“Hi there, Jesse,” Karen said briskly, looking over Jesse’s left shoulder to Brenda on the convertible. “Can we come in?” Without waiting for an answer, Karen brushed past her at the door. Three other women and the black man who had been behind the wheel of the Blazer earlier in the day filed in behind her.
As the others stood quietly, almost respectfully, outside the perimeter of the living room carpet—as if to proceed further required a second invitation—Karen dropped to one knee before Brenda on the couch, took a bandaged hand in both her own, and began the search for Brenda’s eyes. “Brenda?” Her voice was firm and soothing. “I’m Karen Collucci from the Friends of Kent. Did you know we were coming?”
“Yes,” Brenda answered in a flat, distant tone.
Jesse, intimidated, hanging back with the others, reconfirmed that she out-and-out disliked this woman, her energetic, presumptive air, her steamroller positiveness.
“We’re here to help you if you want our help. Do you know about us?”
“Yes,” Brenda answered in that same monotone, fear manifesting itself as dullness. The other Kenters maintained their silence, all eyes on Brenda.
“We just came from talking with Detective Council,” Karen said. “He brought us up to speed from the police point of view, but we’re not here as cops, we’re here as parents, we’re here because we have kids, too, and what happened to your son could have happened to any of our own children, OK?”
“OK.” Brenda kept her eyes on the hand still smothered in Karen’s grasp. Karen looked back to the group, and the Friends of Kent took a few steps forward, Jesse moving with them.
“This is Elaine,” Karen said, introducing a taut woman who, despite her gray hair, looked to be still in her early thirties, a wiry, burning presence, the only Kenter not wearing a team jacket. Her plain face was dappled with a splash of port-wine stain from her throat to her ear, and her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of her jeans as if she were cold.
“Hey.” Elaine spoke in a hoarse, funereal whisper. “We’re gonna do everything we can.” Brenda avoided Elaine’s eyes too.
“This is Marie,” Karen gestured to a woman in her sixties, chunky, with charcoal-black hair and a ferocious tan that gave her eyes a bottomless depth. Marie stepped forward and kissed Brenda on the right temple. Brenda closed her eyes at the contact.
“This is Teenie, Marie’s daughter.” Another deeply tanned woman, with the same chunky build as Marie’s, wearing a gold chain on which hung a chai—the Hebrew symbol for life—and a gold charm, the two stylized stick figures, adult and child, that were the logo of the organization.
“And this is Louis.” The black man nodded. His clipped moustache and gleaming processed hair reminded Jesse of Billy Dee Williams, although his shoes said cop. The Friends of Kent now stood in the center of the room.
“Who’s Kent?” Brenda asked Karen, who was still kneeling, holding her hand.
“He’s a boy we helped find about five years ago. We’ve been helping find kids ever since.”
The front door swung open behind Jesse, Ben entering, hunched over a cardboard flat of sodas, bottled waters, and pastries. “Hey.” He was pale with exhaustion, his forehead fringed with sweat again. Moving quietly, he slipped into the kitchen and began setting up a snack counter on the serve-through cutout.
“Brenda?” Karen held her bandaged hand. “Would you like our help?”
“How old are your kids?” Brenda asked—a delay tactic.
“Mine? Ten, eight, and four.”
“Huh.”
“You see Teenie here? She’s Marie’s daughter. Plus she’s got a four and a six of her own.”
“Huh.”
Elaine moved to the window, her back to the room. Brenda looked at Louis from under the canopy of her left hand, Karen following her eyes.
“Lou’s got three kids.”
“You two are married, right?” Brenda addressed Karen’s midsection.
Karen nodded. “Twelve years.”
“I don’t know. I could just feel it. Jesus, everybody’s got a four-year-old.” Brenda yawned, a nervous shudder. “Jesse too.”
Jesse looked down and scowled at the carpet. Ben stopped setting up for a moment, frowning at his hands.
Karen turned to face Jesse. “Is that true?” she asked in a luxuriously significant voice, and Jesse knew that she was fucked, understood that this woman could and would blow the whistle on her the instant she considered Jesse out of line.
