Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  “How? How is any of this good news?”

  “It means we’re on the right trail. It means we know which way he went. Stay positive, because we are going to find him. I’m not leaving here until we do, and neither is Mac. He swore he’d stay until Ethan is brought home.”

  I frown. “Who’s Mac?”

  “Your detective.”

  It takes me a couple of seconds to realize Lucas is referring to Detective Macintosh. “He’s not my detective, and I thought his name was Brent.”

  Lucas bobs his big shoulders. “I dunno. He told me to call him Mac. Anyway, you can fix your hair later. Mac and I wanted to—”

  He stops when, suddenly, the air vibrates with the roar of an engine. One of the helicopters, I think at first, buzzing back over the camp, until I realize this sound is different. Not a chopper but a big car—a truck maybe—its motor gunning. It’s like the soundtrack from The Fast and the Furious, playing on giant speakers right outside the cabin.

  Lucas’s reaction time is much faster than mine. I’m still looking toward the window, trying to decide whether to run or brace for impact, and Lucas has already leaped to the door, flung it open and charged outside.

  “Holy shit.” His startled voice comes from the porch, right before a crash shakes the floorboards, the sneakers under my feet, the very pit of my stomach. I race after him out the door.

  STEF

  8 hours, 54 minutes missing

  My car skids to a stop on the muddy hill, and I shove at the door. I ram my shoulder into it, pushing with all my weight into the middle console, but it’s no use. The door won’t budge. Stuck from when I slid out of the last curve and into a patrol car, punting the thing downfield like an amusement park ride. I crawl over the center console and tumble out the passenger’s side door.

  The brand-new hot-pink pumps I slipped my feet into this morning sink into mud thick as tar. I lurch out of them with two wet plops, then hurry on bare feet farther into the clearing. The sloping lawn before me is treacherous, as slick as an ice rink. My feet slide around before catching hold, my toes digging in for purchase. I scan the cabins clinging to either side of the hill, searching for someone.

  Anyone.

  “Hello?”

  My desperation to see Sammy is a primal thing, clawing at my chest with the need to touch him, to hold him, even worse than when they pulled his little blue lump from my belly and whisked him away for the longest sixteen minutes of my life. I need to know that he’s okay. That he’s safe. That he’s not the little boy some monster stole from the cabin.

  When the blocked number had sprung up on my screen, I was thinking of Sam’s promise to call with news, of all those voice mails I’d left. I was thinking it might be someone from school, whatever poor sucker they’d appointed to deliver the bad news about Ethan. Then I heard his words—staggering, heart-stopping words—and I thought it was a mistake.

  The memory of his voice hits me like a nightmare. Listen carefully, Stef. I have Sammy.

  Not Sammy, I kept saying over and over. Ethan.

  I’ve spent the seventy-two minutes since in agony, covering sixty country miles in half the time it should have taken me while hovering between disbelief and full-blown terror, and with no one to talk me off the ledge. Sam is in meetings or parked before television cameras, unreachable by anyone in his office. Josh’s and Brittany’s and Jimmy’s numbers kept sending me straight to voice mail. Emma’s, Sammy’s teacher, rings and rings and rings. Even Dr. Abernathy, Cambridge’s head of school, wasn’t picking up, and she always picks up when I call.

  Call the police, the voice said, and your son dies.

  I sense movement to my left. A man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage at the top of the hill, taking in the wreckage behind me.

  “Who’s in charge here?” I yell in his direction. “I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”

  “Get back,” he says, not to me but to the woman rushing down the path behind him. There’s something familiar about her—pale skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones, dirty blond hair with darker roots, willowy frame draped in clothes that were fashionable five years ago. Ethan’s mom. I can’t remember her name. She tries to push past the man, but he’s too big, too strong. He holds her back easily with an arm, stepping in front of her in a protective move.

