by J. R. Rain
We’d gotten along like this for many years, living in quiet desperation, our kids content enough, but our marriage collapsing. I would have continued living like this forever. I was a monster and Danny seemed to at least accept me.
But it all came to a crashing end months ago when I had caught him cheating.
Danny still stood in the doorway, unsure what to do. His tie was still pushed up against his Adam’s apple, and he looked pale and worried. He was still wearing his nice Italian suit. Danny rarely wore his nice suits, so he must have been in court today. An injury attorney, Danny hated going to court. Injury attorneys prefer to settle over the phone. They like easy, cut-and-dried cases. Anyway, if he had been in court, that might explain why he had been so short over the phone.
He finally spotted me in the far corner of the room, where I had sat while the doctors and nurses swarmed over my son. A few long strides later and he was sitting in the spare seat next to me, where he surprised the hell out of me by leaning over and giving me a small hug. I didn’t hug him back.
“How is he, Sam?”
I started to tell him what I knew, but only about six coherent words came out. I broke down completely, sobbing hard into my hands, and I was slightly less surprised when Danny reached over again and pulled me into his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-five
We were sitting side by side at the foot of my son’s hospital bed. It was after hours, although “after hours” didn’t mean much in a children’s hospital intensive-care unit, since parents or guardians are usually permitted to stay with their children overnight.
We had been sitting there quietly for some time before I realized Danny had been holding my hand. I gently pulled it away, shocked and surprised all over again. Danny hadn’t held my hand in six years. And if he did happen to touch me, it was always immediately followed by a visible shudder.
He wasn’t shuddering now. Why, I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t care. Danny was the least of my concerns.
Anthony was breathing lightly on his own. Occasionally his aura would flash yellow, but mostly it was a deep black. Interestingly, bigger flashes of light seemed to hover over his body, and then scuttle away again like frightened fish. I sensed these could be other entities. But I wasn’t sure. How could I be sure? I didn’t know what the hell was going on with myself half the time.
Another curious glob of light came over him, hovering briefly over his head, and then seemed to dart around my son almost hectically.
No, not hectically.
Playfully.
It was the spirit of a child, I realized. And I was suddenly certain this child had died in this hospital. A ghost child. Trying to play with my son.
I took in a lot of air but the sound was strangled and Danny glanced sharply over at me. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hand now that I had removed mine from his.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I had long ago learned not to share my supernatural experiences with Danny. Such experiences served only to freak him out and distance him even further. Now, I just didn’t care to share anything with him.
As I watched the amorphous light zigzag over my son’s inert body, I thought of another child. A girl who was being held prisoner by God knows who. A girl who was alone and scared and probably hurt.
I looked at Danny. “Will you stay with Anthony?”
My ex-husband blinked, and then his eyes narrowed. “Of course. Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to you about something, Sam,” he said, and I heard, amazingly, desperation and a hint of something else in his voice. What that hint was, I refused to believe.
“Can it wait?”
He almost reached out for my hand again, but stopped. I noticed a subtle ripple of revulsion pass through him, but he fought through it. “Yes, it can. When will you be back?”
I stood and grabbed my purse. I looked at my sleeping son. I looked at the impenetrable black halo that surrounded him. I decided against sharing any information with Danny, especially about the black halo. I also didn’t want to talk about the phone call with little Maddie. Danny had lost his intimacy privilege long ago, and was nowhere near my inner circle.
I said, “I might be out all night.”
He nodded. “It’s okay. I’ll be here. You have work to do. Anthony isn’t going anywhere. Are you working a case?”
“Yes.”
“An important case?”
“Very.”
He nodded again. “I’ll be here all night. I took half the day off tomorrow, too.” He motioned to the nearby, partially open window which showed a sliver of silver-tipped clouds in the night sky. “Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have you sleeping here in the morning, right? Might raise a few suspicions.”
I fought through my own shock and surprise of Danny showing an ounce of consideration. I said, “I’ll try to make it back as soon as I can. Call me if anything comes up.”
He nodded, and almost reached for me. I shrank back.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Out,” I said, and left.
Chapter Twenty-six
McDonald’s was hopping.
The smell of French fries hung heavy in the air. I hadn’t eaten a French fry in over a half a decade. I wondered if they still tasted perfect. A creepy, life-sized, cardboard clown grinned at me from a far corner. Outside, shoeless children swarmed over the mother of all jungle gyms. A half-masticated chicken nugget sat under a nearby plastic booth.
And hanging from the ceiling above the counter was a video surveillance camera.
Bingo.
According to my Google map search, this was the closest McDonald’s to Maddie’s last known address—the same address where I had found the working meth lab and the not-so-working dead man.
I headed over to the counter, where a teenage Hispanic girl smiled at me blankly from behind a cash register. Instead of ordering, I asked to see the McManager.
