In Plain View

by J. Wachowski

  6:51:23 p.m.

  I tried calling home, stopped there first, hoping there was some mistake, some kid-confusing explanation for why she wasn’t where I expected.

  No luck.

  I got to the school and all they could tell me was Jenny hadn’t been checked out of the program. The last people remembered, she was on the playground. They had tried to call me at the station and at home. Apparently, the number in the file for my cell phone was wrong. When Ainsley showed up at closing time, almost all the other kids had been picked up. The only clue they had to what happened was the word of one of the kids from the playground, who claimed Jenny had walked off the playground toward a shiny car.

  “I think we should call the police,” one of the teachers suggested tentatively. “That’s the procedure at this point, isn’t it?”

  I already had two of the babysitters in tears and Ainsley threatening to lock me in the car, I needed to get out there and start searching.

  “I stopped at the house on my way here,” I said. “She’s not at the house.”

  Ainsley interrupted, “What about friends? Could she have walked to someone else’s house?”

  “Whose? There’s nobody,” I said. “Kid doesn’t have any friends.”

  “One of us should wait at the house,” I told Ainsley, “and one should go out looking.”

  “You want to look, right?” he answered. “I’ll go wait.”

  “Thanks,” I said, stiff with gratitude. The women were conferring among themselves about what to do. “Call the police. I’m going out to look. You’ve got the right number to reach me now, yes?”

  “Yes, yes,” one of them mumbled, guilty, but with an edge of evil eye.

  “Good.” That made two of us.

  It was maybe a mile and a half from the school to the house. There were two routes Jen and I generally took to get home, a third that the bus followed. I’d followed Ainsley back to the house, searched the backyard and wracked my brain for ideas. Nothing useful came to mind. Consequently, I was out of my mind.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled over and called Curzon.

  “I need a favor.”

  “My lucky day.” The shift of his attention, from work to me, was as clear as a car changing gear.

  “Jenny’s gone.” It didn’t take long to explain. Curzon put me on hold twice, checking with the guys at the station about what had already been done. A car had been dispatched to the school minutes before.

  “Come to the station,” Curzon ordered. “We’ll go out together in my car. I’ll have paperwork ready you can sign when you get here.”

  “What paperwork?” I know I sounded irritated.

  “The stuff we need to get a wider search going. Description for the radio, that kind of thing.”

  “All right. Be there as soon as I can.”

  The station was hustling when I arrived. I remembered the way to Curzon’s office and walked straight through. The door was open. He sat behind his computer, wearing a pair of executive style wireless-frame glasses and a white button-down that was creased and damp at the back from long hours in the big chair. Smart and hardworking looked good on him.

  “You didn’t speed on the way here did you?” he asked without looking up. “I’ll be one more minute. Sit down.”

  I was hoping the first thing out of his mouth would be something like, don’t worry, we’ll find her, she’s fine.

  Unfortunately, Curzon was the kind of guy who didn’t do platitudes.

  I didn’t sit.

  From the doorway, I had an excellent view of the action in the station. There were cops going about their business with plodding intensity, and a couple of secretarial types hanging up their cardigan sweaters and putting on their jackets. Sulking against the wall were a pair of Goth-hoodlums in full-length black capes. Beside a desk, hunched an old man with a bloody head. At the farthest end of the room, four burly guys were dragging an eight-foot-high chunk of concrete up the hall on a cart.

  Police stations are surrealism on testosterone.

  “What’s with the road work?” I asked for distraction. “Putting in a patio out back?”

  He handed me paperwork on a clipboard, pen attached. “Guy’s garage floor. Evidence.”

  Translation: somebody died-bloody-on that slab of concrete.

  A bolus of sick bubbled up my throat. “All this on a Monday night? Why would you ever want to leave this job?”

  Curzon pointed at the paper. “Write. Give details under ‘last seen wearing.’”

  There was too much pumping through my head. I had to force myself to think, to write.

  Purple jacket. Jeans. White tennis shoes, pink laces.

