by Tom Soule
Five minutes and an extra-strength Advil later, I was chewing down on my second piece of jam- and butter-splattered bread. He kept looking at me, moving only to brush a dark brown bang out of his eyes, and I finally put down my toast and wiped my mouth with the back of hand, staring right back into his eyes.
“So, Mr. Detective-”
“Call me Jeremy,” he interrupted, getting up to clean the egg pan.
“Jeremy,” I corrected myself impatiently, “why are you still here?”
He looked at me calmly, a slight smile straining at his lips, but didn’t speak. I continued:
“I mean, not that I don’t appreciate it, but you’re a complete stranger, and you may be police, but well… The police and I haven’t exactly been on the best terms,” I said bitterly.
A glass of wine. That’s what I need, I thought, remembering the peace I’d gotten from last night. Peace without nightmares or rude awakenings. Just a giant blank spot in my memory. I pushed myself off the chair and headed for the wine cabinet, but Jeremy got there before me. He placed one muscled hand on the door and turned me toward my black leather couches.
“I think we’ve had enough alcohol for now, don’t you?” he reminded me gently, and I scowled but sat down anyway.
He sat down in the couch across from me and leaned back. One long leg crossed over the other, and he looked at me thoughtfully, stroking his chin. Uncomfortable, I looked down at my hands and started picking at my nails. I hate when people stare at me.
“You’ve been through a lot these past few days, haven’t you?” he said quietly, barely blinking.
“My son’s missing.”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
There was an awkward pause.
Sighing, Jeremy leaned forward and repositioned himself on my couch. He laced his hands together and stared down at his fingers.
“I’m just going to get straight to the point, Maisie, because I think you’re fed up with all the fancy language and roundabout way of saying things that my coworkers often have.” He looked up at me, and I wearily nodded for him to continue. “I don’t think you hurt your son. I don’t think you hid him away any place. I think someone else has taken him away from you, and now the police are sidetracked by their investigation, so they're hardly doing anything to actually search for him.”
“Why?”
I regretted it as soon as I said it. This man was trying to help me, and God knows I needed it, so why on earth was I giving him a reason to consider pros and cons? I clutched my head between my hands, my cheeks burning up, and I looked away from his wordless gaze.
“I-I’m so sorry, I don’t-”
Suddenly he switched to the couch next to me, rubbing my back with his hand.
“No, no, don’t worry about it, Maisie. Really.” He smiled encouragingly at me, and gradually, I lifted my hands away from my aching head.
Then, suddenly very aware of how close we were, I scooted over, and it was Jeremy’s turn to blush. He quickly snatched back his hand, but I smiled and shook my head before he could apologize.
“What I was trying to say,” he continued, rubbing the back of his head shyly, “is that that’s a legitimate question. I mean, hell, I’m part of the police department, I should be agreeing with them, right?”
I nodded slowly, praying I hadn’t just changed his mind.
“You see, the thing is that you’re suspected because there’s no other people to suspect: your ex-husband is in another state, there were no known offenders anywhere near your bakery, no one saw anyone take him. All we know is that Derek vanished, and that looks absolutely awful on a police report.” I only realized I was scowling when he smiled apologetically. “I know, it’s awful. But it’s also the way that the police system works. The way our solve rates have been, all of our jobs are on the line. My friends down at the station are very concerned, so they’re desperate to make it look like they’re making headway on a seemingly unsolvable case.”
I could feel tears burning my eyes, and I looked at the picture of my little Derek on the wooden coffee table. He was only just two in that picture, barely speaking full sentences, his smile nearly filled in with teeth. We both looked so happy in that picture, standing in the park near Ella’s place on a beautiful summer day. How did this happen? How did we go from then to… this?
Neither of us spoke as I tried to absorb the information that no one was really looking for my Derek. Jeremy explained that they were, just not as much as they would be if they didn’t have a “suspect.” He explained that their force was split in half, between looking for the real culprit and looking into me, but I barely heard any of it. All I could do was sit there, staring at that picture, and wishing so hard my head hurt even more, that I could be back in that park with my little boy.
“Look at me, Maisie,” he said quietly. Grudgingly, I stared into his serious blue eyes. “That’s why I want to help. Not because I care for my job, not because I want to be better than everyone else. Actually, this could get me kicked off the force. But I’m not going to let a little boy disappear while everyone is looking in the wrong direction. Got it?”
I tried my best to smile. “Got it.”
“Okay,” he grinned, using my knee to push himself up. “Now if we’re going to solve this, we’re going to have to talk to the last person who saw him. That would be Jenna, right?”
“Yes, but- you said 'we,' why did you say 'we'?”
I simply couldn’t believe it. Or maybe I didn’t want to. I mean, Derek had gone missing because of me. Because I left. How was I supposed to find a boy that I couldn’t even keep?
“You know what I mean,” Jeremy said.
His voice sounded impatient, but he winked at me almost teasingly.
“But- but I don’t have, I don’t have any training. I mean, I work at a freaking bakery, for God’s sake. I make cookies all day! How am I supposed to find my son?” I spluttered, my heart sinking.
