Tristan's Gap

by Nancy Rue

  Not that there was much of one to make. When Officer Frankie tackled the getaway child at the top of the steps leading to the beach, the setters, seeing that they were no longer vital to the rescue, took a hard left and floated like deer over our privacy fence. I heard two splashes.

  “You got a pool?” Hazel said. She was now at the bottom of the porch steps, squirming offspring still in tow.

  “We do,” I said.

  “Then they’re in it. You’re gonna have to call the Humane Society if you want them out. I got no control over those two.”

  I wasn’t sure which two she was talking about. The girl and the chunky boy she currently had in headlocks were struggling to get loose. The boy gnawed on Hazel’s forearm.

  We got everyone into the backyard, and I sent Officer Frankie to his patrol car with a sack of muffins from one of the several Rubbermaid containers in our recently overstocked pantry. By then, Max had stumbled downstairs, and she stood, gaping, at the top of the back-porch steps.

  Tristan’s T-shirt, which Max hadn’t taken off for two days, hung off one shoulder and down to her knees. She shook the hair that suffered from terminal bed-head and ventured down the steps on bare tiptoes. She craned her neck toward the pool, where the two red dogs were doing laps.

  “Shut up!” she said. “Can I swim with them?”

  The question was obviously meant for me, but before I could answer, Hazel’s girl said, “Sure. They won’t hurt you. See?” And she jumped in, fully clothed. Granted, the denim shorts with the two-inch inseam and the spaghetti-strapped tank top didn’t necessarily qualify as fully. I waved Max toward the pool house before she could do likewise. She emerged seconds later, still pulling on her bathing suit top, and dove headfirst between the two setters.

  “I’m goin’ in too,” the chunky blond boy said and executed a can-nonball that nearly emptied the pool.

  “You going for it?” Hazel said to the remaining member of the tribe. He took a momentary break from kicking an inflated dolphin and shook his head.

  “He’s pouting,” Hazel said. “I never had a pouter before. Sun’s a whiner. Tri’s a biter. If the truth’s known, I prefer pouters. They’re quieter, and they don’t draw blood.”

  “So,” I said, “urn, their names are Sun and Tri?”

  “Yeah, well, Sunrise. She was the one I had in the log cabin. Her father named her that because she was born at dawn.” She put up a hand, which, I noticed, had a ring on every finger and one pierced into the pinky nail. “Don’t take me there,” she said. “Tri’s short for Triumph. My second husband was a biker, rode a Triumph 750. I’m glad he didn’t have a Harley, or he would have named him Hog. I’m not kidding you.”

  I was sure she wasn’t. I was afraid to ask the third one’s name. I’d mentally switched him from Horn Honker to the Terminator. The dolphin now lay limp and shriveled on the deck, and he’d started on the pink turtle. Decapitation was imminent.

  “Man, I’m sorry,” Hazel said.

  “Nobody ever plays with that one anymore anyway,” I said.

  But Hazel launched herself from the Adirondack chair to snatch the turtle out of the child’s hand.

  “Knock it off!” she said, just before bopping him on the head with it. “Get in the pool with your brother and sister. I want to see you swim.”

  The boy slapped his arms into a fold and stuck out his lower lip, brows straining down to meet it. Hazel tugged at one of his cornrows, the color of corn itself. I guessed that husband number three had been African American but that Hazel’s genes were as invincible as the rest of her. All three children had her startling blue eyes.

  “Okay, Desi,” she said to him. “Just sit there, then. Don’t have any fun.”

  “Desi?” I said. “As in Arnaz?”

  “Desmond,” Hazel said. “I think it’s a sissy name.” She snorted. “But it was that or Tutu.”

  I was about to ask why she had let her husbands name her kids, but she pounded her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I’m going on about my kids, and you’ve got one missing.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I do.”

  For a few minutes I had let my imp-self nudge in. Fear smacked her aside now with a little help from guilt. How could I have been distracted from thinking about Tristan?

  “So what are we doing about it?” Hazel said. “That’s why I came by, to see how I can help.” She narrowed her eyes at the squeals rising from the pool. “Not doing too much so far, am I?”

