Most of the mall stores, he remembered, closed at nine. Soon after that a ten-year-old boy on his own would catch the attention of mall security officers. Grasping the possibility with a feeling that he recognized as desperation, Dave headed for the north end of town and the huge shopping complex that had come to dominate the lives of so many San Carlos citizens.
“WHAT THE HELL do you mean, you lost him?” Braden shouted into the phone.
“Well, uh … he was just browsing these stalls, that’s all. I took my eye off him for a coupla seconds and he was gone.” Deputy Pritkin spoke in the tone of one who would rather have faced a firing squad than make his report.
“How long since you missed him?”
“Ten—fifteen minutes or so. Uh … do you think he spotted me?”
“If he did, that means he deliberately gave you the slip.” It seemed unlikely, Braden thought. Pritkin had been drafted into plainclothes for the assignment, but even if Lindstrom had recognized him as a cop, the professor would have had no reason to duck him … unless he had something to hide. “What about his ride? Did you check it?”
“Yeah. I mean, that’s where I am now—in the parking lot. His car’s gone.”
Braden swore. What was Lindstrom doing roaming the streets alone at night? If he didn’t have a class to teach, why wasn’t he home with his family?
“You want me to keep looking for him, sir?”
Christ almighty, Braden thought. Sir.
“He’s probably on his way home,” he told the deputy. “Go and see. If his car isn’t there, wait for him. I want to know when he gets home.”
BERINGER’S MOMENT CAME unexpectedly two hours after the Grand Entry began in the lengthy powwow. A long session of intertribal dances was ending. His attention was distracted by another slim Indian girl in a jingle dress—her entire skirt was covered with silver baubles that jingled as she danced—when he noticed that Nancy was missing from her vantage point on the far side of the arena. The boyfriend was still there, Beringer saw with relief, but where was the girl?
He walked around the arena, forcing himself not to hurry. On impulse he took the aisle nearest to where Nancy had been sitting on the grass in her skintight outfit, like a whore on a picnic. As he walked between two ranks of facing stalls, Beringer took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the soft linen handkerchief he always carried. Business for the vendors was much lighter than it had been earlier in the evening. One seller was even putting some of his jewelry away, ready to shut down. Beringer felt the first twinge of panic. Surely the powwow still had a couple hours to go. Nancy wouldn’t be bailing out this soon. Where—?
Then he saw her.
At the end of the aisle in which Beringer stood, Nancy Showalter paused to look around her. Apparently spotting what she was searching for, she started off purposefully to her right. By the time Beringer reached the end of the aisle, still compelling himself to stroll like a man with nothing on his mind, the tall girl was thirty yards off to his right, near the end of the quadrangle. There, beyond a screen of trees, Beringer saw what she was heading for: a row of portable privies set up to accommodate the needs of the powwow crowds.
Beringer no longer worried about suspicious eyes as he ambled toward the line of privies. What could be more natural and innocent?
Nancy had disappeared into the last cubicle in the row. As he neared it Beringer stopped, casually taking his time as he lit a cigarette. Exhaling, he glanced over his shoulder. A man in jeans and a cowboy hat was hurrying toward one of the privies, too preoccupied to look around. The expanse of lawn was surprisingly deserted.
He heard the rattle of the latch on the end privy as Nancy fumbled with the door. When she stepped out her eyes widened a little as she saw him standing there.
“Miss Showalter? I’m sorry, there’s been an accident.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You’ll have to come with me.” He took her by the arm and started walking briskly, leading her behind the row of privies toward the nearby academic buildings.
“Is it … is it Mark? Has something happened?”
“No, your friend is fine.” Beringer smiled reassuringly at her, still walking quickly, forcing her to break into a trot to keep up, not giving her time to think.
“I don’t understand. Who … what—?” He felt the first tug of resistance.
