The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  “I took that from some hippies,” Earl said, with some satisfaction.

  “Where are your receipts, Earl?”

  “Don’t got none,” he continued, sounding pleased with himself. “Don’t need them. What for? Who’s gonna check on how many cans of Spam I sold?” He laughed, and then coughed.

  “You just count the change?”

  “’Course. Think I’m dumb?”

  “When do you order more supplies?”

  “Every few months. Truck comes up provided the roads are clear. What are you gettin’ at, miss?”

  Frustrated, Naomi left the back of the counter. She walked over to the dusty, neglected toy shelf. “I want to know if anyone bought any toys from you recently.”

  His eyes grew wide. “Why, miss, all you had to do was ask. I remember most everything I ever sold here. I can tell you if anyone bought a toy, and exactly when.” He paused, as if building up the suspense.

  Naomi’s face was framed in the gentle dawn light coming in the window, past the sign still turned to closed outside.

  “It was them Murphy boys,” he announced. “They bought one of them dolls.”

  “When?”

  “’Bout two months ago. A cute little doll. A nice doll.” Naomi could tell he was enlarging the quality of the doll in his mind.

  “Do any of those Murphy boys have any children you know about?” Naomi asked with soft menace.

  He heard the clang in her voice. It was like the calling to wolves in the hills.

  “No,” he said. “Not that I know about. But—”

  A thought appeared to cross Earl’s mind, distracting him from what he was about to say. He frowned.

  “Thank you.” Naomi walked over to the front window and turned the sign over.

  Earl looked puzzled again. “Miss, what does this have to do with the furs?”

  “I don’t know that it does,” she said.

  Earl sucked his teeth. “You gonna report me about the furs?”

  “Not unless you make me.”

  It was a busy Saturday afternoon on the usually quiet street where the Culvers lived. Kids ran outside, playing hoops, jumping, shouting, their voices bright and clear on the warm spring day.

  Naomi wasn’t surprised to find the Culver couple inside, as if hiding from the light.

  The father looked uncomfortable. “You wanted to see us together?”

  “Every time I have visited here since our first visit you’ve sat in that chair,” she told him. “Or you’ve been gone. And that first time you didn’t even look at your daughter’s room with us.”

  He looked around as if he could be saved by the mathematical equations he taught.

  “I think your marriage is in trouble.” Her voice was direct and calm.

  “How would you know that?” He looked accusingly at his wife.

  “Look at where you are sitting.”

  Husband and wife looked at each other. She was in the rocking chair where she had read with Madison. He was again in the recliner across the room—the farthest reach from her.

  “I don’t see how that matters,” he said faintly.

  “It does matter. In most of my cases just one parent calls me—because since the child went missing, the two have divorced. The chances of a marriage surviving a missing child are very low. Especially once the couple feels they have exhausted all hope, which is what you are doing now.”

  The mother spoke up, her voice breaking. “Why do they divorce?”

  “The blame,” Naomi said. “You probably blame your husband for where he stopped on the road. He probably blames you for the stupid idea of going up there to begin with.”

  A smile crossed the father’s face.

  “It is easier to be angry with each other than to face the fact she might be dead,” Naomi finished.

  “She’s not dead!” the mother suddenly yelled. “I keep telling you that!” She burst into loud tears, sobbing.

  The husband did not respond to his wife. Instead he looked at Naomi, his eyes beseeching.

  “You cannot face your own grief,” Naomi told him. “That’s why you are angry.”

  He nodded, his throat suddenly quivering.

  Naomi reached into her bag and rummaged through it. “Here it is. I brought a card for a counselor I know. She can help you both.”

  “What if—”

  “I insist. Now, I have a question for you.”

  The mother stopped sobbing, wiping her eyes. “Yes?”

  “What kind of toys did Madison like?”