  It was impossible to believe what was happening. Less than two hours ago, I was standing in front of Tom Jost’s father, accusing him of parenting failures.

  “I got a question for you.” Even to my ears, my voice shredded the words. “Do you think people have to separate to be good?”

  Addresses: home, school…friends?

  Had I failed Jenny already?

  Curzon mumbled, “Mmduhknow.”

  Names: parent or guardian. Guardian. What a terrible word for it.

  A woman stuck her head in the door. Curzon stopped typing.

  “Amber Alert’s been issued,” she said without looking at me.

  “We’ll have the rest for you in under five.”

  She walked out. Curzon went back to typing.

  “I’ve always thought there’s good and bad in all of us. Everybody’s capable of going one way or another at any time.”

  “Are you more capable of the ‘bad’ because you see it,” I asked him, “because it’s around you all the time?”

  Without hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”

  “Really?” I was unprepared for how vulnerable his honesty made me-with no camera between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to argue. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Yes, you are. You agree. Those Amish people agree. Pretty much everybody agrees. Same reason people move to the suburbs. It’s why we build prisons in the middle of nowhere. It’s why you live alone.”

  “What?” I spluttered. “What’s my living alone got to do with anything?”

  “Who’d understand what you’ve got inside your head? You said you hadn’t had a date since Sierra Leone. My guess is that’s because you can’t picture chatting your way through a meal with some guy, then going into a bedroom with him, taking off your clothes, but never being able to show,” he snorted to himself, “to talk about what’s inside.”

  This conversation was rapidly deteriorating. Direct eye contact seemed dangerously inappropriate, but Curzon wouldn’t look away, so I couldn’t either.

  “How would it feel to lie beside someone, go to sleep, with that innocent mind on the pillow beside you?” He turned away from me just like that, and returned to typing paperwork. His last words were not speculative at all. They were hard with personal conviction. “It’d be a sort of punishment, wouldn’t it? Hiding a part of yourself all the time. Forever.”

  “Does hiding it make you more capable of wrong, bad-ness?” I floundered looking for the right word. “Evil?”

  “Like I would know? I’m on the protection-clean-up detail.” He blew me off. “One thing I do know, once you realize how bad a human being can be, once you can imagine it,” he shook his head as if the rest were obvious, “you can imagine hitting back. You can imagine hurting that person sleeping next to you. You can imagine all sorts of things.”

  I was imagining all sorts of bad things right now with Jenny missing.

  “Aren’t you just the Philosopher King?” I tossed off after too long a silence. This conversation was not helping me worry less. Topic change. “Living alone didn’t protect Tom Jost.”

  “Tom Jost didn’t want to be alone. His problem was reaching for the wrong companions. Classic mistake.” Curzon laid out his version of the facts without hesitation.

  “You think so?”

 
“Absolutely. So says the King.” He gave me a cockeyed grin that took the edge off the certainty in his voice. “Did you bring a picture?”

  “In my wallet.”

  “Good.”

  “Aren’t you gonna say we probably won’t need it?”

  “You want me to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope we don’t need it,” he answered carefully. “I want to know about the SUV.”

  “Don’t start. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” It was my problem for now.

  The SUV run-ins had to be connected to my job. Someone at the station or someone connected to the story on Tom Jost. If I dragged Curzon in at this point, he’d slap a gag on the story. I’d never make the satellite feed.

  Twenty-four hours from now, I could come clean.

  “It’s work related. Got nothing to do with Jenny.”

  Curzon fixed me with the stare. He didn’t agree. He didn’t disagree. “So you got people from your office trying to run you down. Work is going pretty well then?”

  “Work is great. Especially being here, which means I am getting jack-all done on a piece that will probably be seen by an eight share of Nielsen homes nationally, which is to say, no one, and completely submarine my career.” Saying it aloud actually made the urge to puke worse. Jenny. Jenny, where the hell are you? “Have I mentioned I’m going to kill that kid when we find her? You got any Tums?”

