by Leigh Adams
“With my father?” Kate repeated.
“I can’t understand why they’re not home already, unless they had something to do,” Ms. Ryder said. “It wasn’t more than a couple of minutes after two thirty.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I should have called my father first. Let me try to get in touch with him.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call us back as soon as you locate them,” Ms. Ryder said. “It would be a very serious thing if somebody else had picked him up and it wasn’t somebody you’d authorized. We take the safety of our students very seriously—”
“I’m sure you do,” Kate interrupted. “If I could just get off and make a phone call to my father.”
Ms. Ryder was still talking, but Kate didn’t care. She hung up. Then she put the cell phone carefully down on the table and stared at it.
“What’s the matter?” Tom asked.
“Probably nothing,” Kate said. “The school says my father picked up Jack right after school. There’s really nothing wrong with that. And I was asleep. My father probably thought that they’d be home before I woke up. But I’m not the only one around here who has episodes every once in a while. Think about the other day in the diner. I don’t even know if he can drive when he gets like that. I don’t think he knows either.”
At just that moment, Kate and Tom heard the sound of a vehicle in the driveway. They both bolted up from the table, but Kate was faster. She was out into the garage in seconds flat, just in time to see Frank emerging from his pickup.
Alone.
***
It was astounding just how fast things could happen. Frank had come home alone. He was not having an Alzheimer’s moment. He was entirely in his right mind. And he had not gone to the school to pick up Jack.
Kate had begun to lose it while she was still in the garage. By the time she got back to the kitchen, she was shaking all over. She could see the two of them looking at her, and she knew what they were thinking.
Tom had his own cell phone out. “Thirteen years old,” he was saying. “Very slender, but also very tall. My guess is close to six feet already. Yeah. Yeah. Giving him a shot to get to six feet eight is what we’re looking for here. Just a minute. I’ll ask.” He took the phone away from his mouth and asked Frank, “Do you have a picture of Jack?”
“There are dozens of pictures of Jack,” Frank said.
“We’re going to have to e-mail them a photo,” Tom said. “Can I get a pencil and a piece of paper?”
Frank handed him a paper napkin and one of the pens from the little pencil holder next to the coffee maker.
“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.” He wrote down the number. “Why don’t I hand you over to the boy’s mother? She spoke to somebody at the school.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Kate said as Tom held out his cell phone to her.
“We’re putting out an Amber Alert,” Tom said. Kate blanched. “It’s better to do it early rather than late. Even if he’s fine and out with friends somewhere. Tell the officers what you know.”
Kate took Tom’s cell phone. “This is Kate Ford.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Ford?” an officer said. “Please believe me when I say that I know this is a tense and even terrifying time, but almost all these alerts end well, usually because the child has gone off on his own for some reason and not thought to check in. Your son was last seen at school?”
Kate told the officer everything the school secretary had told her. Then she explained what happened when she called Jack’s cell phone.
“So,” the officer said, “the first time you called, it went on ringing for a long time before it went to voice mail. The rest of the times you called, it went directly to voice mail.”
“Yes,” Kate said. Just the way it would have if somebody had killed him and then the phone had started ringing in his pocket and the killer turned it off so it couldn’t be traced by GPS. She put that out of her mind—well, she tried to put it out of her mind, even though it was near impossible.
The officer asked if there was anybody else there who might have information. Kate passed Tom’s phone to Frank and then sat down. Her legs did not feel stable. Her back felt as if it were breaking in two.
After Frank gave some more information, he passed the phone back to Tom. It felt as if everything was taking forever.
Kate closed her eyes and put her head on the table and counted and counted, as if that could fix or change anything or make Jack appear out of thin air.
Tom finished the call and put his phone back in his pocket.
“As soon as Frank gets those pictures e-mailed, we’ll start putting them out to the police departments and on the Internet. We’ve got an Amber Alert Facebook page for this county, and then—”
They both heard the sound at once. It came from the front hall, not the garage entry. The front door opened and shut, and Jack, sounding God awful, was calling.
“Mom? Grandpa? Mom?”
Kate sprang out of her seat and ran into the foyer, moving so fast and so blindly that she and Jack collided.
Jack staggered back, and Kate could see him. She gasped.
Jack had no shoes on and his feet were bloody. His clothes were torn. His hair was full of debris. He had bruises everywhere.
He looked like someone had taken him into the woods and beat him up.
Eighteen
Jack’s feet and lower legs looked so awful, it took Kate a minute to catch the look in his eyes, and that was so much worse. The kid was staring straight ahead, but his eyes were unfocused. He looked like the herald of one of those zombie apocalypses he talked about all the time. Kate grabbed him in an enormous hug and squeezed so hard that Jack grunted.
A second later, Frank was pulling them apart. “Let him breathe, Kate,” he said. “Let him talk.”
Jack staggered out of Kate’s embrace and sat down. “I got home,” he said. “I got home. I ran and ran, and then I wasn’t sure I knew where I was going, but I got home.”
Tom had taken out his cell phone and knelt down on the floor.
“What are you doing?” Kate demanded.
