Together Alone

by Barbara Delinsky

  John shook his head with conviction. “If there was a ransom demand, I might have said Doug wanted the money to bolster his business, but there was no insurance, and there wasn’t any money in either of their families, so where was the money to pay a ransom supposed to come from, and besides, there wasn’t ever any ransom demand.”

  Brian remembered clearly what Emily had said. “The Lindbergh theory holds that Lindy was a prankster, and this was a prank gone wrong. Could that have been the case with Doug?”

  John was shaking his head even before he finished. “Doug isn’t a prankster. Doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, leastways not that I’ve seen, and Kay and I’ve been friends of theirs for a long time. Maybe he had a sense of humor before the kidnapping. Maybe the kidnapping changed him. But that’d be another argument against his involvement.”

  “Most kidnappings are parental.”

  John stood his ground. “Not this one. I don’t like the guy, but he isn’t a kidnapper.”

  “Why don’t you like him?” Brian wondered if their reasons were the same.

  They were. “Because he’s lousy to Emily. She’s one of the nicest people I know. Good-hearted. Generous. She’d give you the shirt off her back, and then iron it for you. She was a second mother to my daughter. She picked up the slack when Kay couldn’t be there. I owe her a lot.”

  “You like her, then.”

  “I just said I did.”

  “Do you see her much?”

  “I see her around town.”

  “Are you anything more than friends?”

  There was a pause, then a cautious, “Come again?”

  “Is it purely social—you and your wife, and Emily and Doug?”

  A chill replaced caution. “What are you saying?”

  Brian knew it sounded wrong. He wasn’t sure why he had brought it up—yes, he was. John said he had gone through a guilty time. Brian wanted to know what that meant. “You have feelings for Emily.”

  “Damn right, I do. For all the reasons I’ve already given, and then some.”

  He looked furious. For an instant, Brian wondered if he’d blown his new job.

  Then John went on. “The fact is that it’s none of your business.” He paused, brooding. “But since you’ve read that file, and since you’re living in her garage, and since you’ll be in a position to see for yourself and maybe even help, I’ll tell you. Once, and no more, and if you bring it up again, you’re out on your can.” Eyes and voice both leveled. “I got to know Emily during the search for Daniel, and after every lead turned cold, we became friends. She was newly pregnant when the boy was taken, and so was my wife. Our girls are best friends. So are Emily and Kay. They see each other a lot, independent of anything the four or six of us might do. I’m a long way from being as close to Emily as Kay is, but I like her, and I feel bad for her. I also feel responsible.”

  “Because you couldn’t solve the case?”

  “Well, what did I have to work with?” he burst out, betraying his frustration. “You read that file. There’s nothing. It’s like someone waved a wand and the kid vanished.” He grunted. “I don’t know why I even mentioned leads turning cold. There were never any leads to speak of. In the whole of my career, it’s the damnest case I’ve ever seen.”

  So much for anything juicy going on between Emily and John. Brian could sniff out lies. He hadn’t heard any yet. There was guilt, but not from sex. It didn’t matter that the FBI had been involved, or that John had been a mere patrolman at the time. He had been the officer assigned to the Arkins and had taken the case to heart.

  “All things considered, Emily seems surprisingly normal,” Brian remarked. “She must be a very strong woman. Either that, or a religious one.”

  “She’s not religious. I don’t know if she was before, but after, well, what kind of God would do what He did to her?”

  “Still, something is holding her together. Unless I’m missing the boat. Will she freak out if I mention Daniel?”

  “No. She doesn’t freak out.”

  Brian heard a catch. “Go on.”

  John did so with clear reluctance, as though hating to betray a confidence but wanting Brian to know. “For months after Daniel disappeared, she would walk around town, up one street and down the next, looking, listening for a cry, like he might be hiding in the bushes. She stopped doing it when Jill was born, but I caught her at it again a couple of weeks ago. It was right after Jill left. The boy would have been twenty-one and at college, too. This must be a tough time for her.”

  “Her husband’s no help.”

  “Never was. I don’t think he ever understood what Emily was feeling. Maybe that would’a been too much to ask. He was suffering. Then he changed. Like he got tired of suffering.”

  “After how long?”

  “A few years. We kept the case active as long as we could, until there just wasn’t anything more to do. After that, Doug just wanted to forget. He made Emily put Daniel’s pictures away.”

  “That’s very cold.”

  “No,” John cautioned. “Think about it. Think about how you’d feel if he was yours, if you didn’t know if he was alive or dead, healthy or maimed, happy or sad. Think of grotesque things happening to him. Think of him crying and crying for you and not understanding why you won’t come. Then realize that you can’t do a fucking thing about it. It’s eating you alive, but you’re totally helpless.” He looked at Brian in a humbling way. “You might want to forget and start over, too.”

  Brian thought of Julia. “I could never forget.”

  “Wrong word. Try fill-your-life-with-other-things. Emily filled her life with Jill and her friends and their kids, and making a home for Doug. Doug filled his with work. That was when he got involved in the management and marketing end of his business, and started to travel. Awful to say, but he would never have built the farm to what it was when he sold it, or have the business he has now, if that little boy hadn’t disappeared.”