  Curzon slid a drawer open and lobbed a bottle across the room. He didn’t prompt, didn’t offer any consolation. He waited, silent.

  I knew the trick of silence, but couldn’t stop myself from saying, “It feels like I’ve stepped into a time machine.”

  “Because of the Amish?”

  “Of course.” The Tums dried the inside of my mouth like road salt. “And Jenny. And my sister. That house of hers.” I quit rubbing my forehead to glare at him. “You, too.”

  “Me?” He sounded pleased. “Why me?”

  “I don’t know.” More rubbing, less glaring. “This place, I guess.”

  “Ahh. You’ve been in trouble with the law before.”

  “Ha.”

  He surrendered with both hands.

  I tried to stay seated. Couldn’t.

  “Two more minutes,” Curzon soothed. He ran Jenny’s picture through a machine at the back of his desk. No wasted motions. “Almost there.”

  “I wasn’t meant for kids.” I paced the tiny rectangle of space in front of his desk. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s crazy.”

  “You can,” he replied, totally calm.

  To me, it sounded like, you have to. “I stink at this. I swear, when we find her-” I kicked my heel against the leg of one of the wooden chairs in frustration. “I did not ask for any of this.”

  Curzon looked up from his computer, nodded pleasantly. “Done?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sure.”

  I wasn’t ready to laugh, so that pissed me off, too.

  He spread his hands and tilted his head exactly like a dashboard Jesus. Men rarely open their hands and show their palms. Curzon’s looked smooth and ruddy. Alive. I remembered how warm they felt and my skin prickled.

  “You can’t turn your back on family,” Curzon said. “Not and keep your self-respect. There it is. Nobody said it would be easy.”

  Pompous, asshole, know-it-all.

  “No shit, Sheriff,” I said. “Tell me about it. Why don’t you start with your divorce from the She-bitch.”

  He didn’t move an inch but suddenly the man I’d been talking to disappeared. Where does a man go when he hides behind his eyes? Curzon had retreated to that dark interior before. It came easily. His eyes narrowed. His face became impenetrable from the inside out and I watched myself change in his view.

  The hurt it caused me was another surprise.

  “My bad. I shouldn’t-You don’t-” I closed my eyes to escape his stare, to hide from myself. My own callused hands reached out, pleading for retraction. “Sorry, Jack. Nothing you’ve said is untrue.” I realized as I said it, how much that meant to me.

  Long time ago, I gave up trying to figure out the mystery of what makes human beings connect. Friends. Neighbors. Lovers. I couldn’t say if it was dumb luck or fine timing or the science of body smells the conscious brain has no control over, somehow Curzon knew how to read me. He knew what I meant. Maybe he knew the words I didn’t say as well.

  “I’m not talking about Sharon here,” he said slowly. His hands laced together and the knuckles whitened with the force of his grip. “But I know what it’s like. All that business on Sunday with Marcus and my father- it’s the same for me. What I want. What my family wants.” He pulled his hands apart. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate them.”

  I don’t even know if he realized, but his right hand tightened into a fist and his left wrapped around it. I thought of that kids’ game-paper covers rock. I felt the force of his will in his eyes, hoping for my understanding. I remembered Jenny running, laughing, playing in his family’s backyard.

  All I could think to say was, “Please, Curzon-Jack, please, I’ve got to find her.”

  He nodded. No false promises. We’ll find her, she’ll be fine.

  I was right; nothing he said to me would be untrue.

  “We’ll take my car.” He stood up and pointed me to the door.

  Couple of serious-looking men in uniforms called “good luck,” as they punched the clock. Curzon raised a hand.

  I was going to owe him big for this. The boss did not, as a rule, drop everything for a kid missing less than two hours. Something else to worry about. Later.

  In less than ten minutes, we were on our way. Probably the fastest completion of police paperwork in history, but I was still crazed. I’d have sprinted to his car if I’d have known which one it was. Instead, I trailed at his elbow.

