She’s wrong. Mrs. Murphy says, “Helena, we all know how much you love to act. Come on up.”
When Helena reaches the front of the class, Mrs. Murphy hands her the poster. “For all we know,” she says, “whoever took this boy is still around.”
Helena risks a squint at the class and sees they all look worried—even the boys who don’t usually care about anything important.
Mrs. Murphy turns to Helena and tries to make her voice sound creepy. “He might be waiting in the park for another child to come along. He might be outside your house, Helena.” Mrs. Murphy grabs Helena’s shoulder. “I’m the kidnapper,” she growls, “what should you do?”
Helena does what she thinks Gabriel Wheeler should have done so that Camel Miranda could have come to his rescue. At the top of her voice, she screams, “elp, elp” and kicks Mrs. Murphy’s leg. When no one stops her, she runs screeching from the classroom with Gabriel Wheeler’s picture plastered against her chest. She runs until Principal Johnston stops her escape at the end of the hallway. Helena’s so hyped, it’s all she can do not to bite his hands when he grabs her.
Principal Johnston must not know good acting when he sees it, because he hauls her off to his office threatening to have her expelled from the school forever.
“elp,” Helena says.
¤
Helena’s mom’s working, so it takes ages before she comes to get her. While Helena waits on a chair in the school’s office, she uses the time to invent a game she calls Kidnapper-Kidnapper. The kids can blindfold the victim, pull hair, and pinch, but can’t make her bleed. If they play the game at lunch, the victim won’t get to eat.
There’ll be two kidnap victims allowed: Helena, for letting her camel misbehave, and bad, bad Camel Miranda for ruining everything.
«25»
Harvey follows a substitute teacher down the hall toward McFarland Elementary School auditorium. The hugely pregnant teacher is a close-talker and Harvey can smell her gum-scented breath as she talks. He veers off enough to restore his personal space.
“The kids’ regular teacher, Launa Granger, went on stress leave because of what happened,” she says. “Can’t say that I blame her, considering it’s kind of her fault.” They walk in silence past a classroom where older children appear to be writing a test. She then adds, “Gabriel’s lucky, though.”
“Whatever he is right now, it isn’t lucky.”
“I mean, to have you in charge of the investigation.”
“I only coordinate the team,” Harvey responds, although it isn’t true. He bears ultimate responsibility for a case that started off cold.
The teacher opens the auditorium door, no longer cordoned off after a painstaking search of the area. “You trained at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” she adds, as though Harvey might be unaware of this fact. “I know you’ll find him.”
“We’ll do everything we can, ma’am.”
No leads came out of the completed student interviews. Regardless, Harvey asked to meet with Miss Granger’s grade four students backstage in the auditorium with hope the setting will help with recall. Gabriel Wheeler didn’t disappear into thin air, and Harvey knows somebody saw something.
Although statistically the boy was most likely abducted by someone he knew, two of Gabriel’s classmates are also under suspicion. Both are reputed to bully vulnerable children, and one of the boys was caught opening the auditorium’s back door during the play. Although Gabriel wasn’t found in the grids already searched, Harvey can easily imagine the poor child pushed out into the snow as a joke, then not let back in. What he can’t imagine, is why the boy would have then wandered off instead of going back in the building through the front door.
The substitute teacher lacks the authority to keep the children under control, which suits Harvey’s purpose: he wants to see the children in their natural environment. The props from the play are still scattered about. A tall boy, suspect number one, tries to lie down in the manger filled with hay while the other suspect kicks a plywood Santa Claus in the balls. A few of the girls hand one other gaudily-wrapped fake presents.
When ten minutes have passed, Harvey instructs the children to sit on the floor in front of the sheets of blank paper and packs of crayons, supplies he had arranged beforehand. Once the children settle, he asks them to draw whatever they can remember from the night of the school play. One of the girls immediately begins to sob, while other children try to stifle bouts of laugher.
