by Brad Parks
“He left the house early this morning. Didn’t you see it on the cameras?”
“It looked like he was going out on an errand. I didn’t think it was of consequence.”
“Well, I’m telling you it is of consequence,” the voice said. “He needs to return home.”
“Why? Do you think he’s meeting with law enforcement?”
“No, no. The woman wants him home.”
This was not the first time their employer had referenced “the woman” he was working with. The woman wanted this. The woman wanted that. The woman was the reason they weren’t allowed to tie up the little girl, even though it would make their lives easier. The older brother was getting annoyed with this woman’s demands.
“Do I work for the woman, or do I work for you?”
“Just get the judge back home. Now.”
TWENTY-FIVE
My plan had been to stick around, in case Kensington Mews was merely Roland Hemans’ first stop of the day. But my surveillance ended when I got a text from Alison:
There’s something I need to tell you and it has to be in person. Can you come home, please?
There’s something I need to tell you. Could she be any more vague? Nevertheless, there wasn’t going to be that much more to see here. And if she really did need me . . .
I texted back:
In Norfolk. Leaving now.
Casting one last glance in the direction of the love connection currently under way, I started up my car, pulled a U-turn, and got pointed back toward the farm.
Forty uneventful minutes later I was rolling down our long driveway, kicking up a plume of dust that I could see billowing in my rearview mirror. Sam was lying on the front lawn, his skinny arm supporting the weight of his blond head.
As I got out of my car and walked closer, I could see he was digging a small hole with a broken shard of tree branch, building up a pile of dirt next to it. He was also wearing his classic worry brow.
Before the kidnapping, I would have told you that Sam was as agreeable and even-tempered as kids came. He was like an engine that just needed the right mix of elements to keep motoring cheerfully along—but instead of oil, gas, and oxygen, it was food, sleep, and Emma.
His sister was that critical as a component of his happiness. Literally from the moment of their conception, they had been constant companions. Before Thursday, they had never spent a single night under different roofs.
And now, deprived of her presence, he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“Hey, buddy, what’s up?”
“Nothing,” he said morosely.
“You’re thinking about Emma, aren’t you, pal?”
“Yeah,” he said, eyes still downcast.
“What would you be doing right now if Emma was here?”
“Probably playing Acorns.”
Acorns was a complicated barter game whose rules I had never fully understood. Still, I offered, “I’ll play Acorns with you.”
“No. It’s not the same without Emma. You don’t know how to do it.”
I couldn’t argue with him there.
“Do you want to go roaming?” I asked. What Sam called “roaming” was really just a walk in the woods on our property. It was referred to as roaming because you didn’t have a destination. You just rambled around, exploring fallen trees, dry streambeds, and whatever animals—or evidence of animals—you might bump in to.
Ordinarily, it was one of his favorite things to do. But this time, he just said, “Nah.”
I thought back to what Alison said about helping him seek pleasurable activities. “All right. Well, I’m going to go in and talk to your momma about something for a few minutes. Why don’t you think of something fun we can do together?”
“Okay,” he said.
I left him to his digging and walked inside. It felt too jarring to yell for Alison, so I walked softly around the house. I discovered her in the mudroom, where she was looking out the window at Sam while clutching a pink dress of Emma’s, which she must have just pulled out of the washing machine. It was a dress Emma cherished, refusing to let it be relinquished to Goodwill even though it was getting so short it barely covered her little butt.
Seeing it gave me this harrowing vision of the future, where we became one of those tragic couples who trudged through their lives in perpetual disbelief, maintaining their missing child’s room as a shrine, as if Emma was going to come back to us any second. In the meantime, everyone tiptoed around us, not wanting to tell us the truth—that our daughter was gone and we needed to move on—but also not understanding that we weren’t even there anymore. Our bodies were heedlessly and stubbornly continuing with the motions of life even though, on the inside, we were already dead.
I was still staring at the dress when Alison looked up.
“Hey,” she said, giving the dress a brisk snap and positioning it on the drying rack.
“Hey,” I said.
She went back into the washing machine for more wet clothes.
“You needed to tell me something?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your text. You texted me you needed to tell me something.”
She whipped her head away from the laundry. “I didn’t send you a text.”
I almost pulled my phone out of my pocket to show her that, yes, she did. But, of course, that was a pointless exercise.
“What did it say?” she asked.
“Just that you wanted me to come home because you had something you needed to tell me in person.”
“Nope, definitely not from me.”
“So, obviously, they sent it,” I said, not needing to explain who “they” were. “The question is why?”
Before Alison could offer any speculation, the answer suddenly became obvious to me. “Oh my God, they must have known I was camped out on Hemans. And they wanted to get me off his tail.”
“What do you mean, ‘camped out on Hemans’? Was that this so-called hunch you were following?”
