Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  Still, he had never thought it was a bad marriage. He’d been stupid, complacent, the worst kind of a fool, until he had come home from California on that hot August night to find her gone.

  There’d been no note. No explanation. Some thought it odd that Adam hadn’t suspected something was amiss when she hadn’t flown west with the other wives for the big series against the Padres. But she’d had the flu the week before and she’d said she was still tired. Adam really hadn’t expected her to go.

  For a couple of shell-shocked days, he had been convinced that her disappearance was a matter of foul play. It happened to men in the national spotlight—rarely, but it happened. Then Jake had pointed out that most of her clothing and all her jewelry were gone. Their bank accounts had been cleaned out, and Bo and his favorite toys were missing as well.

  Pain clenched in Adam’s chest again and receded. He took a quick swig of his beer and nodded wordlessly when the stewardess offered him another.

  Jake had just gotten his promotion to detective that summer. It was Jake who had taken on Jannel’s missing-persons case, over the protests of superiors who felt that he was too intimately involved. He’d dug and dug while Adam had been paralyzed with confusion and the loss of his son. Jake had searched while Adam struggled with the shaming fact that he barely felt the absence of his wife of five years; the loss of his child, his boy, was staggering, and he didn’t know how he was going to pick up the pieces and go on.

  Jake had learned that the wealthy family Jannel claimed to have had in Miami, the family Adam had never met, did not exist. He’d learned that Jannel had a fairly significant cocaine addiction, which Adam had never suspected. And finally, he’d learned that Jannel Payne Wallace herself was...no one. There was simply no bureaucratic record of such a woman, at least not until she’d taken Adam’s name. And that made her damned hard to trace, to follow.

  All in all, he and Jake had finally figured out that she had made off with the better part of two million dollars.

  That was when the rage had set in. Adam’s confusion had given way to a hot need for revenge, a burning desire to make everything right again, to get his kid back, to make her pay. And out of that need, ChildSearch had been born.

  What tortured him still was that she had not just asked him for a divorce. What blew his mind yet was that she had not taken the easy, dignified way out Legal avenues would have allowed him visitation, maybe even custody of his son. They would certainly have afforded her plenty of wealth. She would have come out handsomely in a divorce settlement. She had to have known that.

  Why?

  Why had she taken Bo? Her pregnancy had been a surprise, unplanned, he realized, looking back. He hadn’t consciously wanted a child—he’d been having too much fun playing ball to consider playing daddy—but with that first ultrasound, he’d known Bo’s life for the miracle it was. Jannel, on the other hand, had been an adequate mother, but not even with her own son had she ever revealed any true, strong emotion.

  Why?

  Had she been coerced? Had she gotten herself in trouble somehow with one of the characters who supplied her habit? Had she been forced to run? But then why take Bo? And how the hell could two people, a strikingly beautiful woman and a little boy, disappear without a trace?

  She’d come out of nowhere and had disappeared into an abyss, taking the one thing that really mattered to him. There were no answers. But he would keep looking. He would look until he drew his last breath.

  The stewardess came and took his half-finished beer. They were landing.

  Maybe this time, he thought.

  It was something he had thought enough times before that he winced.

  The first thing that went wrong was the weather. When he’d left Dallas, it had been a relatively balmy fifty-odd degrees. When he stepped out of Philadelphia International it was into the remnants of the previous week’s blizzard.

  Jumbled and clumped mountains of snow lined the roadways and the lots. These were no pristine postcard drifts—they were the angry testimony of countless scores of impatient people battling nature to get where they thought they needed to go. The heaped masses looked gray tinged and mean with their patina of exhaust fumes and smears of brown.

  An arctic wind blasted him from across the rental-car lot. Adam zipped his jacket—nowhere near warm enough, he realized—and found a pair of gloves in his pockets. He ducked his head into the wind to try to find the car he had reserved.

  By the time he reached it, he was frozen to the bone. He threw his suitcase into the trunk, swung his briefcase into the passenger seat and sat for a moment with the engine idling, waiting for some semblance of heat to fill the car. He studied the map they’d given him at the rental-car desk.

  His gaze coasted over the pinpoints marking villages Jake had mentioned. Intercourse—that raised a brow. Paradise. Churchtown and Christiana, Angel’s Cross and Divinity. Names that spoke of hope and promise, he thought. Maybe it was an omen.

  He put the car into gear and drove, believing that until he got off the turnpike and hit Route 10 heading south. It wasn’t a highway. In fact, with the snow crunched and shoved to either side of the road. it was barely a single lane. And that lane was icy.

  It was heading downhill and curving around sharply to the right when the milk truck in front of him didn’t stay with it. The truck went into a skid, and top-heavy, crashed over onto its side. Traffic stopped. People spilled out of their cars, shouting. There were a spattering of small businesses and some homes on the cross streets, and humanity streamed from the buildings, rushing to the stricken vehicle. Others went in search of the nearest telephone. By the time Adam recovered from his surprise and scrambled out of his car—only seconds, really—there was nothing for him to do.

  The bystanders had helped a dazed-looking man out of the passenger door of the cab, now facing the sky. Adam stomped his feel Damn it, it was cold.