“I’m taking pictures,” Tom said. “Of the state of his feet.”
“Oh.” Kate remembered. “The Amber Alert. We should cancel the Amber Alert.”
“Already done it,” Tom said.
“The school said you went off in a car with a man,” Kate said. Now that she knew Jack was safe, her worry was turning into fury. It was so hot and white, she didn’t know if she could get it to stop. “You went off with a man,” she said again. “What’s wrong with you? You know you don’t get into cars with strangers. You’ve known that since you were six.”
Jack stared at her blankly. Frank moved in and handed over a cup that Kate realized was full of coffee.
“Can’t you see he’s been drugged?” Frank demanded. “He’s chock full of something or the other, and it hasn’t completely worn off.”
Jack started in his seat. “Drugged,” he said wonderingly. “That would make sense.”
Jack was drinking coffee in huge gulps. The coffee was hot and scalded his mouth a little so that after every swallow, he reared back and made a face. But he went right back to drinking the coffee.
Tom finished taking the photographs and stood up to fiddle with his phone. “I’m sending these in to my partner,” he said. “I’ve got to report this, Kate. I’ve got to report it right now.”
“He said he was your partner,” Jack said accusingly, looking straight at Tom. The coffee was helping. His eyes looked distinctly sharper now. “I was walking out to the bus stop, and he pulled up and said he was your partner. He even showed me a badge. And he said Mom had had . . . that she’d had—”
“Oh, dear Jesus,” Kate said. “What were you thinking? We’ve talked about this!”
“When I was six. Yesterday you were a mess. This guy shows up and says you’re on the way to the hospital again. He shows me his badge and says Tom
is on the way to the hospital with you and he’s been sent to get me and bring me there. I don’t know, Mom. It didn’t seem all that farfetched. In fact, it seemed perfectly reasonable.”
“This guy showed up and showed you a badge. Did he just show it to you, or did you take it?” Tom asked.
“No cop is going to let you take his badge,” Jack said. “Don’t you watch Law & Order?”
“Did he show you the badge up close? I presume you thought it was real.”
“It looked real,” Jack said.
“Yeah, I got that,” Tom said. “Did he hold it out close to you or keep it near himself?”
“He kept it near himself.” Jack sounded miserable. He’d also finished the coffee. Frank took Jack’s cup and filled it again. Tom had started pacing around the kitchen, his hands thrust in his pockets.
“So you got into the car,” he said, “and then what?”
“And then the guy took off,” Jack said. He grabbed the newly filled cup of coffee like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. “And then, okay, I wasn’t paying all that much attention because I was worried about Mom and I was feeling guilty because I keep thinking she makes it all up. But I was thinking maybe it was serious and she was going to die and then, I don’t know, I just sort of realized that we weren’t going the right way. We weren’t going to the hospital. It was the wrong road.”
“Do you know which road you were on?” Tom asked.
Jack shook his head. “It was out in the country somewhere. I didn’t recognize it at all. So I said, hey, this wasn’t the way to the hospital, and he said something about it being a shortcut. Then he pulled over to the side of the road, and I was just thinking I’d jump out and take my chances. But he grabbed me and shoved this handkerchief over my face. And that’s the last thing I remember before I sort of came to and I was in the trunk.”
“In the trunk?” Kate repeated. “Oh my God.”
“Was it the same car?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I had a blindfold on, and my hands were tied behind my back, so I couldn’t take it off. And I felt awful, like I was going to throw up. And we drove and drove and drove. And then the car slowed down and I could feel us pulling over, and then we stopped.” Jack attacked the coffee again. “I thought he was going to shoot me. I thought he was going to kill me. I just lay there in the trunk thinking I was dead and I didn’t even know why.”
“But he didn’t kill you,” Tom pointed out.
“He didn’t kill me. He opened the trunk and lifted me right out of it like I was a piece of paper. Then he put me on the ground, and that’s when I realized I didn’t have my shoes on. I didn’t have my socks on either. I could feel the road under my feet. Road. Not dirt. But there weren’t any sounds, you know, like traffic.”
“And?” Tom prodded.
“And nothing,” Jack said. “The guy goes, ‘Give my regards to your mother.’ Then he just left. He didn’t peal out or anything. I heard the car leave, but it wasn’t in any kind of hurry. It just went.”
“‘Give my regards to your mother,’” Frank said. “Kate, you can’t seriously argue about getting out of here now. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Wait,” Tom said. He kept his attention on Jack. “You’re not wearing a blindfold now, and you don’t have your hands tied behind your back. You must have gotten loose somehow.”
“That was another one of the weird things,” Jack said. His voice was almost back to normal. “I’d have realized right away if I wasn’t so woozy. The stuff on my hands wasn’t tied all that tight. They were just sort of hanging off my wrists, like it was some kind of a joke. Pulling at them didn’t work, but twisting them around did. I got them off in no time. And then I took the blindfold off, and I knew where I was.”
“You knew where you were?” Kate said.
“Did you get a look at the car?” Tom asked him. “Even a small glimpse? As it was driving away?”
