Abducted

by Brian Pinkerton

  “The Coast Guard found a body,” said Calcina. “Adult female, drowned. She’s been dead for less than twelve hours.”

  “No,” said Anita, grabbing at her hair. “No no no no no.”

  “It’s probably her,” said Dennis. “Roy is…he’s identifying the body.”

  “Where’s Tim?” asked Anita, hysteria washing over her. “Please tell me he’s alright. Please. Please.”

  “We continue to search for Tim,” said Calcina. “There’s a chance that he’s in these woods—that she abandoned him and then took her life. He could be lost. We’re increasing the numbers of investigators. We’re expanding our search.”

  “He’s going to be so cold,” said Anita.

  Dennis stepped forward and hugged her. She wrapped her arms around him tight. More than ever before, she needed his strength. They held onto one another until they could barely remain standing.

  When the reporters started closing in on them again, Dennis and Anita retreated into the back of one of the police vehicles, where they could hear the buzz of activity on the police radio.

  Anita held her face in her hands and cried.

  The next two hours brought only one piece of news: confirmation that the drowned body belonged to Pam Beckert. She probably died very quickly, said an investigator, either from drowning or from the battering against the rocks. Died very quickly, thought Anita. Should that make me feel better?

  She had never, ever been seized by terror that gripped so hard.

  This must be what it’s like for relatives after a plane crash, she thought. The waiting, the hoping, the praying for a miracle.

  The afternoon gave way to the shroud of nightfall. As the darkness deepened, the temperature dropped. Someone distributed flashlights. Someone else brought bags of fast food. Anita ate part of a hamburger, very slowly, tiny bites. It tasted like nothing. But she kept it down.

  With all her remaining strength, she forced positive thoughts into her head. She envisioned a storyline where Pam left Tim sleeping in the car, killed herself, and then some campers found Tim and took him someplace safe and warm. They were feeding him, being gentle and kind, and trying to locate the proper authorities. Tim would be back in her arms by bedtime. They would all go home together.

  Just before sunset, Anita and Dennis saw a handful of investigators pull together. Anita had been watching faces all day, most of them stoic, but these expressions were different. They were alarmed. She tried to lip read. One of them appeared to say “Oh, shit,” in reaction to the words of another.

  The investigators began to spread out, meeting in twos and threes with others who started coming in from the forest.

  Anita and Dennis quickly climbed out of the police car.

  “What’s happening?” shouted Anita, but no one wanted to look at her. Only one person stepped forward.

  Lieutenant Michael Calcina, shoulders sagging, walked up to them slowly. His mouth moved, but he was still searching for words.

  Then Anita saw the tears in his eyes.

  She closed her own eyes. She closed them as tight as she could. But she could not shut out his words.

  The Coast Guard had discovered an object bobbing in the waves. A small, brown stuffed toy.

  It was Tim’s bear.

  VII

  All through the memorial service, Anita didn’t let go. She stood between her father and Dennis, clutching their hands as if they supplied the sustenance that kept her from crumbling. She needed to feel their life because she felt none inside. The tiny coffin at the front of the church contained more than the symbolic loss of Tim. It contained a huge portion of herself, removed and killed off, forever.

  She felt like a shell, or an alien, surrounded by two hundred human beings inside St. Mary’s Cathedral. They were sympathetic. They cried. But they could never identify with her. She existed in another world now.

  The service was beautiful. She knew it objectively, even if she didn’t feel it penetrate her or provide comfort. Maggie had offered to supply her with tranquilizers to get through this day, but it wasn’t necessary. Anita was already numb.

  While everyone was dressed in a mournful black, the church itself was alive with colors. Flower arrangements spilled out in every direction. The April sun lit up the stained glass windows with an almost fluorescent intensity. Even the organ painted colors with its rich, thundering tones.

