“Did he ask for money?”
“No. In fact, he specifically said it wasn’t about money.”
“Then what were his demands?”
“He kept circling back to Sam, something about preserving the Bell Building downtown. He wouldn’t be more specific than that, but he said Sam would understand.”
“Your husband. Sammy’s father.”
“Yes, but obviously, this was about Sam in his role as mayor.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Were there any other voices? Any background noise?”
She scans the people in the room, flustered, studying each face as if for backup. None of us give her any; we are on the sheriff’s side here. We want her to answer the damn questions.
“I...I don’t think so,” she says defensively. She looks at the sheriff, and her face screws into a frown. “Like I said, I was frantic. I was trying to figure out who it was. I made all sorts of wild accusations, told them I would give them anything, anything to get Sammy back.”
“Who did you think it was?”
“The owner of the Bell Building, whoever that is, or maybe one of the neighbors, some preservationist kook who’s angry about the developers taking over downtown. Sam’s opponent, or someone working for him. Lord only knows. The crazies came out as soon as Sam announced his bid for mayor, and my cell number isn’t exactly top secret. Anybody could get their hands on it. There are a million people it could have been.”
The sheriff grunts. “Ethan has been missing now for nine hours. I’m gonna need you to think really, really hard.”
She squints, and her eyes glint with self-righteous anger. “For the past ninety minutes, Sheriff, I thought this was my son we were talking about, so you can stop with that tone, and you can definitely stop with all the lectures. I understand the importance of this situation. I am doing my very best to answer all your questions. But I was panicked and flustered and your pushing me now isn’t making it any easier for me to remember, so I suggest you just back off and give me a minute.” She spits out that last bit like a threat, which it clearly is. It hangs over the table like a black cloud, electric and oppressive.
“Got it,” Dawn says from the corner, then pulls up a video on her cell phone. She drops it in the middle of the table, and everybody leans in. Lucas and I move closer so we can see.
The first image on the screen is of a woman wearing a Days Inn uniform. She looks into the camera, states her name and the date, May 21, then the camera pans to the little boy seated beside her.
His dark curls are wild and a tad frustrated, just like Ethan’s. His ears poke out from the messy locks like fleshy handles, just like Ethan’s. Even his glasses, crooked and milky, look just like Ethan’s.
But the little boy is not Ethan.
It’s Sammy.
He smiles and waves at the camera. “Hi, Mom.”
Stefanie bursts into tears, and so do I. Her son is safe, her terror a false alarm, and I hate her for both.
Lucas curls an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against him in a steely grip, and the tears burn down my cheeks like acid. I don’t want to be bitter. I try not to be. But I can’t help myself. Mac’s gaze catches mine over Stefanie’s head, and his poker face is gone, twisted into one of such naked pity that it makes the tears flow harder.
The sheriff asks Mac to take Stefanie to the hotel so she can be reunited with her son, and Lucas pulls me tight.
Mac nods, but he doesn’t push to a stand. He shifts on his chair, restless. Impatient. “One more question,” he says to Stefanie. “What was it this guy said that made you believe?”
She looks up, as if the question surprised her. “I’m sorry. What?”
“What convinced you that the caller had Sammy?”
“Oh. It was his voice.”
“Whose, the caller’s?”
“No. The little boy’s.” She pauses, gives me a pained glance, then focuses her attention on Mac. “Well, I guess it was a little boy’s. The voice was still distorted, but definitely different than the first. Higher. More faint.”
“What did he say?” The question comes from me, but they’re the words on everyone’s tongue. I just got there first.
Stefanie’s gaze creeps to mine, and I know by the way her head is ducked that the answer is not good. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, one by one. Her eyes fill, and then, so do mine.
She winces and looks away. “He said, Mommy, help.”
STEF
9 hours, 28 minutes missing
The reporters have gotten wind of the situation by the time I screech into the Days Inn parking lot in my banged-up SUV. Multiple clusters of them stand huddled under the overhang by the entrance, the only dry spot in a shower that came out of nowhere. I clamber out of the passenger’s door and take off running through the rain.
A man in a raincoat sees me coming and steps into my path, a physical barrier between me and the door. I give him a don’t-try-it look, and he smiles like this is a game. As soon as I’m close enough, he thrusts his microphone in my face.
“Mrs. Huntington, can you tell us anything about the Atlanta child who went missing during a school field trip?”
I veer to the right, and he matches me step for step. “No comment.”
“According to your husband’s statement, police suspect foul play. Any thoughts as to the kidnapper?”
I try not to glare at the man operating the television camera, but I’m covered in mud and I just found a spider in my hair, so right now I hate him just as much as every other asshole standing between me and my son. “I said, no comment.”
I step to the left, and he follows.
The reporter tries again. “I understand your son, Sammy, was one of the students. Did he tell you if he heard or saw anything out of the ordinary?”
“You’re shitting me, right?” The reporter grins, both at my answer and my testy tone. He wasn’t expecting an answer from me, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting to give one to him, but after the past few hours my nerves are shot, and now, so is my patience. “It’s pretty goddamn obvious to anyone with eyeballs that I haven’t seen Sammy yet, thanks to you and your linebacker cameraman. So either you move out of my way, now, or I will have you arrested for harassment.”
