Through the Darkness (16 page)

“What's that you're taking, Em?” I asked.

“Can't remember. Rema-something.”

Connie gave me a look. “One of her friends brought it over. Judy somebody-or-other.”

“Is it a prescription?”

Emily clicked the mouse, and pages began to spew out of the printer. “I guess so.”

Sometimes my daughter hadn't the sense God gave a goose. This was the same good sense that inspired her to drop out of school to follow the rock band, Phish, for several months out of her young life. I wondered if Emily's lackadaisical attitude toward prescription medications dated back to that troubled time when everything was relentlessly share-and-share-alike.

I played the mother card, although I hated myself for it. “Emily, do you think it's wise to be taking drugs that are prescribed for somebody else?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “It didn't kill Judy, so it's certainly not going to kill me.”

Before I could counter with words I might be sorry for later, Connie stepped in to defuse the situation. “Amanda? Anything happen while I was sleeping?”

Amanda
. Connie and Agent Crisp were on a first name basis. They must have bonded over the long night they had just spent together.

“I'm afraid not. We've been working on Timmy's poster.” Agent Crisp snatched one of the pages out of the printer tray and passed it to Connie, who happened to be standing next to me. Under the circumstances, I couldn't avoid looking at it.

MISSING CHILD ALERT
Timothy Gordon Shemanski
Last seen…

I blinked rapidly, fighting back tears, skimming to the bottom of the poster:

     2.5 feet tall
     30 pounds
     Red hair, green eyes

They'd used the snapshot that I kept in my wallet, and added a second one of Timmy in three-quarter profile, cuddling Lamby under his dimpled chin.

“Excuse me.” Hand pressed to my mouth, I fled the room. I made it to the bathroom just in time.

When the tapping began, I ignored it. I was sitting on the chenille toilet lid cover, using both hands to press a cold, wet washcloth over my face.

“Hannah?” The tapping turned to knocking. “Are you all right in there?”

“I'll be out in a minute, Connie.”

I hung the washcloth on the towel rack to dry, and examined my face in the mirror. I'd aged ten years in a few short days. I needed a haircut, badly. My tongue tasted like I'd been licking dirt off the sidewalk.

I slid the door to the medicine cabinet to one side, hoping to find some mouthwash to rinse the taste of bile out of my mouth. I rummaged unsuccessfully through the bottles—rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, cough syrup (expired)—then turned my attention to the plastic bins Emily used to organize her odds and ends. Plastic razors, sample packets of shampoo, cotton balls, a comb with the American Airlines logo
AA
stamped on it, and—ah-ha!—a similarly marked cellophane packet containing a toothbrush and a miniature tube of toothpaste.

As I was sliding the door shut, I noticed another container on the top shelf filled with random packets of pills—pills in blister packs, pills in foil, pills and capsules sorted by color into mini-plastic Ziploc bags. Curious, I pulled the container down and dumped it out on the Formica counter. Among the cold tablets and remedies for diarrhea and acid indigestion, I counted four pink pills marked Paxil 20 and six yellow pills marked Amitrip 25.

Jeeze Lahweeze!

I pawed through the pile, sorting as I went. Valium, Percocet, Oxycodone, Efexor, Zoloft, Wellbutrin. Emily was stockpiling painkillers and antidepressants. That plus the “Rema-something” she'd just swallowed in the kitchen made six. I wondered if her doctor knew. I wondered if Dante knew.

Ten years ago I would have had a knockdown-drag-out confrontation with my daughter, then tossed the pills one by one down the garbage disposal.

Now? I wanted to bring it up with her, but Emily was no doubt too stressed for anything I could say to register. Knowing how she would feel about my snooping around in her medicine cabinet, I returned the pills to the container and put it back where I'd found it. Eventually I'd end up speaking to Dante about them, especially in light of Emily's temper tantrums on Monday night. Overwrought and over-medicated, a volatile combination.

I ran the airline comb through my hair, brushed my teeth, and returned to the kitchen, where I found everyone except Emily talking into their cell phones. I poured myself a cup of coffee, trying to pick up the gist of the three one-sided conversations going on around me.

Amanda Crisp was giving directions to someone in Quantico who was going to speak at the press conference at two if he could navigate his way around the ongoing construction on I-95 North.

Connie was issuing instructions to an associate at Kinkos about making “Timmy” buttons. From the deliberate way she spoke, I gathered that English was a second language for the hapless associate. Either that or Kinkos was hiring six-year-olds these days.

Meanwhile, Erika stood at the window, staring into the backyard, cell phone pressed to her right ear, hand covering her left, going—
um, ah, no way, my God, you're shitting me, right?
—until I was wild to know what the party on the other end of her cell phone was telling her. Erika had just exploded with a particularly vigorous
Oh my God!
when my own cell phone burst into the opening bars of Mozart's Symphony No.40.

That would be Paul.

I took the call in the living room. “What's up?”

“Just checking in, sweetheart. I'm with Ruth.”

“Where?”

“At Safeway, out near Best Buy. We've just finished postering the mall. Dennis is doing south county, and I was thinking if you'd meet us here and pick up some posters, maybe you and Ruth could take care of the grocery stores in Crofton so I can get back to the house in time for the press conference.”

The posters. I swallowed hard. How could I not agree to hang up posters, plaster the whole world with posters if it came to that, for Timmy's sake?

I must have been quiet for a long time because I heard Paul say, “Hannah? You there?”

“Yes, I'm here.”

“Good. We'll be waiting in Safeway at the Starbucks counter. I'll order you a mocha frappaccino for the road,” Paul said, not doubting for a moment that my answer would be yes.

In the time it took me to finish my conversation with Paul, press the End button, and rejoin the other women in the kitchen, Agent Crisp had pulled up a chair and was sitting next to Emily at the computer. Connie stood just behind, sipping from a bottle of springwater. Erika still stood at the window, cell phone glued to her ear.