  He got back into his car shivering. An hour and a half later, he was still there.

  He sat and glared. Impatience throbbed inside him, though he knew it was a little irrational. But there had been too many close calls and near misses with too many cases over the years His heart thudded harder and harder with a sort of learned desperation. He became convinced that during this time he was stuck in traffic, Bo and Jannel would somehow vanish from Bird-in-Hand. She would know he was coming. Again—dear God, again—he would get there only to find that his boy was just...gone.

  Adam smacked his palm against the steering wheel hard enough for it to hurt, then he heard a thoroughly alien clop-thud-clop sound from directly behind him.

  He looked up sharply into the rearview mirror. It was a horse-drawn Amish buggy. Not that he had no experience with horses, but he realized he’d rarely heard one trotting on asphalt before. Or snow and ice and asphalt, as the case was, which explained the alternating sharp clops and muffled thumps of the animal’s hooves.

  He couldn’t see the driver. The buggy was enclosed. But the long reins jiggled, giving direction, and the horse—a beautiful bay steaming with exertion in the frigid air—neatly picked its way around and through the snarled traffic. The comparatively narrow buggy slipped along the shoulder of the road with no problem, its right wheels up on the drifts, the left on the cleared roadway.

  The driver passed the accident and went on his way. Too late, Adam jerked to attention, shoving against the car door. By the time he thought of catching a ride with the buggy, it was a quarter of a mile ahead.

  What the hell was he thinking? He couldn’t just up and leave the damned rental car in the middle of a road.

  Jake’s words came back to him, unwelcome and troubling. Obsessed Consumed. He shrugged them off deliberately.

  He was stuck for another hour. With the truck blocking the road, with the traffic jammed in both directions and hemmed in by the snow, the tow truck had an impossible time getting through. The injured driver had to walk to the ambulance—parked six cars back—under his own power. Dusk began falling,
and though Adam wouldn’t have believed it possible, the temperature plummeted right along with it. He turned the car on periodically to keep warm.

  When he finally reached the village of Bird-in-Hand, it was nearly five-thirty. He began looking for the farmers’ market with absolutely no intention of cooling his heels until morning, but he drove past the place four times before he finally noticed it

  No airy, open outdoor stalls in this neck of the woods, he realized. This market was indoors, in a huge warehouse-shape building. “Good enough,” he muttered, parking and getting out of the car. Presumably it would at least be warm inside.

  He tried the door and found it locked. The place was closed for the day.

  He swore angrily and went back to the car. Fresh snow was falling. He was getting a headache.

  “Chill out,” he muttered to himself.” Just calm down. Look for the bright side.”

  He was here. At least he had gotten here. And Jake the Master Detective had a theory: he always swore it was a lot easier to nab bad guys in inclement weather. He said blizzards and hurricanes were a boon for law-enforcement agencies, because even crooks shared the very human trait of heading for shelter when the weather got bad. They settled in somewhere, usually with a friend or at home, and they stayed put for a while. If at no other time, the cops could usually find them then.

  Jannel would do the same thing, Adam told himself. if she was here, she would close the doors and pull the blinds and stay put.

  If she was here. If this wasn’t another wild-goose chase.

  He started the car again and drove to the first motel he noticed. listening to a voice on the radio bemoan the current cold snap, warning that it would get worse and that there would be more snow by morning. The motel was an inn with a central section that was shaped like a boat. He stared at it blankly for a moment, thinking it seemed out of place in this landlocked country. Then again, he had seen palm trees in Michigan, an igloo in Pasadena and a miserable excuse for Paul Bunyan outside Miami.

  The artificial sound of gulls piped over loudspeakers in the parking lot annoyed him, but he was able to get a room and—wonder of wonders—found a refrigerator and a microwave within it. He battled the roads again to find a convenience store, and came back to shove a frozen dinner into the microwave. He ate at the desk, pouring over maps, scowling at the artist’s composites of Bo. He tasted nothing.

  Too much farmland, he thought. If the farnners’ market didn’t pan out, he’d spend half his days driving.

  By nine o’clock, there was nothing left to do but wait for morning. He hated the waiting the most.

  By three o’clock the following afternoon, he was still empty-handed. As always, it brought a near physical pain of frustration. A sensation of pressure leaned on his chest and there was a knot of tension behind his eyes. It made his voice harsh, his face hard, his motions abrupt. People stopped talking to him willingly, and he had to browbeat them into answering questions.

  He had covered every single booth in the market. He would have been finished sooner, but the sky had dumped another few inches of snow on the county overnight. Some of the merchants had been late opening. None of them recognized the composite of Bo. None of them thought there was anything familiar about his picture taken four long years ago.

  Adam stopped at the snack bar, more out of a need to regroup than to eat. He wolfed down a hot dog, not bothering with catsup or mustard or relish. He was eating purely for sustenance, because intellectually he knew it was time for a meal.

  He didn’t see the elaborate and finely stitched quilts hanging from rafters overhead. He didn’t appreciate the prime steaks and beef in the display coolers, nor did his mouth water at the rows upon rows of canning jars filled with relishes and homegrown vegetables and fruits. He chewed and he thought, and he finally noticed that some of the shoppers passing by had a relaxed but competent air about them.

