The policeman spoke in halting English. “May I help you?”
I repeated my words. “I saw the person who stole my daughter. She is here in Cologne.” A strange feeling, odd and ill-fitting, overcame me.
The man rubbed his chin as he studied my coat. I knew he was looking at the sleeves and how they hid my hands. He reached for a piece of paper and asked if I wanted to fill out a report. He placed the paper in front of me. I could not understand the German words.
“A report. You must fill out a report,” he said.
“No, you see, my child was kidnapped in the United States by a woman I just saw here in the city.”
The policeman nodded a few times, as if to dismiss me. Then he tapped the paper and slid it closer.
I took the paper and shoved it into the pocket of the long coat. I began to walk out, but then I turned, ran back, and screamed as close to the policeman as I could get. Spit flung into the air as I opened my mouth.
“Get me someone to talk to! Get me someone!” I grabbed the edges of the countertop and started rocking myself back and forth. All of a sudden, two men were at my side as I screamed over and over, “Get me someone!” The coat dragged behind me as they led me into a room.
“Madame, we would like to help you, but what is the crime?”
I didn’t want to sit, but they demanded I be still. They peppered me with questions, coming fast in an unfamiliar tongue. Then in English. I described Hilda. It came down to this: I was a woman alone, wearing a man’s coat, screaming about my child who had been kidnapped almost five years ago.
“The crime you speak of did not happen in Cologne. Perhaps if you would fill out this report, we can assist you.”
“We are wasting time! My daughter is here in your city.”
The policemen exchanged glances. My hair, wet from the falling snow, hung like frozen strings of yarn. They studied me as I wrapped my arms around myself. What proof did I have, other than a glimpse of a woman I thought to be Hilda? Someone placed a cup of water on the table in front of me.
In my heart, I believed I was close to finding Vinni, but the heart is a lonely seeker of the truth. Unreliable when too tired to be called upon to set things right.
I smelled my girl. I just couldn’t see her. This was all I knew.
I caught my breath and spoke slowly, with determination. “My daughter is nearby. She is here.”
I rocked my body back and forth, unable to stop the motion.
The one policeman’s mouth turned up a bit at the corners. “Madame, five years is a long time ago.”
He didn’t have to remind me. I kept rocking.
“We need more information. Please begin with the report we have asked you to fill out.”
By now, would you have had any voice left at all? Would you have stopped rocking? Rolled up the cuffs from your coat?
I WALKED FOR hours after I left the police station. My eyes darted back and forth up and down the street, searching for Hilda. Finally, I caught a cab back to the hotel and asked the driver to wait while I ran in for money to pay him. Tuba was sitting in the lobby. When she saw me, she rushed to my side.
“You’re frozen, child. Let me get you something warm to drink,” she said.
“The cab . . .”
“I’ll take care of it,” Tuba said. “Go put on something warm, and I’ll meet you upstairs. Everything was going so well for you until they stopped filming and turned on the lights. What happened?”
“I saw the woman who took my daughter.”
THIRTY-SIX
BY THE TIME I GOT THROUGH TO JOHN D’ORFINI, IT WAS 10:00 a.m. Spring Haven time. “Are you sure it was Hilda?” John D’Orfini asked through the phone. Then he added, “I should have gone with you to Cologne.”
“I’m sure. I saw her!” Even as I shouted, I wondered at my own certainty. “The woman I saw wore her hair exactly like Hilda’s. And she looked at me. She stood up and hesitated for a minute. I noticed her as the camera lights went off. Before that, I couldn’t see faces in the audience.”
“Maddy, this is a good thing. I mean it.”
“Good? What are you talking about?” I couldn’t comprehend where he was going. My voice trembled.
“If Hilda read about you as one of the artists in the show and made the decision to show up . . . well, that means something.”
“What?”
“She needed to see you. Did Hilda know you used to paint when you were younger?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So she reads about you. She goes to the panel where she knows you’re going to be speaking. Right before the end, while she thinks the cameras are rolling and the lights are shining on you, she gets up, and”—John D’Orfini snapped his fingers— “lights out, and she’s the only one standing. She’s caught. She probably knew right away that you saw her.”
“I know she did. She stopped and looked at me.”
“This is good,” John D’Orfini said.
John D’Orfini made point after point to calm me. Twice he told me he wished he were with me. “If Hilda is starting to show herself, this means something. Soon she’ll make a mistake. Right now she thinks she’s hidden away with Vinni. She thinks she’s safe.”
“I . . . I went to the police station, but I had to file a report. I didn’t do it.”
“Let me take care of this,” said John D’Orfini.
I did not—I could not—tell John D’Orfini that my first thought was of Vinni. That the “borrowing” of my child had ended. Kosinski had told me if I stopped asking questions, Vinni would be returned. I left out that part when I called John D’Orfini. If I had told him, I know it would have changed his theory why Hilda had attended the discussion at the museum.
Did Hilda need to see me out of guilt or remorse? Or was it morbid curiosity? Had she planned on approaching me and changed her mind when I had spoken on the panel about Number Eleven and what had motivated me to paint the wailing babies?