  “Emily would have been better off without any of it,” Brian believed. “She lost the child, then the father.”

  “He supports her financially. It’s more than some men do.”

  It struck Brian that as a husband, he hadn’t been much different from Doug. Uncomfortable with that thought, he tried another. “Was Emily overprotective of Jill?”

  “At times. But she knew she couldn’t smother Jill. Mind you, she never left that child alone in the car. She never left the child alone anywhere for the first few years of her life. She wasn’t risking it. And she struggled later on, too. When Jill got so she wanted to walk to a friend’s house, Emily was dying, but she knew Jill needed to do it, so she let her go. You have to respect her.”

  Brian pushed himself out of the chair. “Yeah. Well, I do, but that doesn’t help her much, does it.”

  “Sure does. She needs support.”

  “She needs more than support. She needs a crystal ball to tell her what happened to the boy. She needs closure.” He ran a hand along the back of his neck.

  “Got any ideas?” John asked.

  He had a few, but they were longshots. The case had been cold for years. It wasn’t like new leads had suddenly popped up. Not now. Not before. Not even bogus leads. “Let me think about it. There may be a few things we can try. Can I hold on to the file for a while?”

  “It’s yours. But do me a favor. Don’t say anything to her. Chances are pretty slim. Y’know?”

  Emily was reading the morning paper when Brian arrived. She heard the Jeep pull into the driveway and started to rise, intent on hiding—making the bed, doing the laundry, dusting the living room—anything to avoid a conversation, should he stop by on his way to the garage. She was feeling foolish, having aired her dirty laundry in front of a stranger.

  Well, he wasn’t exactly a stranger. At least, he didn’t feel like one.

  With that thought in mind, she slowly sat herself back down. She looked at the paper. She waited. She didn’t look up, even when she heard him cli
mbing the stairs, and when he knocked, a wave of renewed embarrassment held her still.

  “I can see you,” he sang through the screen.

  Slowly she set down the paper.

  “I have buttercrunch donuts.”

  She smiled at his shamelessness.

  “And coffee. And time to talk, if you want.”

  Did she want? No. Yes.

  She looked up finally and gestured him in. He promptly set a bag on the table, removed and uncapped two coffees, and unwrapped the donuts.

  “You can’t keep doing this,” she said then.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get fat.”

  He took the chair beside her and slid one of the coffees her way. “I doubt that.”

  She wrapped her hands around the cup.

  “But you’re right. I can’t keep doing it. I start work Monday morning.”

  He was darling, striking a light note, but she couldn’t forget their last discussion, which hadn’t been a discussion at all, or a celebration, for that matter. She had run off in tears.

  Awkward, she said, “You’re feeling sorry about last night. But you shouldn’t. I get down sometimes. It passes.”

  “I know about Daniel,” he said softly.

  Her eyes widened.

  “I read the file,” he explained.

  Oddly, she felt relieved. She wanted him to know. Daniel was part of who she was. “It happened a long time ago.”

  “But it was never resolved. That has to be hell.”

  “Only when I think,” she said with a crooked smile. “I try not to. It won’t get me anywhere. If he isn’t dead, he’s certainly gone. I accept that.” She studied her coffee cup. “I used to dream that someone who was desperate to have a baby walked by, saw him there in the car, snatched him up, and walked off, and that whoever it was, raised him well and loved him the way I did.” She couldn’t look at him. “Silly, huh?”

  “No.”

  “But not likely. What kind of person would take someone else’s baby? Not someone who knows right from wrong. How could that kind of person possibly raise my son the way I would?” She could feel the old panic rising inside her and took a steadying breath. “There was another dream. It had two possible endings. Daniel was taken by his kidnapper across the country to a remote part of Montana, where he was abandoned at a rest stop. The first ending had him being picked up and raised by a well-meaning soul who assumed he was abandoned by his parents.”

  “What was the second ending?”

  “He wandered away from the rest stop and was raised by a pack of wolves.” She looked up with a self-mocking smile.

  But his eyes didn’t mock her. They were silver-soft and sympathetic. “I’d be dreaming the same things, if it was my child. What does Doug say?”

  Emily felt a catch at the sound of his name. When she was thinking about Daniel, she wasn’t thinking about Doug. Two sources of pain and confusion. Room for only one at a time.

  She considered lying. But only for a minute. Brian was her friend. She wanted him to know. “Doug says nothing. He deals with Daniel’s kidnapping by pretending he never existed.”

  “How can he do that?”

  Since they couldn’t discuss it, she could only guess. “Daniel was the first child, the son. He was handsome and responsive and quick, everything a father could ask. Doug can’t cope with the pain of what might have been.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Sometimes. On Daniel’s birthday.” Her voice cracked. She stared at her coffee for a minute before swallowing and continuing. “I can’t forget giving birth to Daniel. My body knows it happened. It remembers the contractions. It feels them again.”

  “Was Doug in the delivery room with you?”

  “Yes. But he’s never home on Daniel’s birthday.”

  “Geez.”