  “Oh!” The father looked up, exclaimed. Here he smiled. “We always said she was pretty remarkable. Even as a toddler she didn’t play much with blocks. Every now and then she might play with a doll, but it wasn’t a big deal to her to have toys.”

  The mother nodded, her cheeks stained with tears. “That’s right. She bombed out of Montessori. Didn’t want to play with a thing.”

  The father looked over at his wife. “Remember how pissed that one teacher was? Little Madison had to do it her own way. Standing in the garden outside, dreaming.”

  They both laughed a little, shaking their heads. For the first time Naomi could see them in unison.

  “What was she dreaming about?” Naomi asked.

  “She loved to be outside,” the father said firmly. “It was our special thing. We would go for walks together. Pick up leaves, talk, feel the rain on our cheeks or the summer sun. She just loved . . . the air. She loved the sight of the trees and would talk about the clouds and find endless fascination in a line of ants on the sidewalk. I always joked she would end up being one of those people who spent all their time outside, if she wasn’t buried in a book. Why, on Saturdays like this we would—”

  He stopped suddenly, his face galvanized with pain. He dropped his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. The wife sat still, as if startled like a bird. As was their pattern, she did not move to comfort him either.

  Naomi stood up, walked to the front door, and opened it. In the bright diagonal of light flooding the house they could hear the children outside, playing. She hesitated, knowing she was crossing a line, but she was desperate they not end up like other families she had known should the final news annihilate them.

  Behind her the husband sobbed. “Go to him,” Naomi told his wife, her voice pleading. “Don’t lose each other as well.”

  During a farmhouse visit where she had watched him shoot windfall apples off a fence post, his left hand now easy, Jerome had asked Naomi why she didn’t carry a gun.

  Naomi had watched the way he handled his service pistol, easily, despite knowing the way it killed people. He was at ease with that in a way she could never be, as if the gun was a secret, sad part of him.

  “I tried,” she had told him, and that was the truth. It wasn’t that she was worried about getting hurt—sometimes she thought that part of her was broken—but that she thought it would be easier to kill a captor if she carried a weapon. Naomi had no compunction, no hesitation, about killing a captor. It was almost as if they didn’t exist to her.

  So she had gotten a concealed carry permit, bought a small handgun from a reputable dealer, and signed up for a class in their shooting range. The deafening noise didn’t bother her. The sight of shells on a damp field didn’t bother her. Even the recoil of the gun, the action of tattering the target—none of it bothered her.

  She had thought she was on easy street.

  But it became clear the moment she began wearing the gun. The dealer had helped her choose a Smith & Wesson because it fit her hand, and because it was small enough to easily be hidden under her jacket, wearing a shoulder holster. But she knew it was there. And somehow—she could not say exactly why—other people did, too.

  The leads she had on cases dried up. The once friendly, open witnesses, framed in doors speckled with gunshots themselves or advancing down prison corridors, would no longer talk. The helpers she had found over the years, the neighbors and teenage witnesses on street corners, froze
solid in her presence.

  The gun seemed to create an invisible barrier between her and the world she sought. The ball of yarn vanished, and all she was left with was a stupid holster on her rib cage and a whole lot of nothing. The day she put the gun down was the day her work resumed.

  “I think they can smell it,” she told Jerome that day, knowing he would not laugh. The air was filled with the tangy smell of sharp apples, blown to bits, and the faintest hint of gunpowder.

  “Of course,” Jerome had said, holstering his pistol easily with his one hand. “People can sense all sorts of things. They have dogs that can smell if someone with epilepsy is going to have a seizure. I think people can smell those things, too, only we don’t know it. Or we pretend we don’t. We call that intuition.”

  “But I can’t tell when you have the gun. Like right now. You feel the same to me,” Naomi said.

  Behind them in the farmhouse Mrs. Cottle had been cooking an early supper, complaining she was going to have to get a lasso to get Naomi to stay. “You could be carrying it and I wouldn’t even know it.”

  “I’ve killed people with weapons.” He had paused. “I know that, I own it. It is in my soul now. See. I made it mine.”