I told her how I had spent my morning, which prompted her to make a sour face.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Do you even know what you’re doing, following someone around? It’s not like you’re trained as a private investigator. I mean, what if they spotted you?”
“I was careful.”
“Still. It’s too much risk. If they found out and punished Emma for it—”
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said. “I’ll stop. I just . . . I got tired of doing nothing.”
“I understand. Really, I do. As a matter of fact, you remember that lab in Williamsburg?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“They said DNA would be a waste of time, but that they might be able to get fingerprints off some of the things that came in the boxes from the kidnappers. For matching purposes, I gave them two objects that we know have Justina’s prints on them—the Honda’s keychain and the toaster. But they still need your fingerprints and mine, to rule us out. There are kits in the kitchen. I picked them up after the Living Museum.”
She expelled a loud sigh.
“What?”
“I was just thinking about the Living Museum again. Karen and Jenny were . . . I mean, I know they were trying to quote-unquote take my mind off things and quote-unquote act normal. But Jenny was bitching about her work schedule, because in her perfect, consequence-free life she has nothing else to bitch about. And Karen was just going on and on about the usual stuff—about how she and Mark are still upside down with the house, about how Mark doesn’t have the balls to ask for a raise, about how much things have changed in the benefits world and she can’t convince anyone to hire her after so much time on the bench, about how unfair the world is to women who have children, and blah, blah, blah.
“And, yeah, th
ey were just trying to keep me distracted from Emma. But it was also just, like, really? Really? You’re going to just sit here and pretend like . . . like these things matter? I mean, I’m sitting here, feeling like I can’t even breathe, like I just want to bury myself in a hole somewhere. Except I can’t, because I still have a son and I’m trying to keep him sane, and . . .”
She signified her disgust by making a scoffing sound.
“Karen called me this morning and actually apologized because I think she realized they had been sort of tone-deaf,” she said. “But it was, like, still.”
“Yeah,” I said as she draped another dress on the drying rack. “Did Sammy at least have a good time?”
“Yeah. By the way, before I forget, something came up during my conversation with Karen this morning that I wanted to run past you.”
“Oh?”
“She pointed out that we’ve now gotten two late-night deliveries, and she thinks we’ll probably get a third at some point.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Well, she wants to keep watch over the house at night. She thinks we can catch one of them in the act of dropping off a package, and then maybe we can pressure the guy we catch into telling us where Emma is. She’s proposing she, Jenny, and Jason take turns.”
“What? Like sitting on the front porch with a shotgun?”
“Maybe a little less obvious than that. But something along those lines, yeah. What do you think?”
I leaned against the doorframe, trying to think of ways that could backfire. Nothing immediately came to mind.
“Yeah. I guess that would be okay.”
“That’s what I said,” Alison said. “It sounds like they’re planning to start tonight.”
“Great,” I said.
“Okay. Hey, would you mind doing that fingerprint kit now? I just want to be able to get it off my mind.”
“Sure.”
“Follow the instructions carefully. I didn’t get extras.”
* * *
After leaving impressions of all ten of my digits in the designated boxes, I returned outside. Sam was now filling back in the hole he had made, using his digging tool to smooth the dirt.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You thought about what you want to do?”
Without looking up, he said, “We could maybe go fishing.”
I looked out at the water. It was nearing noontime, the tide was at its midpoint, and the wind had roiled the waves into a decent chop. In conditions like that, nothing would be biting. We might as well toss our lines onto the front lawn.
But anyone who thinks fishing with your child is about actually catching something well and truly does not get the purpose of the sport. Especially now.
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Let’s go get our stuff.”
Sam scrambled to his feet. We were soon equipped and making our way down to the water. We have a short pier that has somehow withstood the various hurricanes and nor’easters that have battered it through the years. Standing on the end, you can cast out and, under different conditions than the ones we were currently experiencing, catch croaker, spot, red drum, maybe even the occasional rockfish.
I chopped off a piece of squid, which Sam immediately grabbed. This was our big accomplishment for the summer: He and Emma could now bait and cast without my help. He had his line in the water before I did.
And then we sat and waited. Sam has become more patient over time, resisting the urge to check for a fish every time he felt the slightest tug.
“So what did you do this morning?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing,” he said.
“Did you watch TV?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you have for breakfast?”
“French toast.”
His gaze was fixed out at the river. The wind tousled his fine hair.
“Yeah? And how was the Living Museum yesterday?” I asked.
“Good.”
“Did you see the sharks?”
The Virginia Living Museum has a saltwater tank that contains a few species of small sharks. Sam can kill half an hour—an eon in six-year-old time—watching them do laps. Alison always pretends to be scared of the sharks, and Sam tells her there’s nothing to be afraid of because they’re behind the glass.