  “It’s okay. I mourn by myself.”

  “Does Jill know about Daniel?”

  “She does now. But for a long time I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want her fearing that the same thing might happen to her. I taught her the rules—tell us where she’s going, go with other kids, run fast and yell loud if someone threatens her in any way—but I tried to make it sound like a standard precaution.”

  “Remarkable that you were able to be sane about it.”

  “The alternative was to make her neurotic,” which Emily had refused to do. It was bad enough that she had left Daniel alone and unguarded in the car. To screw up Jill because of it would have compounded the error.

  “How did she react when she learned about Daniel?”

  “She kept saying there had to be something we could do to find him. I tried to explain that everything had been done, and that too much time had passed. She accepts it now, like I do. You can’t keep living with something like that, day in, day out. I go through periods when I don’t think of Daniel at all—like Doug, I guess—then something hits me, and I’m back there again, in that police station, reporting his disappearance, reliving the horror of it.” She was reliving it now, feeling the jangles that came with total panic. “I thought they would find him. Really, I did. I wasn’t in the post office for more than five minutes. He couldn’t have gone far in that time.”

  She stopped. She did drink her coffee then, for the warmth, and when she set it down, Brian took her hand. She clung to it. “I shouldn’t have left him alone in the car. It was my fault. It wasn’t like I was in a strange town,” she reasoned. “If I’d been anywhere else, I never would have left him. But it was Grannick.” She held his hand tighter, caught up in dismay. “No one saw a thing. John and the others interviewed half the town, but no one saw anything. It’s bizarre. This is a provincial place. If you get a new car, people see it and spread the word. Same if you have a baby or get divorced. Gossip spreads fast. But no one was looking that day. No one saw anything.” She caught herself and took a breath. She sat straighter. She gave Brian an apologetic smile and reluctantly drew her fingers from his. She tucked them in her lap. “He would have been twenty-one.”

  “Yes. John said that.”

  “Things are different today. Today, there’s the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and networks like CJIS and NCIC. They circulate reports of kidnappings nationwide in no time flat. If Daniel disappeared today, the FBI would be crawling over the car picking up the tiniest traces of fingerprints and fibers. Photographs would be circulated by the millions. The story would be carried by the networks, talked up by Oprah, written about in People, plastered on milk cartons. None of that happened back then.”

  She had been been driven wild by the frustration of it, wanting to do more when there simply wasn’t more to do. She had pushed and pushed, until the pain of hitting that brick wall again and again and again had finally numbed her. Only then had she ceased.

  “Want to see his room?” she asked. When Brian’s eyes went wide, she stood. “I dust there, but I haven’t touched it otherwise.” Nor had she shown it to anyone else. But it seemed right that Brian should see.

  Knowing that he would follow, she set off. She didn’t stop until she had climbed the stairs, and gone down the hall to the only door that was closed.

  She opened it and stood aside to let him in, then leaned against the door frame staring back down the hall, and even then the pain hit her, a wound unbandaged, raw and inflamed, even after all this time. She didn’t have to look to see the lineup of tiny matchbox cars, the stuffed animals, the Lego blocks. She knew when Brian was looking at the picture books lined up along the bookshelf, and when he opened the closet door to see the little boy clothes that hung there, and when he lifted one after another of the many pictures that had graced the living room mantel before being banished by Doug. As she stood against the door frame, looking away, she was enveloped in the baby smell that had been Daniel nineteen years before, and though she knew that it couldn’t possibly still exist, her memory brought it back and made it real.

  She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, d
etermined not to cry, but the emotion rose in her and wouldn’t be quelled. Daniel had been so small, so helpless, so innocent. She had played with him when she dressed him, singing, laughing, hugging him afterward, all chubby little belly, arms and legs wrapped around her. Then he was gone.

  She cried softly, unable to help herself, and when Brian drew her to his chest and wrapped his arms around her, she continued to weep. She couldn’t remember when she’d had the luxury of crying over Daniel in someone’s arms. So she indulged herself, until her tears slowed and she pulled back.

  Leaving an arm around her shoulder, he guided her away from the room. She heard the door close and felt a weight lift from her chest. Freed, she drew in a long, shuddering breath.

  He led her back down the stairs. At the bottom, she took an independent breath, wiped the tears from her face, and stepped clear. She threw him a self-conscious smile. “Now you know.”

  He had his hands in his pockets. His eyes were silvery warm. “Now I know.” Voice and expression were both so gentle she nearly started crying again, not for Daniel, this time, but for everything she didn’t have with the one man she should.

  She told herself there was still hope. But with Doug in England for another full week, she felt helpless.

  So, later that morning, when the small apartment over the garage suddenly filled with the newly delivered furniture and the contents of Brian’s Jeep, she helped unpack. She loved arranging furniture. She loved hanging pictures on the walls, helping set up Julia’s crib, putting bright little toys on shelves in her room. She loved going with Brian to buy plants and lamps and food. She loved watching the apartment take on warmth with each little touch, and when he invited her to join Julia and him for a dinner to christen life there, she couldn’t turn him down.

  eight