“Sweetheart, someone took Ethan. Doesn’t that make you feel scared for him?”
“It’s probably just his dad. Miss Emma said so.”
A flash of irritation heats my chest. What was Miss Emma thinking? What kind of teacher says such a thing to children?
“But whoever took Ethan meant to take you, remember?” I give Sammy time to do the math, and I see when he realizes his mistake. His eyes go wide with awareness, with new interest. “Ethan is in real, serious danger.”
“Oh.”
“I know the two of you have never been the best of friends, but I’d really like it if you could try to say only nice things about Ethan from now on. Do you think you can do that?”
Sammy presses his lips together and plucks at a loose thread in the seat cushion. My son owning his power to be silent.
I will myself to stay still instead of reprimanding him, to keep my finger from wagging and my tongue firmly planted in my mouth. What is it my mother used to say? If you can’t say something nice, better to say nothing at all. I tell myself that’s Sammy’s strategy now, that his silence stems from manners, not spite, and yet I know that’s a lie.
“Mom?”
I turn to him with a smile. “Yes, sweetie.”
“When we get home, can we go to Chick-fil-A for lunch?”
STEF
11 hours, 28 minutes
It’s nearing two by the time we pull into our Tuxedo Park neighborhood, quiet, leafy streets in the shadows of the Governor’s mansion. The driver steers us past stacked stone mailboxes and sprawling lawns, each with a multimillion-dollar home rising up like a colossus from the center of the grass. For me, luxury is a penthouse overlooking Central Park, not these monstrosities of brick and stucco, but Atlantans do love their square footage.
“Who are all those people?” Sammy says, leaning forward on his seat.
“Reporters.”
A good two dozen of them with film cameras and zoom lenses, lining the street by the gate. Their vans are parked at the curb behind them, satellite dishes swirling like sunflowers tipped to the sun. They see us coming and rush the taxi like paparazzi, shouting questions and pressing their cameras against the glass as we pass through the gate. Sammy gives them a timid wave, but I duck my head, refusing to give them a clear shot. Over the past four years, I’ve gotten used to occasional media attention, but this feels claustrophobic, a kind of scrutiny I didn’t sign up for. My lungs lock up until we’re safely on the other side.
Mom comes rushing outside as I’m paying the driver.
“Darling,” she says, opening Sammy’s door and dragging him into a hug. He all but disappears into her arms. “Heavens, am I glad to see you. Are you okay? Are you all right? I’ve been working on your energy from afar—could you feel it?”
Whatever he says gets swallowed up in her torso. I thank the taxi driver and climb out of the car.
Two men I don’t recognize wait by the front door, and it’s a good thing Sam just texted me about the pair of security guards he hired for our protection, because our house has a remote-controlled gate. A ten-foot perimeter fence. Security cameras aimed at every corner of the property. People don’t just show up at our door, and the ones that do are generally not here to borrow a cup of sugar.
“Welcome home, Mrs. Huntington,” the tall black man says. The other is shorter and stockier. They are dressed in matching uniforms, midnight fabric stretched across bulky bodies, with identical logos on the upper chest. “I’m Gary, and this is Diego. We’re going to have to ask you to get yourself and Sammy inside the house as quickly as possible.”
I don’t ask questions, and I don’t argue. I hustle Mom and Sammy through the front door, lock it and activate the alarm. By the time I turn back around, Sammy is already racing up the stairs, the hunger he’d been complaining about for the past half hour forgotten. I debate calling him back down for a sandwich, then decide to let it go. His grumbling stomach will send him down soon enough.
“How are you?” Mom asks, her face twisted in concern even though I texted her twice. Once from the camp, a brief message that took a half-dozen tries to go through, then a longer update from the taxi on the way home. “Where’s your car?”
“At a garage in Dahlonega, getting fixed. I had a little fender bender, but I’m fine. Well, not fine, but better. Thank you.” I push up a shaky smile to let her know I mean it. Standing in my own foyer, knowing there are two guards patrolling the perimeter, has me practically weeping with relief. Now all I need is Sam, who promised me he’d be home for dinner.