  Anita remembered Tim’s fascination with the church. He was always good here, attentive. Other children would let out shrieks of boredom, or wriggle and cry, or kick the pews with intermittent thuds, but not Tim. His eyes used to roam the elaborate woodwork, the dramatic figures in the stained glass, the long rafters and expansive arched ceiling. He looked for the source of every curious sound: the choir, the organ, the singing that spun a web around him. He even seemed to pay attention to the sermons, drawn in to the gentle, Mr. Rogers-like articulation of Father Hammil.

  Now God had him for good.

  Anita fought it at first. Without a body, she would not accept Tim’s death. Even after the police declared him dead and closed the case, she refused to hold a service. At the very least, she wanted to postpone the funeral until a body was recovered. But the pressure for closure mounted until she felt she would crack apart.

  Calcina had explained that they were fortunate to even find Pam’s body, the way the powerful tides along the coastal rock churned and pulled everything back to sea. The search for Tim in the water and in the woods lasted a long time, and involved a lot of manpower. But the hope grew dimmer every day.

  Anita prayed that the police would find a reason or piece of evidence to breathe new energy into the search. But there was none.

  The text message Pam had sent now became an all-too-clear suicide note tinged with defiance and the revelation of Tim’s fate. “He will always be with me.”

  In true nonconfrontational fashion, Pam didn’t leave the world with a conversation, no adult interaction. Just a cowardly note.

  “He will always be with me.”

  The words were burned into Anita’s consciousness. He’s not with you, she wanted to shout. He’s with God. And you are burning in Hell.

  Dennis admitted that his hopes of finding Tim alive died when the stuffed bear was discovered. It looked so soaked and gruesome that neither one of them could look at it for more than a few seconds—it provoked another level of horrible images they did not want to contemplate.

  For several weeks after the bear’s discovery, Anita dashed aside its implications. She hounded Calcina mercilessly every day for any news, any clues, anything. Wherever she went, Anita kept an eye out for Tim. It was crazy and compulsive, but she couldn’t stop.

  And it got her in trouble. On several occasions, in crowds on the sidewalk, in schoolyards, at the mall, she would see Tim out of the corner of her eye. The jolting discovery—followed by the quick realization that it was not Tim, not even close—would nearly send her into hysteria.

  When Dennis was with her, it would infuriate him. “Why are you doing this to us?” he demanded once, loudly, outside the restaurant where they were picking up another carryout dinner. People stared, people knew them like local celebrities now. “I can’t take much more of this, Anita.”

  But she couldn’t help it. And it wasn’t always her fault. There were the sick crazies who called and left ominous messages: “I saw your son. He was at the zoo with a fat man wearing women’s makeup.” Or: “My neighbor Frank has your son locked up in his basement. Here’s his address…”

  She passed the leads on to Calcina, who barely reacted, his voice remaining steady, while hers swelled with panic and hope.

  “Yeah, we get those calls at the station, too,” he said. “Unfortunately, this happens. You get disturbed individuals who want attention, or they want to cause trouble for someone by implicating them for a crime they had nothing to do with.”

  But he always promised to look into it. Then, about six weeks after the abduction, when the search was all but over, she
created headlines at Sears.

  She hated shopping now because she hated appearing in public, but she was simply picking up some dull necessities—undergarments, mostly—when she saw an elderly man and a little boy getting into the elevator off the children’s department.

  The boy, from a distance, seen from behind, looked like Tim.

  The elevator doors shut. Anita dropped everything and screamed. She told a clerk: “That man stole my son.”

  The staff responded with lightning-fast efficiency—she later discovered that they were well trained to follow a strict procedure. In a matter of minutes, the entire store was in lockdown. Gates rolled down to seal off anyone from disappearing into the adjacent mall. Doors to the outside were locked and guarded by security. Scores of police materialized out of nowhere. Every customer was trapped inside, buzzing with excitement, as the store was thoroughly searched: every restroom, every storage space, underneath every clothing rack, behind every counter.

