Kiss Mommy Goodbye

by Joy Fielding

  Donna grabbed the envelope from the startled woman’s hands. She fumbled around impotently for a few seconds, unable to open it, her hands shaking almost uncontrollably. Mel took the envelope from her and quickly tore it open, handing it back to Donna immediately without looking inside. “Where did Victor go?” Mel asked, as Donna quickly perused the few shorts words Victor had written.

  “I have no idea,” Mrs. Adilman said. “Don’t you know?”

  A low wail began slowly to fill the surrounding air. It started as a hum, became stronger, a definite tone, growing, growing, getting higher and higher until it thrust itself into the open air and exploded. Mel quickly threw his arms around Donna, holding her neck tightly against him, but nothing could muffle the intensity of her cry. The final, agonizing death wail of an animal caught in a hunter’s trap. The sound had no beginning and no end. It sprang from the belly like a newborn infant and escaped into the air a full-grown demon.

  Mel reached down and prodded the note away from Donna’s tightly clenched fist. Holding the note up behind Donna’s back, he read the brief message that Victor had earlier penned:

  The point is learning to live with it.

  Mel crumbled the note in his hand and threw it angrily to the ground.

  SIXTEEN

  “What were they wearing the last time you saw them?”

  Donna stared into the golden-flecked eyes of the moonfaced police lieutenant. He was a short man, intensely muscular but surprisingly neutral in appearance, as if the exaggerated curve of his chin and jowls had wiped out any remaining traces of character that might have earlier existed. It was a face that betrayed nothing. Probably the ideal face for a police lieutenant, Donna thought absently.

  She was so weary. They’d had no sleep the night before, the police having asked them to come back in the morning, Sunday night being no time to cope with anything other than the kind of dire emergencies that Palm Beach County seldom had. Their phone calls—to Danny Vogel and others of Victor’s friends and acquaintances—had proved useless. Each knew nothing or claimed to. Donna suspected it was the former. Victor would take no chances. Never having been one to confide in his friends, he would not be about to start now. His disappearance would be well planned, clean, and total. They had called both Ed Gerber and Mr. Stamler. Neither lawyer was able to be of much help, though they had appointments set up with both men for later in the day.

  “Adam was wearing a white-and-blue striped jersey,” Donna said softly, picturing her little boy as he sat proudly on the toilet, beaming over in her direction. “And white shorts. No socks. Blue sandals.”

  “And the little girl?”

  The tears immediately began to fall down Donna’s cheeks, her eyes already swollen almost shut from crying. “She was wearing a red-and-white checked sundress,” she said slowly, trying to keep her voice from cracking. “With matching underpants with ruffles. And white sandals.” She stopped, feeling her daughter’s small arms around her neck. Mmm, you’re delicious, she had told the child. “And a white ribbon in her hair,” she added. “Her hair is very curly.”

  “Yes, we have their photographs,” the lieutenant reminded her gently, holding up the pictures she had brought in. “They’re beautiful children.”

  “Yes, they are.” Donna reached over and grabbed Mel’s hand. They sat side by side across from the police lieutenant. The small sign on his desk identified him as one Stan Robinson. Donna estimated his age at around fifty. He was staring at her, probably trying to organize what he was about to say, but Donna got no clues from the set of his features. She felt only that whatever he was about to say, she was not going to like it.

  “I hate cases like this,” he began. Donna caught her breath. “We’re seeing more and more of them lately. Like an epidemic. One parent gets custody; the other one runs off with the kids.” He shook his head. “It’s about the meanest thing you can do to somebody.” He paused. “And there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

  “What do you mean there’s not a lot you can do about it?” Donna demanded.

  “There’s a term for what your husband’s done,” Lieutenant Robinson said evenly. “It’s called legal kidnapping. A parent kidnaps his own kids. It’s not really kidnapping because it’s a parent. There’s no ransom. The object isn’t to hurt the child. There’s no law against it. They keep talking about bringing in a law but,” he shrugged, “frankly, even if they do, it would be a pretty hard law to enforce. I can’t see it doing much good.”

  “But he’s in defiance of a court order,” Mel argued.

  “Yeah, that’s true. So, we got something there. You find him, we’ll slap him with a court order.”

  Donna felt a strange buzzing sound behind her ears. “You won’t help us?”