Beringer pulled her into a shadowed lane between two buildings. Suddenly they were cut off from the crowded arena and the busy aisles of stalls. They were isolated, out of sight. One of Beringer’s hands bit into the soft flesh of Nancy’s arm. The other flicked open the blade of his Swiss knife. He held it close to the cringing girl’s face, moving it slowly back and forth as her eyes followed it. The blade seemed to catch all of the light in the dark passageway.
“I don’t want to have to cut you,” Beringer said with terrifying calm. “We’re gonna walk out of here to my car. Be a good girl, don’t make me cut that pretty face.”
“Please,” she whimpered, “don’t hurt me.”
When he pulled her by the arm, she didn’t resist. “Why would I want to hurt you?” he said. “This isn’t about hurting you, don’t you know that? This is about … love.”
Among the cars in the parking lot, stumbling through the shadows, Nancy whispered, as if clinging to a last forlorn hope, “Was there really an accident?”
Beringer didn’t answer.
Thirty
RICHIE HAD DOZED off. When he woke, stiff and cold, he was momentarily disoriented. He lay curled up on a plastic webbed chaise in a tiny enclosed patio. He sat up in alarm. Staring through a sliding glass door into a strange living room, he suddenly remembered lights coming on inside—remembered being scared. But no one had appeared, and he had figured out that a lamp in the living room and another in a bedroom were on automatic timers, set to turn on at a designated hour or when it became dark, creating the illusion that someone was at home.
He was at his father’s place. How long had he been asleep? Richie didn’t have a watch and he could not see a clock in the living room of the apartment. Had to be at least ten o’clock, he decided, maybe later. He was chilled and very hungry. Should have worn a sweatshirt or something warmer. He hadn’t expected to spend the night outside in the cold.
Everything had seemed so simple, really. His father had obviously come to San Carlos to see him. Well, if he wouldn’t come around to the house, Richie had to go find him.
He was suddenly seized with excitement. There was movement inside the apartment—someone was there. Richie saw the shadow of a man before the figure appeared, entering the living room from a small foyer. A tall, powerfully built man in jeans and a denim shirt crossed the room quickly, not glancing around, and disappeared down a hallway. Another light flared—the bathroom, Richie guessed.
His heart raced. The brief glimpse had been enough for him to recognize Ralph Beringer, the soldier in the photograph he carried in his wallet. His father.
Black gloves, Richie thought. Their image stuck in his mind, probably because it was so unusual to see someone wearing gloves in warm weather. Maybe they were driving gloves.
Easing off the chaise, he moved into the shadows to the left of the sliding glass doors, suddenly apprehensive of his father’s reaction, less certain of his reasons for being here.
Minutes ticked by. He wondered if he should knock on the glass door. He wondered if he should have come here at all against his mother’s wishes. What had seemed so clear-cut earlier was now murky, an emotional tangle. He didn’t want—
An arm shot into view. A hand slapped at the latch of the sliding door. The door skidded to the side, rumbling in its track. Richie stumbled backward, his heart in his throat. The big man grabbed his shirtfront, slamming him against the block wall of the patio. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who—?”
Ralph Beringer’s angry challenge broke off. He stared at the boy he had pinned against the wall. His grip loosened. “Shit, it’s yo
u!” he said.
“I … I’m Richie.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
His father stared down at him for a long moment in silence. Then, to Richie’s surprise and intense relief, he began to laugh.
“HOW DID YOU find me?” Ralph Beringer asked curiously after they were inside the apartment.
“I saw you following my school bus. I saw you a couple times, you were driving the Buick. Then I saw you turn off on this street, San Anselmo Drive, so that’s where I came looking for you.”
“You were looking for me?”
Richie nodded.
“That still doesn’t tell me how you found this apartment.” Beringer was frowning now.
“I didn’t at first. It was just luck I saw you. It was yesterday afternoon, you were just leaving. I was up the street and I saw you drive out of the garage. I shouted but you didn’t hear me.”
“So how did you—?”
“I came back today after school. I knew where you drove out, so I snuck into the garage when somebody opened the gate. I was looking for the LeSabre but I saw your other car.”
Beringer reacted sharply. “My other car?”