“I’ve been watching for updates on TV,” Mom says, “but they’re not saying much. A child went missing, search parties were dispatched, stay tuned for more updates. That’s about it. They don’t even mention the little boy’s name.”
“They’re being vague on purpose. The sheriff canceled his press conference, and he ordered me not to talk to anybody other than Sam and the police. He’s worried what the kidnapper will do when he discovers he’s got the wrong child. But what if he already knows? What if that’s the reason he still hasn’t called me back?” I check the time on my cell—no new calls. “It’s been four hours already.”
“Somebody on the internet is claiming it was an inside job,” Mom says. “That the teacher was in on it from the beginning, and that she handed him over to a band of gypsies.”
“That’s ridiculous. There are no bands of gypsies roaming through the North Georgia forests.”
“I believe the PC term these days is Irish Travelers, darling, and if you ask me, those folks have gotten a bad rap. The ones I’ve met have been lovely. Anyway, I didn’t say it was true, only that I heard it.”
A sudden rumbling drifts down the stairs like an approaching locomotive, vibrating the hairs on my skin and rattling the door in the jamb. Mom glances up at the ceiling. “What on earth?”
I was once that mother who swore the dreaded video game would never cross her threshold. Boys should run and swim and play outside, not sit in a dark room with a television screen and a joystick. And then three years ago, Sammy broke his foot during a particularly brutal soccer game, and he was confined to a wheelchair until the swelling went down. By the end of day two, a slightly unhinged version of me was forking over my credit card to a bearded hipster at Best Buy, who slid a slew of electronics into my trunk with a little too much glee. The Xbox quickly became Sammy’s favorite.
“Gears of War, by the sounds of things.” By now I’m well versed in his video game sounds.
I kick off my ruined shoes and wiggle my toes, leaving a dusting of dried clay on the floor.
“Well, I suppose he does need a distraction. He feels so badly about what happened, you know.”
I ponder all the things I don’t want to say. That I don’t know, and there’s no way she can, either. That I’m in no mood for her passive-aggressive parenting advice. If Sammy feels bad, he’s doing an awfully good job of hiding it.
“The spirits are telling me Sammy feels somehow responsible.” Mom is still in her psychic bubble, her expression as serious as I’ve ever seen it. “What’s blocking his energy paths is guilt.”
“Well, of course he feels guilty. The kidnapper meant to take him instead of Ethan.”
She sighs, a heavy breath that reeks of disappointment. “Sweetheart, you’re not paying attention.”
I roll my eyes, thinking this is why my baby sister moved her family halfway across the United States, because of our mother’s new-age nonsense. The spirits are telling her. She’s been working on his energy. Why can’t she just be a normal grandparent, the type who knits tea cozies and tells bedtime stories under the covers? Honestly, I don’t know how my father put up with her as long as he did.
“Just spit it out, Mom.”
“Sammy knows more than what he’s willing to say. He knows more than what he’s telling you.”
My exasperation mixes with the day’s leftover terror into a bitter brew. I mumble something about a shower, then turn and head up the stairs, but as I’m passing by the video game thunder rumbling behind Sammy’s door, it occurs to me why suddenly I’m so angry.
Not because I don’t believe her, but because I do.
* * *
That night, it’s not Sam who shows up at dinnertime, but Josh. Sam’s chief of staff, who went AWOL at exactly the wrong time, a man who also happens to be a distant cousin. His face, rounder and more wrinkled than Sam’s, is pressed to the window when I come down the stairs. Looming behind him are the two stone-faced guards.
I open the door and wave Josh inside.
Depending on which branch of the family you ask, Josh’s grandpa Ned was either a genius, a scoundrel, a saint, a con man or a fool. The one thing every Huntington can agree upon is that Ned married the wrong woman—not Josh’s grandmother but Ned’s second wife, Maureen, an ex-administrative assistant with questionable typing skills and the figure of a Playboy bunny. When exactly Ned took up with her, while his first wife was withering away of cancer or after her casket was rolled into the family crypt at Oakland Cemetery, is still a point of contention at Christmases and family get-togethers.