  Max popped up over the side, with the customary yank of her bathing suit bottom. Her hair was slicked back from her face, her grin like a slice of watermelon. The water that curled down her arms and legs glowed on her skin.

  “I’m gonna get our thingies we dive for,” she said. “We can see if the dogs’ll fetch them.”

  “They’ll fetch anything,” Tri bellowed at her.

  “Yeah, but we can’t throw just anything in,” Max said. She was walking backward toward the pool house, shaking her arms out like cooked noodles. “My dad would have a coronary.”

  As if he weren’t already going to have one when he found several pounds of red dog hair clogging up the filter. But as Max darted into the pool house, face alive with a plan, I shook my head at Hazel.

  “You’re already doing a lot,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  Chapter Six

  Hazel, I discovered that day, could not sit still. “You need to put me to work,” she said after she refilled our coffee cups for the third time.

  “I don’t know what you could do—”

  “For openers I could redo that lame excuse for a flier they’re posting. There’s too much stuff on it. It needs to pack more of a punch. I’m a graphic artist. I’ll give it a go.”

  “That would be—”

  “What I’d really like to do is get a bunch of mothers together and go out and find this kid-snatching psycho ourselves so he doesn’t get off on some technicality. If the police nab him, the courts will be all about protecting his rights.”

  Hazel pushed her bracelets up her arms in the absence of sleeves to roll up for the fight. I couldn’t even imagine Hazel in sleeves. She had on a tank top again, which was barely holding her inside it.

  “A bunch of us mothers wouldn’t care about the dude’s rights,” she went on. “Who cares if he’s a Little League coach or some mental patient that got out of the institution because he’d stopped banging his head for two days?” She patted the pockets of her fatigue green hiking shorts that strained at the seams. “We wouldn’t hang around to find out if he was a sociopath who hated his mother so he took it out on you by stealing your kid. We’d take a machete to him first and send him to a shrink later.” She patted her pockets again and stood up. “Hey, Sun, you seen my cigarettes?”

  “They’re in your purse,” Sun shouted from the pool. “But you don’t need one right now.”

  “Get off me, kid.” Hazel reached for a jungle-print bag and glanced at me. “She hides them from me. Thinks she’s gonna get me to quit.” She pulled a rhinestone-encrusted case from the bag. “If I tried to quit, they’d be hunting me down—for homicide. ‘Nicotine Deprived Mother Strangles Children.’ ” She gave me a pained look. “And now I’m gonna step outside before I get my other foot wedged in my mouth.”

  “You are outside,” I said.

  Hazel panned the newly stained deck, the columned porch, the thickly padded patio furniture, and grunted. “This isn’t ‘outside.’ This is ‘gracious outdoor living.’ ” She shook her head and went out the gate.

  I gripped the arms of the Adirondack and pressed my back against its sun-warmed boards. What would it feel like to personally rip Tristan from the clutches of one of the sick, heinous monsters Hazel had described? I couldn’t conjure up anything more lethal to use than a serrated bread knife, but even that image surged through me with an unfamiliar force. Maybe something would take over and I could rake his face with my fingernails, tear off an ear
with the sheer force of maternal instinct, stamp on the hands that had touched my daughter.

  But the wave of energy slammed into a wall. Even if that kind of hate was me—and nothing in my beige past had ever indicated that it was—it definitely wasn’t God. Not the God I was trying to talk to. Whatever was clamping my hands to the arms of the chair and welding my teeth together wasn’t the God I knew. But then neither was the fear or the guilt or the hopelessness that painted over everything else.

  So where was He in this? Was He not what I thought He was? And if not, then who was He?

  The fact that I even had those questions added to the guilt that was already smothering me.

  “You must be drawing out the town kooks,” Hazel called from the other side of the gate. “Get a load of this show.”

  I peeled myself out of the chair and stepped over a prostrate Desmond to join her.

  “Isn’t Officer Clearasil supposed to keep the freaks away?” Hazel said. “Look at him. He’s letting this woman come right to your door.” Hazel shoved the bracelets up again. “You want me to take care of it?”