“Yeah, the Taurus.” Richie grinned. “I’m really good with cars. You were driving the Taurus the first time I saw you. You followed us to the beach Sunday a week ago, didn’t you?”
“Pretty smart kid,” his father said, but he didn’t sound very happy that Richie had seen him in two different cars.
They talked for a long time. Once he got started Richie couldn’t stop talking. Beringer asked him a great many questions about his mom and Dave and Elli. He seemed to want to know all about them. Talking about them felt awkward, but Beringer did not appear to notice. Frequently, in fact, he seemed to stop listening, as if his mind had suddenly drifted off somewhere else. It was only after they had been together for some time, talking, that Richie realized his father was agitated about something. He couldn’t seem to stop moving about the room as they talked. He had two whiskeys, one right after the other, and then a can of beer from the refrigerator.
He pressed Richie closely about his decision to come looking for his father on his own. Was he certain that no one else knew? He hadn’t told anyone where he was going?
Finally—the digital clock on the VCR showed that it was after 11:00 P.M.—Richie asked tentatively if there was anything to eat in the fridge.
His father stared at him. “You’re hungry?” he asked, as if the idea had never occurred to him.
“Uh, yeah … and I need to use the bathroom. I was waiting out there on the patio for hours.”
Beringer went down the hallway ahead of Richie and peered into the bathroom. Then he stepped aside and nodded. “Go ahead, kid. And make it snappy. We’ll go get a hamburger.”
Oddly self-conscious, Richie closed the door before he let loose the flood he had been holding back. While he stood there, tremendously relieved, he glanced around the bright, blue-tiled room. It was just a bathroom, nothing special. The only thing different about it was the absence of a window. A vent fan went on when a switch next to the light switch was flipped.
When he washed his hands Richie noticed that the blue porcelain sink wasn’t even very clean. There were small spots that looked like rust.
Drying his hands, Richie opened the shower door out of curiosity and peered inside. There was a wet towel on the tile floor in one corner, folded as if wrapped around something. Richie saw an edge of black peeking out of the folds. He thought immediately of the black gloves. Why—?
“Hurry it up, kid!” his father called. “Let’s get going.”
Richie eased the shower door closed and turned away as his father pushed the bathroom door open. “I’m ready,” Richie said, hanging up the towel on which he had dried his hands. He started to ask about what was in the shower but changed his mind. “I could eat a cow,” he said.
Beringer chuckled. “Whatever you say. And after that, son … I think we’ll just give your mom a call so she won’t worry.”
He smiled, but there was something strange and unsettling about the smile, as if his eyes and his mouth were sending different signals.
GLENDA SLOWLY PUT down the phone. “He’s got Richie,” she said.
“Beringer? Goddammit, that’s kidnapping!”
“A father can’t kidnap his own son. Besides, he says Richie came looking for him.”
“And you believe him?”
“You heard Richie last night. It doesn’t surprise me.” Suddenly she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “Oh my God …”
Her despair welled up, and the tears she had been holding back overflowed. Dave held her in his arms until, gradually, the convulsive shudders tapered off and she was still.
After a while she pushed off and turned away. “I need a tissue. I’m a mess.”
“You’re not a mess. You couldn’t be a mess if you tried.”
They went into the den. Elli was asleep upstairs, and the house seemed unnaturally quiet. You almost forgot how much noise two children made in a house, Glenda thought. They sat in silence for several minutes before she said, “It never ends, does it?”
“This will. I promise you.”
“You think you’ve buried the past, but it’s always there, waiting for you. It’s like you’re going in circles. Didn’t Einstein say something about time possibly being a circular track, and that opened the possibility of getting on or off at different times?”
“I don’t know,” Dave said, trying for a light, bantering tone. “I could never figure that guy out.”
“You know all those cases you hear about child abuse, about abused children growing up to be abusive parents—or worse? It never stops. What Ralph started when he began beating me … it’s not over, Dave. It’s affected all of us. I was changed, Richie … and now you and Elli.”