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell Momma not to be scared?”
And then, in his guileless little-boy way, he said, “Momma wasn’t there.”
“Because she was getting coffee?” I asked.
“No. She didn’t go with us. Aunt Karen and Aunt Jenny took me.”
“You mean Momma was never at the museum at all?”
“Yeah,” he said, like he was relieved I finally understood.
“So where was she?”
“She went on a little errand,” he said.
“What kind of little errand?”
He shrugged and mumbled an “idunno.”
“Are you sure, buddy?” I asked. “Momma really wasn’t there?”
“Nope,” he said. And that was it.
I turned my attention back to the water and my empty line. But I wasn’t thinking about fishing.
TWENTY-SIX
Throughout the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening, I kept replaying the exchanges Alison and I had had about the subject of the Living Museum.
The first was at breakfast the day before, when she said, “I thought I’d take him to the Living Museum.” And, yes, there was a mention of her sisters. But as joiners. Not as surrogates.
Then there was the phone conversation we had, which allegedly took place while she was in the Living Museum’s cafeteria.
Finally, there was earlier this morning, when she seemed to go out of her way to insert into the conversation how she was peeved with her sisters about their behavior at the museum.
Never in any of that did she mention errands, or separating from Sam, or anything of the sort. It was possibly just an unintended omission. And I might have written it off to, I don’t know, the stress we were under or having more important things to talk about.
But what had she been doing during that time? What was important enough that she would leave him when he was still so fragile?
I kept looking for a chance to ask her about it without making it seem like a big deal, an opportunity that arrived after dinner. Sam was in the family room, having been permitted to watch one more program before bath time. Alison and I were doing the dishes.
“So Sam was telling me about the Living Museum while we were fishing,” I started.
“Oh yeah?” Alison replied.
“He told me he spent a lot of time watching the sharks.”
“Like usual.”
I didn’t know how to take her “like usual.” Because you could say “like usual” whether you were there to watch it or not. I had to press further.
“Did he tell you not to be scared of the sharks?” I asked.
“Uh, I don’t remember.”
Was that true? Or was she being intentionally evasive?
“Well, could you try?” I asked.
“Why?”
She had stopped drying a pan to look at me. I came up with: “It’s just, you know, you said we needed to keep an eye on him with this post-traumatic stress thing and it struck me that if he told you not to be afraid of the sharks, like he always did before, maybe it shows he’s coping okay, still being able to reassure his mother that something isn’t dangerous, rather than fixating on the danger. Do you follow me?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So did he tell you not to be scared? Come on. It’s important. Think about it for a second.”
As she complied, her eyes shifted up and to the right—a classic sign of deception, according to an FBI profiler I once heard at a judicial conference
.
And then she said, “Yeah, I guess he did. ‘Don’t worry, Momma, the sharks are on the other side of the glass.’”
“You’re sure he said it like that?”
Up and right. “Yeah,” she said.
I nodded, like I was satisfied, and returned my attention to the sink so she couldn’t see the devastation on my face. I had to get out of that kitchen. I had to get out of her presence. Something was crumbling inside me.
Though I had allowed my wife to explain herself and given her every chance to correct the record, she had not merely continued to feign ignorance, nor had she nibbled at some small deceit. She sank her teeth into a lie and then, with great gusto, swallowed it whole.
And what was I to make of that? In the twenty-five years we had been together, had she ever lied to me?
Well, of course she had. With the cigarettes. Alison had been a smoker during our twenties. She wasn’t a pack-a-day girl or anything, but she’d smoke when we went out to bars—this was before the indoor smoking ban—or at parties when other people were smoking, or now and then when she was feeling stressed about something.
She supposedly quit cold turkey once we started trying to get pregnant. And I would have told you she had stopped for good. But there was this one time—this was maybe three years ago—when I came to surprise her at work and take her out for lunch on our anniversary. When I pulled into the parking lot, I caught a glimpse of her in the designated smoking area on the side of the building, just as she was exhaling a big lungful of smoke. As soon as she saw my car, she immediately extinguished the cigarette and fled inside. When she came to greet me in the lobby three minutes later, she smelled like hand soap and toothpaste.
A few months later, when I was at the school for a fund-raising event, I found an almost-full pack of cigarettes in her desk at work. Curious, I crushed the corner of it. A week and a half later, I created an excuse to be in her office while she wasn’t there. It was the same pack, now half-full. She was sneaking a cigarette a day, probably at lunchtime.
Over the past three years, there had probably been half a dozen times when I’d taste just a hint of cigarette on her breath or catch the barest whiff of tobacco coming off her clothes. I never mentioned it to her. It seemed like such a little thing. A woman is allowed to have her secrets, right?