Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  “There it is,” Gary says suddenly, and my gaze darts to the screen.

  I’m staring at a view of the front lawn and driveway, shot from high up by the roofline. The angle doesn’t give us a clean view of the street, not with the reporters’ cars and television vans standing in the way, but there’s just enough slice of street that we see it, a black-windowed truck sliding by on the other side of the driveway gate. Gary presses Pause at just the right moment, then fiddles with the controls while Sam coaches him through the logistics of zooming in on the system. I take a deep breath, enough air to make my lungs ache, then blow it all out and wait.

  “Looks like we’ve got a partial.” Gary jots the numbers on a sticky note.

  Everybody begins talking at once. There are so many voices, one leapfrogging over the other to be heard, we almost miss the most important one.

  Diego’s deep voice, coming down the hall. “Mr. Huntington. Mrs. Huntington!”

  “In here,” Sam shouts.

  I twist around in my chair.

  Diego appears in the doorway, his face dripping with sweat, his chest heaving like he just ran here from Alabama. He reaches back into the hall, gives something a good tug and there he is.

  My recalcitrant, runaway son.

  KAT

  55 hours, 42 minutes missing

  After Mac leaves, I sit in my car, watching people pass by in the parking lot. Talking on the phone, pushing grocery carts loaded with food, searching for their keys, oblivious to Ethan’s plight. And why shouldn’t they be? They don’t know him, don’t know me. I watch them, these strangers going about their Sunday morning, and I’m torn between jealousy and spite.

  I check the time on the dashboard—ten-twelve. The day stretches in front of me like a long, colorless road, endless and empty. Mac’s smell still lingers in the air, soap and aftershave and coffee, and I think back on his words, specifically all the ones he refused to say. About the phone call, that downtown building, the demands made of the mayor. Mac said that’s where he’s concentrating his energy. Maybe, so should I.

  I dig my cell from the middle console, type “Bell Building Atlanta” in the internet search bar, and wait for the results to load.

  According to Google, the building has seen better days. What was once a telephone exchange in the 1920s is now abandoned, thanks to a summertime leak that flooded two upper floors. The tenants fled, the owner spent the insurance money on a fancy new house in Buckhead and the building deteriorated into a health hazard, every inch of it crawling in black mold. Nobody cried when the City of Atlanta condemned it, especially not the owner. They paid him good money for it last year as part of some flashy development on Marietta Street.

  I scroll down to find a few ratty images. Three uninspired stories, featureless windows, dirty bricks under crumbling white paint. Why would anyone want to save it? Why is this building worth a little boy’s life? I don’t understand any of it.

  I surf back to the top, to the search bar. Mac told me to stay away from the news and the internet, and Lucas backed him up. He said it was like asking WebMD how long you’ve got after a cancer diagnosis—the news will always be so much worse than you thought.

  I push aside their warnings and type “Ethan Maddox missing” in the bar. My finger hovers over the enter key for only a second or two. I hit it and hold my breath.

  The screen loads with news items, dozens of them, links to local and national articles, interviews with law enforcement and other “experts,” clips from the morning news and CNN. I click on one from WXIA, the local NBC affiliate, but the article doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. Ethan disappeared from an overnight trip to Dahlonega, police suspect foul play, unsubstantiated whispers of a kidnapping, a rumor someone traced back to a cabdriver. No mention of Sammy or the Huntingtons, though it’s only a matter of time before the whispers gain substance.

  I scroll further, flip to the next page. Farther down on the screen, one of the results catches my eye, stopping my heart like an emergency break.

  Child’s remains found in Chattahoochee National Forest.

  My body goes hot like a furnace, and my eyes sprout instant tears. Chattahoochee National Forest smothers the northeastern chunk of Georgia, dipping from Tennessee into a half-dozen counties, including Lumpkin, stopping right before Dahlonega.

  With shaking hands, I press the link and a solemn-faced newswoman fills my screen.

