Everything is awful. Effie will hate her for wrecking her dance routine. All of the other kids will hate her, too. Her dad probably won’t ever be nice to her again. It’s not fair.
When she’s almost finished crying, Helena feels a nudge at her side. She can’t see much out of her wet eyes, so she stabs around with her fingers until she locates the jumbo candy cane her mother passes to her.
Helena peels back an inch of plastic. She jabs the candy cane up under her mask until it reaches her mouth. The sweetness helps, but only a little bit. It’s still the worst day of her life. People are so horrible she bets they all wish she was dead.
She knows she wishes they were.
«16»
Gabriel lies on the smelly floor of the stranger’s car, watching streaks of snow shooting through the darkness in the backseat window. He wonders where he is and wishes he were back at school. He wants to stand beside the Virgin Mary and say his line: “I bring you tidings of great joy.” He wants Miss Granger to straighten up his halo and wings that the man crumpled. He wants to make himself feel better by eating Mandarin oranges and nuts with the other children.
He doesn’t want the man driving the car to hear him cry, but a hiccup comes out anyway. “Shut up,” the man says. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” He reaches back to smack Gabriel’s head.
The man goes back to steering with both hands on the wheel. In the light from another car Gabriel sees a small right ear. Short brown hair. A blue coat zipped up tight at the neck. The man is not a person Gabriel recognizes. He’s not one of Celine’s boyfriends and he lied about Celine being sick in the hospital. This is stranger danger and Gabriel should not have gone anywhere with the man. Instead he should have asked an adult for help.
If Gabriel can get up on the seat, he can bang on the back window so the people in the car behind them will see he needs help. His heart races, as he slowly flips onto his side. He braces himself with his good arm, ready to push himself up.
“Don’t even think about it,” the man warns. He leans over to switch on the radio. The person singing is the real Elvis who Celine says is the nation’s only atomic-powered singer. Gabriel knows the words to the song that’s playing, but when he was young he used to get them wrong. It was the only thing he did that made Celine laugh: “A-well I bless my hole. What’s wrong with me? I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy pee.”
Hearing Elvis makes Gabriel cry harder. After the man shoved him into the backseat of the car he warned Gabriel not to blubber or else. He said, if Gabriel was good, he would take him to Disneyland. He called Gabriel by another boy’s name: Terrance. Gabriel covers his mouth with his hands to muffle the sound of his crying. He already knows about or else.
He knows how much it hurts.
«17»
Celine’s needy bladder drags her out of a dream. She glares at three identical Budweiser clocks that morph back into one on the wall—it’s past six; too late to get Gabriel to his damned school play. Not that she had any real intention of going.
Outside, the blizzard that kept her from work for the past three nights has finally blown itself out. Her eyes shift to her kit on the coffee table. There’s one good hit left and Elvis is still asleep, belly down. She can tell by his bare feet, visible at the end of the bed through the open door. It takes Celine a moment in her befuddled state to understand why she can see the man’s toe hairs even though the lights are off: daylight shines through the front window. “Shit,” she says. It’s six a.m., not p.m. She missed her kid’s play by twelve hours.
Celine rubs the circulation back into her swollen arm, which must have been dangling for hours. Gabriel’s responsible to get himself up for school and Elvis always sleeps past noon. She has the rare luxury of a few private hours.
She picks up her kit. Elvis will be pissed she didn’t share, but he’s not the one who opens himself up to STDs and violence to pay the drug bills. “Family first,” she says as she ties on the tourniquet.
¤
God-damned Gabriel cannot be missing. Celine tosses pans out of a kitchen cupboard the kid’s too big to fit into, and then stops her frantic search. The apartment is in a shambles; it will take all afternoon to tidy up yet there’s nowhere left to look. “You better not be playing one of your fucking baby games,” she warns.
