“You listen to me, little girl. If you make one peep or tell anybody, I’ll kill your sister here. Do you understand me?”
Tess felt as if a trapped bird was flying madly around her rib cage, flapping its wings.
“Do you?” he demanded, poking at Phoebe’s throat with the knife. Phoebe made a plaintive gurgle in her throat.
“Yes…” said Tess.
“Not one sound. Don’t tell anyone. I’ll kill her if you do.”
Tears rose to Tess’s eyes and her chin trembled. “I won’t,” she said.
She was not prepared for what happened next. In front of her eyes, Phoebe was jerked from her sleeping bag and pulled out through the hole in the side of the tent. One minute she was there and then…she was gone.
Tess’s mouth dropped open and she covered it with her small hands. All she could see through the jagged hole was blackness, darkness. She heard rustling sounds outside, into the woods. As if monsters were moving among the trees, able to hear if she made the smallest sound. She did not dare to move or speak. She kept thinking, Phoebe! She kept seeing the look of terror in her sister’s eyes, the man’s knife glinting against her pale throat.
Tess needed to pee, but she did not dare budge. Even if she wanted to go, she wouldn’t know the way in the dark to the dimly lit latrine on the campground path. Besides, she knew not to go there without Phoebe. They always used the buddy system. That was the rule. And she and Phoebe were buddies. They went together or not at all. Tears began to run down Tess’s cheeks at the thought of her sister alone in the woods with that man with the knife. She wept, she waited. She felt pee soaking the legs of her sweatpants but she did not move. She sat like a statue for a long time.
“Jesus Christ. What the hell…?”
Jake appeared, wild-eyed, at the hole in the tent. “Tess. What the hell happened?” He looked around the tent. “Are you all right? Where’s Phoebe?”
Tess stared at him, wondering if she should tell. “Where is Phoebe?” he shouted at her.
Before Tess could decide to answer, Jake withdrew from the tear in the side of the tent. “Dad!” he yelled. “Mom. Dad, help!”
In an instant, the campsite was a chaos of flashlights, lanterns, the cries of the baby. Tess’s father, his eyes frantic, scrambled into the tent and grabbed her by the arms, pressing her to his chest for a moment and then squeezing her upper arms, searching her eyes. “Tess, what happened here? Tell me. What happened to Phoebe?”
Outside the tent, she could hear her mother moaning and Jake pleading in a small voice. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry.”
Tess began to sob. “I can’t,” she said. “He said not to. He said not to tell.”
“Who said that?” Rob DeGraff choked out, his voice shaking, the whites showing around his eyes. “Tell me, Tess. This instant.”
Tess’s small body was trembling. Her words came out in a whisper, sloppy with tears. “The man who ripped the tent with his knife. The man who took Phoebe.”
“What? Rob, what happened? Is Tess all right? Where is Phoebe?” Dawn was screaming from outside the tent.
Rob gasped and doubled over, as if he had been stabbed with the ugly man’s knife himself, and then he groaned. “Oh my God! Oh no.”
Her father’s groans made her feel sick to her stomach and gave her bad goose bumps from head to toe. She had never before heard a sound like that coming from her father. He was the one who was always laughing and saying that everything would be all right. But not this time. This time he sounded like an animal howling in pain. She wondered if he was mad at her. She couldn’t bear for him to be mad at her. She had to make him understand. Her voice was pleading. “Dad, I had to do what he said. He told me to keep quiet after he left, or…”
“What, Tess?” he cried. “What?”
Tess hung her head. Her voice was a whisper. “Or he was going to kill her.”
CHAPTER 2
Twenty Years Later
“Erny,” Tess called out, standing hands on hips in the doorway of her son’s room, which looked like it had been sacked and pillaged. “Answer me when I speak to you.”
Erny, a wiry ten-year-old with shiny black eyes, brown skin, and uncombed, curly black hair, clambered up the stairs of the town house. “The taxi’s here,” he announced.
“What happened to your room?” Tess demanded.
“I was packing,” he explained. “Come on, Ma, we have to go.”
