“Why?”
“Because I need to find him almost as much as you do,” he said, his voice sounding ragged. He gave her one last look, walked into the tiny bathroom, and closed the door.
Mary kept her eyes moving back and forth as they motored through Chicago in the 1932 Ford that Charles drove. By this point in her life, nothing really surprised her any longer. Sitting in the front seat next to the man she’d wished to hell and back . . . well, it almost made sense. She didn’t know how much ground he’d covered looking for Jack, but she knew he’d been able to do a lot more than she had. And for that, she’d use every bit of willpower she had to swallow her pride, her anger, and her mistrust if it meant finding her son faster than she would if she were searching alone.
She’d spent a sleepless night in the apartment, wondering if she was making the right decision, worrying that Charles Westerly would slip out in the morning without her. She had been ready and waiting when he knocked on the bedroom door that morning just after dawn. They left together, strangers who had a single purpose.
“Are we looking in the city?” she asked, finally breaking the silence that had lingered between them since leaving his place twenty minutes before.
“I’ve already covered it,” he said.
“The whole city?” She was skeptical.
“More or less,” he said. “I’ve got contacts in most of the police precincts. I check in every week to see about any reports involving children.”
“So where are we going?”
“Moline,” he answered.
“Moline? That’s south?”
He nodded. “Southwest—about a hundred and fifty miles or so.”
“What about Rockford?”
“Been there.”
“Elgin?”
“Done it.”
“Well, then, what about—?” But she didn’t finish when Charles hooked an arm over the back of the seat and half turned to look at her.
“It’d probably be easier if you just look at the maps I’ve got in the backseat,” he said. “Open the briefcase. It’ll give you a pretty good idea of where I’ve already looked.”
She turned and looked over the seat at the brown case.
“I have to stop to fill up with gas.” Charles turned into a Texaco filling station, rolling the Ford across the driveway air hose, dinging it twice, and triggering the appearance of a station attendant from the white enameled building. His crisp tan uniform had a gold star on the shirt pocket with Elmer embroidered above it.
“Morning, Mr. Westerly,” Elmer said to Charles through the open window. “Fill ’er up?”
“Yeah, thanks, Elmer. How’s the coffee this morning?”
“Not bad,” he said. “Will’s inside. He’ll get it for you.”
Charles opened the driver’s door and looked at Mary. “Cup of coffee? I won’t be stopping again for about fifty miles.”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
When Charles went into the station, Mary reached behind the seat and pulled the briefcase onto her lap. Releasing the clasps, she opened it and discovered dozens of maps inside. Besides one of Illinois, there were maps of Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Several of them were obviously well used, with corners dog-eared, folds creased so some of the printing had worn off. The top one was of Indiana, and she opened it. She traced her finger along a trail of red x’s—state highways, cities, and even major streets. Handwritten notes in a sharp, concise penmanship along the margins included dates, names of hotels, hospitals, diners . . . someone’s name here and there. All the places he’s been looking . . . really looking for Jack.
Elmer slammed the hood down, and she turned from the maps toward the plate-glass window. Charles was standing in front of a cash register, talking to a man in a uniform identical to Elmer’s.
“I’ve been looking for Jack. I need to find him almost as much as you do” echoed in her mind as she watched him.
Charles took a step, and she lost sight of him when he moved behind some tires on display, saw him appear briefly, and then he was gone again behind a poster taped to the window advertising Texaco’s Golden Motor Oil. She looked more closely and saw another flyer, not as big as the ad for oil, but it was a decent size on white card stock. Missing Child! Reward if Found!
Mary’s heart stuttered in her chest as she hurried to slip the briefcase from her lap and open the door. She was across the space in a few steps, staring at a picture of her son.
Jack! The flyer gave pertinent information, including his handicap, approximate size, age, date he was last seen. And a phone number to call with any information. The photo was the one that had appeared in the Chicago Daily Times. She reached out to lay her hand on Jack’s image.
Mary felt Charles approach and stand a few feet away. She tore her gaze away from Jack’s picture to look at him. “You? You did this?”
He nodded, holding a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee and two doughnuts. “Ready?” he asked.
She looked at the window again, then turned to follow him back to the car. I believe him. . . .
Wind rushed in the driver’s-side window as they sped down the highway. Mary subconsciously counted the telephone poles along the road as they passed. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three . . . all the places he’s been, and he still hasn’t given up. . . .
“How many flyers have you put up?” she asked, capturing her hair whipping around her face with her gloved hand and holding it against her shoulder. At another time and place she would have enjoyed the ride—it had been a long time since she’d sat in the front seat of a car with the spring air flowing around her.
Charles had crooked his elbow out the window and his right wrist was hooked over the top of the steering wheel. “I had a hundred made, and I’ve circulated almost all of them. There are a few left in the trunk.”
“How did you get the picture of Jack?”
“You probably recognize it from the Chicago paper,” he explained. “I went to the newspaper office, and they had an archived copy of the photograph.”
