The Gift

by Kim Pritekel

  “Alright, Kitty Cat. I hope I have an answer for you.”

  “I came across something today,” she said, eyeing him. “In the missing persons files.”

  He nodded, almost as if silently encouraging her to continue, even as his jaw muscle pulsed a few times.

  “Papa, what was Amy’s last name?”

  “Zucker,” he supplied, no hesitation. He looked up toward the ceiling. “She was sixteen the day she disappeared.”

  “Why did Mamma tell me her family moved away?” she asked gently.

  “They did. About a year after she went missing, they moved, though I forget where.”

  “Georgia.”

  “Yes. The uh, the uh…” He snapped his fingers as though it would help him think. “The alien place.”

  Catania chuckled. “Yes. Roswell, but the one in Georgia.”

  He smiled but then looked down at his lap, hands resting on the edge of the van on either side of them.

  “They spoke to you in 1983, Papa.” At his nod she asked, “Why?”

  “Because she was always here,” he said simply, looking at her with profoundly sad eyes. “Her home life wasn’t so good, parents always fighting, blaming her for their fighting.” He smiled. “She used to call me either Mr. D or Papa D. This warehouse wasn’t here then, but she was always in this building. Sometimes, I swear, sometimes I still think I see her here.”

  “You really cared about her, didn’t you?”

  “She was my second daughter. Oh, and she loved you,” he said, smiling that gentle smile that he seemed to save just for his Kitty Cat. “She’d carry you like a sack of potatoes on her shoulder.” He chuckled. “You crawled all over her like a little monkey, or something.”

  She felt the blood drain from her face and her pulse race. “Papa, are there any pictures of Amy? Other than the one Mamma showed of Matty and I with her?”

  He studied her for a long moment and then, to her surprise, he leaned over and reached in his back pocket, pulling out his wallet. He flipped it open and dug around until he produced a small, wallet-sized school picture. It was a bit faded and frayed, but there was a full-on smiling young woman. Her dark eyes were guarded, but her smile was beautiful. Her dark hair was short but shaggy, the bangs a little too long.

  Catania took the picture in hand and her breath caught. She held that picture in a trembling hand, tears instantly springing to her eyes. “My god,” she whispered, a tear falling down her cheek and plopping onto the small, glossy shot. “Squirrel.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  She looked down at the box her father had set down on the butcher block island, as well as the case that the projector was in. The rolled-up screen stood on its stand, which they’d left in the living room.

  “She still angry?” she asked.

  Alberto nodded. “Yes, but deep down she knows none of this is your fault,” he said, accepting the cup of coffee she handed him. “I mean, she’s the one who gathered all of this for you,” he said, indicating all that he’d brought. “I think it’s her way of not having to deal with all this by not dealing with it with busywork.”

  She nodded, sipping from her own coffee. She wasn’t entirely sure what he’d brought her, as he’d just shown up after texting to see if she was at work. One nice thing, she supposed, of being temporarily demoted was that she had a set schedule.

  “When does this nonsense stop with your work?” he asked, as though reading her mind. “You are a detective, not a secretary.”

  She smirked. “Don’t I know it. Typically, once it’s clear my gun had nothing to do with the bullets found that shot Oscar. Ballistics.”

  “Sbagliato!” he exclaimed angrily.

  “I know, Papa. I’m not thrilled about it, either.” She shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  He nodded as he finished his coffee. “I’m sorry I can’t stay, Kitty Cat,” he said, taking his cup to the sink and placing it inside. He gave her a bear hug, which hurt her arm a bit, but she was grateful for the affection so said nothing. “I’m so proud of you, and your Mamma is, too.” He left a kiss on the side of her head. “Give her time to process everything that’s happening. And, the doctors talked about Matteo getting better.”

  “Thanks, Papa. I love you.”

  She walked him out then returned, lifting the lid of the decorative box, probably from a purchase in 1964. Faded flowers were printed all over it. When she lifted the lid, she saw it was filled with a menagerie of pictures and boxed reels for the projector.

