by Regina Doman
“We’ve got a lot to do,” Bear said, recalling the new bad news he had to tell them. Not wanting to make a scene, he turned to his brother. “Fish,” he said, “why don’t you and Rose go get the luggage? I want to talk to Jean.”
“Good, then Fish can fill me in on the details,” Rose said, taking his brother’s arm. “Tell me everything, Fish.”
“Sure,” Fish said, with only the barest trace of annoyance. With Rose on his arm, he stalked down the corridor towards the security checkpoint before the baggage claim.
“Shall we sit down?” Bear asked, but the older woman shook her head.
“I’ve been sitting down,” Jean said, “this whole plane ride back. Is there any news?”
“Yes,” Bear said soberly. He told her, as briefly as possible, what he and Mrs. Foster had found in the Brier house that morning.
Jean was bewildered. “What does this mean?”
“It’s proof that someone went to great lengths to implicate her,” Bear said with determination.
Jean had started pacing towards the windows overlooking the parking lot. She halted in the shadow cast by the nearby parking garage. “But who would have done such a thing to Blanche?” she asked. “Is this something that you were involved with, Bear? It almost sounds a bit like one of your undercover operations.” She laughed shortly, but her eyes were despondent.
“I’m not sure how it’s connected to me,” Bear said heavily. “We’ve found drugs in three places where Blanche has been frequenting—my apartment, her workplace, and your home. I’m forced to conclude that someone is after her as well.”
For a moment they stood in silence, watching a car on the third level pull out of a parking spot in the parking garage just across the street from them.
“Do we have any sign at this point that she’s even still alive?” Jean whispered. “I haven’t brought it up to Rose, but my mind is flying immediately to the worst possibilities. Kidnapping, or murder, or—now I’m wondering if she was actually seriously depressed after all. What if we find out that she’s committed suicide?”
Again, Bear fought off the thoughts that crowded into his mind. “No,” he said at last. “She wouldn’t do that, no matter how depressed she was. Blanche might be fearful, and she might doubt, but at the bottom of her soul, she wouldn’t despair.”
“You sound very certain,” Jean attempted to smile through her tears. “But you haven’t seen her these past few months.”
“But I know her,” Bear said, and took a deep breath. “And I believe in her.”
For a moment, Jean looked at him as though she were recognizing him for the first time. Then she wiped her eyes. “All right, Bear,” she said. “I’ll try to believe that we’ll find her. That she’s still out there, somewhere, and we can—”
Suddenly she pointed, her voice changed. “My God. Is that her?”
Bear looked out the window. Directly across from them was the fourth level of a parking garage. And inside the parking garage, a girl in a red kerchief was running after a dog. It was Blanche.
It was like a sudden vision from God, abrupt and positive and a bit odd. Although in a different building, she was no more than a hundred yards away from them. For a moment they both stood there, gazing stupidly at the picture of the black-haired girl in a red headscarf making a flying leap at the escaping canine, seizing him by his thick collar, and wrestling him around. She started to drag him coaxingly down the ramp towards the exit.
Then both of them sprang into action. Jean pounded the window and shrieked, “Blanche!”
Bear took off running down the terminal. “Stay there and watch her!” he yelled to Jean, who was jumping up and down and waving her arms, hoping to attract Blanche’s attention. But the sunlight bouncing off the terminal windows was probably obscuring her motions.
As fast as he could, Bear tried to run to the parking lot exit. The number of people at JFK suddenly bloated in size as Bear tried to make his way down the terminal causeway. Obstacles flew at him from every direction as he ran. He dodged around departing and incoming passengers, leapt over a luggage cart, hurried down an ‘up’ escalator, and burst through the glass doors at the bottom.
There was a security checkpoint there, but Bear ignored it and rushed through. Two guards immediately jumped to their feet, shouting for him to stop. Suddenly Bear found his way blocked by two other guards who had appeared almost out of nowhere.
“Sorry sir, you need to go through the metal detector,” they said, propelling him back by his shoulders.