“Yup,” Jesse said tightly, fingering the cell phone in her pocket, a new one that her brother had secured for her. I have a job to do, she told herself, feeling marrow-tired, the world turning gray.
“Brenda.” Karen turned back to her, took both bandaged hands in her own again. “Do you want our help?”
Brenda sighed, an exhausted, despairing exhalation. “OK,” she said, her voice floating away. Jesse knew that she just wanted these people gone, perceived them as further punishment.
Jesse raised her eyes to the room again, saw Elaine staring at her from the window, focused but expressionless. “Can we sit down?”
“OK.”
Karen slid in next to Brenda on the couch, Teenie and Marie pulling up dining chairs to form a semicircle. Elaine remained by the window, and Louis held his post against the wall, self-possessed and quietly alert.
“First thing. I need to hear from you what happened.”
“No. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t say that anymore. I told the police everything—”
“I know, I know, I know.” Karen amiably drowned her out. “It’s just… Look, like I said, they have their priorities and we have ours. Right now, they’re off doing their cop thing, they have certain pressures on them, certain… Us and them, we have different ears, we hear different things. So, Brenda, please, just one more time, I wouldn’t put you through this if I didn’t think it was worth it. Please.”
“No.” Brenda took back her hands, covered her face. “I can’t. I just…”
It was a standoff, Karen waiting, Brenda hiding behind her bandages; Karen letting the silence run a good two minutes, Jesse wanting to warn Brenda about how she was coming across; the others hunching forward, elbows on knees, staring at Brenda or at the carpet.
“Brenda. You got to help us help you.” Another two minutes passed. Jesse had to walk off; the silence was excruciating. “OK,” Karen finally acceded. “I understand. We can go with the police report if you want.” Brenda nodded, dropped her hands back to her lap, palms-up. “OK. This is what we do. We put together a flyer, run it out there right away. Post it, hand it out, get it in the papers. Now…”
Karen went into a dufflelike shoulder bag, extracting a Hagstrom grid map of Dempsy County. She unfolded it to the Gannon-Dempsy border and showed Brenda the scene of the crime, marked with a red dot. “This is what we do.” She drew a three-inch square around the dot with a felt-tip marker. “We like to do a canvass ten blocks square around the crime scene.”
“In Armstrong?” Brenda groaned.
“Armstrong and the streets around. Just knock on doors.”
“You’re probably not gonna get anything,” Jesse volunteered, measuring her words carefully. “Those people are pissed. The cops just went through there like storm troopers.”
Karen looked at Jesse for a few seconds before answering. “Exactly. We come around, like I said, we’re parents.”
“You’d be amazed what people tell us, don’t tell the cops,” Teenie said, pulling on her gold charms.
“Jesse, you got to see them,” Ben crowed from the serve-through, grinning goofily.
Jesse wouldn’t look at him.
“You ever been through those buildings?” Jesse asked—a casual warning, her last comment. Elaine was still staring at her from the windowsill.
“Honey?” Teenie’s mother’s voice sounded like boots trudging through gravel. “You wouldn’t believe some of the places we been through.”
Marie’s comment made Karen
and Teenie smile. Jesse noticed that Marie and Karen wore that same gold-charm logo that Teenie did—Karen’s on a bracelet, Marie’s on a neck chain, like her daughter’s. Elaine’s throat and arms were as bare of ornamentation as her face was of expression.
“So, Brenda.” Karen tapped the red square on the map. “Right now, on the phone, we can put a hundred volunteers together within the hour. We have kind of a volunteer reserve corps for situations like this, but they’re all from around Hoboken, Bayonne, Jersey City. They don’t really know this town. Now, we already have the names of everybody on the Armstrong tenants’ council. We’ll call them first, see if they can help out, raise some local people. But how about you? Do you have any friends, family…” Brenda shrugged, dropped her eyes. “No?” Karen cocked her head. “OK. How about at work, people from work.”
“Just the, Felicia.”
“Felicia, OK, we call Felicia.”
“Felicia…” Teenie, pen poised, let the name hang.
“Mitchell,” Brenda said.