  “Okay, what’s the point of this,” she mumbled, lifting a few snapshots out and glancing at them before setting them aside. “Mom’s been cleaning out the attic again.”

  She glanced up when she heard her phone ring. Hurrying to the bedroom where she’d left it, she saw a number she didn’t recognize. Answering the call, she put the phone to her ear.

  “Detective d’Giovanni?” Fuck you, Price, she thought. “Hey, Rodney,” she said, shocked to hear Detective Slovodnik’s voice. “What’s up?” She listened, her shock turning to surprise, then determination. “Yes, I’m glad you called, Rodney, thank you. Text me that address and I’m on my way.”

  She tossed the phone to the bed and quickly changed out of casual, lazy Saturday clothes into her professional attire before she flew out the door.

  ****

  It took her a while to find the remote location. She sorely missed Oscar’s presence as well as his unending knowledge of anything maps or directions. Alas, she’d found it with a little help from GPS and Google. A black-and-white was on scene as well as a similar nondescript sedan like the one she and Oscar used, and a tow truck.

  She turned off the Jeep’s engine and unbuckled her seat belt She was about to climb out of the tall vehicle when something floated down into her lap. It felt like butterfly wings as it brushed the side of her face before it settled.

  Staring back up at her was Amy Zucker. Her father had lent her the picture he’d carried for so many decades after her promise that she’d find her. Taking the small portrait between thumb and forefinger, she brought the picture up closer to her eyes, looking into those of the teenager. Again, she thought of Squirrel, but knew it just had to be an uncanny resemblance. Right?

  Again pushing it out of her mind, she put the picture back where it had been tucked under an elastic band wrapped around her sunshade. She let out a soft sigh, then turned to see Rodney standing outside her door.

  Nodding an acknowledgement of him, she opened the door and climbed down from the Jeep. “Hey,” she said, reaching into her pocket to remove a pair of latex gloves she’d snagged from the box at home.

  “I’m really glad you came, Nia,” he said, glancing toward the action. The chain had been attached and now the white Subaru was slowly being pulled out of the water with a winch. “I don’t know what the hell is going on with Price,” he said softly, just loud enough for her to hear. “I don’t agree with his antics, but you needed to be here for this.”

  “You’re sure this is my car?” she asked.

  “Divers were able to identify the VIN.” He met her gaze. “It’s a match.”

  The car slowly eased out of the water, the back of it riddled with bullet holes, the white paint chipped away to reveal the gunmetal-gray beneath.

  Together they walked over to it, the motor of the winch loud and whining. Jorge Trujillo stood with the tow truck driver, watching. Water was pouring out of every exit it could find, including the small bullet hole in the back window.

  “Kinda creepy, isn’t it?” Rodney said loud enough to be heard over the winch.

  Catania nodded, unable to take her eyes off the car. Finally, all four wheels were on dry land, even as the pouring water created a mud puddle beneath it. The tow truck driver turned off the winch and unhooked the cabling.

  She walked over to it, mesmerized as she knew in her heart this was definitely their car, in addition to Rodney’s confirmation. She could feel an aura of absolute evil coming off that wagon. The windows
were fogged over with condensation and a billion tiny water droplets that clung to the glass.

  She stared down at the driver’s side door handle and, with steeled courage and caged rage, she reached for it, surprised to find it unlocked.

  “You may want to take a step back, ma’am,” the tow truck driver said. “Gonna be a deluge when that opens.”

  She glanced at him and gave his advice its due, stepping back as she tugged the door open. A veritable waterfall rushed forth. The mud splattered up onto her pants legs and shoes, but she didn’t care. All she could see was the faces of those who could not speak for themselves any longer: Anastasia, Eric, Aaron, Megan, Liv, Oscar, and…She shook her head, pushing the image out of her mind. No. That would wait.

  Focusing on the task at hand, she noticed something white fall out of the car with the last of the water. It looked to be a long, thin strip of some sort. For a moment she thought it was a fish or some sort of marine life, but on closer inspection, she was surprised.

  Bending down, she grabbed a nearby stick on the ground. Something about the stick caught her eye and she looked at it, marveling at the fact that it looked more like it had been carved to look like a stick than anything from nature. Pushing that thought aside, she used it to work until she was able to drag the strip over to her to see it better.

  “What is that?” Detective Trujillo asked.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured absently, squatting down. She got it wrapped over the stick enough to bring it up closer. “Looks like a piece of medical or surgical tape. She glanced over at him and could see the confusion. “You know, like if you were to tape on a gauze pad or something.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, got it. It does look like that.”

  “Here’s another one,” Rodney said, looking at them through the car as he stood at the open passenger door. He held one up with a gloved hand. “Oh, one more, in the back seat. Looks like it’d gotten tangled up in the seat belt.”

  “What the hell?” Catania stepped over the largest portion of mud to Rodney’s side of the car, which wasn’t as bad.

  “This one has a little bit of another piece stuck to it, see that?” he said, holding it up for Catania to see. “Looks like it was used.”

  “Any blood on any of it?” Jorge asked, pulling open the driver’s side back door.

  “Nope.”

  “Blanket back there, probably what he had the girl wrapped in during transport,” Rodney offered.

  “This car is clean other than that,” Jorge said, standing back and looking the car over. “Nothing in the glove box, center console, nothing.”

  “Let’s get the blanket and tape bagged, then let’s get it loaded up and to the station to be processed,” Catania said, frustrated.

  ****

  “Hey, baby. Sorry I haven’t called you today. I ended up out with the two detectives Price assigned to take over our case. I’ll explain when I see you tonight. I hope you’re having a good day and…I miss you.” Catania smiled at her own shyness. “Bye.”

  Voicemail left, she set her phone aside. Glancing at the box of pictures she’d begun to look at before Rodney had called, she decided to figure out why her mother had sent them, and moreover, why her father had brought them over. More than once when Antonia d’Giovanni got on a cleaning kick or thought that one of her children might want her entire collection of Cosmopolitan for some reason, she’d sent it off with her husband to deliver. And, more than once he’d either kept “on loan” items hidden at the shop for a time until he felt they’d been “borrowed” long enough by whatever child would never want them and return them dutifully to his wife, or blatantly find an out-of-the-way dumpster in which to dispose of them.

  This time, however, had not been one of those times, so he obviously saw some value there. She began to make a couple piles as she went through the mass of various-sized snapshots and professional pictures, some of the boys and her in their individual school pictures throughout the years. She cringed at a few of her hairstyle choices before tossing the pictures in the pile of what amounted to “no real need revisit.” That pile was essentially filled with pictures she needed to get out of the way.

  Catania didn’t consider herself a particularly nostalgic person, especially when it came to pictures, so it was quite a chore for her to go through the box. There were at least some minor comedic breaks when she found the random piece of trash that had been tossed in when one or the other of the kids were asked to go through the box of pictures to find this one or that one over the years. It was a hated task, one which she’d had to partake in a few times, and retaliation took many forms for such punishment, including leaving trash behind. She laughed outright when she found Paul’s fourth-grade report card buried near the bottom. She remembered that year, and how she’d tried to back him up by hiding hers and saying they hadn’t received them that year.

  “God, we were so stupid back then.” She chuckled, shaking her head.

  She reached back into the box, and found a rubber bouncing ball, which she tossed out onto the hardwood floor, watching as it bounced its way across the room. She smiled, thinking of the quirked look of confusion that would be on Ally’s face if she found it while cleaning Wednesday. She left it where it settled against the wall. Her attention was grabbed from the colorful ball when she hissed in pain.

  “Son of a biscuit!” she exclaimed, snatching her hand back to find her fingertip bleeding. Looking down into the box, she saw a used disposable razor that had been tossed in at some point. “Jesus, that hurt.”

