“But he would’ve called, wouldn’t he? You know Matt, he never forgets anything. Do you think I should call the police and find out if there were any accidents reported?”
“No. Well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to check if it would make you feel better.”
I called the Orlando Police Department. They had no record of any serious accidents either with Matt’s name or with unidentified persons. The officer took my number and called back ten minutes later to say that he had inquired with the state police and their search had come up empty as well.
“There’s nothing you can do except try to relax,” Jill said when I reported back to her. “Have a glass of wine and go to bed. I’m sure it’ll all work itself out tomorrow.”
Griffin called to check in. Like Jill, he thought I was overreacting.
I managed to get a decent night’s sleep, but the minute I woke up I started worrying. This was the first time I could remember that Matt had let me down. That was a testament to his character, but his unwavering rightness had always felt like a reminder of what I could not be for him. Maybe now he’d decided to turn the tables and let me see how upsetting it could be when someone disappointed you and left you hanging.
I was pouring myself a cup of coffee when the phone rang.
“Mrs. Drobyshev. This is Ernie Glickman, the general manager at the Royal Palm Hotel in Orlando. I’m following up on the conversation you had with our night manager. Have you heard from your husband and children yet?”
“Not yet. I’m very worried. I contacted the Orlando police to see if there might have been an accident, but…I don’t know. It’s not like him not to call.”
“Well, our records show he is still a registered guest in our hotel. I don’t mean to alarm you, but I checked with housekeeping, and they informed me that no one has been in the room since the beds were made up Monday around ten-thirty in the morning.”
“Monday?”
“Yes, our staff leaves complimentary chocolate mints on the bed pillows every day when they’ve finished making up the room. I’ve spoken personally with the housekeeper on that floor, and she distinctly remembers that the candy, along with the rest of the room, was untouched yesterday morning. It appears that your husband and children have not stayed here the past two nights.”
“Oh my god. I don’t…Have you…?”
“I’m not sure what to tell you, Mrs. Drobyshev. As I said, your husband is registered with us until Friday. There’s no unpaid balance on the room. Perhaps he decided to go elsewhere without informing us.”
“Or informing me!”
“I’m sorry,” Glickman said. “We’ve left a note in the room asking him to call the front desk immediately if he returns.”
I hung up. I was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in my hand. For hours I’d been grasping at the possibilities, hoping one of them would make sense; then my heart stopped as I thought of something Matt had said Sunday night. He told me he was taking the kids to a water park the next day. But Sarah couldn’t go swimming with her cast on. I leaned against the counter, my knees weak as if I were dizzy, but my mind was perfectly clear. I threw my coffee cup and watched it shatter against the wall.
“He’s gone, Jill,” I screamed into the phone. “Matt’s taken the kids. Nobody’s seen them.”
“Wait! What? What do you mean?”
“He’s kidnapped them. He left the hotel without checking out.”
“Please, Luce, try to calm down. Tell me exactly what you found out.”
I told her about the call from the hotel manager. “The hotel room’s empty. Matt and the kids haven’t been there since Monday morning. When I spoke to him Sunday night, he said they were going to a water park the next day. But don’t you see? He must’ve been lying. Sarah can’t go swimming with a cast on her arm.”
“I don’t know. I—”
“He’s fucking disappeared, Jill! He’s never going to let me see my kids again.”
“Stop. Please. Let’s try to think this through. There has to be a reasonable explanation.”
“I need my kids, Jilly. I need to hold them.”
“I’m coming right over, Luce. I’ll be there fast as I can.”
Three yellow-and-white striped canisters were on the counter beside me. I stared at them for a moment, then swept them onto the floor. Matt had said they’d been one of his mother’s favorite possessions, but he would have left them in Butler if it wasn’t for me. Since the funeral he had gone home only once to deal with her things and settle her estate. I was the one who sent Christmas cards to Uncle Joe and Aunt Sally. Matt never talked about his mother, never even hung her picture on the wall. I’d always assumed it was too painful for him. Now I saw his bloodlessness; he could simply turn the page and move on, just as he did with that boy whose arm he’d broken. He told me there was a moment when he really wanted to hurt the kid, an instant when he could have stopped himself but didn’t. I remembered how he had felt guilty for a day or two then had seemed to forget about it. I hadn’t thought about that incident for a long time, until now. I should have brought it up when he was blaming me for Sarah’s broken wrist. Was that his justification for stealing the kids, her accident on the trampoline? He was quick to condemn me for my faults without ever seeing his own. In my mind I kept hearing him say, So long, Luce.
It was a warm summer day, but my teeth were chattering. I went upstairs and put on a pullover and a pair of sweatpants. From the bedroom, I called work and said I wouldn’t be in. I told Tillie I had a problem but couldn’t explain it now, and she obviously heard something in my voice that kept her from asking me anything more. Thank God Jill was coming. I couldn’t be alone.
I suddenly thought of Thorny in New York. His secretary told me he was in a meeting, but I said it was an emergency and I needed to speak with him immediately.