  When police apprehended the elderly man of Anita’s description, the two-year-old boy in his possession only had a vague similarity to Tim. Both looked terrified. The elderly man was befuddled and pale, repeating over and over, “It’s my grandson. He’s my grandson.”

  The little boy looked ready to cry.

  When Calcina showed up—sweaty, chest heaving from running—the look on his face sent a chill through Anita.

  Without a fault, through the investigation, he had been warm, patient, compassionate, and controlled. Now he was just one pissed-off cop. She could tell he was holding back from chewing her out.

  She felt sick. She apologized to everyone over and over, automatically, until she didn’t even hear her own words.

  “Look,” said Calcina. “I understand how traumatic this has been. I know how important it is to still have hope. But, when you’re under this kind of stress, your mind can go into overdrive and play tricks. It’s like a hallucination or mirage. You see what you want to see. I’m just saying this because you need to be aware that it happens.”

  “He looked like Tim,” said Anita simply, flatly.

  Calcina nodded. He promised to set her up with a grief counselor.

  I don’t need a grief counselor, she wanted to tell him. He won’t make me feel better. Only one person can make me feel better. And he’s gone.

  Anita knew that she would keep seeing Tim until there was closure. The funeral would be closure. But it would also be the death of hope.

  As the weeks continued to pile up without progress, with rapidly dwindling resources devoted to the search, Dennis started the conversation about a funeral service. When the police closed the investigation, she knew it was time to put Tim to rest.

  Still, she pushed it away for more weeks, until it loomed so big and heavy that she could no longer push.

  She then faced the reality of Tim’s funeral, knowing it would be the worst day of her life.

  She now knew why relatives of plane crash victims wanted remains—any remains—for a burial. The absence of a body tormented her. He needed to return to her, come home, even in the worst possible state.

  In the end, there was only a lock of hair, saved from his first haircut. During funeral preparations, she had the option of a memorial board with pictures, or a casket to fill with mementos. She chose the latter.

  The casket held the hair snippets, goodbye letters, family pictures, favorite toys, drawings—every item bringing wrenching tears as it was added to the collection.

  At the funeral service, her brother, her father, Dennis, and his father carried the casket up the aisle. Father Hammil delivered a homily that tried to make sense of a life cut so short and something he called the “disruption of the orderliness of the universe.” Her father delivered a eulogy. Despite being an engineer, he was a polished speaker, and brought tears out of everyone’s eyes. He spoke about the little boy who touched so many lives.

  Originally, Anita had planned to deliver a eulogy, and even wrote one out, but she couldn’t say the words out loud without a complete breakdown. Finally, she put the handwritten eulogy into Tim’s casket. Afterall, it was for him, not the crowd at the funeral service.

  Dennis had considered speaking as well, but simply could not articulate his thoughts, and probably couldn’t bear to try. His survival technique seemed to be silence, and he spoke very little during the worst weeks, blank-faced with an emptiness in his eyes.

  Anita knew Dennis was hurting tremendously. He had taken to fatherhood very strongly, with even more devotion than she ever imagined. Tim brought out a warm and wonderful side of Dennis and he relished the time they spent together. Now he was just vacant and detached, like someone pulled the plug.

  When the mass ended, the pallbearers regrouped to accompany the casket out of the church. As Anita turned to leave the church, she could finally see the rows of faces she had felt behind her, looming like one large being. There wasn’t much to distinguish them. Uniformed in black, red eyes, red noses, long faces. Everyone was sniffling, shuffling, looking away from her. A few individuals came up to her and offered words that she barely heard and hugs that she barely felt.

  Outside the church, reporters had gathered. She refused to acknowledge them. A woman waving a microphone tried to find a willing soundbite. A TV station needed some compelling footage to sell advertising space around. Would they ever leave her alone? Weeks ago, one had the nerve to ask if she was going to attend Pam’s funeral. She had just glared in response.