  “We’ll help you as much as we can,” the lieutenant said, “but I don’t think it’ll do you a lot of good. Look, Patty Hearst disappeared for how many years? And we had the whole country out looking for her. You’re talking about a man and two kids who nobody knows and nobody cares about except the two of you, and you’re talking about a whole globe he could be hiding in. The kids got passports?”

  “What?”

  “You got the kids registered on either your or your ex-husband’s passports?”

  Donna looked frantically at the ceiling, then back at the police lieutenant. “I have them on mine,” she said with some excitement. “When I went to have my passport renewed last year, I had the kids registered on it, I don’t know why.”

  Mel’s free hand reached over and squeezed their already interlocking other hands.

  Stan Robinson stood up and moved around the desk. “Well, then, at least we know they can’t leave the country.” Donna let out a deep breath. “That leaves fifty states and probably Canada.” He paused long enough to let the hopelessness of his words sink in. “I don’t think you need a passport to get into Canada,” he continued. “We can check with immigration, but I doubt it’ll turn up anything.”

  “What else can you do?” Mel asked.

  “Basically, just tell you what you can do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Call all the airlines, see if they have a record of Mr. Cressy and the kids on any of their recent flights. I’d also call the Tampa and Miami airports. That’s a hell of a job because there are so many airlines and thousands of flights he could have taken, if he took a plane at all. Probably he did, but then he probably also used a phoney name and paid cash for the tickets. You could check with whatever banks Mr. Cressy used, see if he closed out or transferred any accounts, but I doubt they’ll tell you anything. Check where he worked. Maybe he got a transfer. Call your lawyer. Call anyone who knew him. Any relatives. Send pictures to all your friends and family who live out of state, if you have any. You can hire a private detective, but that gets pretty expensive, and usually they don’t turn up much unless you can give them lots to work with. Try and remember any place he might have mentioned that he’d like to live. What does he like to do? Any particular sport?” He leaned against the desk. “We had a case here not too long ago where the mother got custody and the father took off with the kid—a little girl. Six years old, I think. The mother hired lawyers, detectives, the works. Couldn’t find her. Took a year. They finally found them in Colorado. Husband liked to ski. But it wasn’t the lawyers or the detectives or even the wife who clued in. They got a phone call one day from a friend who lived in South Africa, of all places. He’d been to Aspen skiing on a holiday and he saw the guy lining up at one of the slopes.”

  “Victor doesn’t like to ski,” Donna muttered numbly, hearing the buzzing sound once more behind her ears.

  “The point is—” Lieutenant Robinson said.

  Mel cut him off. “She got the point, Lieutenant.”

  Stan Robinson walked back behind his desk. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I really wish there was more we could do.”

  “So do we,” Mel said, standing up and helping Donna to her feet.

  The buzzing sound grew lo
uder. Before they had walked several steps, Donna felt her legs buckle beneath her, was aware that Mel’s arms had prevented her from falling, but was aware of nothing else except the persistent buzzing. Then she fainted, and the buzzing stopped.

  The woman had Victor’s eyes and full mouth, but aside from these two features, there was little to connect Lenore Cressy with her son. The woman was blonde, although this was undoubtedly aided by artificial coloring, and was quite short, where Victor was tall and dark. She was somewhat top heavy but she dressed tastefully, even meticulously, and her makeup was cleverly, almost artfully, done, to disguise the unwanted wrinkles and creases of age. Donna looked hard at the woman, estimating her age, from what she knew of her background, at close to seventy, although she looked easily ten years younger. Except for the sadness around her eyes she was still an amazingly attractive woman.

  “I haven’t seen my son in over eight years,” she said with simple directness. Donna felt her heart sink. It was a feeling she had become increasingly familiar with in the last five days.

  She and Mel had called every friend or acquaintance Donna could ever remember Victor so much as mentioning—no one knew anything. No one had any ideas. Victor never talked about his plans to anyone—his office had been stunned by his sudden departure. They had no idea where he might have vanished. The airlines had been initially very uncooperative, unwilling, until the police stepped in, to go over the previous Saturday’s passenger lists. When the situation was formally explained to them, they grudgingly acquiesced, but after several days, each airline had come back with nothing. No Victor Cressy was anywhere on record. And there were simply too many single parents traveling with children to try to run them all down. Sharon, of course, would not even have required a ticket. If Victor had not used his real name, and he obviously had not, there was no hope in finding them through the airlines.