  “Hikers in North Georgia made a gruesome discovery earlier this morning, when they came across the body of a young boy. The tourists were trekking along the Dockery Lake Trail when they spotted the child’s remains. State and local police have arrived at the scene, but so far, no formal identification has been made...”

  Whatever she says next, I can’t hear it over my own sobbing. Big, ugly, heaving sobs that burn in my chest and convulse my body like a seizure. A body. A boy’s body. In the woods north of Dahlonega. How many missing boys can there be?

  I call Mac, choking out the words in seizured spurts. Hikers. Body. Boy. My voice rising, spiraling into a steady wail Mac has to shout over.

  “Kat, listen to me. It’s not him. It’s not Ethan.”

  I shut up for long enough to let his message worm its way into my brain, but it can’t. The distance is too great. My body can’t understand, either. The tears are still flowing, my hands are still shaking, and my lungs can’t quite suck in enough air.

  “Did you hear me? It’s not him.”

  His words loosen the knot around my chest, but my breath still shudders and aches. “It’s not? Are you sure?”

  “Positive. This boy was older, and his body had been there for a while. A week, at least.”

  “Oh, thank God. ThankGodthankGodthankGod. I saw that news clip and I just...” I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and say it again. “Thank you, God.”

  He gives me a moment to pull myself together. “I thought you weren’t going to watch the news.” His voice is patient, even though his words are a reprimand. When he told me to stay off the internet, he said that included the news, as well.

  “I know, I just feel so damn helpless. I want to do something, but there’s nothing for me to do. All I can do is sit here and wait, and it’s making me crazy.”

  “I know how hard it is for you to sit around and wait for news, believe me, I do, but go home. Get some rest. Take care of yourself. That’s the best thing you can do, both for you and for Ethan.”

  I give him a shaky nod, even though he can’t see. “Okay.”

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve got something to report. I promise.”

  We hang up, and the raw emotions of the morning gather, swirling into a black hole of grief. Of fear and sorrow and missing my son. I give in to my tears again, allowing myself another good cry, and then I do what Mac suggested. I start my car and point it home.

  STEF

  55 hours, 51 minutes missing

  I fall to my knees with a hard smack I feel all the way to my bones, snatch my son from the guard’s hand and tug him to my chest. Sam steps up on the other side, draping his arms around both our shoulders in a full-family embrace. “A Sammy sammie,” that’s what the three of us always call it.

  But after that first, singular moment of absolute relief comes anger. No, not anger. Fury. Fury sends me hurtling back to earth like a blazing asteroid, questions firing in my mind. Why did Sammy run away? Where was he going? What was so goddamn important he would dangle himself out a window, streak past the guards and the cameras, dodge traffic and who knows what else to do it?

  “What were you thinking? You scared me to death.” I pull back, clamp my hands onto his shoulders, and shake him until his teeth rattle, until his glasses fly off his face and clatter to the tile. “I thought he got you. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I thought the kidnapper came back for you.”

  A spl
inter in the back of my mind tells me I’m out of control, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

  Sammy’s head bobbles around on his neck, but he doesn’t cry out. His lips are pressed shut, but his eyes are peeled wide. I’m scaring him, that much is clear, and I’m suddenly glad for the burly guard standing right behind him. I’ve never, not once, raised a hand to my child, but I have to hold myself back now. I want to hug him, then throttle him, then hug him again while meanwhile my brain pounds out, he’s here, he’s back, he’s alive.

  “I found him on Pine Valley,” Diego says, still panting in the doorway.

  Pine Valley is more than a mile from here, across more than one busy street.

  “You were going to Liam’s?”

  Sammy flinches, and I take that as a yes.

  “Why?” When he doesn’t respond, I shimmy the backpack off his shoulders and wrench the thing open. I see the device, I acknowledge it’s there, cradled in the bottom of his backpack with crumbs and empty candy wrappers, but I don’t understand any of it. “Your Xbox controller? You risked your life and gave your father and me a heart attack to play a fucking video game?”