  I start up the hill to them, but I don’t make it very far. I slip and my body pitches forward, landing on my knees and hands in the mud. “Have either of you seen Sammy?” I push myself to a stand, swiping my filthy palms down the front of my jeans. “I need to see my son right away. Where are the kids?”

  There’s commotion on the other side of the hill, cops streaming out of a long and squat cabin. They’re all holding guns, dark things aimed down the clearing at me, as if I’m the enemy. I hold up my mud-streaked hands, right as one of them, a large guy in dark clothes, tells them to stand down. Three little words float down the hill, ones I’ve never been so happy to hear until now: “The mayor’s wife.”

  I’m not the type of person to name-drop. I don’t use my status to get out of speeding tickets, to scoot to the front of the line, to book tables at the city’s hottest new restaurants. Up until this very moment, I’ve never pulled that card—don’t you know who I am?—but I’m glad as hell somebody did it for me now.

  My hands drop to my sides. “I need to see my son, Sammy, right this instant. He’s here on a field trip with his second grade class.”

  For the longest moment, no one speaks. No one moves. Except for the steady ding ding ding coming out the open door of my car, the camp is silent, a communal holding of breath. I can’t take the silence, the lack of response another second.

  “Somebody take me to Sammy—now.”

  My words echo around the clearing, a feverish call and response, and I know how it sounds. It sounds like an overwrought mother losing her shit, like an addict frantic for her next hit. I can tell by their expressions that my hysteria is not doing me any favors. They think I’m crazy. Out of control. Exactly the way that I feel.

  A man steps forward. He’s a kid, barely out of college, but he’s in uniform and I latch onto it. Finally, a person in charge.

  “Where’s my son?” I’m scrambling up the hill in his direction, but for every two steps I take forward, I slide one back down.

  He braces on the railing with both fists, leaning over it to holler down the hill. “Mrs. Huntington, you can’t be here. This is an active crime scene.”

  By now I’m twenty feet away, close enough to see the trio of deep lines slicing across his forehead, the guns in the other men’s hands, their twitchy fingers. They’re worried I’ll do something rash. “You don’t understand. I spoke to someone this morning who said—”

  “Ma’am, stop right there.”

  “Just tell me. Is he okay? Where is he?”

  “Stefanie,” a woman’s voice calls from right behind me. My name on her tongue is angry and sharp.

  My head turns to see Ethan’s mother step into the clearing, the wet ground squishing around her sneakers. A breeze flutters the hair around her face, and her eyes latch onto mine. They’re not kind.

  Now that I’ve seen her, seen the dark circles bleeding out under her sunken eyes, I think it can’t be Sammy who was taken. This woman looks like the mother of a missing child, not me. Not Sammy.

  “For fuck’s sake, Kat,” the man behind her mutters. He’s not old enough to be her father, but he’s protective like one. Her brother? A lover? He takes up her rear, scowling at me over her shoulder.

  I ignore him, focusing everything I have on her.

  “Please, Kat,” I say, and my voice breaks. “Please help me find Sammy.”

  She watches me with envy, with hatred. As if my worst nightmare is somehow stealing the thunder from hers. This woman doesn’t want to help me, that much is clear. She’d sooner scratch my eyes ou
t than give me an ounce of relief. She stares at me, and I feel myself turn to stone.

  And then something in her expression breaks.

  “He’s fine,” she chokes out. “Your son is perfectly fucking fine.”

  And then suddenly, both of us are crying.

  KAT

  9 hours, 6 minutes missing

  “Mrs. Huntington,” the sheriff says, “I’m trying really hard to understand why you’re here.”

  The cabin is claustrophobic, jammed with bodies that reek of rain and woods and earth. The sheriff is huddled around the table with Dawn, Detective Macintosh—Mac—and Stefanie, while Lucas and I are notched into the cranny on the other side, shoulder to shoulder and pressed against the metal kitchenette counter. The air is alive with energy, with electricity.

