” Teri said. “This before Roe versus Wade. Abortion was still illegal back then.”

  “That didn't prevent them from happening.”

  “It wasn't that kind of clinic.”

  “Were you pregnant?”

  She cast her eyes downward at her coffee cup and shook her head. “No. We had Gabe four years later, after both of us were out of school and Michael was working for Henry & Patterson.”

  “You left the Bay Area and moved up here?”

  “There was a group of us, a bunch of friends who always hung around together. After college we decided to stick together if we could. Back then, communal living was a pretty common thing. So we all kind of migrated up here.”

  “And you lived together?”

  “For awhile,” she said. She finished the rest of her coffee, and got up to return the cup to the kitchen sink. “Then some of us got married and moved into our own places, and others got jobs that took them out of the area, and some just lost interest and drifted away like lonely clouds in the sky.”

  “How did you hook up with Childs again?”

  “When I got pregnant with Gabe we started asking around about a good general practitioner. It was all part of that getting back to nature thing we were trying so hard to do at the time. I was planning on using a midwife for the birth, and after that I wanted to take my baby to a good family doctor, a Marcus Welby type, like they had back in the Fifties, someone who might actually make a house call once in awhile.” Teri finished washing out her coffee cup and placed it in the rack next to the sink. For a moment, she gazed out the kitchen window at the apartment across the way, letting the color of her thoughts melt into the creamy caramel color of the building. “Someone mentioned to me that Childs had set up a practice in the area. So three weeks after Gabe was born, I took him in to see him.”

  “What was Childs doing up this way? Did he ever say?”

  “I don't remember exactly. Something about wanting to get away from the city.”

  “Like everyone else, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Teri broke away from the window and came back and sat down at the table. Her thoughts drifted through the last time she had spoken to Childs and what he had told her about Gabe's aging. Then magically, they drifted to the night when she had put Gabe on the phone to talk to his father. It was the only time she could remember Gabe lighting up with a smile.

  “I've gotta call Michael and tell him what's happened,” she said suddenly.

  Walt dropped the pencil and stretched. “Maybe he already knows.”

  “No, we talked to him the other night on the phone. He didn't know anything. I had to convince him it was really Gabe.”

  “You called him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Gabe wanted to talk to him.” And then something suddenly occurred to her, something she had nearly forgotten. She slumped back in her chair, and felt all the energy drain out of her as if it were one final breath before dying. “Oh, my God.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I just remembered. That thing Childs mentioned, that Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome. Gabe's aging process—it's speeding up.”

  [72]

  For a time after that, nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. The implication was like a dark secret suddenly exposed to the light of day. Out in the open, it was perhaps more manageable, but that didn't make it any less monumental. Time had become of the essence now.

  A sense of despondence quietly settled over Teri like a dar
k thunder cloud, and she nearly let herself sink back into the abyss of the last couple of days. That would have been easy for her. So easy. All she would have had to do was close her eyes, and let the sleep come. But instead she got up and stood at the living room window. She gazed out over the city lights, watching the traffic patterns glow, and thinking how huge the town had grown the past fifteen years.

  Gabe was out there somewhere.

  And he needed her.

  When she came back to the table, Walt took out his pencil and they made a list of things they needed to get done, people they needed to talk to. The list went on for nearly three pages, one item, one line. And they agreed to get started on it the next morning.

  It was a little after midnight when Teri finally went off to bed.

  Tomorrow was going to be the day she started looking.

  And she was going to keep looking until Gabe came home again.

  [73]

  Mitch watched the lights go off in the upstairs apartment. He opened his notebook, checked his watch, and made this entry: 12:27 A.M. TRAVIS APARTMENT. LIGHTS OFF.

  It was getting cold out. The sky was clear and according to the weatherman the temperature was supposed to slip below forty tonight. He closed his notebook, stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat, and leaned against the corner of the building, deciding to wait awhile longer. A couple more minutes of enduring the cold and he could assure himself they had truly retired for the night. Always better to be on the safe side.

  Mitch blew some heat into his cupped hands, then folded his arms across his chest, and watched a brown tabby emerge from the row of shrubs across the walkway. The cat let out a hungry meow and weaved back and forth between Mitch's legs before he picked her up.

  “What are you doing out in the cold, huh? Somebody lock you out?” He scratched behind her ear, absently enjoying the deep resonance of her purr, while he watched the apartment.

  Two of a kind, we are, huh? Out late like this.

  Except cats were known for their independence and now that Mitch thought about it, however briefly, he realized he had never been what you might call independent. Divorced. No children. Nothing had worked in his life until he had enlisted in the military in his early twenties. From that day until this, he had thrived on being told what to do next. As long as there was someone willing to hand down the orders, Mitch had his place in the world.