“I need to find that girl out there,” he pointed fruitlessly. “There’s a girl out there in the parking garage, chasing a dog. I’ve been trying to find her—can’t I go and get her first?”
“First you need to go through the metal detector,” the guard said. “If it’s really important, we’ll send someone out to find her.”
“It’s really important,” Bear said.
One of the guards started checking Bear for concealed weapons while the other one continued to stand in front of Bear, and began to explain about airport regulations. Bear wasn’t listening, but was instead watching the ground floor of the parking garage, which he could glimpse through the windows behind the guard’s shoulders. Bear became aware of how fast his own heart was pounding, and how fast he wasn’t moving.
At last, the guard with the wand finished frisking him and let him go. Bear hurried outside to the parking garage and started scrutinizing the cars that were coming out. He didn’t recognize any of them, or their drivers. The lady taking payments at the gate didn’t recognize Blanche’s description but promised to keep a look out. Frustrated, Bear turned to the windows of the airport terminal and tried to signal to Jean to come down.
Rose and Fish came running outside a few minutes later. Bear was steadfastly watching every car that exited the garage, but so far had only gotten odd looks from the drivers and had seen no sign of Blanche, or a dog.
“Are you sure it was her?” his brother queried.
“There was no mistake. Jean and I both saw her face,” Bear said. “It was her.”
“She’s alive!” Rose said joyously.
“Fish, go and have her paged on the intercom. If I missed her somehow and she was going into the airport, she might still be in a place where she can hear the page. Rose, go inside the garage and look for her. See if anyone’s seen her. I’ll stay here.”
“All right. Let’s hope Blanche isn’t here planning to fly out of the country,” Fish said dismally, dialing his cell phone. “Or she’ll be in even more trouble. Excuse me,” he said into the phone. “Is this customer service at JFK? How can I find out if a person has a ticket on an outbound flight?”
“If she was flying anywhere, she was probably going out to California to find her mother,” Bear argued, his eyes still scanning the passing cars and the exiting people, looking for anyone with a dog—why had Blanche been capturing someone’s dog?
When Jean appeared, she was considerably happier, but could only say that Blanche had disappeared, dragging the dog down and around the ramp. She went into the garage to see if she could find Blanche. Bear remained at his post, asking guards and passing people if they had seen a girl with a dog. A few had seen a dog running away, but no one had seen where it had gone.
“Nothing to do but start searching the entire terminal to see if she’s getting a flight,” Fish said grimly when they gathered again. “Probably useless at this point. If she was here, she’s probably gone by now.”
But Bear’s heart pounded with a new hope. Jean persisted, “We should at least try to find her here, even if it takes hours,” she said. She smiled at Bear, who nodded.
Blanche is alive. She’s alive.
At least they had that.
Chapter Ten
She rose the next day to join the friars for two and a half hours of their routine: the Office of Readings, private meditation, Morning Prayer, and the Mass. It was difficult to wake up so early and pray so long, but unexpectedl
y sweet, a bit of manna in the wilderness. As she made her way through the still-confusing book of the Liturgy of the Hours, she thought briefly about becoming a nun. It was temptingly easy to consider. After all, becoming a nun meant marrying Christ. The only perfect Man.
She smiled to herself. Ah, yes, men, those imperfect mortals. Even the really amazing ones, like Bear, were imperfect. Heartbreakingly imperfect.
Suddenly she found herself blinking back tears. She hated to admit it, but yes, Bear had let her down.
If only Bear were different, if only he were from a happy family like her own, if only he didn’t have to go off and figure out what to do with his life and leave her alone…then it would be so much easier to trust him again. But right now he certainly didn’t seem likely to deliver any dreams of living happily ever after.
What was she supposed to do—hold staunchly onto her image of Bear as a flawless prince charming or admit that in some ways she had been deceived, or at least mistaken in him? There didn’t seem to be any way out.
“Why spend money on what is not bread? Why spend money on what will not satisfy?” Isaiah asked in one of the readings of the day. She suddenly wondered if that meant that it was more sensible to spend yourself only on God, instead of placing yourself in the hands of anyone lesser.