Mary looked at Charles’s profile for a moment. He probably would have made a good governor. He looked like a man who could command authority, even though he seemed satisfied with his morning coffee from Texaco in a waxed cup. He glanced at her, and she turned her gaze to the windshield.
“There was a phone number on the flyer,” she said.
“It’s an answering service,” he said. “I check in with them every other day to see if anyone has called.”
“Has anyone? Called, I mean?”
“I’d say a couple dozen phone calls have come in, and I’ve checked out every one of the leads, but . . .”
Mary just nodded.
“Some of them were from people trying to be helpful, and some of the tips come from crackpots who get their kicks from messing around with something like that.”
“I wrote letters from Oakdale,” she said. “Dozens of letters to anyone I thought might be able to tell me about Jack. I don’t know if I can ever explain how painful it is to send those hopeful letters out there in the world—and never get anything in return.”
His expression darkened. “No need to explain. The pain must have been unbearable for you.”
“It never occurred to me to write to you,” she confessed. “Especially not . . .” But she didn’t finish.
A moment passed before he glanced at her. “I thought of telling you about my search, but I’d already caused you so much pain, I couldn’t bear to be the one to give you false hope as well.”
“You wanted to find him and then tell me.”
“That was the plan,” he said with a rueful smile. “Guess I shouldn’t have kept it a secret.”
“We all have our secrets, I suppose,” she said, her words almost lost in the rush of air through the window.
He murmured his agreement, and Mary turned to look out the window, her hand still gripping her hair. “But have you ever kept a secret that you wouldn’t tell anyone because of
what could happen if the truth came out? The kind of secret you’ll even lie about for the sake of helping or protecting someone you love?”
When he didn’t immediately answer, she looked back at him, at the tense set of his jaw.
He finally nodded. “I should have done a lot of things differently,” he said.
Mary’s answer was heavy with regret. “That sums up my life.”
The road sign announced Moline 45 miles.
“How do you go about it?” Mary asked, changing the subject. “How do you start looking once you’re in a city?”
“It varies with the size of the place,” he began. “I usually start at the police station, check the hospitals, the local morgue . . .” He flinched and glanced at her with a look of apology. “I’m sorry, that was—”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I asked.” She turned back to the scenery out the window.
“Tell me about Jack,” he suggested after a few more miles.
She contemplated for a moment, then, “He likes puzzles. And anything chocolate. His smile always starts in his eyes, and then kind of meanders down to his mouth—like he’s giving me a bonus by letting me see his teeth.” She couldn’t help but smile at the mental image, and she caught Charles staring at her and shrugged self-consciously. “It’s funny the things you notice about your own child,” she said. “He’s been special since he was born, but I’ve always had an uphill battle to get anyone else to see it.”
“You’re talking about the . . . gift? The prophecy?”
She hesitated, holding her right hand out the window against the wind. “That’s part of it,” she finally said, “but he’s so much more than that. He’s a self-contained miracle, even though he’s filled with a bundle of emotions that can’t come out, words that can’t be expressed, sounds that I don’t even know if he can imagine. But—it is the gift that makes him a valuable person in the eyes of the world. I finally realized that.”
“So the gift is real?”
She closed her eyes for a moment at the implication, then forced herself to answer calmly. “It’s as real as the maps in your briefcase, as accurate as the red lines you’ve drawn along those highways.”
“Seems like a big burden for such a little boy,” Charles said.
Mary felt the truth of the words, the weight of his statement, the regret that she’d allowed Jack to be caught up in all the gift entailed. She tugged the cuff of one glove a little higher on her wrist, then clasped her hands together in her lap. The wind went back to swirling her hair around her face.
“I asked Jerry about your gloves,” Charles said, a hint of apology in his voice. “He told me you were burned as a child.”
“Is that all he said?” she asked warily.
“Pretty much,” he admitted. “If you have a choice, he said you never take them off.”
“Well, for once Jerry wasn’t lying,” she said mockingly.
“How old were you when it happened?”
“Eight. Same as Jack’s age when . . . when we were separated.” She cast a quick glance at him. “My mother was canning . . . there was boiling water, and . . .” Her voice faded with the memory. “And I’ve been wearing my gloves ever since.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Okay.”
“How did you wind up with a man like Jerry?” He kept his eyes on the road.
Mary sighed. “I was young—only sixteen when we met. And I was living with a foster family.”
“What happened to your parents?”
She allowed herself a small smile. “They were so in love when I was little. I remember lots of whispers and kisses and quiet dinners that didn’t include me. But then my dad made a terrible mistake. My mother . . . well, she found out he was having an affair.” She looked over at Charles and could see his hands gripping the steering wheel. “Am I saying too much?”
He shook his head.
“Anyway, she couldn’t stay with him after that. Couldn’t forgive him—couldn’t forgive herself for not being enough for him, I guess. She started to drink. My dad moved away, not wanting to have anything to do with me—with us.” Her voice softened. “She literally drank herself to death.”