  The bank where Donna had shared an account with Victor was likewise of no help. They could release no information, she was told, though as Donna was about to leave, a sympathetic teller had informed her secretly that Mr. Cressy had closed his account there months ago.

  None of this came as any surprise to Donna, but it did come as a constant disappointment nonetheless. Ed Gerber had been kinder than Donna had prepared herself for—he seemed genuinely surprised by Victor’s actions—but he claimed he knew nothing that could be of any help. Mr. Stamler said he had various contacts in various states whom he said he would get in touch with immediately. He also arranged for the hiring of a private detective, who so far had turned up nothing except the fact that Victor had sold his car—for cash—to Ben’s used car lot on South Dixie. He had apparently dropped it off just after leaving Donna. The private detective had also called all airline limousines and taxis but no one remembered anything substantial. One cab driver thought he remembered taking a man and a couple of kids to the airport either Saturday or Sunday, but he couldn’t remember what airline, and even if he had, there had been nothing to stop Victor from then proceeding on to another terminal. It was all futile anyway, since the airlines had no record of any Victor Cressy. Knowing Victor, Donna thought, he had probably changed planes several times in several cities, enjoying every minute along the way.

  They had sent pictures of Victor and the kids to everyone they knew who lived out of state, including Mel’s four sisters, two of whom lived in the L.A. area, and two whom lived on the East Coast, and his two brothers, one in the state of Washington and the other in Hawaii. They sent similar pictures and information to Donna’s sister, Joan, who was currently living in England, just in case Victor had managed somehow to get the children out of the country.

  And finally they had come here to Connecticut. To see Lenore Cressy.

  The woman’s eyes filled with tears as Donna poured out her story. With each new fact, the woman seemed to grow increasingly fragile. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely audible. “I never knew that I had grandchildren,” she said, making no moves to stem the flow of her pain.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Cressy,” Donna said with genuine feeling. “I asked Victor many times in the first years of our marriage to let me call you, but he was very adamant. I kept hoping you would call, but you never did.”

  “I called for almost two years, but he would never speak to me. Finally, I stopped calling.”

  Mel’s voice immediately trailed the older woman’s. Donna was startled—she’d almost forgotten he was there. “How did you find out Victor had gone to Florida, Mrs. Cressy?” he asked.

  “A friend of mine, Mrs. Jarvis, a widow, she went down to Palm Beach to spend the winter. She ran into Victor at a movie one night. He pretended he didn’t know who she was, but she knew.”

  Donna lowered her head. Another accidental sighting like the man skiing in Aspen, Colorado. How long until they had a similar accident? A month? Two? A year? Five years? Ever? The thought made her start to tremble. She looked around the well-appointed living room. The furniture was obviously old but, like its owner, meticulously maintained.

  “Mrs. Cressy,” Donna asked, leaning forward in her seat toward the woman who sat across from her. “Can you tell me anything at all about Victor that might help me find him?”

  The woman shook her head. “He always took things so to heart,” she said, remembering. “Even as a boy, you had to be so careful about anything you said to him, be careful he didn’t take it the wrong way. His feelings were always so easily hurt. You had to be so careful.” Her voice trailed off, then continued. “He always worried about doing everything exactly the right way. He could never accept responsibility if something went wrong. It was always somebody else’s fault. He used to make himself sick with worry the first day of school every year—he was always worried that he wouldn’t go in the right door, of all things. Very concerned that he wouldn’t find the right door.” Again, she stopped.

  Donna stared long and hard at the woman who was obviously lost in her own memories. “Mrs. Cressy,” she persisted, “would you please call me if you hear anything from Victor? Please.”

  Lenore Cressy’s voice was quiet. “No,” she said, simply and quietly.

  Donna felt as if the word had been loudly shouted in her ear. For a second, she thought she had not heard correctly or that the older woman had misinterpreted her request. Lenore Cressy caught the confusion in Donna’s eyes. “You have to understand,” she said hesitating, obviously debating with herself whether or not she should call Donna by her first name or as Mrs. Cressy, and then deciding not to call her anything at all, “that eight years ago, I lost my only son because of something stupid that I did. I’m not about to make that same mistake again.” Once more, she hesitated. Donna substituted the word Donna for the pause.