Tess shook her head and then closed the door on the catastrophe that was Erny’s bedroom. “When we get back, you’re going to have to clean that mess up.”
Erny was jiggling with pent-up energy. “I will, I will. Come on, we’ll miss the plane.”
“We’re not going to miss the plane,” Tess said calmly, although she felt half-sick and her stomach was in a knot. “Where’s your bag?”
“Downstairs.”
“Okay, put your sweatshirt on and tell the taxi driver to wait. I’ll be right there.”
Erny descended the staircase two steps at a time. Tess took a last look in her bedroom. Her gaze fell on the framed photo on her bureau top. It was a snapshot of a blonde girl with braces and sweet, dreamy blue eyes, intently brushing out her long hair. Her shadow loomed large behind her in the lantern light. Tess kissed her own index finger and gently pressed her fingertip to the cheek of the girl in the photo. Then she turned away, pulled out the handle on her bag, and rolled the suitcase to the top of the stairs. She picked it up and carried it down. Erny was leaning out the front door, pleading for the taxi driver to wait for them.
Their cat, Sosa, named after one of the baseball players Erny idolized, peered out at them from under the living room sofa. “Say good-bye to Sosa,” said Tess. “He’s under the couch.”
As Tess pulled her jacket from the hall closet, she heard Erny flopping down on the living room rug, crooning to Sosa and promising him that he would be well cared for by Erny’s best friend, Jonah. Jonah was the son of Tess’s best friend, Becca, and Becca’s husband, Wade Maitland. The Maitlands lived three blocks away from them in their Georgetown neighborhood. Wade was an executive producer on Tess’s documentary team and Tess was the one who had introduced him to her childhood friend, Rebecca. They fell in love almost at once, and ever since Tess was always credited with being a matchmaker. The two women loved the fact that their sons got along so well. It gave their old friendship a brand-new dimension. It was good, Tess thought, to have friends like that to rely on. Especially for this trip, when she felt unusually fragile and worried.
“Everything will be fine,” Tess called out to Erny. She repeated those words to herself silently, like a mantra. As if by insisting on it, she could convince herself that this was just an ordinary trip to see her family. Everything will be fine.
Tess checked herself in the hallway mirror. Her shiny, brunette hair parted naturally a little off center and fell to her shoulders around her oval face and dark brown eyes. She had a creamy complexion, high, healthy color, and deep, comma-shaped dimples in each cheek that showed at the slightest hint of a smile. A friend once told her that men made monkeys of themselves trying to make Tess laugh just so they could see those dimples. Tess had denied it, but she suspected it was true. Today, as was her habit, she wore a minimum of makeup. She inspected her outfit, wondering if her silk shirt and tweed hacking jacket would be warm enough for late October in New England. Normally, on a trip to New Hampshire, she would have worn her work clothes—a roomy canvas coat with lots of pockets, jeans, and muck boots. Out in the field, she dressed for speed and comfort. She worked as a cinematographer on a team she’d joined when she’d been an intern in film school that made documentaries for cable and public television. She enjoyed everything about her team and her work, including the fact that she could buy most of her work wardrobe from Eddie Bauer. But on this particular trip, she felt as if she needed to look slightly more businesslike.
There was a crash from the direction of the living room. Tess’s heart leapt.
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p; “What was that?” she called out as she rushed to the doorway.
Erny, looking worried, was holding two ragged-edged porcelain triangles that had once been a square plate depicting an ancient map of the world. She kept the plate on display on the table behind the sofa.
Tess took the pieces from Erny and looked at them ruefully. She had bought that plate in a Paris flea market long ago and had always treasured it. But life with a child had taught her that mishaps were commonplace, and that it was a mistake to become too attached to breakable belongings. “What happened?” she asked.
“I was hugging Sosa and he ran away from me and jumped over the table,” said Erny. “He didn’t mean to break it, Ma.”
“I know,” said Tess with a sigh. She placed the pieces carefully on the mantel over the fireplace. “Maybe we can glue it back together.”
“I’ll get the glue,” Erny cried hopefully.
“Not now. We have to go. When we get back.”
“Sosa’s just scared of being alone. Jonah’d better take care of him,” Erny muttered, smacking his fist into his palm.
“He will. His mom will make sure he does. Come on. Grab your bag.” She forced herself to adopt a lighthearted tone for Erny’s sake. “We’ve got places to go and people to see.”
Erny, rarely downcast for long, shouldered his backpack and shot the handle on his suitcase. “I’m ready.”
Tess smiled back at him. “Vámanos!”
The driver helped them put their luggage in the trunk and they piled into the backseat of the cab. “Dulles, please,” said Tess, naming the airport.
Erny pressed his nose to the window, gazing out at the familiar street. As the car pulled away from the curb, Tess looked back at their Georgetown home. It was a true city house—a two-story neo-Colonial brick town house in the middle of a block of similar attached houses with multipaned windows, buttercream trim and window boxes, wrought-iron stair rails, and marble steps. There was a tree in front, and Erny’s school was only two blocks away. Tess had bought the house using her share of the proceeds from the documentary team’s first sale to HBO. When she’d bought the house, she’d been twenty-three and single and had just wanted privacy and a home of her own. The house had proved to be both a good investment and later an indispensible asset when Erny came into her life.
She’d met Erny when the team was shooting a documentary about grandparents forced to become parents for their grandchildren. Erny’s grandmother, Inez, had lost her single daughter to drugs and the street. The identity of Erny’s father was unknown. From the first day of shooting, Erny, who’d been five at the time, showed an irrepressible interest in everything the team did. He attached himself to Tess and asked her a million questions about the camera. Erny’s grandmother, though infirm and poor, adored her grandson and protected him fiercely, and the segment about them was among the most touching in the film.
Several months later, when the film was cut and ready to be aired, Tess called Inez to invite her and Erny to a screening. She learned then that Inez had died suddenly, and that Erny now was in foster care. Tess immediately arranged to visit Erny at his foster parents’ run-down, chaotic home. She thought that seeing the film so soon after Inez’s death might be traumatic for the five-year-old, but Erny insisted that he wanted to come to the screening, and his foster parents, who were caring for six kids at the time, seemed indifferent. Finally, full of misgivings, Tess agreed to take him with her.
Erny was ready when she came to pick him up, hair combed, wearing his best clothes. He sat without fidgeting, watching the film intently, squeezing her hand the entire time. When she brought him back to his foster parents, he clung to her silently and refused to let her go. Tess promised she would come to see him again and he watched her leave with hopelessness in his eyes. Tess returned home to her lovely, quiet house.
Over the next few days she told herself that Erny’s situation was sad but couldn’t be helped. She told herself it was not her problem and there was nothing she could do about it. She was young and single and couldn’t take on the burden of a child, no matter how winning he was. She’d never have a boyfriend or a social life again. She tossed and turned at night and finally realized that she was not going to be able to reason her feelings away. Six months later, the adoption went through and ever since, Tess had been a single mother. Sure enough, her social life tapered off. She stayed home a lot and when she did date, she developed a tendency to judge every man she dated by his reaction to Erny. Most of them didn’t want to arrange their lives around the needs of a child. Tess found, to her surprise, that she didn’t regret the loss of any guy who felt that way. When her friends shook their heads and warned her that she would end up alone, she pretended not to care. But in her heart she shared their apprehension. Adoption hadn’t been an easy road, for either her or Erny. Still, she had never regretted the decision.
“Do you think Dawn will let me use Sean’s bike this time?” Erny asked.
He could not yet bring himself to call Tess’s mother “grandma.” Tess understood. She also knew that he usually enjoyed their visits to her family. But this time could be different. For both of them. “I’m pretty sure she will,” said Tess.
“Maybe this time I’ll ride out to the mountain,” Erny announced.
“We’ll see,” said Tess.
