by Lisa Unger
“The same people who would leave a rifle registered to me in Fort Tryon Park for the police to find.”
I looked at him hard, as if I was expecting to squeeze the truth from him with the very force of my gaze. “Oh, so now it’s some kind of conspiracy?”
“What do you want to call it?”
There was too much information for me to process about too many different people and circumstances. I started to feel that fog fall over my brain again, everything suddenly nebulous, dark forms moving behind a veil of smoke.
“I need to know everything that’s happening, Jake. No more lies. Are you prepared to tell me everything? No omissions.”
“I’ll tell you everything I know. There’s no more reason to hide anything from you,” he said softly. I was quiet a minute, thinking of all my million questions as they jammed up against one another on the way to my mouth. I could come up with only one.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I said as the sadness finally pushed its way past the anger and showed its face. The tears came then, too. Silent, heavy, sent directly from my bruised and mangled heart. “After all of this? Murder and lies and manipulation. Did you at least get what you were looking for?”
He sighed and turned his eyes from me, cast them down to his feet, and his body seemed to sag a little beneath the weight of my words. “I haven’t found what I was looking for, no.” His voice was quiet and he raised his eyes back to me as he moved toward me. “But I found something I never even knew existed.”
“Oh, please,” I said, hating him for saying what I wanted to hear. “Don’t even pretend you ever cared about me. You know what? Fuck you, Jake.” I turned my back and started moving away from him.
“Ridley, please.”
He moved quickly, too quickly for me to get away. He held me hard while I fought harder. I’m not talking about little girlie slaps and halfhearted punches. I kicked him in the shin. Pounded on his back. He didn’t release me.
“Let go of me. You’re a liar. I fucking hate you.” Screaming like a maniac. Between blows to his back, which by the way felt like granite, he said, “I’ll let you go when you promise to hear me.”
I tried to bring my knee up into his groin, but he deftly blocked me with his leg. Finally I just leaned against him in exhaustion, like boxers seem to do in the ring, holding each other, delivering painful blows to the kidneys. I released a long breath and rested my head against his neck. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
He kept his word. But I didn’t. The minute he released me, I took off like a shot heading to Brooklyn. “Ridley, Jesus!” he yelled. I was running with every ounce of strength and speed I had left in me, but he was on me in a heartbeat. I told you I wasn’t very fast. Now he had me from behind, my arms locked to my side. I tried to kick back at him; I thrashed and screamed like a kid throwing a tantrum.
“You’re right, Ridley!” he yelled over my screaming. “I lied to you. Let me explain.”
I don’t know how long this went on, but eventually exhaustion, coupled with the knowledge of Jake’s physical strength, led me to just collapse against him. “Okay,” I said finally. “Let me go. I won’t run. I’m too tired.”
“Please,” he said, his breathing heavy. “Don’t. I’m too tired to chase you.” After another second, he released his hold on me and I moved away from him. I walked over and leaned on the railing. The morning was almost pretty, a moody gray-blue sky, whitecaps on the gray water below us.
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I said, looking off into the distance. “Tell me you didn’t kill Christian Luna. Tell me it wasn’t you driving that car.”
To be honest with you, as far as what was between Jake and me, even with all the lies and manipulations, those were the only deal breakers, the things for which there could be no forgiveness, no explanation. He moved in next to me, slipped an arm around my shoulder, and lifted my chin with his hand until I had to look into those eyes.
“It wasn’t me.”
I think if he had tried to say more, I might not have believed him. But he let me look into his eyes and I could see it was the truth. I nodded.
“How did you find me?”
“What do you mean? Right now?”
“No. I mean, I know how you found out that my father was Jessie Stone’s physician. But how did you find me?”
He laughed a little. “The same way Christian Luna did. Thank that Post photographer.”
I sighed. “God, I hate that guy.”
He hung his head a bit at that and I could see that I had hurt him a little. I didn’t say anything to make it better.
“You’re sorry you met me,” he said after a while.
“Let’s just say you’ve got a lot of talking to do.”
We stood there for I don’t know how long, looking down into the river of traffic rushing beneath us, the smell of exhaust rising, feeling black and gritty in my throat. Neither one of us said a word. My fears and questions were a coil of razor wire between us. We might get through them, but it was going to hurt like hell.
We found a diner on Montague Street in Brooklyn. We’d walked there in silence. He had a lot to say, I know, and I had so many questions, but it was understood between us that we needed to find someplace safe and quiet to talk. He wore a sweatshirt with a hood over his head and the bill of a baseball cap covered his eyes. I kept my distance and walked quickly. With the sun coming up, I felt as if we were both exposed and needed to get inside.
We slid into a red leather booth and ordered coffee. We were quiet, not looking at each other. Neither one of us was sure where to start, I think.
“How did you find me?” I asked. “Right now, I mean.”
“I was watching the studio from Tompkins Square.”
I nodded. “You knew I’d come looking for you?”
“I didn’t know. I hoped.”
More silence.