If a whole police force couldn’t find him, how could we? A baker and a rebellious detective? It sounded like some kind of sick joke.
“It seems hopeless to everyone at first,” Jeremy replied gently, placing one massive hand on my shoulder, “but these kinds of cases do get solved. And you know Derek better than anyone else. You know what happened better than anyone else. We’re going to find him, okay? I promise.”
I nodded, looking down at my hands and biting my tongue so I couldn’t point out what a load of crap that was.
“As I was saying,” he continued, moving to the opposite couch again, “Jenna was the last person to see Derek. Maybe there was something she forgot to mention? She was in quite a panic when she was questioned; there’s a chance she forgot to mention something.”
I nodded numbly.
“Chin up, buttercup,” he grinned, lifting me by the arm. “Go get dressed, and then we’ll go see what our dear friend Jenna has been up to.”
Chapter Four
Jenna looked like she was about to cry.
We were sitting in the kitchen of her apartment, three untouched mugs of tea and a plate of my shortbread cookies on the table in front of us. I could barely look at her, even though I knew Derek’s disappearance could not be blamed on her at all. But every time I saw her, I was reminded that she had been on duty when some monster stole my child. If she had done something different, maybe he would be sitting here with me.
Jenna was the first to speak.
“I’m sorry, Maisie, I really am. But the police already spoke to me. I just went to the back for a second. He was right behind the counter, and when I came back… When I came back he just wasn’t.”
Her bottom lip shook, and she picked up her tea, clutching it with a dark, trembling hand. I could feel myself verging on tears, so I looked at Jeremy, silently begging him to speak so that I didn’t have to. Somehow, he got the cue.
“Ms. Blake, no one thinks that this is at all your fault, okay?” he said gently, putting her mug down on a coaster before she spi
lled it on herself.
I do, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt Jenna; the young girl was a great worker and very sweet, but, much as I hated it, a part of me couldn’t help feeling that if I had left my little boy in the care of anyone else, this never would have happened.
Jenna nodded, wiping tears off her cheeks, and I felt a small pang of jealousy when he gave her the same reassuring grin he had should have saved for me. Embarrassed, I quickly smothered it. He was just trying to help everyone out; he wasn’t “reserving” anything for me. I was just another scared civilian.
“Now, please, I know you’ve already repeated it many, many times, but if you could just humor me and tell it one more time?” he asked, taking a sip of his own tea.
She nodded and took a deep, shaky breath, looking only at me as she spoke:
“Maisie left Derek standing behind the counter with me. He… he liked- I mean likes-” she corrected herself quickly, cheeks burning. “He likes to pretend that he’s working there too, you know, taking orders and stuff. It was… It was a really quiet afternoon. I mean really quiet. It was the after-lunch lull, when everyone has just eaten and gone back to work. So there was just one customer, and there wasn’t much food left, so I had to go to the back for his order. I took a whole tray of the cookies out of the oven and laid them on the tray just like Maisie would, and… And when I came back, he wa-was go-gone.”
I stared numbly as she burst into tears and Jeremy comforted her. I hadn’t heard her story. I hadn’t heard how my Derek had gone missing, how Jenna had simply neglected to bring him to the back with her. How this was all because we had run out of cookies.
Try as I might, I couldn’t look at her any more.
“The cu-customer was just com-ming back in when I got there,” she continued, trying to wipe the tears away even as new ones came down to replace them. “He-he said he had for-forgotten his wallet and went back to his car to get it. I told him that Derek was missing, and he ran off to find him while I called the police, bu-but whoever had taken him must have taken a car or something-”
My head snapped to Jeremy, and we exchanged looks. I started trembling, and my hands hooked around the edges of my chair.
“Did he come back, Jenna?” I asked, my voice shaking along with the rest of my body.
She looked at me, confused and unfocused, her mind stuck in the past.
“What?” She was still crying.
“Did the man come back?” I almost screamed it; the entire world was spinning around me.
Jenna looked startled; her eyes darted nervously from side to side as she licked her lips.
“I-I don’t remember,” she admitted, cowering as if afraid I would hit her. “It all happened so fast, I don’t remember if he-”
I almost did smack her just then, but Jeremy put a warning hand on my thigh.
“I need you to think very hard, Jenna, okay?” His deep voice was calm, but he was talking faster and more firmly now. “Maisie’s question is very important. Did the man come back to the store? Did the police talk to him?”
Jenna paused, thinking, and I could feel my heart smashing against my chest, both excited and terrified. Ecstatic that we might be closer to finding my child, and scared to high hell of what we might find when we did.
“No, I mean, I don’t think so,” she said tentatively, quickly looking back and forth between me and Jeremy. “I mean, I didn’t see him after that, but I was panicking, I wasn’t really thinking straight.”
I covered my mouth with my hand, fighting back tears, and the detective leaned towards my employee, locking eyes with her.
“Can you tell me what he looked like? Any detail you can remember. Any distinguishing features.”
She answered apologetically, looking down into her tea. “Oh… Um, I don’t know, he had this really dark brown hair, like, almost black, he was kind of tanned, I guess? I don’t really remember.”