  Stefanie has tidied up some at the sink, but she’s still a mess. Her face is smeared with leftover makeup, light brown and sparkly. Her hair is in shambles, blow-out curls that have long since lost their bounce. But God, she’s beautiful, like every movement of her perfect body is choreographed. Even now, with mascara track marks on her cheeks and clothes caked with mud, she’s stunning.

  She stares across the table at the sheriff with eyes swollen from crying. “When can I see Sammy?”

  “I assure you, ma’am, your son is fine. I’ll have one of our officers bring you to him as soon as we’re done here. In the meantime, if you would just answer the question, please. Why did you come all the way up here? The school was supposed to make very clear to parents that the children would be returning sometime later today. They were to be explicit in that parents were not to come up here to fetch anyone themselves.”

  The sheriff has pushed his chair so far back from the table that he’s practically up against the wall. His long legs are stretched away from the table, his boots crossed at the ankle.

  Stefanie slaps her hands to the table and leans across it, and her voice spirals into the high hysteria she used out on the lawn. “I haven’t spoken to anyone at the school. No one was picking up the phone, and they haven’t returned my messages.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because of the other phone call. He told me not to call the police, and I didn’t know what else to do. I had to see for myself that Sammy’s safe.”

  I’m trying really, really hard to give Stefanie the benefit of the doubt. If she thought it was her son who went missing, then she’s probably still in shock. If I were in her designer pumps, which someone fished from the mud and rinsed under the tap before handing back to her, I wouldn’t relax until I saw my son, either.

  But I also need her to stop playing around and eating up precious time. It’s nearing noon, which means Ethan has been missing for more than nine hours. I want to climb over the table, shake Stefanie by the shoulders and tell her to go the hell home.

  And then I notice Mac’s face. The way his skin has tightened, how without moving any other muscle in his body, he shifts his head toward Stefanie. His poker expression is perfect except for his eyes. They glitter with new interest, with eagerness. I flash a glance at Lucas, and his do, too.

  “What other phone call?” the sheriff says, losing patience just like the rest of us.

  “The one I received this morning.” Stefanie seems a little calmer now, even though she’s still not very forthcoming. Her gaze scans the faces around the table. “The person on the other end told me they had Sammy. That’s why I came up here, to see if it was true.”

  The room goes still. Stefanie has just stunned us silent.

  The sheriff clears his throat. “You’re saying that you received a phone call this morning from a person who claimed to have kidnapped your son, Sammy?”

  Sammy, the kid who, on more than one occasion, called Ethan a “crybaby loser.” The one who earlier this semester invited every boy in the class to his birthday party but Ethan.

  “Yes,” she says. “He said he had Sammy, and I didn’t know what else to do. My husband’s not answering his phone and neither was anybody else, and I couldn’t just do nothing. I drove here as fast as I could.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No. He told me not to. He told me he’d kill Sammy if I did.”

  My heart backfires, then takes off at a steady sprint. I can’t think about her words just yet, can’t think about what that means for my son, so I steer my mind away from it. I grab Lucas’s elbow instead. “I don’t understand. They took Sammy, too?”

  “No!” Stefanie twists around in her chair, her lithe body strung tight, ready to pounce. She juts a thumb over her shoulder, to the sheriff. “He just said Sammy was fine. I demand to see my son right this second.”

  The sheriff glares across the table at Dawn. “Call over to the hotel, talk to whoever’s got eyes on the boy. I want verbal and visual confirmation.”

  Dawn pulls up a number on her cell and moves to the edge of the room. I can barely breathe because my heart is exploding with a new, desperate hope. Maybe it’s not Sammy across town in the Days Inn but Ethan. Maybe this whole ordeal has been one huge, horrible mistake.

  While Dawn repeats the sheriff’s orders into her phone, he returns his attention to Stefanie. “Start at the beginning. From the second your phone rang—which was when, exactly?—until now. As much detail as you can remember.”

  “Well, I was at home, on the phone to another class mother when—”

  “What time?”

  “Sometime just after ten. Five minutes maybe? Certainly not much more.”

  The sheriff gives her a go-on bob of his head.