“I went to see Zack,” I said after a minute.
“Yeah? Why did you go there?”
“Where else was there for me to go?” I shrugged. “I thought because he knew my father, he could help me see things more clearly.”
“But?”
“But…he tried to make me believe I had imagined all of this. His mother was there, too. And then I realized.”
“Realized what?
“Project Rescue. That whatever it is, they’re part of it.”
He nodded as though he already knew it, which he probably did. I reached into my pocket, withdrew the copy of Charlie’s birth certificate and the photograph of Charlie, Adele, and Michael. I placed them on the table, slid it over to him.
“You’re Charlie, aren’t you?” I said quietly.
How did I come up with this? While I’d been on the phone with Detective Salvo, I’d been looking at the birth certificate and noticed that Charlie’s birthday was July 4, 1969. The first night I’d met Jake, I’d wanted to know his sign; he told me Cancer. I looked at the fuzzy picture of the toddler on the pony and I couldn’t be sure then that it was him. But something about his face on the bridge had made me think of the photograph again. And my subconscious had been shifting around pieces of the puzzle. I wasn’t surprised when he nodded, looking down at the items in front of him. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Or I was once, anyway.”
“What happened?”
“I still don’t know exactly. I don’t know how I wound up abandoned in the system. All I know is that Charlie was kidnapped from his home when he was three years old. What happened from there is still unclear.”
“But you were right about your mother. She loved you.”
“She tried to abandon me.”
“But she came back for you. She was young and scared. Her husband was a junkie. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.”
He gave a shrug and a halfhearted nod. God, aren’t we all just little kids who so badly need to know that we were loved by our parents?
“And you found your grandmother. Why didn’t you tell her?”
“I don’t understand,” I said when he didn’t respond. “Isn’t that what you were looking for? Your family?”
“I thought so,” he said. “But when I found Linda McNaughton…I don’t know. It didn’t seem right. The boy she loved was so long gone. Her daughter, too. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I thought I’d go back when I figured out what had happened to me. I still don’t know.”
We were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “There’s only one person left who knows what happened to both of us for sure. Why and how we were taken, what happened from there.”
“Who?”
“Your father. He was the attending physician for all four of the children that went missing that year. And who knows how many others.”
“There are others?”
“I think there are many, many others.”
“Project Rescue…” I said, more thinking aloud than anything. I couldn’t see the connection between what had happened to Charlie, Jessie, and the others and Uncle Max’s organization, but I knew there was one, like you know an island connects to the ocean floor though it may be miles below the surface of the sea.
“That’s why you sought me out?”
He released a long breath and looked at me. “To be honest, I was kind of at a dead end when I saw you on the cover of the Post. I’d seen Dr. Hauser and I knew about your father. But I didn’t know how to get close to him. It’s not like I could just walk up to him and ask about Project Rescue. Then Arnie died. All my other efforts to find out about the organization failed. And I was just lost for a while, grieving, walking around like a zombie, working on some cases to bring in money.
“Then I saw your picture in the paper. You looked so much like the picture of Teresa Stone from the Record, I had to wonder. I mean, it was jarring. I thought I was losing my mind, becoming so desperate for a lead, so obsessed with this quest that I was seeing things that weren’t there. Then I read that you were Benjamin Jones’s daughter and it just felt like fate. I thought by getting to know you I could find a way closer to your father.”
“So you used me, basically.”
He reached for my hand and I didn’t pull it away.
“It started out that way, Ridley. But…” He didn’t finish his sentence and I was glad, because I didn’t want to hear how he’d never expected to have feelings for me. I think on a cellular level I knew what had happened between us. Words would just make it less than what it was.
“So if you’re Charlie and I’m Jessie, what about the other two children who went missing that year? Who are they?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to track them down. These kids all disappeared. I mean, take yourself, for example. You have a different name and a different Social Security number. There’s a birth certificate in the name of Ridley Jones. It’s the same with me; I have a birth certificate for Harley Jacobsen. Charlie, Brian, Pamela, and Jessie don’t even exist anymore. Most of their biological parents are dead.”
It didn’t seem strange to be talking about Charlie and Jessie in the third person. Neither one of us, I think, quite identified yet with the missing children. I didn’t feel as though I had ever been Jessie. She was someone whose fate was intimately connected to mine, someone whose story I needed to unravel before I could understand what had happened to me. By the way Jake was talking, it seemed as though he felt the same way.
“I still don’t understand. These children were taken from their homes and somehow wound up in other homes with different names and Social Security numbers. Why? And how could this have happened?”
“A network of very powerful people with a lot of money and a lot of influence,” he said without any hesitation, as if he’d been thinking about it for a while. “The level of organization and corruption it would take to accomplish it is nothing short of astounding.”
“But why?” I asked again. “Why would anyone do this?”
“When I first started looking into this, it was just about me, what had happened to me. At first I thought it was some kind of black-market thing. I thought, Okay, kids were abandoned at the Project Rescue sites, many of them probably left without birth certificates, Social Security numbers. There has to be a system in place for getting abandoned children new identities, right? Maybe the healthy Caucasian children were snatched from the system somehow and sold to wealthy people who wanted children but couldn’t conceive.”