  “You won’t help me?” Donna asked, incredulously.

  “For eight, years,” the woman answered, “I have been praying for another chance. I won’t lie to you. If Victor called me, gave me that chance, I’d never betray him again.”

  “But you never betrayed him to begin with!”

  “He thinks I did.” She stopped, her head moved slowly from side to side. “Funny, how sometimes the harder you try to do the right thing, the worse it turns out. I tried so hard with Victor and Janine never to interfere in their lives, always to listen to both sides if they ever came to me with a problem, not to judge them. I tried always to be fair. Look where it got me.” She looked back directly at Donna. “I’m sorry,” she said with great finality. “I won’t be able to help you.”

  Donna felt the frustration rising in her voice, felt the tears edging up behind her eyes. “But they’re my children!”

  The woman’s voice was calm. “He’s my son.”

  “He’s a shit, what else can I tell you?”

  Donna stared hard at the young woman who sat across from her amid the plethora of cushions on her bright cherry-and-pink flowered sofa. Janine Gauntley Cressy McCloud was perhaps a year or two older than Donna, her face full of interesting angles, her body lush with the
early months of pregnancy.

  “I spent three years on the couch because of that creep,” the young woman was saying. “It took me another three years after that to like men enough to marry one of them, and here I am now, almost thirty-six, finally about to have my first child. You know, even hearing that crud’s name still makes me angry, even after all these years.”

  Donna compared herself silently with Victor’s earlier wife. Physically, there was a mild, superficial resemblance. They were both the same approximate height and coloring, the same general age range, but that was really all. Intellectually, Janine McCloud seemed more street-smart, less bookish. Emotionally, she seemed tougher, more coarse. Not really what Donna had expected at all.

  “We were married for two years, the most miserable two years of my life. Don’t ask me why. I honest-to-God have no idea. I tried—I really did. I wasn’t a child-bride or anything. I’d been around a bit. But I’d never met anyone like Victor. I didn’t know what to do for him—to make him happy. Nothing I did was right. I busted my butt trying to accommodate him, and you know what he does? He walks out! Announces he wants a divorce. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “And Lenore?”

  Janine McCloud stood up and walked to the window. It was night. Her husband was off playing basketball at the local Y. “Oh, her. She’s a real case. As bad as he is.”

  Donna looked surprised. She remembered Victor’s assessment of his ex-wife’s relationship with his mother.

  “I tell you,” the woman continued, “that whole family’s nuts. All two of them. You wanna know, I made a real effort to be friends with that woman. I was never very close with my own mother and Lenore seemed like a nice enough lady, although, at first, I tell you, she didn’t think I was good enough for her little boy and she made that very clear. If there’s one thing that lady is, it’s honest. But I was pretty persistent because it seemed important to Victor—I wanted him to be happy. So, I called her every day, I took her to lunch, I visited her all the time. I don’t think she ever really accepted me, but she tried—listen, she wanted Victor to be happy too. That was the main thing. Make Victor happy. He was her golden boy, all right. Victor Cressy could do no wrong. She always took his side, no matter what the argument. No matter how badly he behaved. She was always there to make excuses for him. He worked too hard, she’d say, he was under so much pressure. I shouldn’t take everything he said so seriously. She was blind as far as he was concerned. She would do whatever he told her to do. I guess ’cause his father died when he was so young and Victor kind of took over, made all the decisions. And she likes that. But underneath it all, she’s a very tough little lady. You know what I used to call her? Not to her face, of course, just to myself. I used to call her Mighty Mouse!” She stopped, grimacing and shaking her head. “Hey, I’m not being very nice. I mean, when Victor walked out, she was really very sweet to me. I was in a bad way. Lenore was always there for me. Suddenly, Victor gives her some sort of ultimatum, and I guess it caught Lenore a bit off guard, she took too long to answer—I don’t know, and off he goes. Disappears. Wow! Really messed her up.” She stopped, walking back from the window to where Donna and Mel sat on the red-and-white striped love seat. “So what does she do? She cuts me off—right off. Same as him. Exactly. Just in case he comes back, he’s gotta see she’s no longer consorting with the enemy. Or something. Beats the shit out of me.”