She lights up a cigarette. Gabriel might be at school by now, doing something useless like the multiplication table. Too bad Celine can’t check. When the school called to confirm his absenteeism, Celine thought the kid had slept in and a habitual lie slipped out. Now they think she kept him home with a fever. If Celine retracts the lie the principal will alert Social Services, and they’re already hard on her case after the latest assessment.
Elvis, the useless oaf, is glued to the tube. He’s devouring the last of the cold pizza and drinking more tequila than ginger ale. The sound of the daytime game show is an irritating reminder of the time. It’s enough to know her baby’s missing; Celine doesn’t want a tally of the hours and minutes that passed before she’d noticed.
“What’s the plan?” Elvis says. “You calling the pigs or what?”
“Let me fucking think.” The wheel on the Price is Right beeps rapidly as Celine turns the front door’s deadbolt. She has to push the door open against a drift; they’re almost snowed in. Five or six feet away a glittering object is half-buried in a drift. She runs to the familiar object on bare feet and digs it out.
Celine flies back inside to fling her son’s frozen halo at Elvis’s startled face. “Why’d you do it, you fucking bastard?”
“What are you jawing about, woman?”
“That was outside. Tell me why.” A pissed off neighbor on the second floor opens a window to ask for quiet. Celine will scream to wake the dead if that’s what it takes to get an answer.
Elvis flicks the halo to the floor. “Beats me. Call the pigs. Let them deal.”
“They won’t bother to search. Not with you and me to arrest on suspicion.”
Elvis’s attention turns to the game show contestants who are guessing the price of a mop. “Your kid, your call.”
Celine knocks the tequila from Elvis’s hand. “Find him,” she screams. “Find my baby.”
«18»
Harvey slumps over his precinct desk, staring at a chocolate glazed donut he can’t summon the energy to eat. He cancels yesterday’s wish for an interesting felony case with a prayer for a quiet shift. He needs time to process the fact that a moving van has come and gone from his house this morning. Effie is driving south in Pam’s Jaguar when Harvey hasn’t even had a chance to hug his daughter or sign her cast. He would have written “I love you forever, kiddo.” He would have signed it with her nickname for him, Daddy Man.
The interoffice phone rings. Before patching the call through, Verna prepares Harvey for a distraught mother who believes her eight-year-old was abducted. The name, Celine Wheeler, doesn't trigger Harvey’s recent memory but the woman’s caustic voice does. It’s heart-breaking to Harvey, but no surprise, that vulnerable little Superman is potentially missing. Rather than ask for help, Celine Wheeler delivers Harvey an ultimatum: Find her son pronto or she’ll have Harvey’s badge.
Harvey leans on his years of professionalism to gain control of his anger towards the woman and of the conversation. He records the boy’s stats: full legal name, nickname, height, weight, date of birth, sex, race, and the clothes he was last seen wearing. Celine Wheeler hedges when Harvey asks when the boy was last seen. “Was it this morning?” Harvey pushes.
“Yesterday, if you must know,” Celine says.
“At bedtime?”
“Are you going to find my kid or just keep wasting my time?” Celine says. Before Harvey can respond that he’ll do everything in his power to secure the child’s safety, including gathering the information he needs, she hangs up.
¤
As Harvey drives to the Wheeler apartment, he keeps an eye out for the boy as per protocol. Verna radios in: “The secretary of Gabriel’s school says he stayed
home with the flu. At least according to his mother.”
Celine opens the door of her apartment then crosses her arms as Harvey gets out of his car. She’s dressed in tight, low-rise jeans and a sweater that accentuates her breasts and reveals her stomach. Behind her stands a tall man whose black forelock and sideburns brand him as one of the many Elvis impersonators in the town. “Took you long enough,” Celine says.
Harvey scans the disturbed snowdrifts at the front of the building as he strolls towards the pair. When he reaches the doorway Celine stays put, barring his way, rather than urging him inside. “Where do you think you’re going?” she says. “I wouldn’t have called if my kid was here.”
“With your permission, ma’am,” Harvey says, “I need to search your home. In the majority of cases, children are found either hiding or asleep. You’d be amazed at the places kids find to hide.”