“But your mother went back for you. You weren’t actually abandoned.”
“Right. And when I learned about the other children who went missing in that area, I found that they were never abandoned, so it kind of blew my theory.”
“But they’d all been patients at the Little Angels clinic.”
“That’s what they had in common.”
“And the Little Angels clinic is a Project Rescue facility.”
“That’s right.”
“So? What does that mean?”
“The other thing they had in common was the number of visits to the clinic. When a child has too many visits to the doctor for certain kinds of injuries or excessive illness, they’re flagged by attending physicians as possible victims of abuse. Jessie’s arm was broken. Charlie was abandoned. Brian was brought in for a broken leg, a blow to the head. Pamela had her arm pulled out of the socket. These are not normal injuries for toddlers.”
“How do you know that? Dr. Hauser said he didn’t give you the files.”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to tell you that he’d violated clinic policy because of his friendship with Arnie.”
I smiled inside. I had been right about Dr. Hauser and his Dancing Bear tie. The inner hippie had won out in the interest of doing the right thing, even if it meant breaking the rules.
“So you’re saying that someone believed these children were the victims of abuse.”
“Not someone, Ridley. Your father.”
Jake seemed to be looking past me, his brow knitting, and I turned to see what he was looking at. There I saw what he saw, the Firebird, as stealthy and menacing as a shark.
He reached over and grabbed my head and pushed it down on the table. He lay his head next to mine and yelled to the waitress, who was the only other person in the diner, “Get down!” She responded as if she’d been trained to do so, immediately dropping into a crouch behind the counter.
It was then that the windows of the diner exploded in a crystalline blizzard of glass. The sound of automatic gunfire and shattering glass was deafening, easily the most terrifying sound I’d ever heard. The whole world was a kaleidoscope of deadly shards and blinding light. Jake dropped under the table and tugged on my legs for me to do the same, and together we crawled behind the counter, where the frightened waitress was weeping on the floor. I was too stunned to even be afraid.
“Is there a back door?” Jake yelled above the sound.
She nodded and crawled into the kitchen. A back door stood open through which the cook must have fled. We exited on all fours.
By the time we were in the back lot, the sound of gunfire had ceased and we heard the burning of rubber on asphalt. The Firebird engine revved and rumbled off into the distance. Jake pulled me to my feet.
“Call the police!” he yelled at the frightened woman, who huddled against a concrete wall, weeping. “Ask for a Detective Gus Salvo.”
In the cold, bright morning, Jake took my hand and we started to run.
We ducked into a church on Hicks Street. My ears were ringing from the violence of the sound and my heart had burrowed itself into my esophagus, where it stayed, making it difficult for me to breathe. I gripped Jake’s hand like a vice, only noticing how hard once I let go and felt my fingers cramp.
The church hummed with silence. An old lady in a black kerchief prayed in the front pew. The morning light washed in through the stained-glass windows, those bright colors dancing on the floor like butterflies. Votive candles flicker
ed in the alcoves. It felt very safe. Who would try to kill you in a church?
Jake dragged me into a confessional. A small sign announced that confession would begin at four P.M. I was glad. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I sunk onto the red velvet cushion that was so worn, its stuffing had started to show through. I touched the leather Bible and took away a fingertip black with dust. Jake stood peering through the curtain.
“Who is trying to kill us?” I whispered fiercely.
“Ridley, we’re deep into something. Someone doesn’t want us getting any deeper. But at this point, you know as much as I do,” he answered softly.
“But I don’t know anything.”
He gave me a look that I couldn’t read and then turned back to keep his watch outside the confessional. I noticed a gun, a semiautomatic, cold and menacing in his hand. I realized I’d never seen an actual handgun before. It made me sick.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked stupidly.
“Protect us…if it comes to that.”
Do you think you go straight to hell for shooting someone in a church, or does God understand that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances? I leaned my head against the wood wall and felt the most powerful wash of fatigue. “I don’t know anything,” I whispered again.
I thought about those foundation dinners, those glamorous events filled with New York City’s elite in business, broadcasting, medicine, society. I thought about all that money being funneled into Max’s charitable fund. I thought about all the people that money had helped. I thought about Max’s driving passion to save abused children and battered women in a way he and his mother had never been saved, how it had become a kind of salve for his own pain. I thought of how frustrated he and my father were sometimes over a system that failed so often, a system that bound the hands of physicians from helping children in danger. So many nights over dinner they had discussed these issues. So many times I overheard their impassioned debates in the study. So many times as a child I wondered why they became so angry and sad.
What would have happened if Max and my father had decided to take certain cases into their own hands? What if providing safe haven for abandoned babies was just one arm of Project Rescue? What if there was another Project Rescue? One with which the social elite of New York City wouldn’t be so eager to have their stellar names associated. These thoughts ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins.