by John Case
She has her keys out and she cuts a wary glance my way before opening her door.
I feel paralyzed.
She rolls down the window – manually. She turns on the ignition. The car sounds as if the timing is off. It’s idling too fast. By the time I can get myself to move, she’s fastening her seat belt. I approach her, holding my hand up.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“I’m sorry, but I’m really in a hurry.”
“Wait.” And then I blurt out, in my newscaster’s voice: “We have a tragedy in common.”
My rehearsed words sound strange, very strange – even to me. Emma frowns, as if I’ve spoken in a foreign language and she’s trying to translate what I said.
“I’m Alex Callahan,” I say, talking too fast now, my words tumbling over one another. “You’ve seen it on the news. My sons Kevin and Sean have been abducted. Your tragedy’s over, Emma, but mine is ongoing. I need your help. I need-”
It’s the sound of her name, I think, that really does it. Nothing else I said really sank in until I used her name. The name she doesn’t use anymore.
I see the realization hit, recognition followed a nanosecond later by horror. Then she’s gone, driving away in a pebbly screech.
I blew it.
But the truth is I don’t feel panicked because I know she can’t get away from me. Not really. I know where she’s going. But just for this moment, I can’t seem to move, can’t seem to get my breath. The air presses in on me, heavy and dense. I’m still standing in exactly the same place when she comes back.
She stops her car, opens the door. Light spills out the open door and she sits there, in its illumination. “Look – I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t feel good about it. There’s a lot of negative energy – me being the one person who could really sympathize with you, but instead I did everything I could to keep away…”
Her voice trails away and for a minute or so she doesn’t say anything. The sound of the traffic seems to be getting louder, gathering force.
“And when I saw about your boys on the television – oh, God.” She takes a shuddery breath. “I knew it was him, I just knew it. And I thought – I actually thought… I thought…” Her voice is falling apart now and she’s starting to cry. “I thought… good, now he won’t come back. He’s got what he wants.” She chokes in a sob. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” I start, “that’s okay. I under-”
“No, it’s not,” she says, interrupting. “I’m so ashamed of myself.” A sigh. “The thing is,” she says, “when the kids showed up in Eureka – you’d think everybody would be sooooo happy. But they weren’t, not really. There was this big deal about how it was a miracle and all, and wasn’t it wonderful – but it’s like it wasn’t enough for them. The happy ending was good for… like… forty-eight hours. After that, they wanted to get back to tragedy and disaster, the nastier the better. And it was so hard. The kids came back, and then they took them away from me.”
“That must have been unbelievable.”
She shakes her head, taps her foot, taps out a cigarette and lights it. “I’m trying to quit,” she says. “I never smoke around the boys.”
“That’s good.”
“You have to understand,” she says, “I’m still afraid they’ll find some way to take the boys away. You know?”
“I understand.”
“See they still don’t believe I’m innocent. They never believed that Dalt just left, just spooked when I called from the police station and told him what happened. He’d had a kind of messy past; he spent some time in prison. I knew that, but I didn’t know he was on parole. And then when they couldn’t find him – they fixated on this theory. They just wouldn’t believe the truth – that he took off because he was afraid. They were always thinking they’d find the kids buried somewhere. Or Dalt would turn up and confess that he and I had sold my kids as sex slaves or something.”
“Really.”
“Really. And when the boys came back, it’s like they wanted the boys to be fucked-up. The fact that they were fine, really – I mean more or less fine – was a disappointment. And they just would not leave the little guys alone. They just kept picking away at them. I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have trusted me, either.”
“Look, I have a lot of sympathy for you. But the reason I came looking for you is because I’m desperate. I think whoever took your sons has my sons now.”
She looks away from me, and when she looks back, I see that she’s crying. She holds her face in her hands. “I know.”
“So-”
“I just don’t think I can help you. Part of it was that the police fixated on me and Dalt, but part of it was that they had no leads. The CCTV at the gas station had some footage of the trailer, but no license plate. A bunch of people at the gas station saw the guy, but he was wearing a uniform – coveralls and a cap, like a maintenance man. He didn’t show up on the station’s video.”
“Will you talk to me? Just tell me about it.”
She looks at me. “If I can do it without turning my life into a National Enquirer story – yes. I don’t know what I can tell you that’s going to help, but…” She shrugs.
“Thanks.”
She heaves a sigh, looks at her watch. “The babysitter’s going to be worried. Not to mention I’ve gotta get those boys to bed. Why don’t you come to the Bunny tomorrow?”
I don’t know why, but I play innocent. “The Bunny?”
“I saw you there – Orioles cap? You bought a bottle of water.” She taps her temple. “Too bad I didn’t see the guy who took the kids. I never forget a face.”
CHAPTER 18
I help Emma during the times when she gets slammed with customers – handing her cans of soda, restocking the backup cooler, minding the window while she rents out a board or sandcrawler. We talk during the slow periods. Between the roar of the surf, the roar of the generator, and the hum of the refrigeration machinery and air-conditioning, it’s so noisy inside the concession stand that we conduct our conversation at a volume just short of shouting.
By midmorning, we’ve each recited our basic stories. To me, there’s little question that the man who abducted her sons is the same man I think of as The Piper. But Shoffler was right. The parallels are broad. There’s no real detail, let alone evidence, to link the two cases.
We compare notes on what it was like to be suspected of responsibility for the disappearance of our own children. “With me, you can figure it would happen,” she tells me. “I mean, I’m a junkie – recovered, yeah, clean for three years now, but so what? You’re always this far from a relapse.” She pinches a tiny space between thumb and forefinger. “You gotta turn that space into – like – titanium. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“I like your chances.”
She shrugs. “The thing is – with me, it was like they thought it was a shakedown of some sort, I was trying to get money, that’s what was behind the kids’ disappearance. But with you? I don’t get it.”
“My wife and I were separated. Anyway, The Piper – he made it happen. He left this bloody T-shirt in the closet and for a couple of days, anyway, they thought I killed the kids.”
“Oh, that’s right – I remember that. The chicken blood.”
“And that bowl of water – that was part of it, too. I don’t know what they thought – I was keeping the boys locked up in the closet?” I shake my head.
“What bowl of water?”
“There was a bowl of water up on the shelf in the closet in the kids’ room. Way up high. I don’t know what it was doing there. It was the same closet where they found the T-shirt.”
It’s not really a gasp – it’s more like she’s stopped breathing – but there’s no way to miss the sense of alarm coming off Emma Sandling.
“What?”
“It really is him,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“What about dimes? Was there a row of dimes?”
“Yes. They were lined up on the bathroom sink. How…”
Emma puts a hand on my forearm. “There was a row of dimes right down the middle of Connor’s sleeping bag. I thought Con did it himself. But then Amalia – she lived in the tent next door – she took one look at those dimes and she freaked right out. I mean she practically turned white – and Amalia, she was very dark-skinned. She was the one who noticed the water, too – a bowl up on this little shelf I had, you know, rigged to the side of the tent.”
“Why did she freak out? What does it mean?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to know, but Amalia – first she tells me not to touch anything, she’s like too hysterical to explain anything. Don’t touch the water, she says, don’t move the coins. And she is serious about this, like it’s life and death, you know? And I don’t get it. I’m like – what’s this about? She tries to explain it to me, but her English isn’t all that good. What I get out of it is that it’s some kind of voodoo thing, and the bottom line is I should not mess with it. Did I say she’s from Haiti? Hang on.”
She waits on a contingent of teenagers, ringing up Cokes and chips, a tube of sunscreen, a Life’s a Beach T-shirt. A girl giggles and says, “Come on, Kevin, stop it!” Kevin. The name, just the sound of it, transfixes me. Kevin. Sean. Where are you?
There’s a lightness, an uneasiness in my chest. It’s because the police removed the water and the Liberty head dimes as evidence. In view of what Emma just told me, I can’t get over the feeling that this could hurt the boys. And maybe it has.
Emma slides the window closed, comes back, sits on the stool, pushes her bangs back away from her forehead. The air-conditioning inside the van can’t quite keep up with the heat, and we’re both covered with a film of sweat.
“So this Amalia – you still in touch with her?”
Emma shakes her head. “Never saw her again. Right about then is when the cops came and they cordoned off the tent with police tape. I wanted to stay there – I was still thinking the boys might show up – but they took me down to headquarters. They started questioning all the other people in the park, too; they blocked the exits. Amalia and her guy Bertrand – they were illegals, you know. She worked in the Comfort Inn. He was a roofer. Lots of people like that live in the parks. You know – the working poor. Campsites are way cheaper than rent. Anyway, Bertie and Amalia – they sure didn’t want to talk to the police. Amalia just clammed up. Didn’t see anything, hear anything, know anything. When the police came back to her about those dimes, because I mentioned it – and this was, like a week later – Amalia and Bertie were long gone.”
“So you never found out what she was talking about?”
“Well, I found out it was some kind of curse – which I’d already figured from the way Amalia acted. But that was about it.”
“She told you not to move them, not to even touch them?”
“Right.”
“The police seized the bowl of water from my house. And the dimes. As evidence.”
“Oh, me, too. In fact, they just about destroyed everything in my tent – including the tent – testing for blood and all. You should see what I got back when they finally returned my worldly possessions. They made a list, you know, when they took it all. I guess they have to.”
“The search warrant inventory.”
“Right, yeah – that. Well, some of the things I didn’t get back at all. It was marked down on the list: tested to destruction.” She makes little quotation marks in the air, then shakes her head. “The dimes were in a little baggie. I threw them in the ocean, afterward, you know, when I got the boys back. One by one.”
I take over the window while she goes outside to sign out two beach umbrellas. I sell two ice-cream sandwiches and a rocket pop.
“I don’t get the voodoo connection,” I tell her. “The guy who took my kids is white.”
“That’s what my boys said – the guy wasn’t black. I couldn’t really figure it out, either. One of the detectives told me they were thinking maybe it was a child-kidnapping ring.”
“Emma?”
“Please try to call me Susie.”
“I’m sorry. Susie?”