Harvey sits on a bench at the far side of the auditorium beside the substitute teacher to observe. One of the boys who’s a suspect sketches stick people hacking each other to death with swords. The other suspect draws a dog peeing on a Christmas tree. The substitute touches the mound of her belly with the palm of her hand. “Don’t be an idiot boy,” she whispers.
Two girls give up on drawing and edge close to Mary, the prettiest girl in the class, a child whom Harvey was informed has a personality disorder. “Draw a dung beetle,” the taller of the girls instructs Mary.
The other says, “Yeah, draw a self-portrait.”
“Don’t be a cruel girl,” the substitute says.
Harvey rises and his uniformed approach scatters the girls, leaving Mary alone once again. Harvey has no difficulty recognizing what the child has sketched. The word “exit” over a door is clue enough. Mary adds snow falling from the sky behind the open door. Next, she roughs in the shape of a head. Harvey has to remind himself to breathe as the girl adds an underdeveloped nose, tiny eyes, a heavy beard and caterpillar eyebrows.
Mary adds a hat next, then chooses a red crayon to color in a winter coat. It isn’t until the child draws a bulging sack and what looks like a large dog with a collar of bells that Harvey realizes she’s copied the cut-out Santa that so recently got kicked in the balls.
“I saw Santa,” Mary says, “but you don’t have to believe me.”
«26»
Despite suffering from the tail end of flu, Launa Granger is on a volunteer search-grid line that’s forty bodies long. Nothing could make her spend her stress leave at home. She trudges across the trampled snow one slow step at a time while dressed in a numbered day-glow vest, proof that she’s a registered searcher. Launa’s grid has performed the east-west, west-east, and north-south searches, and now they’re completing a final south-north pass. Like the other participants in her squad, Launa is cold, wet and exhausted. Unlike them, she’s to blame for all this discomfort because they are searching for something she has lost.
Word has spread about her failure to protect her students. She feels herself judged and sentenced by the other searchers on the squad, most of whom are Gabriel’s neighbors or members of a neighborhood watch patrol. The searchers are positioned ten yards apart and they toss fragments of conversation back and forth as though they’re playing piggy in the middle. Launa is the pig. Although she doesn’t blame them, the way they speak rankles.
Launa has never been a physical person, and she’s dead on her feet after five hours of trudging through snow while calling out Gabriel’s name, relieved only by the most unsatisfactory of rest breaks. For the umpteenth time, her frozen toes catch on an uneven patch of ground. She tips forward, nearly taking a fall. None of the two close by offers a hand in support, not that she expects much from an intimidating Goth and his black-clad girlfriend.
“My effing boots leak,” the Goth says as though nothing just happened. “Brand new too. Bitching store better cough up a refund.” The boots in question are black elevator platforms with skulls for the zipper pulls.
The stumble Launa took pulls the plug on her energy. Taking another step seems impossible. The others move one, two, then three steps beyond her. The Goth glares back before stepping to the right to fill some of the gap left by Launa.
Although Launa must keep moving for Gabriel’s sake, her knees lock, refusing to swivel. Forward progress requires a stiff-legged shuffle. A glance at her wristwatch tells her it’s already 4:30 p.m. Before th
e last of the evening light drains away, the pastor of Saint Elizabeth’s Anglican Church overseeing this particular grid will call the group back in.
Her unlucky toes catch yet again, this time on something solid. Launa crumples. Her hands and wrists take the impact, sparing her calcium-depleted hips. The sound that leaves her lips is a ridiculous old-lady huff. Even so, a few individuals in the line stop and turn.
Launa’s right hand wraps around an object missed on the previous passes. They are searching for clothing or body parts and a shiver runs the length of her spine. All day she’s been unable to escape an image of two small pale legs frozen solid beneath a crust of suffocating snow. Now she recognizes bone and frozen flesh. As she releases the object, the horror in her eyes tells the others.