  I stood on tiptoe and looked over the gate. Aunt Pete was crossing the driveway, stiff-legged as a stork, sarong threatening to slide off one hip.

  “She is a kook,” I whispered to Hazel. “But she’s my husband’s great-aunt. She’s staying with us.”

  Hazel slid her sunglasses down her nose to look at me over the top. She must have donned them when shed gone “outside.” Furry leopard fabric covered the frames. “You let her out of the house?” she said.

  “She wanted to walk on the beach or something. She was a little bit stir-crazy.”

  “That’s scary.” Hazel dropped her cigarette onto the gravel and ground it out with the sole of a tiger-striped flip-flop. “Looks like she found something for you on the beach. Too bad he’s a little young. Nice body.”

  I pushed open the gate and stepped out to where Hazel was standing. She pointed to Officer Frankie, who appeared to be deep in conversation with a tanned young guy in red Bethany Beach lifeguard swim trunks.

  “Would you please watch the kids?” I said to Hazel and took the driveway at a jog without waiting for an answer.

  “All right, enough with the horsing around in the pool,” I heard her yell. “Tri, you drown that dog and I’ll drown you.”

  Officer Frankie nodded at the lifeguard when he saw me. The young male face that turned to me was on the far side of adolescence, jaw cut confidently out of fuzzy teen-ness, cheekbones freshly polished with the cloth of his emerging sexuality. Smooth, muscled arms hung carelessly at his sides, but I saw Tristan in them, pounding on his pectorals, pulling her face from the attack of his lips—

  My last flash before I stopped in front of him was the serrated edge of a bread knife.

  “This is Mrs. Soltani,” Officer Frankie said. He inched toward me, close enough for me to see the muffin crumbs that hung on the buttons of his shirt. “This is Jeff Cousins. Your aunt says—”

  “He might know something, Serena,” Aunt Pete called from the side porch. “You talk to him. I have to go inside. Some kid ran over my foot with his skateboard. I think he broke my toe.” She wiggled her index finger at me. “You talk to the kid.”

  I looked again at the young man, who was rubbing the side of his nose with his thumb.

  “The lady said you were looking for a lifeguard,” he said. “Nickname starts with S?”

  “Do you know one?” I said.

  “What’s your nickname?” Officer Frankie said. He’d taken a wide stance and lowered his voice, but his last syllable squeaked despite his best effort.

  “Fried,” Jeff said. He gave a self-deprecating smile that covered his cockiness not a whit. “My first summer guarding I refused to use sun-block. I fried the first week and ended up in the hospital.” He stopped and wiped his mouth with his palm as if to erase all levity. “Sorry,” he said. “I do know a guy that guards down at Fenwick—or he did. His name’s Spider.”

  The name crawled across my skin.

  “He did lifeguard at Fenwick Island?” Officer Frankie said. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and jerked his chin at Fried. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I heard he’s getting fired. He must have ticked off somebody down there.” Fried tossed the answer sideways without looking at Frankie. He obviously wasn’t impressed with his interrogation skills.

  “Ticked ’em off how?”

  Fried shrugged. “Probably by being a jerk. He had that down to an art form.”

  “So you know him?” I said.

  “Not any more than I have to. He started hanging out up here this summer. I guess nobody in Fenwick Island wanted to have anything to do with him. I was at a couple of parties he came to up here, and I’m like, ‘Keep this dude away from me, man.’ He’s the kinda guy I eventually would’ve taken down. Still might.” He twitched his shoulders as if he were gearing up should Spider suddenly appear over the dunes.

  I wished he would.

  Officer Frankie pawed at his shirt pockets, and for a confused moment I thought he was looking for cigarettes.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I gotta get my pad.”

  He trotted heavily toward the patrol car. The dark blob of sweat on Frankie’s back stuck his shirt to him like the skin of a plum. Fried fixed a smirk on his mouth.

  “Do you know where he is now?” I said. “This Spider?”

  “I haven’t seen him lately. I never found out his real name. Didn’t want to. All I can tell you is, he’s not from here.”