They don’t move, but they don’t try to stop me, either, when I push past. The glass doors open with a whoosh of air, and I rush inside.
The middle-aged man behind the counter takes me in with interest. His gaze rakes down my body, lingering not on my curvier spots but on the Georgia clay. The streak on a sleeve, the caked and flaking chunks on my jeans, my brand-new suede Manolos, soaked and ruined. I look like a designer-clad mud wrestler.
“I’m looking for the Atlanta kids,” I tell him, and his gaze snaps to mine. “Ms. Quinn is expecting me.”
He hikes his chin to the corridor behind me. “Down the hall to the left. The door’ll say Employees Only but go on in. There’s no way they’ll hear you if you knock.”
No kidding. I can hear the pandemonium from here, high-pitched squeals and laughter that can only come from excited kids, interspersed with the occasional yelp of an adult. I thank him and hustle down the hall.
The employee break room is teeming with bodies—kids coloring on the white-topped table, clambering across the leather three-seater couch by the wall, running circles around the war-weary adults who’ve given up trying to corral them. Three boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts lie demolished on the far countertop, next to a half-empty gallon of sweetened iced tea.
My gaze seeks out the curly-haired boy by the window. His back is to me, his attention laser-focused on Juliette, a precocious blonde with emerald eyes. They’re arguing about how many steps they climbed in the gold mine. She’s schooling him, a kind of mini-mansplaining in reverse, but I’m not real
ly listening to her words. I’m thinking that from this angle, Sammy looks exactly like Ethan.
The entire world shrinks down to that one thought, cloaking the ruckus in the room around an absolute eye of silence. It could have been Sammy. It was supposed to be him. For seventy terrifying minutes, I didn’t know if it was Sammy or Ethan who vanished into the night.
I’m not the type of mother to lose control, have never been the type for public meltdowns. But when he turns to face me and I see my son’s face, the relief is just too great. My knees buckle and I collapse, my legs folding up underneath me on the shabby linoleum. Animal sounds of grief pierce the eye of silence, and I realize with a shock they’re coming from me.
One by one, every head in the room turns. Sammy pushes through the bodies, his expression hovering somewhere between confused and embarrassed. He’s only seen me fall apart like this once, four years ago, when my father died of a heart attack, dead before he’d hit the green of the seventeenth hole. I tell myself Sammy is fine—he’s fine—but I can’t seem to stop crying.
“What are you doing here?” he says. “How come you’re so dirty?”
I snatch him to my chest, the loops and tangles of his hair getting caught between my fingers as I rock his body back and forth. I know I’m causing a scene. I know I’m confusing and scaring the kids. They are gathered around us, watching the scene with open mouths and uncomfortable giggles. Their unabashed stares bring me slowly back to reality.
Suddenly, I can only think of one thing.
“Come on,” I say, pushing to a shaky stand.
Sammy looks at me in confusion. “Where are we going?”
“Home,” I say, to him and the room at large, to the kids and Miss Emma, who can’t quite meet my eyes, and in a tone that dares anyone to try and stop me. “I’m taking my son home.”
* * *
Rather than push through the sea of reporters still camped out under the canopy, Sammy and I sneak through the back and call a taxi, an old four-door Nissan with tattered upholstery and rubber mats on the floorboards. The tough-skinned man behind the wheel couldn’t believe his luck when I told him where we were headed, and he even apologized before he asked me for $350. A ludicrous fare for a sixty-mile ride, but I fell onto his backseat without so much as a counteroffer. After seeing the wall of reporters between me and my car, I would have paid him twice as much.
My cell lies faceup on the backseat between us, still and dark. In the end, the police let me keep it, but only if I swore to keep it charged and on at all times. There’s something strange about knowing they’re monitoring all my calls, listening in on every call that comes in from Sam, my girlfriends, my hairdresser calling to remind me about Thursday’s appointment. A necessary measure, they said, for when the kidnapper makes contact again. When, not if, though I don’t know what’s fueling their certainty—experience or hope. Either way, waiting for the thing to go off is like living on a Big Brother set—you don’t know what’s going to happen other than it’s going to be bad. Every time it chirps or buzzes, my body fills with dread.
Sammy sits strapped to the seat on the other side, kicking his feet and watching the scenery fly by outside the window, his shoulders relaxed like this is a joyride. I know he needs an explanation, but the problem is I’m still trying to decide how much to tell him. I heard the chatter at the camp, read all their grim expressions. The police don’t think they’ll find Ethan alive, either.
The driver takes a sudden left, steering us down a two-lane ribbon of country road.
“I guess you’re wondering why I showed up at the hotel, frantic and covered in mud,” I say, turning to Sammy.
He bounces his shoulders. “I don’t know. I guess.”
Sammy-speak for yes, but I’m too weirded out to ask.
My gaze travels to the back of the driver’s head, and he catches my eye in the rearview mirror. He looks away quickly, strumming his thumb to the beat of the pop song coming through the radio speakers, but what’s the chance I’ll read a gross exaggeration of my words in tomorrow’s newspaper? High, probably. I lower my voice and choose my words carefully.