“The teacher found something,” someone shouts. An overwrought searcher sobs. With the exception of the Goth, the line stops in place as they were instructed to do in the event of a find. The Goth crouches beside Launa. He claws away at the snow, following the trajectory of Launa’s arm, wrist, and hand. His long, black-nailed hands brush away enough snow to reveal orange and white fur.
Disregarding instructions not to handle potential evidence, the Goth rises, dangling a dead cat by its stiff tail. “Fucking awesome,” he says.
“You’re sick and disgusting,” one of the neighborhood watch people says. Others murmur agreement as they wait in formation for the squad leader to process the dead cat after determining there may be a tenuous connection to the case.
Finally, the squad members are permitted to move on and finish the last few yards of the day. A whistle blows, calling the searchers in. They abandon order and focus. In packs they make their way back across the part of the field that does not hold the corpse of a dead little boy. Launa arrives back last, too late to catch the next day’s instructions.
Today Detective Harvey Sam drops by to debrief. Launa’s antique never-skied-in ski pants squeak a protest as she forces them over to where the detective chats with the squad leader. When their conversation ends, the officer lifts a cup of steaming hot chocolate to his lips. The whites of his bloodshot eyes mirror the blue twilight reflecting on snow. Despite being clean-shaved, the pouches under his eyes and the single lock of disobedient black hair suggest a man who has not showered or changed his clothes in days.
Launa touches his sleeve to gain his attention. “If I may steal a moment of your time?” She immediately regrets her unfortunate wording. He might think the word play was intentional.
After a searching glance, he looks away, as though eye contact requires more energy than he can spare. Launa follows the trajectory of his eyes. There’s nothing to see on the horizon except a low ceiling of dark cloud pierced on the horizon by the gleam of fading light. She fears more snow will come in the night, further complicating the search.
“Gabriel would not have attended the play if I had not insisted,” she says. Others, besides her intended audience, can hear her confession. These, however, are not the words she planned to speak, not the truth she thinks about endlessly. It was a point of pride to have her class present and accounted for at all school events She’d allowed herself to believe the boy’s absence would reflect poorly on her and she’d pressured him to come.
The detective’s hand pushes against her arm. “You’re shivering,” he says.
“I lost the boy.”
“Go home,” he says. “Get warm.”
«27»
With a grand total of nine hours sleep in three days, Harvey is severely sleep deprived. On the drive over to the Kiknicky’s home for his last witness interviews of the day, he caught himself nodding off for a few seconds at a time. Now, standing at their kitchen door, his eyes drift shut until the door opens with a bang and Harvey’s head snaps forward.
Romy wears a sweater with extra-long sleeves that she wraps around her middle like a blanket. “Harv,” she says, “can you believe this horrible week?”
Harvey resists the temptation to comfort Romy in his arms. It’s clear he’s too involved with this family, too subjective. He briefly considers delegating the Kiknicky interviews to another officer. With 523 men, women and children to get through, however, his colleagues are running ragged too.
“Come on in.” Romy’s touch is electric as she unwraps an arm to lead Harvey by the elbow into her cluttered kitchen. She knows him well and offers hot chocolate instead of coffee.
“No, thanks. I won’t be here long.” Harvey’s amazed he can speak at all; the sight of Helena’s green boots, a matching pair to Effie’s, almost knocks him to his knees.
Romy’s eyes first settle on the boots, then Harvey’s face. “I’m so sorry about Pam and Effie,” she says. “This must be terribly hard.”
“The breakup was a long time coming,” Harvey says. “What I don’t understand is why Pam took Effie so far away.”
Romy nods as she takes a seat at a scarred kitchen table where the bird-of-paradise Ben bought has reached the browning stage. She picks a decayed yellow blossom. “Ben’s in bed sick with the flu. I told your receptionist, but she said you’d risk exposure.”
“I’ll speak to him next.” Harvey sits across from Romy at the table. Although he knows her address and phone number by heart he starts the interview by confirming both with the hope that following procedure will focus his scattered mind.