But yet…She stared at the tabernacle. The answer to the riddle wasn’t yet apparent to her.
After her solitary breakfast, she went to the vestibule but found her enthusiasm for finishing the job strangely lacking. Brother Herman came by.
“Good morning, Nora.” He opened the vestibule door and sniffed the warm breeze of the summer morning. “Look at that sky. So blue, even here in the City. Lovely, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she said. But inside the stuffy vestibule with clothes piled up around her, it didn’t seem like a blue-sky day.
“How are you doing?”
“Feeling unmotivated,” she admitted with half a smile.
“But yet, responsibilities still call us,” the bearded friar said with a smile and a sigh of his own and gently closed the door. “The people who come to our food pantry will start lining up outside soon,” he said. “Can you come downstairs and help us get organized?”
“Sure,” she said, squelching a sigh, and went.
II
Thursday morning was the day the friars handed out bags of donated food to any needy families in the neighborhood who wanted it. Around eight o’clock, a line of homeless men, bag ladies, and single mothers with kids started forming in front of the door to the basement of St. Lawrence Church. At nine, the friars opened the doors and started handing out bags they had prepared from donations given to them during the week: day-old bread from bakeries, dented cans of beans and boxes of macaroni, wilted vegetables, and other items collected from bakeries, groceries, and produce stands around the City.
Brother Leon walked among the visitors, joking with the men and greeting the kids, most of whom he knew from his neighborhood rounds. But there were a few newcomers. He recognized the fluorescent blue stocking hat and green visor of the old lady that had come to the friary the other day. She was someone you didn’t forget quickly.
“Hey Bonnie! How’s it going?”
Bonnie was going back and forth between two bags of groceries, taking out the things she apparently didn’t like, and transferring them to another bag. “You got any tuna? Haven’t had tuna in forty days and forty nights…”
“Same here,” Brother Leon said, hitching up his rope belt. “I don’t think we got any this time. Sorry. So where you from, Bonnie?”
“Queens,” she muttered. “Just got up this way.” She started shuffling off on one of her wandering rambles, and Leon, mindful of how Bonnie had meandered through the friary on her last visit, followed her, keeping up a stream of friendly banter. She didn’t seem interested in him, though.
They wandered through the basement, Bonnie peering into any bags they passed, including bags already taken by others. Nora was talking to Marisol’s little girl, who had come with her mother to get some groceries. He waved at her.
“Who’s that?” Bonnie asked. “Your girlfriend?”
Leon grinned. “Nope. I’m already taken.” He nodded to Nora. “She’s a volunteer. She’s been helping us out around the friary.”
“Now isn’t that sweet?” Bonnie fixed her eyes, dimmed by her green eyeshade, on Nora. “A pretty little beauty queen like that. What’s her name?”
“Nora,” Leon said reluctantly.
Bonnie started chuckling to herself as she puttered on her way, dragging her bags behind her. “Is that right? Nora, hey? A pretty little thing like that…” She paused, and looked at Leon. “You watch she doesn’t try to hook you,” she rasped. “You know that’s what those kinds of girls do.”
III
By the time they had exhausted the search of the airport, it was evening, and the Briers and the Denniston brothers had agreed to take a break from the search for Blanche until the next morning. Bear and Fish had dropped off Rose and Jean at their home, and had gone back to their apartment.
Once back at the apartment, the stress of the past several days combined with the time change had finally unleashed itself on Bear’s body like a delayed wave crashing onto the beach. It immersed him in sleep that lasted until well into the next morning.
When he finally awoke, reality was still dim around him although it was just past ten. There was no sound but the soft whoosh of the air-conditioning. He rolled over in bed and looked out the window at the sun glaring over the tops of the buildings. The waves of heat enveloping the City didn’t touch him, high in his tower.