  “Oh.” The idea hit Naomi. “It’s like what I tell the children after I find them: to make it theirs. I want them to feel okay about themselves, to not feel ashamed.”

  “Exactly.” He had smiled at her, a breeze lifting the black hair, his empty shoulder seeming to agree. “Once it is part of you, then no one can tell.”

  “That you were ever any different?”

  “That you should have been anything but what you are.”

  Perhaps because she had been born—literally—into her body, running across that dark-night field, Naomi felt more comfortable learning the physical art of self-defense. Over the years she had taken classes run by retired police; had completed an intensive course with a Filipino street fighter; and, in her favorite experience, had flown to Mexico to train with a professional boxer retired to glory after a life of dirty fighting.

  Learning how to fight was a transformative experience for Naomi. The fighters called it glove shy, and Naomi learned not to be glove shy: she learned how to keep her eyes open for danger. She was pleased to see later how hidden the knowledge became: the sight in the bathroom mirror was of a strong, softly muscled woman, no different than the one who had walked before, but with a potent promise.

  It was that gnarled and cauliflower-eared boxer in Chihuahua, Mexico, who taught her the most important lessons.

  Lesson number one, he had said in his croaking voice, as the ditch outside glistened with scum and the woman in the kitchen cooked them another meal, him wrapping her hands before they began:

  “It doesn’t matter how you win.”

  Lesson number two, he said, as he drove her through the countless exercises she repeated to this day to keep her strong:

  “No one cares how you win as long as you win.”

  Lesson number three, as the world turned to the smell of stucco and salt, and the old fighter swirled and moved, always effortlessly, a counterpoint to her panting effort:

  “It’s nothing more than this.”

  He taught her all the tricks—all the dirtiest, most low-down and rotten tricks. The head-butting and rabbit-punching and kidney-punching. The ear and nose biting. The tender bones most easily snapped in two. The places skin can rip. He taught her all this with the same sad yet interested look in his eyes.

  On the last day he had finally pulled away, flecks of blood on both their wrapped hands, and he said:

  “Now you know, la reina.”

  The queen—he had called her the queen.

  “What do I know?” she had asked, and outside the sun shimmered over the ditches, cotton drifting from the nearby fields.

  “How to win.” He had laughed and they had gone inside, where the smell of chicken simmered and the old woman was chopping vegetables.

  Naomi had the Murphy claim on her map, sketched out down past Stubbed Toe Creek. It was far away from where Madison went missing, but she reminded herself that the brothers often drove up to the Strikes store. They could have found the child wandering the road.

  She found the place easily enough, a sprawling shanty off a winding road in a clearing covered with vines, right past the hamlet of Stubbed Toe Creek. Unlike the other claims she had explored, this one was clearly occupied. The trash of several generations was collected outside: old pipes and pallets and broken-down trucks. People in cities took garbage service for granted, she thought.

  There were no signs of children. No toys in the yard, no pictures in the dirty windows—no reason that she could see for the Murphy brothers to buy a doll.

  There were several ways to search a home, Naomi knew. She could wait until the occupants looked gone—not much of an option here—or she could gain admittance, usually by pretending to be someone she was not.

  She had found her way into homes by acting lost and asking for directions, by yelling in a panic as if she was the one being chased, and by pretending to be everyone from a door-to-door salesperson to a long-lost relative. In the trunk of her car she kept a yellow safety vest and a hard hat, both with the false logos for a demolition firm. More than one captor had opened his door thinking that Naomi was there with a condemned-property notice. Others had opened their doors because of one of the dozen fake business cards she kept in her bag. According to these cards, Naomi was everything from an oral historian to a vector control specialist. That was in case she observed a rat problem.

  She liked to gauge, often at the last minute, which guise would work best. She went by instinct as much as anything.