She’s sitting on the stool, her legs crossed, swinging a leg from which one flip-flop dangles. I notice that her toenails are painted five different pastel colors, like tiny jelly beans.
“Can I talk to the boys?”
“Oh, Jeez,” she says. “I knew it would get down to this.”
“I just think maybe there’s something – I don’t even know what – but something they know that might help me.”
She sighs. “I just don’t want to revive it all, you know? What if they tell you something and you want to tell the police? And then the police question them again – and it leaks out.” She sighs again. “I really don’t want to move and have to start all over again.” She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling. Behind the roar of the generator, the wind kicks up outside. A spray of sand ticks against the van. Above us, the balloon-rabbit snaps against the guy wires. When Emma looks back at me, I see the glitter of tears.
“I guess I shouldn’t ask.”
“How can you not ask?” she says. “I know that.” She balls up her hands and rubs at her eyes with her knuckles, like a child. She takes a deep breath and fills her cheeks with air, like a cartoon depiction of the North Wind – then exhales, all at once, a tiny explosion. Compassion finally overwhelms her instinct for self-preservation. “Okay,” she says, pressing her eyes shut as she says it, as if she doesn’t want to witness her own assent.
Emma sets the ground rules and makes me swear “on my children” that I will adhere to them. I will call the boys by the Florida names (Kai and Brandon). I won’t press them too hard if they don’t seem to want to answer. The session can last only fifteen minutes and whatever they say is for me only. And so on. It amazes me that after all she’s been through, she still places so much value on someone’s word.
We meet the following night. My first sight of Kai and Brandon almost takes my breath away. It’s not that they look like my boys. They don’t. But they share the habits of twinship, the way they look at each other, play off each other, interrupt one another, finish each other’s sentences, check to the other with their eyes for assurance in the midst of speaking.
I’m braced for a horror story, but what they tell me is almost reassuring.
“Where were you?” I ask them, first of all, looking from one to the other. “What was the place like?”
“It was a big house.” Brandon looks at his brother, who gives him a little nod.
“Really big.”
“With a humongous lawn.”
“Lotsa trees. Like in a forest.”
“What kind of trees?”
Kai looks at Brandon and shrugs. “I think pine?”
“Yeah,” Brandon agrees, looking at his mother. “Like in the Grand Tetons.”
“We stayed there for a couple of months,” Emma explains. “I worked in Jackson at a restaurant.”
“They had buffalo burgers,” Kai says, knotting up his face in disgust. “Gross.”
“Were there other people there, at this big house, I mean – mowing the lawn or doing the chores – or just the man who took you into his car at the McDonald’s?”
“Just him. I mean there were other people sometimes, but we couldn’t meet them. We had to stay in the big room. Doc told us.”
Doc. I don’t like the sound of that. Doctor Mengele. Papa Doc. Baby Doc.
“But we didn’t have to be quiet or nothing.”
“Or anything,” Emma corrects.
“Or anything. We could play Nintendo even.”
“Why couldn’t you meet anyone?”
“’Cause they might tell, and then Mommy” – he shoots a look at Emma – “might get into trouble and we’d never see her again.”
“When the man approached them at McDonald’s,” Emma explains, “he told them that he was a friend of mine, that I had to go bac
k into treatment, that I couldn’t stand the idea of telling the boys-”
“Doc told us she had a relapse,” Brandon says.
“He told the guys it would break my heart to say good-bye,” Emma explains. “He said I was staying in the ladies’ room until they left. He told them I’d come for them as soon as I was better. But if anyone knew they were staying with him, he wasn’t authorized – so they’d have to go back into foster care and child services would never let them live with me.”
“Ever again,” Kai says in an earnest voice. “That’s what he told us.”
“Now we have a code,” Brandon elaborates, “so we know if it’s true from Mommy or not.”
“Don’t tell him!” Kai warns.
Brandon glares at his brother, then turns to me with an apologetic smile. “We can’t tell anyone or someone might find out and then they could trick us.”
“That’s a good plan.” I can feel my fifteen minutes ticking away. “So what did you do all day? Play Nintendo? Watch TV?”
“Nuh-uh. No TV. We played Nintendo a lot. And Ping-Pong.”
“Uno and Yahtzee, too.”
“Mostly we did training.”
“Training?” I look from one to the other. “Like what?”
“Exercises,” Kai says, and begins to list them in a kind of singsong rhythm as he counts them off on his fingers. “Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching, gymnastics-”
“Both of you?” Dr. Mengele jolts into my head along with phrases like muscle biopsy, cardiac development, VO max.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did he test you – like on machines or anything?”
“Nuh-huh.”
“We had contests sometimes, though,” Kai says. “Mostly I beat.”
“Not every time,” Brandon protests.
“We did gymnastics a lot,” Kai says. “You know, somersaults and stuff.”
“And backwards somersaults. Want to see?”
“Alex doesn’t have time for that,” Emma cautions. “Apparently, they did this for hours every single day,” she adds. “Balance beams, vaults. It made me wonder if Doc was some kind of crazed would-be Olympic coach.”