  He sat up straighter on the stool, his eyes narrowing. They weren’t browsing, he realized. They had come specifically for some item. So it was reasonable to assume that they had been here before, maybe even the previous Friday.

  He got to his feet again abruptly and threw a bill on the counter. He started to move off without waiting for change, remembered his vow to pinch pennies a little and drummed his fingers on the counter while the man collected his money. Good thing, Adam realized. The bill had been a ten, and the hot dog had cost a dollar seventy-five.

  He finally began moving up and down the aisles with new purpose. He stopped strangers and asked if they had been there on Friday, the day the anonymous woman had called ChildSearch’s number on the milk carton. He showed both the composite and Bo’s old picture around once more. And got nothing, not even a nibble, not the slightest hesitation before the invariable volley of “Sorry’s” and “No’s.”

  It seemed impossible. Someone in this building on Friday afternoon had seen a boy who looked like Bo’s composite. But even Adam was reasonable enough to know that he was not going to find that someone today.

  Some of the merchants were beginning to close up. He folded the dog-eared pictures carefully, almost reverently, and tucked them into his jacket pocket. His mind kept going in all the directions Jake had taught him as he went back to his rental car. Where did people have to go? To post offices. To grocery stores. They needed remedies for their colds and to get their hair cut periodically. If that person was Jannel, she would need cosmetics and to get her nails painted as well. He would go back to his room, lay his hands on a phone book and make a list of all such places. He would begin visiting them tomorrow.

  He drove back to the motor inn. At the traffic light on Route 30, he hit the brake and remained there long after the light had turned green again. Horns beeped behind him with surprising politeness, as though to remind him to move rather than to curse him for tying up traffic.

  He made a sudden decision and put his turn signal on. He veered out of. the left-turn lane, back into traffic and crossed the intersection.

  Farmland.

  He had started with the village of Bird-in-Hand because it was the orderly, practical way to begin a search. Bo had been seen there, and Jannel was a woman who liked civilization. But if she wanted to get lost like a needle in a haystack, well, then, it had always been his experience that haystacks were found on farms.

  He didn’t expect to find her crossing a road. He didn’t anticipate a hand-painted arrow pointing in her direction, not even in a village called Divinity. He noticed the welcoming sign—a weathered plank of wood on the side of the road, bearing the name and a design of blue flowers. He passed through another quaint cluster of buildings, then the land opened up into rolling fields again and he cruised. And this time, almost in spite of himself, he noticed that the area was beautiful.

  He had crossed a road and entered into another world. And it was a world where time had not so much stopped, he realized, as it had slowed down and stalled. The snow that had irritated and thwarted him since he’d gotten here now gleamed an almost ghostly blue. Streaks of orange from the dying sun flayed it in patterns cut by the slanting shade of the trees. He found himself hitting the brakes again and again, pausing, as he passed orchards. The trees were bare of leaves, but their naked limbs were alive with glittering diamonds.

  A fairy land. He was a little embarrassed by his own fanciful thought.

  He saw a windmill—a working windmill, for God’s sake—turning slowly. Ice had fanned out from each of its paddles and winked in the sun. He drove on, feeling more curious than urgent now.

  Some cows stood pressed against the leeward side of a huge barn. They turned bored, inquisitive eyes on the car as he passed.

  There were silos and old two-story farmhouses. There were poultry buildings and carriage houses—not antiques, not restored but the real thing. The few horses he saw—he imagined most of them were in their barns at this hour—all looked healthy and sleek and strong. And land. There was a lot of land, enough to strike even a man from Texas. It rolled and und
ulated to form tree lines that rose over more hills and reached for the sky. And the virgin snow remained unblemished by anything other than foot- and hoofprints now and again.

  A frozen creek curved around the next homestead. The road followed it for a while, and he drove through a covered bridge before he actually realized what it was. Then he came out and followed the ribbon of black road again as it snaked on through the whiteness.

  Another world.

  He realized that it had been a long time since he had seen another human being. He had just begun wondering about that when he spotted a boy trudging along the edge of cleared macadam. He was ten, maybe twelve, and because of that he didn’t bring the immediate thump of hope to Adam’s heart that he might have if he had been younger. He was dressed all in black, in a woolen jacket and broadfall trousers and boots. He wore a wide-brimmed hat. Given the scenery, he didn’t seem out of place or odd at all.

  Adam was well past him before it occurred to him to show him Bo’s picture, and that amazed him, too. He stopped the car and looked back, but the boy had already turned up a drive and had nearly reached the house at the end of it.

  Adam let out his breath and drove on. And then, as though God in the outskirts of a village called Divinity was giving him a second chance, he saw a woman.

  She, too, wore black—stockings and shawl and shoes. But a flash of azure showed beneath her dark apron. It was startling enough in the monochromatic landscape to snag his attention right away. She drew the shawl protectively over her head as flurries began drifting down yet again.

  She picked her way toward a mailbox. Adam coasted to a stop beside her and lowered the passenger-side window. She kept walking but her spine jerked straight, as though she knew she was being stared at.