  After the funeral, Anita gathered her remaining stamina to attend a luncheon with a small group of friends and relatives at the home of her neighbor Gilda. Gilda and her husband had moved into the area around the same time as Dennis and Anita, and they had become fairly close over the years. Gilda had a young daughter about Tim’s age—she was wisely absent from the house.

  The gathering was well meaning, but awkward. There was only one subject to talk about, and no one dared show disrespect by straying to something else. Everyone took a turn coming up to offer their deepest, most heartfelt condolences. They all had good intentions, but they simply could not soothe her or reach her pain. They were on the outside, looking in.

  And when they weren’t coming up to say how sorry they were, they were staring at her from across the room with sorry, pitying eyes.

  Barbara Roeber still looked shell-shocked, feeling the burden of responsibility for recommending Pam. Anita didn’t know whether she should harbor animosity toward her or not. Surely Barbara could have offered up something about Pam’s obsessiveness or possessiveness around children. Unfortunately, the truth was that Anita missed it, too. No one could have seen this coming.

  Maggie was there, along with all her cohorts from Digital Learnings. Maggie kept saying, “Please let me know what I can do to help,” although there was nothing. Nothing.

  Several people offered meals—what night would be good to deliver dinner? Anita did her best to be appreciative while turning them down. She had built up a collection of stock comments and replies.

  The exhaustion was quickly settling in. She wanted to leave and be alone, but too many people had driven or flown from out of town. In fact, she had not seen such a comprehensive gathering of family and friends since her wedding.

  One of Anita’s least favorite people, Dennis’s mother, was here, inevitably. She spent most of her time hovering near Dennis. She always treated Anita with an artificial cheer, never failing to contradict or undermine her. Shriveled, frowning, blue-haired Myrtle Sherwood still wanted to be the number one woman in Dennis’s life, and Anita was still and forever the competition. Not an unusual scenario, Anita understood, but irksome all the same, especially when her parents treated Dennis like a prince.

  Maggie, bless her, injected the one and only moment of humor into the day when she provided Anita with a quick, snarling impersonation of Myrtle Sherwood’s loud displeasure over the lack of ice for her vodka and 7-Up. Anita had shared many “in-law” tales with Maggie, who didn’t even speak to her mother-in-l
aw anymore. They had a falling out more than a decade ago over who would host Thanksgiving dinner.

  Anita’s family, up from Nevada, hovered around her, peppering her with questions, examining her delicately. “Do you want something to eat?” “Do you want to sit down?” “Do you need to go home?”

  Anita’s brother Peter tried to make her feel better with an affectionate, long-winded remembrance of his encounters with Tim, but it only brought tears to her eyes. Finally, Peter simply told Anita that he loved her very much, which he had never said before, and possibly didn’t mean. It was her cue to tell her brother that she loved him, too, but she merely nodded.

  If there was any relief to be found, it was in the presence of her parents. Perhaps it was the simple fact that they had always been her protectors and guiding lights. Now she felt like a little girl again, needing them to make everything all better.

  Her father was as pragmatic as they came—precise with his words and actions and always right, if not very emotional. Her mother was a heavyset, cheerful woman who could find the silver lining in almost anything. It was strange to see her today without a smile. She looked much older.

  Both were retired, and they were prepared to stay with her and Dennis for an indefinite period after the funeral. Even if Dennis did not favor the arrangement, he did not object. He probably knew she wouldn’t let him.

  Dennis was simply too shattered to be a pillar of strength right now. Anita knew that her parents would help keep her from going off the deep end. They would also help fill out the haunting emptiness at home.

  The luncheon broke up in the mid afternoon. Once a few people started leaving, the rest followed quickly. Anita could not blame them. They needed to reconnect with their own safe and secure lives. She wished she could leave the gloom behind as well, but it was going to travel with her, like a raincloud following a cartoon character.

  Gilda wrapped up the leftovers and passed them out to the reduced group that was going home with Anita and Dennis. Anita thanked Gilda for everything. Gilda cried. Myrtle Sherwood quickly downed her third vodka and 7-Up.