  “Is he mean?” I said. “Do you think he would hurt … a girl?”

  Fried’s arms suddenly seemed too long for him, and he planted his hands under the opposite armpits.

  “I never saw him be violent or nothin’ like that,” he said. “He’s got this obnoxious thing—like he tries to be funny, but all he does is insult people. He acts like he’s this macho stud, but I never knew a girl to even go out with him.” He tightened his arms. “You think Spider had something to do with your daughter being gone?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said.

  He glanced toward Officer Frankie, who was hurrying in our direction empty handed. “I saw your daughter at Boardwalk Fries all the time,” Fried said. “She was a nice kid. Is a nice kid.”

  He gave me a pained look. Officer Frankie reached us, face neon pink, breathing like the little engine that could.

  “Couldn’t find my pad,” he said. “You should probably talk to Detective Malone anyway.” He patted his pockets again. “Cell phones in the car.”

  “I’ll call him,” I said. I pulled my cell from the pocket of my cargo shorts. “As soon as, well, I’ll call him.”

  “You sure?” he said. He puffed out his chest, still panting, and jerked his chin up at Fried.

  “Just contact me through Fenwick Beach Patrol.” Fried had recovered his superiority and reached out a magnanimous hand to Frankie. “Glad I could help, buddy,” he said.

  I called Nick as I headed back to the pool. His voice mail picked up almost immediately, informing me seamlessly that he couldn’t take my call right now.

  Anxiety threatened again, or was it annoyance? He had his phone turned off right now?

  Okay, stop, I told myself. He’s not getting reception. He’s on another call. He’s in the bathroom. The kidnappers have taken him too …

  But that particular conclusion didn’t have the power it would have had an hour ago. Not with the more disturbing possibility that some person named Spider had lured my child into a web. The thought skittered through me. I tried Maya, Nick’s assistant. She said she hadn’t seen Nick yet today.

  But he’d left the house hours ago.

  By the time I let myself back in the gate, Aunt Pete was in the hammock under the overhang with a bag of ice on her foot. Hazel was perched on the edge of a canvas deck chair a few feet away, leaning her forearms on her knees and dangling an unlit cigarette from one hand. Body language told me Aunt
Pete was giving her a full report over the constant squeals coming from the pool.

  “Well?” they said unanimously. Having met only moments before, they were g in one voice.

  I filled them in, detail by detail. Talking kept me from ripping right out of my skin.

  “Did you call Malone?” Aunt Pete said.

  “Nick wants to handle that,” I said. “But I can’t reach him.”

  Hazel looked at me over the tops of her leopard-skin glasses. “I don’t get it.”

  I didn’t attempt to explain it to her. My mind was spinning in another direction, which had me punching at my cell phone again.

  “You calling Malone?” Aunt Pete said. “Thank heaven.”

  I shook my head and waited for Aylana to pick up. When the hip-hop version of the Fiddler on the Roof song started, I wanted to toss the phone in the pool.

  “What gives?” Hazel said.

  “I need to talk to Aylana,” I said.

  “Who?”

  Aunt Pete was nodding at me. “See if Spider’s the name of the guy who was hitting on Tristan.”

  “Did you just say ‘hitting on’?” Hazel said.

  “I’d go down and check it out for you, Serena,” Aunt Pete said, “but …” She moved the ice bag to reveal two toes that could have been mistaken for Greek olives.

  “Go where?” Hazel said. Actually, it didn’t seem to matter where, because she was already standing up. “You want me to go?”

  “Boardwalk Fries,” I said.

  “I’m there. I’ll pick up some corn dogs while I’m out. They’re all hollering they’re hungry.”

  I shifted my gaze to the pool, where Max and Sun were each astride an Irish setter, and Tri was teetering at the edge with Desmond thrown over his shoulder. I couldn’t decipher what Desmond was screaming, but it clearly had nothing to do with food. Aunt Pete and I exchanged glances. Hers read, Let her leave here without those children, and your name is going to be Mud.

  Snatches of conversations whipped past me on the wind as I wove my way up the boardwalk.