“Good. Excellent. We call Felicia Mitchell, see if she can raise some bodies for us.”
“You have her phone number?” Teenie asked.
“We’ll get that.” Karen waved off the query, then turned back to Brenda. “OK, so I understand you work in, like, what, an after-school program, right?”
“The Study Club.”
“The Study Club. The kids are, like, what…”
“Little mostly.”
“Teenagers?”
“A few.”
“Good. They’ve just been drafted. And they can bring their friends. See? It’s gonna happen, OK? It’s amazing how it comes together.” She tapped the map again. “OK, so we do this ten-block canvass. We do it tonight. Now, if that doesn’t play out?” Karen drew a larger square, superimposed over the original, doubling the area.
“We never quit. We just get angry.” The women nodded in agreement, Jesse thinking, Our motto. “OK. Now this is what I need from you, and we should get this right away so we can get humping on that flyer. I need a good picture of him. I need a description of his clothes, his hair, any scars, height, weight.”
Brenda protested the request with a deep, heaving sigh, then got into it yet again. “Four foot three, forty-seven pounds, hair crew cut on top, long in back, like some professional wrestler I don’t know the name…” Brenda rattled off the vitals in an aggressive, high-pitched monotone meant to express her exasperation. Karen, unaffected, nodded. Teenie wrote it all down. “Got Ren and Stimpy pajamas, big dinosaur slippers, growl when you step on the heels; got a scar line through his right eyebrow…He had stitches from when this kid in the playground…”
Jesse had never heard about this scar before. It was a fresh recollection and she saw Brenda begin to falter, tripped up by the vision that began to materialize despite her best efforts to keep this fact-laden prattle on the level of a tantrum.
“This kid, it was an accident,” Brenda said, her voice beginning to drift. “And it was, like, you know how you see stuff happen before it actually happens? He was on the top of this sliding pond, Cody, and this other kid, Brian, he was standing on the bottom, you know, to try to walk up the slide? And mentally I was already there, you know, like scooping one of them off before—”
“Scar line through the right eyebrow,” Karen said, to bring her back.
“That’s all,” Brenda said, ingesting a fresh gulp of grief, her hands crossed over her face again. Jesse anticipated the gesture before it was made, the repetitiveness of this reflexive movement over the last day and night having taken on the weight of a leitmotif, a physical refrain.
“OK. We need a good picture,” Karen said, her eyes roaming walls and tabletops.
“Can’t you just use the picture in the paper?” Brenda pleaded from behind her hands.
Jesse was surprised, unaware that Brenda had caught sight of herself on the newsstands.
“I want to show you something,” Karen said, extracting a large manila envelope from her shoulder bag, sticking a hand in there, raising a thin clatter. She pulled out a metal photo button—the envelope was bulging with them.
“Look.” Karen held up a color reproduction of Cody feeding the goat, the image heat-sealed around the disk. “I got my guy to do this.” Karen looked from the button to Brenda. “I made up a gross. We’ll pass them out, you know, to keep up the awareness out there, but, Brenda?” Karen pointedly squinted at the image. “I swear to you, I swear this—I don’t really think I could recognize him in the flesh, coming off this picture, could you? It’s too shadowy. And let me just ask you. How old is this picture, because you say he’s crew cut up top, long in back. This kid here’s got hair in kind of a bowl cut, a mushroom cut, so—”
“That was almost a year ago.”
“Yeah, see?” Karen sounded sad.
Jesse found herself becoming increasingly irritated by Karen’s slow, exaggerated tones, her patronizing cue-card emotions.
“If I may speak freely.” Ben turned heads his way, then held up a four-picture photo booth strip that had been attached to the refrigerator with a magnet.
“That’s good.” Karen nodded. “Brenda?” Brenda nodded without looking.
Elaine, finally pushing off from the windowsill, took the photo strip from Ben, the written details from Teenie, and left the apartment. Jesse experienced a great wave of relief at her departure.
“Now we’re gonna have two phone numbers at the bottom of the flyer,” Karen told Brenda. “The police and the Friends of Kent hot line. We have a twenty-four-hour operator. I’d rather not give out your home number, if that’s OK, because—”
Brenda cut her off. “OK.”
Karen hesitated for a beat, studying her. “About phones. Brenda?” Her voice lifted Brenda’s eyes. “Let’s say the guy panicked, saw your son in the backseat, pulled over somewheres, let him out of the car.” Brenda gave one of her wet herculean sighs of despair. Karen waited on the side of the road. “He let your son out. Does Cody know how to call home?”
“What?”
“Does he know his phone number?”
“Yeah. Yes.” Brenda’s eyes turned to the phone, then down to the disconnected jack. Karen followed her gaze. “I started getting prank calls,” Brenda said, quickly, as if Karen would punish her. She struggled to her feet to reconnect the jack, but Ben beat her to it, raising a hand for her to take it easy. “I was getting prank calls,” she repeated.
“Hey, I understand.” Karen raised a hand in the same gesture as Ben had: Take it easy.
“Now. Do you have an answering machine?”
Brenda shook her head, and Karen, dipping into her shoulder bag again, pulled out a gray plastic model that had an 800 number painted in red on the body. “Before we leave you tonight, I’m going to have you tape a message for your son on this in case he calls when you’re not here, OK?”
“Yeah,” Brenda said to her hands. “And in case the guy gives him a quarter when he throws him out of the car.”
Karen and the others seemed to absorb this rebellious comment nonchalantly, and Jesse sensed that Brenda was in great peril, that the forces slowly coming together against her were drawing greater and greater strength with each evasive or inappropriate response. She looked across the room to her brother, who returned her gaze with a galling wink.
“So, OK.” Karen laid a light hand on Brenda’s knee. “We’re out there canvassing tonight. Hopefully we’re getting some tips that people wouldn’t give the cops, getting some leads on the actor. And now we come to the question head-on. Where is your son. Where do we look. Where do we look.” Karen flattened out the Hagstrom map, touched her felt-tip pen to the crime scene. “What’s your gut feeling, Brenda?”
“He took off in a car.” Brenda sounded angry again. “How would I know?”
Karen leaned forward on the couch. “Let’s say, your son woke up sooner rather than later. Let’s say, the guy realized he had a passenger in the backseat sooner rather than later. S
o let’s keep it within a mile.” She drew a nine-inch circle around the two canvassing squares, the crime scene dot now taking on the aspect of a bull’s-eye. “Look at this.” Karen slipped a hand behind Brenda’s back, to nudge her forward. “Gut feeling. Where should we look…”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what does he like to do? What is he attracted to?”
“He’s in a car,” Brenda sobbed. “It’s night. He’s four.”
“Well, my four-year-old? He sees the word pizza, he starts foaming at the mouth.” She turned to her husband. “Right, Lou?” Louis gave a perfunctory nod. “Now, Teenie’s four-year-old, Adam? He sees a park, he drops to all fours, starts running like a dog. Right, Teenie?”
“Tell me about it,” Teenie muttered.
“What’s your four-year-old like to do, Jesse?” Karen asked, turning to her with tight-lipped, unblinking attention, giving the leash a little tug.
“You name it.” Jesse shrugged, looking off.
“So what’s Cody like to do?” Karen eased it back around to Brenda.
“Be with me. He likes to be with me.”
“Huh.” Karen gave it a moment to absorb the straight-arm, then picked it up again.
“OK, well, look. The fact is, it’s been almost twenty hours, about, so the odds of him still wandering out in the street somewheres, not getting picked up by now, helped out by now, are not so good.”
She tapped six blobs of mapped green within the one-mile circumference. “Now, we looked at this map earlier today and on paper we saw six possibilities where a kid could conceivably get lost or hide out for a whole day and night, not get noticed. But then we drove around and eliminated three—this is a golf course, this is a cemetery, this is a ballfield.” She drew X’s through the rejects. “There’s no cover, no trees, no hollows, no structures, no place to hide, if that’s what he’s doing, which leaves us”—she circled the other greens—“the old Chase Institute, Freedomtown, and Hudson Park, OK? So, Brenda. What’s your heart say…”
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