Agent Crisp glanced up as I entered the room. “Come, take a look at this.”

I'd made it halfway across the kitchen when whatever curiosity I might have had about what Amanda Crisp was looking at was driven straight out of my head by the shrieks of Ms. Erika Rose, Attorney-at-Law. “Why are you just now telling me this, Andrew?”

Four heads swiveled Erika's way.

“What do you mean you had to keep it under wraps?”

Connie poked my arm and mouthed,
What
?

I shrugged.

“Ohmahgawd!” said Erika Rose. “Oh. My. God.”

Erika must have sensed four pairs of eyes staring at her, boring into her back, because she turned around about then, wide-eyed, and flapped her free hand in our direction. “That is so fanfuckingtastic!” she said into the phone. “I am so psyched.” And then, “Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

“What?” I said aloud.

“Yeah, what? What?” echoed Connie.

Erika held up her hand, palm out, signaling patience. I didn't know about the others, but the suspense was killing me. There could have been a breakthrough in the search for Timmy, George Bush could have resigned his presidency, or maybe one of her girlfriends had just gotten engaged. It was impossible to tell.

“Okay,” Erika said, wrapping up the conversation at last. “I'll be right over.”

With her thumb, Erika pressed down on the End button of her cell phone, a self-satisfied grin spreading across her face. She puffed air out through her mouth. “Sorry, girls, but I have to go.”

Emily leapt to her feet. “Is it Timmy?”

“No, sorry, Em. I would have told you if it were Timmy, you know that.”

“Then,
what
?” I repeated.

Erika scanned the room until she located her handbag in the corner where she'd tossed it, shouldered the bag, tucked her cell phone into an outside pocket and headed for the kitchen door. “Well, ladies. Something I've been working on for quite some time is about to hit the fan big-time, but in a very good way.” She disappeared into the hallway.

We stood there like statues, our mouths slack, staring at the empty space where Erika's back had just been. “Does that mean we've just got one less volunteer?” I asked of no one in particular.

Suddenly, Erika's face reappeared around the door frame. “You can't get rid of me that easily, Hannah Ives.” Her teeth flashed white in the dim light. “Watch
Cross Current
tonight. NBC. Ten o'clock. You will not be sorry.”

In the bleak reality of day after endless day, at least
Erika's breezy announcement gave me something to look forward to.
Cross Current
had been a highly hyped addition to NBC's fall lineup, successfully challenging CBS's popular prime-time news program,
60 Minutes
, in the television ratings wars. I couldn't imagine what connection Erika Rose might have to the show, but it had to be something controversial. If
Cross Current's
host, Mitch Harmon, ever showed up on your doorstep, it would be prudent to keep your mouth shut and duck out the back way, speed dialing your attorney as you went.

My sister Ruth had insisted on staying with me for the remainder of the day, lending both physical and moral support as we plastered public buildings and business establishments in Crofton with Timmy's poster, with the full cooperation of the various merchants. With her help, we finished in time for me to hustle back to Annapolis to pick up Chloe and Jake from school.

That evening, because they taunted me with it, I knew that Connie and Dennis were sharing a hot King Ranch chicken casserole with Emily and Dante, one of a half-dozen casseroles now overflowing Emily's freezer courtesy of the ladies of St. Catherine's Episcopal Church. Meanwhile, at our house, Ruth helped me fix dinner, or at least what passed for dinner those days: pizza. I dumped the ingredients for pizza dough into the bread machine, punched a button and let it do its thing, while Ruth kept her mind off things by chopping up assorted toppings.

After dinner, Ruth supervised bathtime upstairs, then picked up reading where I'd left off in the first Harry Potter. We'd been reading
Sorcerer's Stone
to the kids for what seemed like ages—Emily thought that
Goblet of Fire
was too violent. Downstairs, Paul helped clean up the kitchen, debriefing me on the press conference Ruth and I had missed that afternoon.

“I wish there were more to tell, Hannah, but at least there's no really bad news. Ron Powers reported that the Anne Arundel County police were still reviewing the shopping center videotapes.” He handed me a dirty plate. “They're pretty bad quality, apparently, having been erased and taped over many times. Then the FBI profiler from Quantico made a statement suggesting that Timmy's kidnapper may have no intention of returning him to us.”

“Oh, no,” I moaned, feeling the pizza turn over in my stomach. “Poor Emily. That news must have really stung.”

Paul grunted and handed me another plate. “Very disturbing. According to the profiler, when the victim is an infant, and the infant is abducted by a nonfamily member from a hospital or other location, not from a home, the abductor's motive often is to raise the child as her own. There have been cases of women who faked a pregnancy, then stole a child in an attempt to strengthen a crumbling relationship with a significant other. And other women who have miscarried, then snatched a baby to fill the void of darkness and despair brought on by the death of that child.”

I retrieved the box of dishwasher soap from under the sink, poured some into the soap cup, twiddled with the dials, and slammed the door shut over the dirty dishes. “Damn! If that's the case, how will we ever find him? Or her.” I'd been imagining the kidnapper as a man for so long that switching to the image of a woman was a major paradigm shift.

“Agent Crisp told the reporters that the FBI is checking hospital records,” Paul continued. “They're trying to identify women who have lost children recently. At the press conference, Crisp urged the public to report anyone who has turned up unexpectedly with a baby, particularly if they haven't appeared to have been pregnant.”

I grabbed a broom and started attacking the bits of cheese and vegetable scattered over the tiles. “It seems like such a long shot.”

Paul smiled grimly. “I agree. But the other bit of news is more positive. According to Dante, Phyllis Strother is starting a reward fund for Timmy's safe return, and has contributed ten thousand dollars to kick it off.”