  The Murphy family presented a challenge. They had seen her, in the store and in the hamlet. They probably had heard from the clerk that she had pulled the claims. They might have heard she was in the local museum, reading the microfiche, and they had seen her having dinner with the ranger. That ruled out a lot of guises.

  It was the claims that gave her the idea. She pulled out one of the fake business cards and clipped it to the folder and got out of the car.

  The younger Murphy who had confronted her at his truck was opening their door before she was halfway across the overgrown yard. He was wearing a dirty pair of duck trousers and a plaid shirt. A brown cap was pulled down over his hair.

  “You again! What is it you want?”

  She put on her best smile. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. She showed him the folder, opened it up to their claim. He took the card and frowned at it. “Assistant professor?”

  “Yes. I’m working on a project—writing about gold fever in Oregon.”

  “There ain’t no gold up here.” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “I know that, that’s the story—gold fever. I went to examine the Claymore mine,” she burbled a little. “I’ve been talking to people about the old mines, how people threw their lives away to find gold even when it wasn’t panning out, so to speak. I was hoping your family might know a bit more about the local history. Maybe your mother knew people who tried to find gold up here?”

  He searched her face. She kept smiling enthusiastically, gambling that Earl Strikes had kept his word and not told them she was looking for Madison. “I’m sorry I was rude at your truck that day. I was a little startled when you came up behind me.”

  “You just want to talk to us?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave a lazy grin. “Dammit. I was hoping for more.”

  Naomi was surprised at the inside of the Murphy home—not because it was as messy and slapdash as she had expected, or because the family was as loud and raucous as she had imagined, or because, as she had surmised, there were no signs of children.

  She was surprised because the walls were lined with books.

  The original homesteader, Ida Murphy, held court from a sepia photograph above one of the many bookshelves: her ancestors gathered under it at a long table, talking, whittling, eat
ing, reading, and laughing. The home had a warm aura that reminded her instantly of Mrs. Cottle. There was a rich smell of pipe smoke and wet wool socks drying on a rack near the fire.

  “This is Naomi,” Mick Murphy introduced her. “She says she ain’t with fish and wildlife after all. Some sort of professor.”

  “That’s good,” the eldest brother said, tooling with a trap. “’Cause I’m about to go do me some night poaching, and you look about right.”

  “Oh, you,” slapped the younger woman next to him, with bright eyes and a merry laugh. “Don’t mind Cletus here.”

  “Is his name really Cletus?” Naomi asked.

  “Naw, it’s Patrick. Just checking your trash meter.”

  “Are you here for my poetry?” The mother sat down, opening a bottle with relish.

  Mick Murphy pulled out a chair for her. “My mother is a well-known poet.”

  Naomi felt a little taken aback by these people. “I had a different impression of you,” she admitted, taking the chair.

  “What, from that old fart Earl?” The mother cackled.

  “He did describe you as fools,” Naomi admitted.

  “Of course,” the mother laughed, pouring a serious stream of wine. “In Earl’s mind anyone who writes poetry is a plumb fool. You know,” she added with a sly smile, “I did know his wife, Lucinda. When they were courting, Earl wrote her a few poems. She shared some of those scribbles with me. Not much there.”

  “What exactly are you studying, Professor?” Patrick Murphy asked. He made the word sound dirty.

  Naomi passed around the card, explained that she was writing about gold fever. She talked about it so enthusiastically she believed it herself. Patrick Murphy studied the card, which claimed she was an assistant professor of history at an obscure college, looked up at her questioningly, and then shrugged. The mother was sharper. She held the card between two fingers and looked at Naomi with bright eyes. She asked a few questions. Naomi had all her roles down pat: she gave the song and dance of her college from practice.

  The family relaxed, sharing what little they knew about gold mining. The mother remembered Robert Claymore from when she was a girl, and shared a funny story of how one day he came screaming into Stubbed Toe Creek, yelling about a black hole in the mountain. That’s when, she said, they carted him off to the funny farm.