“Take it easy, honey. If he intended to harm Richie in any way, he would hardly have telephoned to let us know Richie’s with him.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
“It would make no sense.”
Glenda was not reassured. She looked away. The backyard was dark and she saw her face reflected in the window. Over the past two weeks, since Ralph’s return, she had lost weight. The hollows of her cheeks and under her eyes were more pronounced. Ironically, the shadowed features made her familiar face, which she did not regard as beautiful in any way, more interesting, giving it a haunted quality. She looked a little like one of Dave’s favorite actresses from the forties, the one who played Laura. Gene Tierney, she thought, in a blond wig, staring back at her.
Dave said, “What Beringer is doing will count against him when it comes to custody, let’s not forget that. It’s irrational and irresponsible.”
Dave still didn’t get it, Glenda thought. This wasn’t about custody. Ralph didn’t want to be saddled with a ten-year-old. Richie would drive him crazy in a week. This was about revenge. Punishment. What Ralph thought of as payback time.
In that moment she had a sense of the answer to Ralph’s scheming being right there in front of her, if only she were smart enough to see it. But before she could pursue the question Dave said, “We’ll find them. I’ll stay out all day tomorrow looking for them if I have to. This town isn’t that big.”
“I have this terrible feeling that we’re missing something. I told you Ralph knows exactly what he’s doing, but why has he waited this long? Why call up out of the blue and then avoid us? Is he just trying to drive me crazy?” She laughed harshly. “If that’s it, well, it’s working, Ralph, you son of a bitch. God damn you all to hell!”
“Take it easy,” Dave said again, the words thick with restrained emotion. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go straight to the police before I go out looking. This time they’ll have to do something.”
Glenda stared at him in silence. When she spoke her tone was bleak. “Ralph has that all figured out, too. They won’t do anything.” An image of the small automatic pistol in her purse flashed before
her. Dave didn’t know about the gun. “Whatever’s to be done, no one else is going to do it for us. We’re on our own.”
Thirty-One
ON SATURDAY RICHIE’S newly discovered father took him to the beach. He insisted on it. A warming Santa Ana condition was building. The sky was a clear blue except for scattered white fluffy clouds running on the desert winds, and the temperature rose into the high seventies. As a result the beach was crowded, parking lots nearly full. Crawling along in the Buick LeSabre, Ralph Beringer saw a family in a Dodge Caravan waiting for another car to back out of a parking space. The car backed toward the waiting van, preventing it from reaching the spot. Beringer raced forward and, just as the car drove away, swung neatly into the vacated space, cutting off the van. He grinned broadly.
The driver of the Caravan honked his horn and shouted, shaking his fist as he leaned out the window. Beringer held up his middle finger. Seeing Richie’s unease, he laughed. “Hey, you gotta grab what’s there, kid. Nobody’s gonna give you anything in this world. Take it from your dad.”
They found an open patch of sand and spread out a blanket. Even though the water was very cold in spite of the warmth of the day, raising gooseflesh all over him, Richie ventured into the light surf. Beringer, wearing khaki shorts rather than a swimsuit, relaxed on the blanket, a cooler beside him holding a six-pack of beer. His father looked very muscular and strong, Richie thought with boyish pride—like an athlete. He had a scar under one knee, white against his healthy tan, and another on his back. Richie wondered if they were battle wounds.
Surfacing after plunging through a wave, Richie saw his father staring after a trio of young girls strolling along the beach in string bikinis. That was okay, Richie thought with a trace of defensiveness; Beringer was divorced, wasn’t he? Why would Mom care? The question was confusing.
They spent two hours at the beach, Richie in and out of the water, his father working his way through the six-pack. When they left they stopped for lunch at the Bright Spot, where this neat blond waitress named Iris made a big fuss over them. She seemed to know his dad, kidding around with him, and she acted as if she were really glad he had brought Richie along with him to the diner. Beringer explained that he was divorced and Richie had been living with his mother. He didn’t say that he hadn’t seen Richie in eight years.
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