When he asks her to describe the events of December 17th, Romy shuts her eyes. “After our camel broke your ballerina’s leg, we didn’t stay at the school. Principal Johnston requested we take Helena home because she was hysterical.”
“Do you know what time that was?”
“6:45, by the auditorium clock.”
“Can you describe what you saw in the parking lot?”
“Parked cars. Snow. We didn’t see that poor boy.” Romy plucks off a second petal, which she squishes in her hand.
Even though Harvey knows better than to ask leading questions, he slips one in. “Did you notice if any of the vehicles were running?”
Romy shakes her head. “Helena was crying and Ben was fuming.”
“Once you were in the car, what did you do next?”
“We tried to leave and almost got stuck in the parking lot. Ben had to do some tricky maneuvering.”
“Did you see anything on your drive home?”
“Ben caught up to one other car. We followed it going west down Eight Avenue until we turned off at Hummingbird Lane. I’m pretty certain it was gray. Ben says he thinks it was green. The driver wasn’t going fast. But they couldn’t: not with all the snow.”
“Do you remember the license plate?”
Romy shakes her head. “Maybe someone could hypnotize me or something. You know, to retrieve my lost memory?”
“Did the car have any identifying features?”
“I don’t remember anything unusual, but I wasn’t really paying attention. It was enough just trying to get home in the snowstorm, and I was distracted by Helena. You’ve heard her cry. It’s loud.”
Harvey’s about to state he needs to interview the child next when a camel wearing a tiara bursts into the kitchen shouting, “elp, elp!” Her hands are tied with a colorful scarf behind her back. She’s followed by another girl who appears to have already replaced Effie.
When the girl notices Harvey, she pushes the camel out of the room. Once out of sight, Harvey hears a whispered “oink” before the girls let loose a fit of explosive laughter.
“We’re having trouble getting Helena out of the costume,” Romy says. “Do you need to interrogate her?”
“Police interview people,” Harvey says. “Did Helena wear her costume on your drive home?”
“I know she had the head on when we left the school because I had to help her across the parking lot. She still had it on when we got home. She was asleep and we managed to get it off without waking her. We let her sleep in the body, though. It’s close enough to pajamas.”
Romy drops her head into her hands. “Oh, god,” she says. “Th
is happened because of Helena’s behavior, didn’t it? Effie’s fall distracted the parents supervising backstage. If that boy is dead, it’s our fault.”
Harvey reaches across the table. His fingers linger as they touch the back of Romy’s hand. Romy looks up and her pupils shrink, a negative sign. Harvey retracts his offending hand, taking the vase with it. A flood of reeking bird-of-paradise sludge pools on the table before spilling over the edge and onto the crotch of his pants. “Shit,” he says, rising.
Helena does a loop through the kitchen shouting “elp,” with her new best friend giving chase. The moment they’re out of sight, the girls are almost in unison as they shriek, “Effie’s dad peed his pants!”
“She’s angry,” Romy says. “We’ve tried to set her straight but she blames you for Effie leaving. I’ll make her apologize before you do the interview.”
Harvey is confident in his child interview protocols. He uses terms children understand and is quick to compensate for their short attention spans. He starts with a safe and comfortable invitation for the children to freely recall their memories of the event. Any questions he asks are specific with yes or no answers.
But first he builds rapport.
Harvey gathers his splattered notes. “I’ll come back tomorrow.” He can’t face Romy’s husband with a crotch full of guilt. If he speaks to Helena right now, it won’t be an interview; it will be an interrogation.
«28»
It’s not fair. Camel Miranda couldn’t play with her new best friend and she was stuck watching out for stinky Mark all day Saturday, because her dumb parents both have the flu and can’t stop barfing. One of them is in the bathroom right now, puking their guts out. Mark’s face turns sour, so Helena sticks her camel fingers in his ears, holding tight when he tries to squirm away. He doesn’t have the flu but that won’t stop him from barfing if he hears the yucky gagging sounds.
All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1) Page 7