“This morning I got a phone call from a man who said he had you. A bad man, probably the one who has Ethan.” I tell my nerves to calm, but they don’t listen. My hands are still as sweaty as my feet feel inside my sodden shoes, and I wipe them on the seat. “I couldn’t reach your father or anyone from the school, and I didn’t know what else to do. I drove to the camp to see for myself.”
Now, finally, Sammy turns his face to mine. His eyes are magnified by the lenses of his glasses, making him look perpetually wide-eyed. Under the messy hair of his bangs, his forehead is crumpled.
“Sweetheart, do you understand what I’m telling you? I thought it was you, not Ethan, who went missing.” I press my palm to the back of his head to flatten a maverick curl. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m such a mess.”
“Oh.” His voice is tentative. “But the bad man didn’t take me.”
I blink back fresh tears. “No, and thank God he didn’t. But it was the most scared I’ve ever been in my whole entire life. Even worse than when the doctor told me you had to come out of my belly a whole seven weeks early.”
It’s a story Sammy knows well, how I went in for a routine checkup and didn’t leave the hospital for days, how the doctors pulled him, blue and silent, from my belly. It’s a story with a happy ending, much like the one today. I want to tell him Ethan’s will end well, too, but I also don’t want to lie. The truth is, I’m already bracing for the worst.
“But why did he take Ethan?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. The police don’t know. We think it’s because he wants something.”
“Does he want money? Because Ethan’s parents don’t have any. He doesn’t even own an iPhone.” A statement, not reproach.
To myself, I think: if an iPhone is your point of reference, then maybe we’ve given you too much.
But technically, Sammy is not wrong. I’ve seen how Ethan comes to school, in a rolling rotation of Kmart specials that are too short, too tight, too small—with the glaring exception of those Mondays after a weekend at his father’s. Then his jeans are designer, his trendy polos still sporting fold marks from the packaging. Even so, I don’t have the idea that Andrew is rolling in cash. Nine times out of ten, people who are that flashy and loud have a lot less money than they’d like you to think, which makes me doubly worried for Ethan. What happens if this guy calls back with a ransom?
“Sweetheart, do you understand how serious this is? A bad man took Ethan, and the police think he meant to take you instead. I’m not telling you this to make you worry, though, or be scared for your own safety. Your father and I will keep you safe until the police find whoever did this.”
A short silence while Sammy takes this in. “Will they find Ethan?”
“I hope so. They’re working very, very hard. They’re doing everything they possibly can.”
He nods like he already knows this. “Yeah. They asked us a lot of questions. Like who was at the mines earlier. If we saw anybody at the camp. Things like that.”
I fiddle with a lock of his hair. Sammy isn’t always a big talker, but once he gets going, there’s often no stopping him. I’ve learned to savor these moments. “And what did you tell them?”
“Well, there was this dude with a million tattoos panning for gold. One of them was a red-and-black snake that looked like it was crawling up his neck. He was pretty weird.” A rare and unfettered stream of information.
“Did you tell the police about him?”
“Yeah. They thought his tattoo was pretty weird, too. Oh, and nobody liked the bus driver. He smelled like dirty socks.”
I don’t put too much stock in Sammy’s finger-pointing. Decorating your neck with permanent pigment doesn’t say anything about a person other than that they have
a high pain threshold and questionable decision-making skills, but a snake tattoo would certainly get a man noticed by a group of sheltered eight-year-olds.
“What about at the cabin? Did anybody see or hear anything?”
He looks at me with eyes that are wide and dry. “There was a fire, Mom. Mia Davis woke up first, and then she screamed so hard she almost busted my eardrum. Miss Emma told us to run outside and meet by the chairs, so we did. Mr. Fischer went around back to kick some dirt on it, but the fire was too big. We could see the flames coming over the roof.”
“That must have been scary.”
Another shrug, a one-shouldered bounce, an unenthusiastic I guess. “It was mostly boring. We stood around forever while Mr. Fischer ran for help. By the time he came back, the fire was a lot smaller. He put it out with a fire extinguisher.”
“And where was Miss Emma while all this was happening? What was she doing?”
“The girls were pretty freaked out. She was trying to calm everybody down.”
“And where was Ethan?”
“He was the last to come out because he wanted his backpack even though Miss Emma said to leave them. And then he started crying and wailing like all the girls.”
“He was there the whole time?”
“I guess. When Miss Emma couldn’t find him, everybody just figured he’d gone off to look at rocks or something.” Sammy’s mouth curls down at both ends, like it often does when he speaks of Ethan. “He’s so weird.”
A weirdo. A crybaby and a tattletale. These are just some of the words I’ve heard Sammy throw around when referring to Ethan. Is it possible to be allergic to another person? Because that’s the only way I know to describe it, how exposure to Ethan seems to alter something at Sammy’s cellular level. A flushing of skin, a rushing of poisons through the blood, much like when Ethan’s lips touch a peanut. One tiny whiff of Ethan, and Sammy seethes with venom and vitriol.
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