  The curse word plops out before I can snatch it back, not that I try to. I am consumed by rage. Eaten alive by it. My throat throbs with the strain of holding it in.

  “Sammy, what were you thinking?” I give him another rough shake, and he bursts into tears.

  Sam presses a hand between my shoulder blades. “Let’s all just take a step back and regroup, okay? We’re not going to get any answers like this.”

  His words slice through my furious haze, and I understand what he’s trying to say without actually saying it: Settle down. Stop talking. You have an audience. It’s the Huntington curse—that we are always being watched, heard, judged. Even in the privacy of our own home.

  I clamp my lips shut, but my hands are still sweaty and shaking.

  Behind me, Sam begins doling out praise to the men in the room. He thanks them for their service. He apologizes for the trouble we’ve put them through. He shakes their hands and offers to walk them out like they’re guests who dropped by for a glass of wine. Despite whatever emotions are brewing behind his mayoral facade, he’s charming and cordial and polite. There will never be a more perfect politician.

  But I am no public servant, and I no longer have the energy to pretend. I push to a shaky stand, take Sammy by the arm and drag him into the hall without a word. The men step aside so we can pass.

  “Mommy,” Sammy whimpers as I drag him up the stairs, and the word is like a vise to my heart. He hasn’t called me Mommy in years, not even last fall when he woke up after having his tonsils taken out. I wait for whatever is coming next, an apology, maybe, or an explanation. He opens his mouth to haul air, his breath stuttering with the kind of sucked-in sob that comes from too much crying, but he doesn’t say a word.

  We step onto the foyer floor, and I stab a finger in the direction of the living room.

  “Go sit your butt on the couch and do not move a muscle.”

  Sammy looks down at his upper arm, which my other hand still wraps around in a stranglehold, the tips of my fingers stark white against his T-shirt. I release my grip, and he ducks his head and scrambles off.

  “What are you going to do?” Mom says from right behind me. I turn, and she hands me his glasses.

  “I’m going to try really hard not to strangle my only child.” My voice is shaking, not with the humor I meant to shove in my tone, but with fury.

  “Compassion and anger can coexist, you know. Sit still. Listen closely to the messages of Sammy’s heart and honor them. He doesn’t always have the right words, but if you give him room to talk, he’ll let you know why he did what he did.”

  I roll my eyes. “Mother, please.”

  Sammy is just where I ordered him to be, seated in the middle of the couch, his back pushed all the way into the cushion so that his legs dangle above the shaggy carpet. His sobbing has grown loud and messy, a mucousy gulping into his lap. I sink onto an armchair at the end, propping my foot on the coffee table, thinking about the little bottle of Xanax upstairs in the safe, left over from last year’s brow lift. When all this is over, I’m going to poke a couple down my throat and sleep for a week.

  Sammy’s guilty gaze creeps from his lap to mine, then flits away.

  We sit there for a long moment in silence, listening to Sam wrap up another round of thank-yous and let everyone out the front door. It shuts with an ominous click. Sammy flinches, then again with each one of Sam’s footsteps coming our way. He sinks onto the arm of my chair.

  “So, I’ve been thinking and I think I’ve figured it out.” Sam’s voice is surprisingly calm, his tone almost friendly despite the way his jaw clenches and his hands clasp on a thigh, his long fingers curling into a death grip. “You called an Uber, didn’t you? A Yukon XL was on its way to take you to Six Flags.”

  This is one of Sam’s more irritating techniques, to mask his anger under a steaming pile of smart-ass. Sammy looks up, his forehead wrinkled in confusion.

  “No.” The first word he’s spoken since his choked-out Mommy on the stairs.

  Sam tosses up his hands, lets them fall back to his lap. “What, then? Let’s have it. Your mother and I are dying of suspense. What’s your excuse? Where were you going?”