* * *
Now I was sitting in the McDonald manager’s office. It wasn’t much of an office. It was just a desk at one end of a narrow room. At the other end was the employee’s time clock and the drive-thru window.
“We have to make this quick,” he said. He was a very short, oddly shaped man with a bad limp. So bad, in fact, that I think his right leg might have been a prosthetic.
“Or the clown gets pissed,” I said.
He grinned. “Something like that.”
He didn’t bother introducing himself. I guess when you’re wearing name tags, introducing yourself is redundant. Anyway, according to his shiny black and silver tag, his name was Bill, and he was the general manager.
He listened to my story attentively. As he listened, he leaned a little to the right. He seemed to be mildly in pain. I would be, too, if I was sitting on half an ass. I concluded my story with my request to view the surveillance video.
“And you’re working with the police?”
I gave him Detective Hanner’s card. “Call her if you’d like.”
He took it from me, studied it. “I’ll do that. But I’ll have to get approval from my district manager before I release the surveillance video.”
“Of course.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to help you.”
“I understand.”
“We just have procedure.”
“Of course you do.”
“Awe, fuck it. There’s a missing girl. Hang on, and I’ll get you set up in here. I’m not exactly sure how to run some of these electronic gizmos, though.”
“I’m pretty handy with electronic gizmos.”
“Of course you are. A regular James Bond.”
“Minus the babes and the goofy English accent.”
He grinned again. “Hang on.”
He got up and limped out of the office. As I waited for him to return, I thought of my son and the black aura, and a crushing despair unlike anything I had ever fel
t took hold of me right there. All thought escaped me. Rational thought, that is. I had an image of myself grabbing him and jumping through the hospital window. Of me running off into the night with my son in my arms. Where I would go, I didn’t know, but I had an image of us together, somewhere, alone, while I willed him to perfect health. The image was strong. The image was real, and I wondered if it was perhaps precognitive.
Could I now see into the future?
I didn’t know, but more than likely it was just an image of a helpless mother doing something, anything, to help her sick son.
Bill came back with a remote control and a small three-ring binder. He sat back at his desk, easing himself down slowly. As he did so, gasping and wincing, a wrecked motorcycle briefly flashed before me. I saw it steaming and twisted on the asphalt.
“You were in a motorcycle accident,” I said suddenly and without thinking.
Bill snapped his head up. He had been flipping through the binder. Now his hand paused in mid-flip. His eyes narrowed. “How did you know?”
I could have pointed to the Harley-Davidson picture frame or the Harley-Davidson coffee mug, both of which were sitting on his desk. I could have told him that it had been a lucky conjecture. But I didn’t. I was too mentally exhausted for lies and half-truths.
“I had a vision of you crashing. I saw the twisted wreck of your bike. I saw the twisted wreck of your leg.”
He continued looking at me, and then finally nodded. “Yeah, I crashed it. Took a right turn too wide. Head on into a minivan. To this day I have no clue why I’m alive.”
“You still ride, though,” I said.
He nodded. “It’s the only thing that keeps me sane. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“You’re a freaky lady.”
“You have no idea.”
“And this little girl,” he said.
“She was here.” I said. “I know it.”
“There’s a lot of tape here. I was just looking through the instructions on how to—”
“Video surveillance 101,” I said. “I can manage.”
He pushed the folder over to me. “Here’s the passwords to access the program. It’s all stored on remote hard drives, but we can access it from here, and elsewhere, too. We have a lot of shit that goes down in our parking lots. Cops are always here checking out our video feeds.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Do you know what day she was here?”
“No clue.”
“Do you know what the girl looks like?”
“No clue.”
“Do you know what the bad guys look like?”
“I have an idea,” I said, thinking of the big black man in Maddie’s memory. “I do have a picture of the mother.”
“It’s a start,” he said.
The strong smell of French fries seemed to eddy in his back office. I said, “You ever get sick of the smell of French fries?”
“Honestly?” he said. “It turns my stomach.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
The surveillance program was one I was familiar with. The images recorded were stored on a Cisco Video Surveillance Storage System, which permitted the authorized user, yours truly, to access any point in time over the past five years.
So where to begin? Admittedly, using my apparently increasing psychic powers could help here, but I wasn’t sure how to harness such extrasensory perceptions to an actual date. Maybe someday I would get to the point where if I sat quietly enough, an actual date would just appear in my thoughts. I wasn’t quite there yet, and I somehow doubted my gifts could be that accurate.
So I went about this as any investigator would. Deduction, deduction, deduction.
According to official accounts, Madison and her mother had gone missing about three months ago. According to Bill, the “My Little Pony” Happy Meal theme had concluded nearly four months ago. Those timelines nearly coincided.