“And your dad? Do you see him?”
“Never. I don’t know where he is or anything about his life.”
“So you met Jerry . . .” he prompted.
She nodded. “I wasn’t getting along too well with my foster parents. Jerry proposed, and I said yes. It didn’t take long for me to see I’d made a terrible mistake, but by then I was pregnant with Jack. . . .”
“I remember when my daughter was born,” Charles said softly. “The best day of my life.”
“And that’s how it should be, isn’t it?” Mary asked, her voice also low. “The best day.”
Amazed at herself for all she’d said, all she’d revealed, Mary turned her face back toward the passenger’s window.
Chapter Thirty-nine
MOLINE, ILLINOIS, LOOKED LIKE MANY of the other towns Charles had visited in his search for Jack, the difference this time being the company he had. Mary Godwin was a mystery to him. How she could bear to be in such proximity to him, the one who had ruined her life, was beyond him. But she was doing it, and with a fair amount of grace. He saw the wariness, moments when even anger flashed in her eyes when she looked at him. But for the most part, he felt as though they were becoming allies in the battle to find Jack. For that he was grateful and more than a little humbled.
They made stops at both the Moline police station and the hospital with their picture of Jack; but it was the same story as every other place he’d been. No one had seen the boy. He knew it was hard on Mary, and though he didn’t want to repress her hopes, he tried to keep a realistic tone to the search. Any information would be welcome, but she needed to understand it was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
“Hope tempered with caution,” he said to her when they arrived in the center of town. They each took opposite sides of the main drag, entering all the biggest diners with Jack’s picture to ask employees and patrons if they recognized the little boy. Occasionally Charles would get permission to post one of the flyers in a storefront window. Now, standing at the corner of Fourth and Main, he looked across the street and could see another person shaking his head as Mary held up a flyer.
He saw her shoulders round in discouragement, watched her steps slow as she made her way toward another person on the block. He crossed the street.
“Let’s take a break,” he suggested as Mary watched a young woman pushing a baby buggy past them.
“No, thanks, I don’t need a break.”
“Surely you could use something to eat?”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Thirsty, then?”
“Not really.”
“Come on. Not even a hot dog or a hamburger or a club sandwich?”
“No,” she insisted.
“Look, Mary. We could be at this for a day, a week, another month. You need to keep up your strength, and if you don’t eat, you’ll get sick. You won’t be worth anything to Jack if you are not taking care of yourself now.”
“You make a good argument,” she said with a shadow of a smile. “Must be a lawyer.”
He grinned. “Comes with the territory. You may not be hungry, but I am. I saw they have an A&W Root Beer stand here. Ever had a root-beer float?”
The A&W was on the other side of Moline, the well-traveled side with a frontage road spilling onto the highway that ran north and south. Several barstools were placed along an outside counter running the length of the building. Charles pulled out a stool and motioned for Mary to have a seat.
She perched on the stool in front of a screened window, and he sat down next to her. A teenage boy spoke through the screen before they had even gotten settled. “WhatcanIgetcha?”
“Two floats, please,” Charles said. “And take your time and make sure they’re really good, because I�
��ve been bragging on them.”
“Coming right up in mugs so cold they’ll freeze your hands,” the boy said, a bit slower this time. “You might be glad you’re wearing gloves, lady.”
Mary smiled. “That’s good to know.”
The shadow behind the screen disappeared.
When the screen on the window slid up, the boy pushed two frosty glass mugs toward them. “Here ya go,” he said. “That’ll be thirty cents.”
After Charles dug out the change and passed it across the counter, Mary wrapped her hand around the cold mug and smiled. “I am glad to be wearing my gloves.” She took a tentative sip through the fat straw.
Charles watched her eyes widen. “What’d I tell you?” he said with a grin. “You like it. I can tell.”
Mary did like it, but she wasn’t ready to give him the satisfaction of knowing that. Wasn’t ready to like the man as much as she was starting to. It felt wrong to have a light moment, wrong to smile when Jack was still missing.
“It’s not bad,” she finally conceded with another sip.
“Not bad! My daughter calls it heaven in a glass.”
Mary saw a light in his eyes, followed by a flicker of longing when he mentioned his daughter.
“How old is she?”
“She turned eight last month.”
“Almost Jack’s age,” she mused. “Do you ever see her?”
His face was really all the answer she needed. “No. My ex-wife moved away right after . . . after the whole mess with that letter.”
“She shouldn’t keep your daughter from you,” Mary said. “It’s not right.”
“In Lila’s eyes, I’m not a good man anymore,” he said. “You kept Jack from Jerry because you believe he’s not a good man.”
“It’s not the same thing at all.” She frowned. “Jerry doesn’t love Jack—he never has. He views him as worthless—a weight around his neck. I can see you truly love your daughter. I know you ache to see her.”
The Silent Gift Page 26