  The silence that spins out lasts forever. It’s the kind of silence that wraps around you like a shroud, the kind that turns the air thick and solid. Sammy presses his lips together and stares at his lap.

  “Spit it out, Sammy. I figure no kid hangs out of a twenty-foot window for no good reason, so give it to us. What was so goddamn important you almost killed yourself to do it?”

  Sammy’s head pops up, and the look on his face is defiant. “It wasn’t that hard.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Sam loses it—his patience, his temper, every last shred of his politician’s diplomacy. “You could have broken your neck. You could have died.” Sam spews a volley of curses, his face turning an alarming shade of purple. “Now answer the question. Your mother and I deserve to know where you were going.”

  Sammy takes a couple of deep breaths, and I can’t tell if he’s scrambling for a lie or gathering up his courage. Tears drip from his chin onto his lap. His gaze locks onto mine, a silent cry for help. I reach over to a side table and toss him a box of Kleenex.

  “I needed to get on Liam’s Xbox for a minute,” he says, ignoring the tissues.

  I place my fingers at my temples and press in concentric circles.

  “Are you shitting me?” Sam screams. “Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that you risked your life and scared the living daylights out of your mother and me for a stupid video game? We called the police! We had I-don’t-know-how-many people out there looking for you. And maybe you missed the memo but there’s a kidnapper on the loose, and the kid he really meant to swipe from that cabin in Dahlonega is you. Not Ethan. You.” Sam stops talking for a moment, breathing heavily as if trying to rein himself back in, but when he continues, his voice is still thick with emotion. “Do you have any idea how careless that makes you look? How selfish?”

  By now Sammy’s face is slick with tears. He flings his head into his arms and sobs onto his lap. “You don’t understand,” he says on the tail end of a wail. “It was important.”

  The same word he said to me in his room upstairs, right after I took his Xbox.

  Sam hauls a breath to respond, but I press a hand to his knee, a not so subtle sign to give me a try. I scoot from the chair to the couch, wrapping an arm across Sammy’s shoulders.

  “Sammy,” I begin, but it comes out angry. I smooth my tone into something more somber. “Sammy, look at me, please.”

  He peeks up from between his arms.

  “Your father and I are trying really hard to understand you, but I need you to try to understand w
hy we’re so angry. When you left, when we couldn’t find you anywhere, we thought the kidnapper came back for you. We thought he took you.”

  Sammy’s face curls into itself again, and he swipes away fresh tears with the backs of both hands, first one, then the other. “Oh.”

  “Oh? Come on, Sammy. You can do better than that.” I pluck a couple of tissues from the Kleenex box and start mopping up his face. Under the dirt and the snot, his cheeks are covered in angry, red scratches. “I need you to tell us why you tried to run away. What was so important?”

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  His lip wobbles and there they are again, the relentless tears. “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because.”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go, Sammy. We can do this all day. Because why?”

  “Because I thought you would be mad. I thought you’d hate me.”

  My chest tightens, and I cup a hand under his chin, tilting his face to mine. I wait for his watery gaze to find mine. “I am your mother, and I will always love you no matter what. Do you understand?”

  Sammy nods and squeezes his eyes shut.

  “So help me understand. Tell me what you were trying to do.”

  “I wanted to apologize.” His expression is sad and eager at the same time. “I wanted to tell him I was sorry.”

  My son has so many transgressions to apologize for. Hijacking my password, jumping out a second-story window, running away, lying. But it’s clear this apology is not for me. “Apologize to whom?”

  “To Ethan.”

  “What do you need to apologize to Ethan for?”

  Sammy wipes away his tears with the backs of his hands, then dries them on his T-shirt. “For making him trade sleeping bags, even though I knew his was brand-new. For making him cry. Lots of stuff.”

  “But why? Why would you take his sleeping bag?”

  “I don’t know. His mummy bag was so much nicer than mine, and he was acting like it was the greatest thing in the world. I don’t know why that made me so mad, but it did.”