He had fallen asleep in the bedroom that had been his mother’s, a sanctuary of hushed and refined femininity. She had decorated it herself in tones of purple-gray and silver-white, and it was the room that most reminded him of her. The only alteration that Bear had made to the room was to hang up his mother’s portrait. Now he looked over at the large image, painted in oils by one of her friends. Catherine Denniston had dark hair and blue eyes, fair skin—she had been a beautiful woman, before the cancer. Bear always felt a bit odd gazing at that portrait, which captured her expression from a time he barely remembered. Even then, though, her eyes had been sad. She had been a quiet, sensitive person, artistic, and long-suffering.
Feeling stiff from his long sleep, he sat up, touched his toes, and swung out of the bed. He remembered as a kid waking up here when he had crawled into his mom’s bed after having a nightmare. After the darkness had passed the next morning, he had tumbled out of this bed to see the sun rising out of the windows overlooking the Hudson River and Central Park...
Long ago and far away, he thought to himself. Back then, he still thought he had a mother and a father who loved each other the way parents ought to, a whole life. Now he was acutely aware of how innocent he had been of the realities of the situation.
Getting dressed, he walked down the curving staircase that curled around the edge of the living room at the center of the house and went into the kitchen.
Fish was there, making himself some bacon in a frying pan. He glanced up at Bear. “You dressed? Good. We’re meeting Mrs. Foster over at the Briers again. I recommend that we try to pick up Blanche’s trail by going to her workplace, the banquet hall. But sometime today we’ve got to sit down with Jean and have a discussion.”
“About what?”
“About what to do with the drugs we found in her house. It’s one of those legal conundrums. If she does the right thing and turns them over to the police, she might be charged with possession the same way we were charged, or at least strengthen the case against Blanche. But if she doesn’t turn them over, then she’s breaking the law.” He lifted a piece of bacon out of the pan and inspected it. “So there are some tough decisions to make there. You want some bacon?”
“No thanks.” Dismally Bear opened the refrigerator and stared at the contents—mostly condiments. Obviously, neither of the brothers had been out shopping
since they had gotten back. He checked the freezer, found a package of frozen potpies, and pulled two out.
“You can’t microwave those,” Fish said. “They take a half hour in the oven. And putting them under the broiler can really backfire. I speak from experience.”
Without a word, Bear thrust the pies in the oven and turned on the timer.
Waiting again, he thought about Blanche, as he leaned against the central island. The search at the airport revealed that Blanche apparently hadn’t taken a plane out. So she was still in the City. What was she doing? Did she have any idea how worried everyone was about her?
Quite possibly not, he realized. As far as Blanche knew, he was still in Europe and her mom and sister were in California. It was possible she had no idea what kind of turmoil everyone else was experiencing on her behalf. He wished again he had kept up better communication with her and not been so preoccupied with himself. Looking back over the past months, every time he had called her, it seemed as though they had talked about his problems, not about hers.
He stared out the window at the street far below at the currents of warm air snaking between the buildings. There were only a few pedestrians on the street at this hour. A man in a sports coat and sunglasses stood on the street corner, smoking, apparently waiting for a taxi. Bear had always wondered how people could smoke when it was so hot.
When they went downstairs to the lobby, Ahmed glanced at them, embarrassed.
“How you doing?” Bear said easily, trying to show there were no hard feelings.
The doorman nodded, and looked relieved.
Bear had no hard feelings against Ahmed, but seeing him reminded Bear that he was out on bail, and that unless he could prove his innocence soon, he might be returning to jail. Not only that, perhaps Blanche, when they found her, would also be charged and imprisoned. He didn’t blame her for hiding.
The knot in his stomach returned as they walked onto the street. The heat of the street hit him like the blast of an oven. As he opened the door to Fish’s car, he glanced around them. He noticed the man in sunglasses he had seen from the window was still smoking on the corner, apparently deep in the thrall of a tobacco addiction. From street level, Bear could see that the man’s broad shoulders and large head looked ominously familiar. He had dark hair and a broad, flat nose, which looked as though it had been broken in a fight. Apparently perceiving that he was being watched, the man turned his back, tossed his cigarette into the trashcan, and walked away.