  “Anyway, I was on the patio when my phone rang. I figured it was the school since Sam told me to watch for their call. I picked up even though I didn’t know who it was.”

  “Who was it?” at least three people say at once. I am one of them.

  Stefanie shrugs. “The caller’s name was blocked. The screen said Unknown.”

  Mac reaches across the table, palm up. “Can I see your cell?”

  She slides an iPhone from her jeans pocket, ticks in her passcode and passes it to Mac.

  “Keep going,” the sheriff orders. “What did the caller say?”

  “So first I heard this weird beeping, like something electronic, and then the voice. He said I have Sammy.”

  “That’s it? Just I have Sammy?”

  “Well, first the beeping and then he asked if he was speaking to me—”

  “You’re certain the voice belonged to a male?”

  “Yes.” She pauses, then frowns. “Well, maybe. It was distorted, like one of those apps that make your voice unrecognizable, so I can’t be one hundred percent certain. But the voice was really deep, so I just assumed it was male.”

  “And he called you by name?”

  “Yes. He said, Is this Stef Huntington?, and when I said that it was, he said, Listen carefully. I have Sammy.”

  “Call came in at 10:02,” Mac announces, “and lasted for six minutes and forty-three seconds.” He waves the phone at the sheriff. “Do you have someone who can trace the call?”

  “Probably a burner, but worth a try. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a location. Give it to Dawn when she’s done, and she’ll run it over to the tech lab.”

  Stefanie bristles. “You’re going to take my phone?”

  “Ma’am, your phone is evidence in a child kidnapping case.”

  “But what if he calls back?”

  And just then, the phone does the unthinkable. It comes alive in Mac’s hand, buzzing and lighting up, and a familiar tune drifts through the air. Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.”

  Matching pink spots bloom on Stefanie’s cheeks, and she lunges for the phone. “That’s my husband. I’ve left him like a hundred messages. I’m sure he’s frantic.” Her hands are shaking as she answers. “It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Sammy. It was another kid.”<
br />
  The last two words—another kid—are as physical as a slap. My entire body jerks. From the very first day that I met this woman, on Ethan’s first day of kindergarten, this has been my problem with her; she’s just so goddamn entitled.

  “His name is Ethan,” I say through gritted teeth.

  Her glance my way takes two tries before it sticks, and then her brows rise in alarm. “No, I haven’t seen him yet,” she says into the phone, “but someone from the sheriff’s office is contacting the teacher now. I’ll text you as soon as she confirms it’s him.” A pause, and then she holds out the phone to the sheriff. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell him I’ll call him later. For now—”

  “You do realize this is the Mayor of Atlanta on the phone.”

  A dark flush rises up the sheriff’s neck, but he keeps his voice in check. “I don’t care if it’s my dear departed grandmama calling from the great beyond. A little boy is missing, and you are sitting on information that could lead us right to him. Now hang up the phone so we can get back to it.”

  She stares at him, her eyes wide with insult, then mumbles to her husband that she’ll call him back later.

  The sheriff doesn’t even wait for her to hang up. “After the caller confirmed it was you and told you he had Sammy, then what did he say?”

  She ends the call and slips the phone back into her pocket. “Well, it went back and forth for a while. I was in shock, as you can imagine, and it took a bit before I realized what was going on. I mean, his words were just so unexpected. I couldn’t believe them at first. I thought it was some kind of sick prank.”

  “And when you understood his message?” The sheriff leans in, pushing aside a notepad with his fist. His gaze is latched onto hers like a laser, never once budging from the outlines of her face. The rest of us are breathless. This is the sheriff’s show, and we are all spectators.

  “Then I jumped in my car and drove like a madwoman all the way here.”

  “I meant, what did you say?”

  “Oh, well, I screamed a lot, I remember that much. I was trying to figure out who it was, who would do such a thing. I begged him, told him I’d do anything he wanted, give him anything he wanted, just please don’t hurt my son.”