“Don’t ma’am me,” Celine says as she steps aside just enough to let Harvey pass.
Once inside the ransacked apartment Harvey loses hope of finding untampered-with evidence. Closet doors are open and items scattered. Furniture is tipped over or moved from previous locations. A jarring note in all the chaos is Gabriel’s cot, which is neatly made in a corner of the living room.
Harvey calls Gabriel’s name while performing a thorough search. He notes that any drug paraphernalia normally in the suite was moved prior to his arrival and the kitchen knives are still jammed between the stove and the counter, although a week has passed since he put them there as a safeguard. He finds the boy’s Superman pajamas folded and tucked under his musty pillow, but any outerwear Gabriel owns is missing. The strangest find is a soggy halo, which Celine confirms was part of Gabriel’s angel costume for the Winter Extravaganza, an event she didn’t manage to attend. The halo was found outside in the snow that morning.
Flem Minkov is the Elvis impersonator’s real name according to his driver’s license. Harvey instructs the man to wait in the bedroom while he interviews Celine alone. As they sit across from each other at the kitchen table, Celine jiggles her legs to signal her impatience as Harvey confirms and records necessary biographical details. According to Celine, Gabriel doesn’t have grandparents, extended family or any child friends he plays with after school. She insists none of her previous partners have a reason to take the boy and she’s certain his father hasn’t escaped from his psychiatric hospital because that was the first place she called. Gabriel was never fingerprinted for identification purposes, was seen once in hospital for an accidental burn and never had dental work done.
“Are there any family or school problems that might have affected him?” Harvey asks.
Celine visibly bristles. “My kid’s the teacher’s pet and the bitch you sent from Social Services cleared me.”
Harvey lifts his pen from the paper. Celine breaks eye contact when he asks, “Did Gabriel ever talk about running away?”
“Of course not. He’s fucking eight years old.”
“You said you last saw your son yesterday evening. When did you notice his absence?”
“When I woke up this morning.”
“What time?”
“The school phoned when he didn’t show, so it had to be after eight. That’s early for me. I work nights.”
“You told the school Gabriel was sick with the flu.”
“I thought he slept in. The principal freaks out if Gabriel’s missing without a good excuse.”
“But you waited until 11:43 to call Emergency Services.”
“I wasn’t sitting on my ass. I was looking for him.”
“For almost four hours?” Celine doesn’t respond and Harvey fails to keep the obvious from showing on his face: Celine’s delay in reporting her son’s absence makes her Harvey’s prime suspect.
“So are you going to find my son or not?” Celine says.
“Because of your son’s age and the unusual circumstances we’ll begin an immediate intensive response to protect him, ma’am,” Harvey says. “I’ll need to interview your boyfriend alone next and we’ll need you to provide some recent photos of your son.”
“Ask the school for Gabe’s picture. I don’t have one.” Celine pushes away from the table. “And I told you not to fucking call me ma’am.”
«19»
Willard lifts a hand from the steering wheel to lick his greasy fingers. The taste of burger and fry grease is fading, making his mouth crave the next meal even though he ate his last less than two hours before. His fingers search for tidbits, but there aren’t any left in the dregs of the feast scattered on the seat beside him.
His hunger, always a bloody nuisance his grandfather used to say, is causing him trouble. Food means stopping, and stopping is what will get Willard caught. His belly flutters as he sneaks a peek at Terrance in the rear-view mirror. Although he tries to stop them, his eyes dart further back to the snow-clogged northern highway spooling out behind them.
During the second his eyes were off the road the front right tire hits a pothole, making the boy yelp like a sissy girl. It’s the boy’s fault if his injured shoulder is now dislocated; he should have known better than to try to run last time Willard stopped the car for a potty break.
Willard slows, proud of himself for knowing that the pothole might have damaged the tire’s rim. He releases the steering wheel on a straight stretch as he once saw his grandfather do, and the undamaged car steers straight despite the slippery conditions.