  “There’s my car.” He pointed me toward an older Audi.

  “What about those?” I pointed. Two rows over sat at least five matching silver SUVs. They had no visible police markings.

  “Special transport. We got a grant,” he said. “Is that the kind of car that gave you trouble?”

  The parking lot was suddenly colder. I met Curzon’s narrow gaze and thought about the darkness he closed himself into so easily.

  “Maybe.”

  “There are a lot of silver SUVs out there.” His voice had a bland edge that wasn’t there a minute ago.

  “Yeah, sure. Let’s just go.”

  We were in his car and on the road in a matter of moments but Curzon wouldn’t stop glancing over to check on me. “You cold?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He reached over and grabbed my fingers, then let go before I could make anything of it. “Those still bend?” he asked, while punching buttons on the dash to fire up the heat.

  “How’s this?” I curled my hand into a fist and shook it lightly.

  “Hey! Look, kids, it’s Feisty the Snowman. Where to first?”

  I resisted the smile, but his silliness struck a spark that the car’s heat built into warmth. “Let’s go back to the school.”

  We drove in silence. Curzon didn’t even need directions.

  What is it about the inside of a car at night? He was watching the road and I was looking out the window, eyes burning for a glimpse of purple jacket. The car wrapped a cave of safety around us. I was too worried about Jenny to resist-the comfort or the intimacy.

  We cruised the neighborhood, stopping anywhere I could think Jenny might have walked so I could get out and shout her name. I saw at least two other police cars slowly driving around, which pleased me at first but gradually sent the anxiety creeping up, up, up. A lot of people were looking.

  Where the hell had she gone?

  “So. Only you and your sister in the family?” Curzon’s tone was an injection of calm.

  “Just the two of us.”

  “What neighborhood you from?”

  Neighborhood, parish, high school-I gave him all the standard Chicago-
locator coordinates, answered every question and more. I don’t usually talk so much. Must have been the car.

  “Can we follow the bus route?” I asked. “Maybe she tried to walk home that way.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll go back to the school and we’ll start from there.”

  I did a couple head rolls and shoulder drops. With every zap of the police radio, I twitched. Curzon was right of course; we needed to be systematic. Systematic was taking too damn long.

  “Tell me about this story you’re working on. Why’d you ask me about Samaritan law?”

  It was hard shifting my brain to thinking about work, shifting tectonic plates hard. I wasn’t sure whether to call the result a headache or a headquake.

  “I think somebody may have seen Jost at the tree. Setting up. Doing the deed. The whole thing.”

  “He did it by the side of the road,” Curzon pointed out matter-of-factly. He flicked a glance my way. “You feeling all right?”

  “Great,” I said, with one eye closed. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “What, the tree? No. He picked a tree on his daddy’s front lawn.”

  “Okay, classic protest suicide-look what you made me do. But the more I’ve talked to people, the weirder that part seems. Amish people don’t do protest, much less suicide. And wouldn’t he have gotten the same effect if he did it in his apartment and wrote a note? So why the tree? What was he thinking?”

  Curzon slowed to a stop at a yellow light. “You’re asking, what did he get by doing it in that tree?”

  “Exactly.”

  Curzon’s cell phone rang. He answered, “Sheriff.”

  Time stopped. The street light was red.

  Still red.

  My night vision dissolved. All the grays of the shadows around us went black. In the distance, car headlights flashed and turned away.

  Red.

  “Yeah, got it. Tell them five minutes.” He snapped the phone shut with a flick, dropped it into the space beside the gear box. “They found her.”

  “She’s okay, right?” Don’t bury the lead, you sadist.

  The answer was hard to hear over the sudden blare of his siren.

  “She’s alive.”

  8:47:59 p.m.

  I doubt it took us three whole minutes to get to her. Curzon drove like a bat out of hell. I was numb enough to admire the bright streak of lights we passed and the sensation of gentle compression into the Audi’s butt-warming leather seat.