  Ordinarily she’d just stick her finger in her mouth, but the razor was used, and even though it was her family…just, no. She held her hand up and hurried over to the kitchen sink and washed it. Snagging a piece of paper towel, she dried her finger and squeezed it to try to stop the bleeding before grabbing a fresh piece and wrapping it tightly around her cut finger.

  Returning to the box, she tossed the razor out then shoved some other pictures aside when she stopped cold, her hand about to shove the picture aside. Instead, she brought it out of the box and studied it.

  In the snapshot, Jason and Karen stood in front of a movie theater. Behind them in huge letters on the marquis was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He and Karen looked much younger. She was trying to think of when this picture would have been taken because she didn’t remember him having such long hair. Then again, there were a few years in her early- to mid-twenties when she saw very little of her family and pretty much not any of Jason, as she had focused solely on her career. She was also hiding the relationship she was in from all of them. Karen was giving a silly smile toward the camera, a wizard’s hat on her head. Jason was looking at her, his hair pulled back into a single braid.

  She dropped the picture and stepped back from the island, letting out a long, slow breath. To get some distance, she walked back over to the sink and unwrapped her injured finger, noting the bright red blood spot on the white material of the paper towel. She noticed the print left behind was distorted, a strange splice of white on the fabric.

  Looking at her finger, she realized it was the one that had taken the staple just before Christmas when hanging lights for Karen. The slight wound of skin ripped out had been so deep that the blood on the surface from her cut on the razor had gone around it. It was the same idea if she’d left a fingerprint after pressing her finger into an ink pad.

  She brought her other hand over and covered her fingertip with blood from that was beading up from the cut. She pressed that fingertip onto the paper towel, noting the normal, fully covered blood spot.

  Rewrapping the cut finger with the paper towel, she stopped, unwinding the white towel before slowly wrapping it, watching the process closely.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered.

  Racing around the butcher block island, she grabbed her phone and quickly sent off a text message to Rodney:

  Catania: Get that medical tape tested for fingerprints in the adhesive! The fucker was using them to wrap his fi
ngertips!

  Rodney: Wait, what? Are you serious?

  Catania: You’ve got to see if you can find the other two if not more. See if he was wrapping all ten fingers if he has them.

  Tossing her phone aside, the picture caught her eyes again. In it, the couple stood hip to hip, Jason’s left arm around Karen’s shoulders, left hand dangling over her upper chest. Never taking her eyes off her target, she absently reached for her phone and, glancing at the screen, tapped on the camera function and aimed until it was focused as best she could, then snapped the picture.

  Bringing it up on her photos, she eased her thumbs over the screen, the image becoming larger and larger. The larger it got the more pixelized it became, but she thought she’d seen what she needed to.

  She needed to know something else, though. She hurried back to her bedroom and snagged her notebook off her dresser. Plopping down at the end of the bed, she flipped through the seemingly endless pages dealing with the cases they were working on until she found what she was looking for.

  Using her finger as a guide, she trailed over the lines for the period of dates. “Okay,” she murmured, resting the notebook on her thigh as she grabbed her phone and used a search engine to find out when the Harry Potter movie had been released. “June of 2004,” she read aloud. Her eyes closed and she brought the phone up to rest against her forehead. “No, no, no…”

  She gasped when her phone rang, nearly throwing it in her surprise. Bringing it down to look at the screen, she saw Restricted. She stared at that word, the ringtone sounding again.

  Swallowing, she answered the call. “D’Giovanni.”

  “Hi, Nene.”

  “Hi, Squirrel,” she whispered. Suddenly, the little carved squirrel she saw on Karen’s mantel popped before her mind’s eye. The hot sting of tears followed. “Where are you?”

  “You didn’t give me anything for Christmas,” she said, her voice soft and unusually vulnerable. “You know what gift you can give me, Nene?”