“Daddy! Listen. I need your help.” I tried to be clear and direct, explaining what I was sure was going on. Matt and the kids were getting farther away every minute. “Please don’t think I’m crazy. This is real, Daddy. I know it in my heart.”
There was no hesitation in his voice. “We have people here at the firm who can deal with this sort of thing. Keep your phone line open. I’ll have someone call you within ten minutes.”
It took less than five. A man from the Pinkerton Detective Agency asked me a few questions; then he said he would be sending someone from their Boston office within an hour to interview me and get photographs of Matt and the kids.
I went back downstairs. When Jill came, she didn’t try to offer any mitigating explanations for Matt’s whereabouts. We were cleaning up the mess from the broken canisters in the kitchen when the Pinkerton man arrived. He and Jill and I sat in the living room. I gave him several photographs of Matt from last summer and a studio portrait of Sarah and Nathan I’d had taken on a whim at Sears a few months before. I told the detective about Matt’s not calling and what the hotel manager in Orlando had said about the room being empty.
“Can you find them?” I said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mrs. Drobyshev. It’s Wednesday; your husband isn’t due back in Boston until Friday. With a little luck, he’ll call today with some lame excuse and all this will be a welcome waste of time.”
“In other words, you think I’m overreacting.”
“No, not at all. You were wise to get us involved so quickly. If he has abducted the children, the sooner we start looking, the better chance we have of finding him. Meanwhile, I’m going to have to ask you some questions to see if we can come up with anything else that could help our investigators.”
The interview was exhaustive. I tried to be brutally honest. If the detective or Jill—who knew most of it but was undoubtedly hearing some of my starker admissions for the first time—thought I was a lousy wife and mother, I didn’t care. I was past the point of lying about any of it; I just
wanted to see my kids again. The detective took copious notes. He said it was important to know that Sarah had a cast on her arm because it made her stand out and people would remember her. Before he left the house, he got paged on his beeper. He asked if he could call his office in private, and I showed him to the study.
When he came out, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t call it good news exactly, Mrs. Drobyshev, but it’s a start. Airline records show that your husband and children took a flight to Memphis, Tennessee, Monday morning.”
“Memphis?”
“We’ll get our people down there on this immediately.” He stuffed his notes in his briefcase. “Memphis. Smart move. Middle of the country. Means we’ll have to cover a lot more ground.” He was thinking aloud; then he looked at my face and realized his mistake. “But don’t worry, we’ll find them.”
“Will you?”
He forced a reassuring smile. “We’re good at what we do.”
I called Thorny and told him what I had learned. He said Amanda was on her way to the city to meet him and they’d catch the next shuttle out of LaGuardia for Boston. I didn’t try to act tough and tell them not to bother. Jill stayed with me until they arrived and promised to come back the next day. I was supposed to go to the movies with my friend Anita that evening, but I called her to cancel, saying I’d come down with a summer cold. I couldn’t bring myself to broadcast what I so desperately didn’t want to be true.
Griffin called at some point. He wasn’t due back until Saturday. He offered to fly home, but I said he should stay and finish his business, everything would probably be resolved in the next day or two. Maybe I was testing him, hoping he’d insist on coming home. He said okay, he’d wait to hear from me. As I hung up the phone, some part of me realized I didn’t want him here right now. In my mind I was already blaming him, thinking how none of this would have happened if he hadn’t come crashing back into my life. Which was both irrational and true. As the day wore on, when I wasn’t blaming him—or hating Matt—I was blaming myself. Hating myself, certain that everyone would be whispering about what a horrible mother I had been, saying I deserved to have the children taken away. Chances are most people already believed that anyway.
Every minute felt like an hour. I was chain smoking and chewing my thumbs raw, my mood swinging between catatonic silence and screaming rage. I couldn’t eat, didn’t want to sleep. Each time the phone rang, I was filled with a sudden hope, believing it was Matt come back to his senses. I wouldn’t let anyone stay on the line for more than a minute, afraid Matt would call and get a busy signal and change his mind. Thorny spoke with the phone company Thursday morning and arranged to have a second line for outgoing calls installed that afternoon. Amanda called Tillie for me and explained the situation but asked her to keep it quiet for now. Tillie said I could take all the time off from work that I needed.
Late Thursday afternoon a man from the Pinkertons called and talked to Thorny. One of their detectives had spoken with a clerk at the bus station in Memphis who said she had sold tickets on Tuesday to a man she was certain was Matt. She remembered the little girl with a cast on her arm. Matt paid in cash. She wasn’t positive, but she was pretty sure he bought tickets to Little Rock. The Pinkerton man said it was a huge break; his detectives were only two days behind and were going to start posting fliers with photographs of Matt and the kids. Thorny authorized them to offer a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward to anyone with information that led directly to “the recovery of the children.” That was how the Pinkerton man wanted it worded; he wanted to make sure we didn’t call it a kidnapping. Matt and I had agreed he could take the children on vacation to Disney World. Flying off to Tennessee wasn’t something we’d talked about, but as long as he brought the children home on Friday when he was supposed to, it would be hard to claim that he had broken any laws.
“Oh my god, Daddy,” I said. “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Don’t worry about the money, sweetheart.” He put his arm around me. “We want to catch the son-of-a-bitch. That’s all that matters.”
I was awed by the way he had taken charge of the situation and touched by his concern. It was so much more than I had expected, and I think he may have even surprised himself. He was not a doting father or grandfather, but this violation had struck a nerve. This wasn’t the usual Thornhill fiasco, someone screwing up with their foibles and bad habits; this was an assault on the whole family. As I watched Thorny’s steely resolve, I understood for the first time why he’d fared so well on Wall Street.
***
On Saturday, after the deadline had passed, Thorny and I went to see the Boston police. We were careful not to mention that Matt had been a cop, fearing they would automatically close ranks around him and put us at a disadvantage. If the sergeant who listened to our story recognized Matt’s name, he didn’t let on. He laced his fingers over his broad chest and pretended to be interested.
When we were finished, he said, “Listen, folks, I sympathize with you. I really do. I can see how hard it must be for you with all this waiting. But you have to understand, he hasn’t been gone that long. Cases like this usually resolve themselves in a couple weeks. The parent gets tired and runs out of money; the kids are whining to go home. So he calls some friend or family member who talks him into doing the right thing. Bottom line is, your ex-husband was supposed to come back yesterday. I know it seems like a long time to you, but we have to let this thing run its course.”
Thorny said, “Couldn’t your department get in touch with your colleagues in Orlando, where the children were staying last? Or Memphis? We know their father took them there.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, sir. Police departments don’t have the manpower to run around dealing with stuff like this. Do you have any idea how often some parent gets ticked off and takes off with the kids? We’re talking about beaucoup cases. There are hundreds of them here in Boston every year. We file a missing persons report and hope for the best. If our officers ran around trying to chase those people down, we wouldn’t have any time left to go catch the bad guys.”
I wanted to spit on him. Since when were kidnappers not the bad guys?
Thorny said, “Do you think we should contact the FBI?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Good luck with that.”
That afternoon the man from Pinkertons called. He said they’d gotten hundreds of leads, most of which proved to be dead ends. But one had come in from a motel clerk in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, who recognized Matt and the kids from the flier. She said Matt was growing a beard. He registered for the room under the name of Gerard Betz and stayed Tuesday night. He was driving a blue 1977 Chevy Malibu. The woman from the motel said there was no reason for her to take down the license number—the motel didn’t require that from their guests—but she remembered the car because her brother had one just like it. Using this information, the investigators were able to trace the car to a dealership in Little Rock. The used-car salesman remembered Matt well and said he’d paid cash for the car. He was also able to give the detectives the license number.
Thorny thanked the Pinkerton man and reminded him that Matt spoke Spanish so he might be headed for Mexico. Not to worry, the detective said. They had people south of the border where Matt and the kids would stand out more than they did in the U.S. With all the information they’d gathered, the Pinkerton man didn’t think it would take long to track him down.
I tried to feel confident. Looking at the Rand-McNally atlas, I traced the road from Little Rock to Arkadelphia with my fingertip and followed it down into Mexico. There were still moments when the entire situation didn’t seem real, as if Matt were engaged in a grotesque practical joke.
Jill arrived with her kids, all three of them bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked. She had been coming to see me every day. Amanda paraded the kids out into the backyard while Jill and I talked in the kitchen. I poured some iced tea for her and told her what the Pin
kertons said.
“They’ll find them,” Jill said. “I know they will.”
“Do you really think so, Jilly?”
“Absolutely. I really do.”
I began to cry for the seven hundredth time. Jill reached across the table and held my hand. “I know it’s hard, but you have to stay positive, Luce. You have to.”
“I know.” But in my head I was screaming, Can’t you see this is killing me? You have it all, you mindless sow—devoted husband, perfect kids, vice-president of the La-fucking-Leche League. My life is a total wreck. Half the time when you look at me I know you’re thinking it’s all my fault. And it is. It really is.
“Jill,” I said softly, “did Matt ever…? I mean, you two have always been so close. He never said anything to you about…you know, doing anything like this?”
“Oh, Lucy.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I love you. You’re my best friend. How could you even think such a thing?”
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” I rocked in my chair and covered my face with my hands. “They’re gone, Jilly. Really gone!”
Chapter 26
Matt
“Can we go to IHOP for breakfast?” Sarah said. “Mommy likes to take us there.”
I looked at my watch. It was quarter to seven Monday morning, our bags packed and ready to go. “Sure. We have time before we go to the airport. I saw one just down the road.”
“We’re going on another airplane?”
“Yep, we’re going to a zoo. A big zoo.”
Nathan said, “I wanna see monkeys.”
“Sure, we’ll see lots of monkeys and lions and tigers and polar bears. You guys’ll love it.”
Sarah said, “Are we coming back to Disney World?”
“No, honey. We’ve been on all the rides and stuff. Let’s go have some new adventures.”
“Okay.”
I was relieved. I was afraid she was going to balk or start asking questions about why we were leaving here and going on an airplane that wasn’t taking us home. “Did your arm itch last night, hon?”
Lies You Wanted to Hear Page 21