“The heart has a way of changing shape when being trampled upon,” I said, as I sat facing the auditorium. “This is what I’ve tried to paint—the stampeding like wolves amid muscles and bone across the broken landscape of suffering.” I took a sip of water. The other panelists waited for me to continue. “My child was stolen from me five years ago. I haven’t stopped believing that she’s alive.” A hush came over the audience.
“I paint because otherwise I might kill myself.”
Silence—corner to corner—filled the room.
TUBA AND I had breakfast together the next morning. She had postponed joining her two children at their family home on the island of Chiemsee, outside Prien. “It will be just the three of us,” Tuba said, as she sipped coffee over a plate of two poached eggs in the hotel’s dining room. Her white gloves matched the cup’s elegance. She had dined with her two children the night before while I stayed in my hotel room. It was impossible for me to sleep as I thought about Vinni. She would turn thirteen in May.
“Are you sure the woman you saw was the woman you believe took your child?” Tuba asked. Everything about her had softened since she saw her children. Her chignon—pulled less taut—exposed a side wave brushed naturally away from her face.
John D’Orfini had asked me the same thing. At one point during our conversation the night before, I had screamed into the phone, “Do you believe me? I’ve got to know that you believe me, or else . . .”
“What?” His voice went tender. “You’ll give up? I know that’s not going to happen.”
I extended my stay in Cologne for another week. Tuba insisted on being with me. Together, we returned to the police station I had stumbled on when I was wearing a man’s coat with sleeves that hid my hands. My story was the same. So was their response. After two days, I told Tuba to go. “Be with your family. It’s the holidays.”
Reluctantly, she left the Excelsior Hotel with a promise to call me every evening.
Although the staff proved kind whenever we spoke, their faces changed from com
passionate to polite. They’d nod their heads, cross their arms over their chests, and glance sideways.
Five years ago, my daughter was kidnapped. . . . A woman here in Cologne . . . she took her.
Not only the concierge but two of his assistants—the man working days and the woman who worked nights—checked in on me. I hardly knew what to ask for.
It was a week before Christmas. The city was full of life. I felt more alone in the crowds than ever before. I should go home. But how could I leave? Over and over I replayed seeing Hilda in my head. If she was here, so was Vinni.
At the end of the week, the concierge at the hotel took pity on me. His brother-in-law was a police captain in another precinct. He offered to accompany me himself to the station. “Perhaps a personal introduction could bring you some kind of satisfaction,” he said. The captain offered me a seat in his private office while the concierge read from an aging magazine outside his door. He wore a pair of rimless reading glasses. A man in his late forties, he had a roundness that softened his stiff way of moving, as if he were put together in fewer pieces than the rest of us. The captain spoke English well. There were no wild arm gestures or voices raised. Vinni had been kidnapped in another country, five years ago. What could be done now?
“I wish there was something we could do, madame,” the captain said as he stood. He showed me a book of pictures of women who had been in trouble with the law. I doubted each turn of the page. The next day, he assigned a young police officer to drive me around the city. I sat in the front seat of the vehicle, feeling like a child. I stared out the window, scanning every moving person, but I saw no one resembling the woman I had seen at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. Hilda had vanished.
I CALLED KAY as soon as I arrived back home, and told her I was sure I had spotted Hilda in Cologne. John D’Orfini had filled her in, but her response was not as sweet as his.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“But do you believe I saw her?” I said.
“I believe you think you saw her. Other than that, I don’t know. After all, I wasn’t there,” Kay said. “Eyewitness identification is often unreliable.”
I wanted to tell Kay I was sure that Vinni was alive. Hadn’t Kosinski sliced off my toe in exchange for my silence? I wanted to show Kay the photo of Vinni that Kosinski had given me. But I couldn’t. I was too afraid to take the chance of losing my girl.
The next day, I waited for John D’Orfini. His train was due to arrive at Penn Station at 7:00 p.m. “I’ll cook,” he said. “Buy something, and I’ll whip it up when I get to your place.”
That night, over dinner, I came close to telling John D’Orfini everything. Words piled up as I grew quiet.
“Are you tired? Jet lag? What’s going on inside that head of yours?”
I was tired—tired of not telling him all the truth.
“Look. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for you to come all the way up here,” I said. “I’m sorry. I really am, but I don’t feel like talking much.” I sensed the irritation in my voice. I pushed up the sleeves of my sweater, even though I felt chilled.
John D’Orfini nodded, took our plates over to the sink, and started the water. He had lived alone so long, he didn’t believe in using a dishwasher unless there were dishes for at least four.
“Leave them,” I said.
“You want me to go, don’t you?” His dark eyes slipped into a distant place I recognized from before, where he protected himself by drawing upon his profession. His voice stiffened in line with his shoulders.
“You need some time. You’re in shock from believing you saw Hilda. Understandable.”
When he spoke in one-word sentences, my heart broke. But I had made a promise to myself in Germany. No matter how long I had to wait, I would do it. And I would do it without telling John D’Orfini or Kay. I had come this far in silence.