I removed the police file from my handbag, opened it, and looked again at the only picture of Maddie’s mother on record. The woman was probably twenty-two but she looked fifty. She also looked like a typical user: skeletal, pallid, lost. Meth eats away at the brain like a tapeworm from undercooked pork, and the results are typically the same: extreme paranoia, loss of motor control, and a disinterest in anything that isn’t meth. Even your kids. The woman in the picture—a mug shot taken of her years before—wouldn’t have cared about her daughter’s health. Or anyone’s health. She cared only for getting high and it had gotten her killed. And put her daughter in harm’s way.
I decided I would start four months ago and work my way forward.
And that’s exactly what I did for the next five hours. Going through day after day, studying the faces of anyone who was towing a child with them. The camera was a good one, and it was set up behind the counter, looking over the employee’s shoulder. There were only three active cash registers and the wide-lensed camera was able to capture the faces of any and everyone who walked up to the counter. Little kids tended to disappear below the counter, but I generally had a good view of any kids approaching the registers. Not that it mattered since I had no clue what Maddie looked like anyway.
I’ll know her when I see her, I thought. Or so I hoped.
As I went through the days and fast-forwarding only to promising targets, I thought about my son, Danny, Fang and Kingsley.
The men in my life.
My thoughts lingered on Kingsley and something pulled at me. Something important. What was it? I wasn’t sure. Something he had said perhaps. Something that had been important, or could be important. Whatever it was, it got my heart racing.
I would think about it later, whatever it was.
Days and weeks passed. I paused often and studied faces. There were a few possibilities that made me sit up and take notice. But upon further view, the woman/child or man/child didn’t add up. The girl was too perky. The mother was too happy. The father seemed particularly loving. None of this added up, at least not to me.
I continued forward. Hours sped by. Whole families appeared in the frame. I wasn’t looking for whole families. I was looking for a lonely girl and someone else. Someone that made sense.
And then I found them.
The girl was dirty, dressed in a stained dress that had a torn Strawberry Shortcake patch over her chest. She trailed behind a woman who seemed confused by the McDonald’s order board. Who gets confused over a McDonald’s order board? It’s the most famous menu in the world. She frowned and bit her lip and seemed to talk to herself. The woman herself was dressed in torn denim shorts. One leg was torn higher than the other. A white pocket hung free, squared off with a package of cigarettes. Not once did the mother look back for her little girl, who stayed behind her, swaying gently to unheard music. The girl hooked one of her tiny fingers in her mouth and waited for her mother. She could have just turned and walked out of the restaurant and her mother would never know, and perhaps never care. The little girl kept swaying. She was barefoot. Her feet were dirty. So were her ankles. The mother had been wearing flip flops, but now I couldn’t see the mother’s feet, since they were below the counter. The girl was far back, easily in the camera frame. I stared at the girl, fascinated, my eyes glued to the monitor in front of me. In my thoughts, I could hear the girl talking. This little girl.
“He kilt my mother. He shot her dead.”
“Maddie,” I whispered.
And as the mother fumbled her way through the order, the worker placed an open Happy Meal on the counter, and as Lauren dug into her pocket, presumably for money, someone else came into the McDonald’s. A man. A big black man wearing a long trenchcoat. Maddie saw him and shrank away immediately. The man said something sharply and the mother nodded. She, too, shrank away.
The man jerked his head and little Maddie followed him deeper into McDonald’s, where she disappeared out of the camera frame.
I watched Lauren count out her money, then wait for her chang
e, and finally hurry deeper into the restaurant. Thirty-three minutes later, the happy family left together, with Maddie trailing behind, forgotten, her finger hooked in her mouth.
Holding her Happy Meal box.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The surveillance software has a nice feature that allows you to freeze a face and zero in on it, which I did for Maddie, her mother, and the man.
Now I was sitting outside a Starbucks on a cool night with Detective Hanner of the Fullerton Police Missing Persons Unit. Neither of us was drinking a coffee, which was a damn shame. Detective Hanner was studying the photos and making small, disapproving noises. I wondered if she knew she was making those sounds. Then again, my hearing tends to be exceptional these days, so perhaps I was never meant to hear her small, disapproving noises.
She looked up from the pictures.
“Good work,” she said.
“I sometimes get it right.”
“Detective Sherbet said that if anyone was likely to turn something up, it would be you.”
“Detective Sherbet says the nicest things.”
Hanner shook her head. “Actually, rarely. He likes you.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
She tapped the photo of the black man in a trench coat. Her fingernail was long. And sharp. I might have gasped a little. “He was with them around the time of their disappearance,” Hanner said. “He’s a person of interest.”
“He’s got my interest,” I said.
“This photo will be everywhere as soon as I get back to the station. We’ll catch this bastard.”