Regardless, Ned fell hard and fast, and Maureen was sleeping in his bed before his wedding band had tarnished in the drawer. Like any good Southern family, the Huntingtons weren’t exactly subtle about their disapproval, and their censure drove a wedge between Ned and his three siblings, including Sam’s grandfather. Ned sold his shares in the family business, a portfolio of real estate investments up and down the East coast, for more money than he and Maureen could ever spend. Then they proceeded to spend it. They bought vacation homes, racehorses, yachts and cars and airplanes. But the shiny new toys attracted the wrong kinds of people, and Ned got suckered into a string of sketchy investments. His and Maureen’s days of living large were over in less than a decade. Maureen moved on. Ned died soon after, and his daughter—Josh’s mother, an only child who’d just flunked out of Barnard—was left destitute.
All this goes to say, Josh and Sam may be cousins, but they grew up worlds apart. Sam sailed through life with the Huntington name and trust fund, while Josh weathered a one-bedroom apartment on the wrong side of town. He went to public school and took public transportation and, later, worked his way through public university and then business school. Sam has always admired the way Josh is the first Murrill in three generations to pull himself up by the bootstraps. When Sam decided to run for mayor, Josh was his first hire.
“You look like shit,” I say to him now. In the natural light of the foyer, his face is puffy, his skin paler than usual everywhere but under his eyes, twin dark smudges that bleed into his cheeks. “What happened to you?”
Josh gives a sarcastic snort. “What happened is an Atlanta child went missing while I was visiting my sister in the boondocks. If it weren’t for some trucker with a transistor radio at the Denny’s, I’d still be sitting on my sister’s front-porch couch right now, watching the grass grow.”
Josh’s sister, however, is much less of a self-starter. Her straight-D squeak through high school was followed by a series of dead-end jobs waiting tables or scrubbing floors, all of which she managed to get fired from before the first paycheck had cleared. As far as I can tell, she lives off unemployment, food stamps and the few hundred bucks Josh presses into her palm whenever he drives to South Georgia to visit, which is often.
“Anyway, I’m on my way downtown, but I wanted to stop by and check on you and Sammy. How are y’all?”
As much as Josh loves my husband and me, he adores Sammy. The two are often disappearing together to go rock climbing or laser tagging or go-cart racing around the track in Alpharetta. Josh claims the dates with Sammy keep him young, but Sam says Josh has always had a taste for adrenaline. I sometimes worry that he’s teaching my son the same, but then Sammy comes home so full of excitement that I can’t bear to tame their time together. And besides, Josh would never let any harm come to Sammy.
“We’re fine, thanks.” Are we fine? I say it again, more for my sake than his. “Sammy and I are fine. Or we will be, as soon as they catch whoever did this. Have you talked to Sam?”
Josh shakes his head. “He’s been tied up in meetings with the police all afternoon. Still no news on who’s behind this, which means the police have no clue where to look for that boy.” He moves closer, his rubber-soled shoes silent on the foyer floor. “I know it’s the last thing you want to be talking about, but can you give me a quick rundown of that phone call?”
I pause, summoning my strength to recount the drama for what feels like the hundredth time. I go through the phone conversation word for word, telling Josh everything I can remember, and it takes me right there, back in the thick of it. To the sound of that man’s voice coming through the phone and the feverish drive to Dahlonega. To my hysterical blabbering into Sam’s voice mail when I didn’t know where our son was or if he was alive or dead. To the panic rising in my chest all over again, choking me until I can’t breathe.
“And you’re certain the caller was male?”
“The voice was distorted, so no. I can’t know for sure, but it seemed awful low. Too low to be coming from a woman, I think. And there was a long stretch when I was trying to understand what he was telling me. I was talking in panicked circles, but his voice never went screechy or high, not even when he told me to shut up and listen. It stayed low and calm the whole time.”