I grabbed her hand desperately, and her eyes flicked up to me, slightly startled. I couldn’t stop the tears anymore, and I knew I looked disgusting, but I didn’t care. We were so close to having the biggest lead on my son’s disappearance that anyone had had in all the time he'd been missing, and if there was any possibility Jenna could recall what the man looked like, then I damn well would get it out of her.
“Please, Jenna,” I whispered, my voice thick with sobs, “please, you have to remember more. This is my son. You have to.”
She looked down again, about to shake her head, and then she froze. Looking up at the ceiling, the young woman bit her nails, her brow furrowed as a memory slowly rose to the surface.
“I think- I think his eyes were blue, which surprised me because they were very bright for his skin tone, and I might be wrong, but it looked like he had broken his nose at some point a while ago. I mean, there was a bump in the middle of it and it was sort of off-center, like it hadn’t been set properly, you know?”
My hand fell from hers and onto the table, and the entire world slowed around me. I could hear the blood rushing through my head, and I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up. Jeremy asked me something, but I couldn’t hear anything above my own racing heart.
“What did he order?”
My voice sounded far away and muffled, and I locked eyes with Jenna. Surprised at my question, she opened her mouth, then closed it again, and impatiently, I asked again:
“Jenna, what did the man order?”
Bewildered, she shrugged, nervously tucking her hair behind her ear.
“I don’t know. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Answer her question,” Jeremy said firmly, but he was looking at me, not her.
“Uh…” She looked around the kitchen, as if something in there might help her remember, and then her eyes locked on the plate. “Shortbread! He ordered two shortbread cookies.”
I closed my eyes, a wave of nausea washing over me. He had him. He had my Derek. Oh, crap. Oh, crap, crap, crap.
“Maisie?” Jeremy sounded concerned. “Maisie, what’s wrong? Do you know him?”
“Yes,” I whispered hoarsely.
Opening my eyes, I looked at Jeremy desperately, every part of me chilled with disbelief.
“It’s my husband, Jeremy. My ex-husband, Randy. He was here.”
Chapter Five
“Are you sure, Maisie? There isn’t any record of him coming into the country.” Jeremy looked calm, but he was gripping his mug so hard that his knuckles were white.
“Positive,” I replied, shaking but certain. “I don’t know how he got here without being noticed, but he broke his nose while playing baseball when he was twelve, and it never quite healed properly. And the shortbread - he always loved shortbread.”
He nodded and quickly stood up, walking out of the room while whipping his phone out of his pocket. I picked up both of our mugs, wiping the tears from my cheeks, but Jenna caught my wrist and took them from me.
“Go, Maisie. I’ll clean up. You go.”
“Thanks.” I smiled weakly and ran into the other room just as Jeremy hung up the phone.
“I just got off the phone with one of the tech specialists at the station,” he said, talking almost quicker than I could understand. “They ran his social security number through a database; he’s renting an apartment on the other side of the city. He must have snuck across the border.”
“Are they going to arrest him then?”
He shook his head, lips pursed, and began walking to his car. I had to run to keep up with his long strides.
“What do you mean? He’s got my son! They’re not still hung up on me, are they?”
“We don’t have any definitive proof that he took Derek at all, Maisie. This is a weak lead at best. I’m just going to go over and question him-”
“Hold on a second!” I grabbed his hand just as we reached the front door, and turned him around to face me, “What do you mean, ‘I’?”
“Maisie…” He looked away guiltily, a
nd I gritted my teeth in anger.
“Don’t you think for a second that I’m not coming with you. Derek is my son, and if you think I’m just going to sit and wait for you to bring him home, then-”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” He wrenched his arm from my grasp and stormed through the front door.
I ran after him, tripping over my own feet in my anger, and blocked the driver’s door before he could get in. Sighing in annoyance, he tried to push me aside, but I grabbed onto the side mirror and glared at him.
“Please get out of the way.” Jeremy crossed his arms, looking like he was about lose his cool any moment, but I refused to move.
“I’m coming with you,” I retorted, trying to sound as menacing as possible and knowing full well that I was failing.
“You’re a civilian, and a liability!” He was frustrated, “I can’t bring you into a potentially dangerous situation.”
“Who said it’s going to be dangerous? I thought we were just going to question him?”
“Maisie-”
“I’m coming!”
“No you’re-”
“Why?” I was furious now, both insulted and annoyed. “And don’t give me any of that ‘it might be dangerous’ crap, because if it was, you would have backup. Why won’t you actually let me come?”
“Because I care for you!”
We both froze, equally shocked by his statement. He stared at the ground, gritting his teeth.
“Alright? I don’t want you to come because there is a small possibility, however slight, that this might be a dangerous situation, and I couldn’t live with myself if I ever put you in any kind of danger, because I like you.” He spoke quietly, suddenly sounding exhausted. “Happy?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again, unsure of what to say. I chewed my lip, paralyzed. Did I like him? How could I even tell - these past three days had been an emotional roller coaster. I had no idea how I felt.
“This isn’t the time for this,” I replied, my voice low. “I’m coming.”