ON THE TRAIN ride home, John D’Orfini called me on his cell phone. I had fallen asleep on the couch and woke in a fit believing I was still at the Excelsior Hotel in Cologne.
“Maddy?”
I had no idea what time it was.
“Are you home?”
He laughed. “Only if you count halfway to Asbury Park as almost home.”
“What’s the matter?” I felt guilty having asked him to leave the city after he had trekked all the way up here to see me.
“Uh . . . there’s something we should talk about,” he said.
I sat up and wiped the corners of my dry lips. My phone said 11:22 p.m. He had left my apartment about two hours earlier. “What do you mean?” I had asked him to leave because I needed the space. Why was he calling me?
“You want to know about things when they happen, right? Well, there’s some things . . . that you should know.”
I knew he wasn’t going to say much more while riding on a public train bound for Monmouth and Ocean Counties.
“Should I come down tomorrow, or do you want to call me when you get home?”
“That’s an easy answer. We didn’t really see each other tonight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Even in my half-awake state, I could tell that John D’Orfini had something on his mind.
I OPENED THE door to the Spring Haven Religious Gift Shop and saw Katherine Mulvey unknotting a gold cross necklace at the counter.
“Feel free to browse,” she said, without lifting her head. We have some beautiful single-rose vases perfect for last-minute Christmas shopping.”
“Actually, I’m meeting someone here.”
Katherine stopped and looked up with the knotted cross lying gently between her fingers. She studied me as I looked to the right of her shoulder at a selection of little girls’ white veils inside a glass case. “You’re that woman,” she said. The twitching on the side of her neck pulled at the tip of her collarbone. “John D’Orfini’s waiting for you in the back.”
I followed Katherine past the statue section, where dozens of wooden and ceramic versions of St. Christopher, St. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and, of course, St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary lined up like commuters at a bus stop. I reminded her I had a name.
“I’m Maddy Stewart,” I said.
She slowed a bit and turned at the display of amethyst and crystal rosary beads.
“Yes, I know who you are.” Her neck pulsed violently.
My detective stood up as soon as he saw me, and pulled out a chair. Katherine took a seat on the opposite side of the table. I looked at him as I questioned what I was doing here. He had texted me earlier and said to meet him at the shop.
“How’s your family, Katherine?” John D’Orfini knew to ask about her five children, all of whom had attended St. Rose’s elementary and high school one town north of Spring Haven. “Will they all be coming home for Christmas?”
“Ann Marie and her brood can’t make it this year. The rest will start coming in tomorrow, God willing and the weather holds up, which means no nor’easter until after New Year’s.”
That was just enough police foreplay for John D’Orfini.
Katherine ran her polished nails over the tops of several of the religious statues in an effort to dust away what she had missed.
“The other day, Katherine, I believe I might have heard you at Cryan’s Deli mentioning a woman named Hilda? Could I have heard that right?”
I began to feel as if I was there for dramatic effect—a life-size figure of a woman propped up in a ladder-back chair.
“It’ll be five years ago this coming August that a little girl was kidnapped from the beach here in Spring Haven.” John D’Orfini gestured toward me. “You may remember meeting her mother.”
What the hell?
“The leading suspect has always been a woman named Hilda, who lived here with her husband. She vanished the day her husband died. So did a child named Vinni, here on vacation with her mother. You remember this?”
All the while John D’Orfini spoke, Katherine
took turns fussing with the odd arrangement of wooden martyrs lined up on the table. Turning them at odd angles as if introducing them to one another at a gala.
“I know we spoke to you at the time of the child’s disappearance, but I’m thinking something here, and I know it’s a long shot, but you wouldn’t have been talking about this same woman named Hilda today at Cryan’s, now, would you have?”
Katherine did a once-over on top of the most expensive statue of the Virgin Mary—all crystal—without moving from her chair. She cleared her throat and excused herself for a glass of water.
“What am I doing here?” I said in a low voice. “I’m uncomfortable.”
John D’Orfini touched my hand with his. “Trust me,” he said.
Katherine returned with two glasses of water and placed one on the table in front of John D’Orfini and one for me. “Thank you,” I said.
Katherine stood holding on to the back of her chair. “I was speaking about the same Hilda.” She looked at me. “The summer your child disappeared, this woman walked into the store and we started chatting. She had been in here a few times but never bought anything and only said ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye,’ no matter how long she stayed and browsed. One day, she noticed the trinity rings—the ones in the front case—and asked me how much they were. I told her the rings started at thirty-five dollars and ran up to one hundred fifteen. She asked me if she could see one up close—the thirty-five-dollar one.”
Katherine let out a long sigh before she continued.
I could barely breathe.
“She told me she had a daughter who died. It was a long time ago. That’s all she said.”
I loosened the scarf knotted around my neck.
“Why didn’t you tell us this earlier? Like, five years ago?” John D’Orfini asked.
“I mind my own business, John—you know that. Doesn’t the eighth commandment remind us never to bear false witness?” Katherine hesitated, as if she knew the commandments had nothing to do with it. Especially the eighth. Then she added, “And besides, the woman had a sadness about her. I felt sorry for her.”
A Matter of Chance Page 25