Ahead on the left, a complex of log buildings appears. Most are small cabins, with a large house in the center. A painted sign shows a dancing fork, plate and spoon beside the words “The Greasy Spoon.” They have traveled north far enough that sit-down restaurants will be the only option for hot food, until Willard reaches home. He doesn’t want to pass up this one.
Willard drives a short distance further, then pulls onto an unused side road, continuing as far as the deep snow will allow. As he gets out of the car and opens the back passenger door, he informs Terrance of his plan. Willard will walk back to the restaurant while the boy waits patiently in the trunk of the car. The boy shies away, forcing Willard to yank him out of the car by his injured arm.
As Willard unlocks the trunk, where masking tape and rope are stashed, the boy squirms from his grasp. He foolishly tries to run up the impassable road toward frozen wilderness.
Willard is not much of a runner but, unlike the boy, he’s wearing boots. The boy moves lopsidedly because of his injured shoulder and bare feet. Even so, Willard is out of breath and furious by the time he chases him down.
He smacks the rebellious boy upside of the head. Willard hadn’t understood the constant need for discipline when he was a boy, but he does now. Children need the defiance driven out of them for their own good. “March,” he commands, dragging the boy to his feet and giving him a shove in the direction of the car.
Willard’s too winded now to walk all the way back to the restaurant. As they drive away from the promise of crispy bacon at The Greasy Spoon, he flicks on the radio in search of news about other people’s problems to soothe his agitation. Instead, a man talks about the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy named Gabriel Wheeler from Fenny.
In the rear-view mirror Willard’s little brother’s eyes burn bright. “That’s me,” the boy says.
Willard steers off the road. His palm takes a swipe at Terrance’s head. As he steers back onto the road, he glances back at the weeping boy. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” he says.
¤
As Willard rounds the last bend of the snow-choked driveway, he sees the shack has changed since he left one week before: a section of the unstable brick chimney has finally fallen away. At least there are no visible signs of someone snooping around.
Willard gets out of the ticking car, pocketing the keys. His legs break through a hard crust of old snow before sinking in up to his knees. There are animal tracks leading to the cabin porch and what looks like the bloody remains of a death match between a rabbit and a predator. They’l
l have to be quick; he has never liked to be outside at dusk.
Although no footsteps lead to the shed, Willard trudges around the side of the house, proving to his doubting self that the old rusted padlock he used to secure the door is still in place. He sniffs the air, picking up the scents of animal dung and wood rot: nothing to trigger a trespasser’s suspicion. When yanked, the lock holds. “Stay put,” Willard instructs the dead old man inside.
He makes his way back to the front of the house and sees the boy, who was whimpering like a baby in his sleep when they arrived, is now wide awake. He escaped the car but had not managed to get very far. Willard finds it fitting to see the boy hunched in the snow, flanked by Willard’s grandfather’s handiwork: a Grecian goddess and a flute-playing cherub. Like the snow, the boy’s face and hands are tinged violet.
The boy only trembles when Willard speaks his name; he doesn’t move his head or eyes to look. Willard growls it the second time: “Terrance.” Hot piss melts the snow around the boy’s legs. His teeth chatter hard enough to crack.
It angers Willard his brother is so afraid of him when he only has kindness in mind. He blames their parents for poisoning the boy against him. Because of the fear they instilled, Terrance believes he has to run away. He kicked up stink when he lost a wing and got a dislocated shoulder in a tussle. At least his halo, which Willard insisted he wear for the homecoming, is still intact. Terrance makes a nice statue, prettier than those Willard’s grandfather used to decorate the yard. Willard should leave him in place until spring thaw.
“Take your coat off. Stay awhile,” Willard says instead. It’s a joke because the boy is only wearing a bed sheet, T-shirt and jeans. Later, if the boy is good, he’ll give him back his shoes. When he doesn’t budge, a prod to his damaged shoulder is all it takes to get the slacker moving.
All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1) Page 5