Jack shook his head. “It was gone by then,” he said. “But I remember it from school. It was this little silver thing, and I thought it was weird because it looked a lot like Mom’s.”
“Probably a coincidence,” Tom said. “You didn’t happen to notice the make or model or any of that kind of thing?”
Jack shrugged. “I was distracted, like I said. I was worried about Mom. I wasn’t thinking about being kidnapped.”
“I still say this ends the argument,” Frank said. “You’ve got to get out of here. It’s not just about your health anymore. You’ve got to consider the possibility that somebody out there thinks you’re a threat to them.”
Kate thought about Paterson out at the Fairholt Bridge and the bonfire and shuddered. “Even if somebody is,” she said, “there’s got to be a reason for it. And if it’s just that whoever it is wants Ozgo convicted, well, they’ve convicted him.”
“Convictions can be overturned,” Tom said.
“Yes, of course convictions can be overturned, but they aren’t usually, are they?” Kate said. “And if somebody thinks I know something the police don’t know, they’re completely addled. I don’t even know what I know. I was playing detective, and I didn’t find a damn thing. The whole thing sounds ridiculous and you know it.”
“Ridiculous or not, we have to get the two of you out of here until we find out what’s going on,” Frank said. “And I think we should take seriously the idea that somebody may be following you. Somebody threw that rock through our living room window. And don’t tell me that could have been any kid, because the rock they threw belonged to you. They had to get it somewhere. Somebody got access to you, Kate. They knew where to find that rock. They knew where Jack goes to school and what to say to get him to go along with them. We’ve got to get you two out of here and we’ve got to do it in a way that they don’t know where you’ve gone—or even that you’ve gone—until you’ve been gone for a good long time.”
“No,” Tom said. “We’ve got to make them think they do know where you’ve gone.”
“Ah,” Frank said. “Smart man.”
“It does help when they give you the perfect excuse,” Tom said.
***
There were still an awful lot of loose ends, but twenty minutes later, Kate and Jack climbed into Kate’s car, Frank climbed into the cab of his truck, and Tom led the way in his own car, out of Kate’s driveway and down the road toward the highway.
Jack was both tense and exhausted, but he was no longer fuzzy minded. “Have any of you considered the possibility that whoever is watching us probably knows about Grandpa’s cabin?”
Kate tried very hard not to bite her lip. “I’ve considered it,” she told him. “The idea is that whoever may be watching us will think we’ve gone to the police station to report what happened to you, and then they’ll see Grandpa leave, but not us, and they’ll think we’ve stayed behind to finish up with the police business. This is just to buy some time to think of a better plan. This isn’t a permanent fix.”
“Listen to yourself,” Jack said. “You can barely keep a straight face.” He was right, but there were only two more turns to the police station, and she drove them without answering him.
The underground parking garage for the police station was like all underground parking garages everywhere: dark and dank and more than a little haunted. Kate pulled into a visitor spot and cut her engine. Jack got out ahead of her. Tom and Frank were already parked and waiting.
Kate got out and walked over to Tom to give him her car keys. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Wait an hour,” Frank said. “But you’re not going to wait here. You’re going to get in the back of Tom’s car, both of you, and you’re going to stay down. Way down. I need you to stay so close to the floor that nobody in another car can even guess that anybody is back there. I’ll be driving.”
“Every single person in this entire family has lost their screwing minds,” Jack said.
But he climbed into the back seat of Tom’s unmarked car. Kat
e watched him go—tall, yes, but still very delicate, very fine boned, almost frail. But he wasn’t frail, she knew that. He was on the cusp of that growth spurt that would not only add a few more inches to his height but also fill out the muscle that was already becoming evident under the skin. He was a boy, but the man was there, waiting.
“Kate,” Frank said.
Kate got into the car herself, took the vacant half of the back seat floor, and scrunched down as far as she could. Kate was smaller than Jack, but he was doing a much better job of folding himself up. That was the difference between being thirteen and thirty-six.
Frank slammed the door behind her.
If Kate could have gone to sleep, she would have. Jack did. She could hear the low hum of Frank talking to Tom, but nothing else, which did not improve her mood even a little bit.
After what seemed like forever, Frank got into the front of the car and started it up.
“See you tomorrow,” he said to Tom.
Then the car began to roll, bumping and turning slowly, leaving the parking garage.
Kate knew they were out of the parking garage and onto the road again because the radio blared into life. Frank fiddled with the sound until it was at a reasonable level. He had it tuned to a local oldies station, in spite of the fact that “oldies” these days meant Metallica, not the Beach Boys.
“News on the hour,” an announcer’s voice said.
That’s when they heard that Evans, Senate candidate and prosecuting attorney in the just-finished Ozgo trial, had just been found dead in his office.
Nineteen
Everybody always talked about how wonderful it would be if they could just get free of technology. Almost nobody ever tried it because they knew what they wouldn’t admit: off the grid was annoying and frustrating and often just plain boring.
It drove Kate nearly crazy from the moment they walked through the cabin’s doors. It didn’t help that there was a lot to be done. The generator had to be turned on as well as the electricity and indoor plumbing. Appliances had to be checked. Bedding had to be put on beds.