Josh shakes his head. “Did he say when he’d call back?”
“No. Just that ultimately, what happened next was up to Sam. He said not to demolish the Bell Building, and that Sam would know why.”
Josh’s forehead crumples, and his eyes narrow into slits. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the Bell Building.”
“It’s part of the Marietta redevelopment downtown. A real eyesore. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to keep it. Did you talk to Sam?”
Marietta is a street near the aquarium, one that’s been all over the news since Sam’s office started fielding bids from developers to repurpose an entire city block. Sam is behind a LEED-certified mixed-use development, one that includes mass transit, retail, green space, and above, apartments and condos. It’s a cornerstone of his reelection campaign.
And now, apparently, cause for a kidnapping.
I nod. “Only briefly, but he was in a room full of people. The only thing he really said was that we’d talk tonight.” I glance behind me and then up the stairwell, making sure Mom and Sammy haven’t sneaked into the foyer, eavesdropping on the conversation. By the sound of the video game rumbling, they’re still upstairs, but I lower my voice anyway. “Josh, what’s going on here? Is Sam’s administration in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
I stare at him in disbelief, his uncertainty only heightening my panic. Josh is the self-proclaimed wizard behind the mayoral curtains, the reason many people, Sam included, say he got elected. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Has Sam mentioned anything to you about the leaks?”
“No.” I shake my head, stepping back. “What leaks?”
“Somebody’s been feeding Nick Clemmons information. His media plan, his community outreach, even his campaign poster looks like the one we were about to unveil. He knows everything we’re about to do, right before we do it, every goddamn time.”
Nick is Sam’s opponent, the candidate who came out of nowhere and whose platform is built on the sole selling point that he’s not a tree hugger like Sam.
“Who’s telling him?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, and before it completely sabotages our campaign. As of this morning, we were only up by a four-and-a-half-point split.”
This is interesting enough to dampen some
of my worry. When Sam ran the first time, he jostled for attention in a crowded field of eight candidates, and he won by a surprise margin that for those first few months, grew his head by a good two sizes. This time around it’s just him and Nick, and whatever hopes Sam and Josh may have had for another landslide are long gone. Nick has surprised them, and not in a good way.
And then I think of something that prickles my arms with gooseflesh. “Do you think the leaks are connected to the kidnapping somehow?”
“It’s possible. I don’t know. I need to talk to Sam before jumping to any conclusions.” Josh checks his watch, reaching in his pocket for his keys. “Jesus, what a nightmare. We’ve got a fund-raising event at the Fox on Thursday, a donor lunch every day this week, a hundred and eighty days left in the campaign, and Chief Phillips calling for a total media blackout, which is the very last thing we need to be doing. If we don’t get out in front of this mess, Nick Clemmons is going to crucify us.”
“Do you want something to eat? I could make you a sandwich or something.”
“Thanks, but Sam’s waiting, and I hit a drive-through on the way here.” Josh pats his paunch, which has spread since Sam took office—a combination of not enough gym time and too many fast-food dinners at his desk. “Hey listen, when all this is over, what do you think of me and Sammy disappearing up to Asheville for a couple of days? I’ve been promising to take him white-water rafting forever now, and you and Sam could use a break.”
I smile. “Sammy will be thrilled, and so would I.”
“Give him a hug for me, will you? Glad y’all are all right.” He drops a kiss on my cheek and disappears out the door.
KAT
13 hours, 56 minutes missing
One weekend, when Ethan was still in diapers and Andrew was away on a business trip, Izzy came over to keep me company.
Andrew and I were in the midst of yet another spat, and my skin was still stinging at the angry words we hurled back and forth before he wheeled his suitcase out of the house. This was back before our relationship had reached the tipping point, before either of us had said words that couldn’t be snatched back, when the inevitable still felt evitable. Izzy was there to help me dissect our relationship like a high school biology earthworm and study it from every angle. I wanted her to point to a spot with her scalpel and say here. Here is where this can be fixed.
Three Days Missing Page 13