At the airport, after checking in and going through security, Tess and Erny proceeded to their gate. Tess stopped at a newsstand and bought herself a newspaper and a book of Sudoku puzzles they could do together on the plane. Erny was better at the number game than she was and never tired of seeing her reaction when he beat her to the solution. Then they walked down to the crowded waiting area at the boarding gate and found two seats. Tess walked up to the desk and asked the uniformed ticket agent if she knew what gate their connecting flight would be leaving from in Boston.
The woman tapped a few keys on her computer keyboard. “You’ll arrive in Boston at gate A-seven and depart for Unionville, New Hampshire, from gate C-three.”
“Have we got a lot of ground to cover there?” Tess asked.
The woman shook her head and looked at the times of the flights. “You arrive Boston at noon and leave for Unionville at one. That gives you plenty of time.”
Tessa thanked her and went back to the seat where Erny was fidgeting.
“Can I watch the planes leaving?” he said, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the ticket counter.
“Sure. Stay where I can see you,” said Tess.
Erny bolted from the chair and flattened himself against the windows, peering out at the planes on the tarmac. Tess picked up the newspaper. On the fourth page of the Washington Post she found the article she was looking for. The dateline was Stone Hill, New Hampshire. Tess began to read.
The office of New Hampshire Governor John Putnam confirmed today that the DNA results will be announced tomorrow in the case of Lazarus Abbott, who was executed ten years ago in this state for the rape-murder of thirteen-year-old Phoebe DeGraff. Twenty years ago the girl was abducted from her family’s campsite in the White Mountain National Park and her body was found two days later in a shallow roadside ditch. Based on the description of the lone eyewitness, the victim’s younger sister, Police Chief Aldous Fuller arrested the 23-year-old Abbott, a convicted sexual deviant who still lived with his mother and stepfather. Semen found on the girl’s underwear was a match to Abbott’s blood type. Abbott’s trial lasted only three days. The jury agreed on the death penalty within an hour of the conclusion of the sentencing hearing.
Although the physical evidence was scant, the eyewitness testimony was damning. The victim’s sister, nine-year-old Tess DeGraff, who was present when the abduction occurred, positively identified Abbott under oath as the man who ripped open the side of their tent with a knife and warned her not to scream or he would kill Phoebe with the knife he was wielding. The child’s pale, grave face and unwavering certainty sealed Abbott’s fate and he was executed, after exhausting all his l
egal avenues of appeal, ten years ago.
Abbott insisted on his innocence right until the moment of his execution and his mother, Edith Abbott, was finally able to persuade Ben Ramsey, a local attorney, to take up her cause and have the evidence in the case tested for a DNA match. DNA evidence was not widely available at the time when the crime was committed and the courts refused to order it in the years leading up to and after Abbott’s execution. But the newly elected Governor Putnam, who is a vocal opponent of the death penalty, agreed to Mr. Ramsey’s request to order the testing.
The evidence of semen on the clothes and skin from under the fingernails of Phoebe DeGraff was still in the possession of the Stone Hill Police Department and the tests have been carried out at the Center for Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Edith Abbott has always insisted that the results of these tests will clear her son’s name. Tomorrow the announcement will be made by the governor at the offices of the Stone Hill Record , a local newspaper that had joined Ramsey in pressing for the testing of the DNA, although the newspaper does not champion the cause of Lazarus Abbott. “The people of this town have long felt that justice was done in this case,” said Channing Morris, editor and publisher of the Stone Hill Record, reflecting the widely held conviction in this area that Abbott was guilty. “I think the whole business is unfortunate. But we have nothing to fear from the truth. Let’s get it out in the open and put this matter to rest, once and for all,” the publisher said.
“May I have your attention, please?” the ticket agent announced over the PA system. “We are now beginning to board flight Two-eighty-six to Montreal, with a stop in Boston.”
Erny barreled over to where Tessa sat. “Ma, that’s us. You better put the paper down.”
Tess was jerked back to the present. Grim-faced, she took out their boarding passes and zipped up her bag. She forced herself to smile at her son. “You looking forward to this trip?” Tessa asked him.
Erny nodded. “You think Uncle Jake will take me for a ride in his truck?”
Stolen in the Night Page 2